Aitik Copper Mine, Sweden

Located near Gällivare, northern Sweden, the low-grade Aitik copper deposit was discovered in the early 1930s. Bulk-mining technology made exploitation feasible in the 1960s and mining at Europe’s first large, low-grade open pit copper mine started in 1968 at a production rate of 2Mt/y of ore. Since then, a series of pushbacks have increased output to approximately 19Mt/y. The concentrator, expanded in parallel, ships over 200,000t/y to the Ronnskär smelter.
Since the consolidation of Outokumpu’s copper and zinc mining and smelting activities into New Boliden in January 2004, Aitik has been wholly owned by Boliden.

Boliden approved the investment of Skr5.2bn ($790m) for the expansion of the operations (Aitik 36) which will see significant increases in capacity and production.
Boliden says that the expansion will result in one of the world’s most efficient mines becoming even more efficient. On average, ore is mined at the rate of 1t/manhour. Boliden says that production at Aitik is now at 43t/manhour but will increase to 55t/manhour.
The company said recently it also expected life of mine cash costs to fall from $0.80/lb to $0.43/lb.
All this extends the mine life from 2016 to 2025, while increasing copper, gold and silver production and adding new production of molybdenum. By lowering costs, ore reserves have been tripled.
The mine currently employs 430 people, of which 280 are in the mine. This number is expected to increase significantly in line with the expansion.
GEOLOGY AND RESERVES
The orebody is hosted by a basin of volcanic rocks surrounded by granitic intrusions, within a supracrustal metamorphosed shear zone of precambrian age. Biotite schists in the volcanic sequence contain disseminated chalcopyritic mineralisation averaging less than 0.40% copper plus gold and silver values.