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Mines/Chile

El Teniente mine

El Teniente mine, Chile. Producing, underground, mining copper, molybdenum since 1905.

Why El Teniente is famous

El Teniente in the Andes of central Chile is an underground copper and molybdenum mine. The Braden Copper Company of the United States began works in 1904, and Codelco's 2015 report gives 1905 as the year the mine opened. The state took 51 per cent in 1966 and the mine was nationalised in 1971. In 2018 the division made 465,040 t of copper and 6,756 t of molybdenum, the most of any Codelco division that year.1,2,3,4

Story cards

Timeline

  1. 11 July 1971Chile nationalises large copper mining5

What kind of deposit

Porphyry copper

El Teniente today

Where copper is mined todayWhere molybdenum is mined todayMining in Chile

Where next

Mines

Same kind of depositChuquicamataCodelco's Chuquicamata began in 1915. El Teniente, an underground mine, opened in 1905.1

Events

Came out ofChile nationalises large copper miningEl Teniente began under a US company in 1904. Codelco now runs it.1

Places

Located inSewellEl Teniente is about 7 km from Sewell.1

Deposit types

An example ofPorphyry copperEl Teniente belongs to the porphyry copper family of deposits.6

Sources

  1. data/minerals/operations.csv Prospector Trails (internal)
  2. Annual Report 2018 Codelco
  3. Annual Report 2015 Codelco
  4. Annual Report 2016, timeline Codelco
  5. Allende and the nationalisation of Chilean copper (milestone essay) US Department of State, Office of the Historian
  6. Mineral Deposit Models (Bulletin 1693, Cox and Singer, eds., 1986) US Geological Survey

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.