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Mines/Chile

Chuquicamata mine

Chuquicamata mine, Chile. Producing, open pit and underground, mining copper, molybdenum since 1915.

Why Chuquicamata is famous

Chuquicamata in northern Chile began under the Chile Exploration Company, owned by the Guggenheim family of New York, in 1915. Its engineers used open-pit methods that were new at the time. The Chilean state took a 51 per cent share in 1966 and nationalised the large copper mines in 1971. Codelco was created on 1 April 1976. The division made 320,744 t of copper and 12,172 t of molybdenum in 2018. USGS reports 385,309 t of copper from the mine in 2019. The underground mine began operating in August 2019 at a total cost of about USD 5.5 billion. USGS says it was expected to ramp up by 2026 to more than 320,000 t of copper and 16,000 t of molybdenum a year, and to add 40 years of life. Codelco's 2018 report calls the open pit the largest in the world and says it will stop being exploited as the underground mine takes over.1,2,3,4

Story cards

Timeline

  1. 11 July 1971Chile nationalises large copper mining5

What kind of deposit

Porphyry copper

Chuquicamata today

Where copper is mined todayWhere molybdenum is mined todayMining in Chile

Where next

People

Owned byDaniel GuggenheimThe Chile Exploration Company, owned by his family, began Chuquicamata in 1915.1

Mines

Same kind of depositEl TenienteCodelco's Chuquicamata began in 1915. El Teniente, an underground mine, opened in 1905.1Same kind of depositBingham CanyonTwo early open pits: Bingham from 1903 and Chuquicamata from 1915, run by the Guggenheims.6

Events

Came out ofChile nationalises large copper miningChuquicamata began under US owners in 1915. Chile nationalised its large copper firms in 1971.1

Deposit types

An example ofPorphyry copperChuquicamata belongs to the porphyry copper family of deposits.7

Sources

  1. data/minerals/operations.csv Prospector Trails (internal)
  2. Annual Report 2018 Codelco
  3. Annual Report 2016, timeline Codelco
  4. 2019 Minerals Yearbook, Chile US Geological Survey
  5. Allende and the nationalisation of Chilean copper (milestone essay) US Department of State, Office of the Historian
  6. Kennecott operation page Rio Tinto
  7. Mineral Deposit Models (Bulletin 1693, Cox and Singer, eds., 1986) US Geological Survey

Pictures on this page: Daniel Guggenheim.jpg, Bain News Service, New York. (Public domain).

From the Prospector Trails mining history dataset: each fact links to the source it was checked against. Figures are as the source gives them, in the money of their day. Not investment advice.

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Cover photos from Wikimedia Commons: Chuquicamata from the ISS by Alexander Gerst (ESA), CC BY-SA 2.0; Haul trucks by Lechhabmed, CC BY-SA 4.0; Drilling and blasting by Siim Roov, CC BY-SA 4.0.