Bingham Canyon Copper Mine, UT, USA

Located near Salt Lake City, Utah, US, Bingham Canyon celebrated its 100th anniversary in June 2003. The Bingham Canyon mine, Copperton concentrator and Garfield smelter comprise one of the largest and most up-to-date integrated copper operations in the world: major investments during the past 15 years have ensured economically and environmentally sound operation. Cumulative copper output is now about 17Mt, more than any other mine.
For much of its life, Bingham Canyon was owned by Kennecott Copper Corp. However, during the post-1973 oil crisis shake-out, the company was acquired by British Petroleum, then sold on to Rio Tinto, which operates Bingham Canyon through its 100% subsidiary, Kennecott Utah Copper Corp. The facilities employ about 1,400 people.


In early 2005, Rio Tinto committed $170m to the East 1 pushback project, which will extend the life of the open pit at Bingham Canyon until 2017.
Following research from analysts and investors, Rio revealed in 2008 it was studying deepening the 1.2km pit to shore up an extra 2.83 million tonnes of copper resources.
If this came into fruition, the additional contained copper resources could extend the mine's life from 2019 to 2036, with plans for a subsequent underground mine extending its life even further.
Rio hopes to begin the project in 2009, which is estimated to produce copper valuing about $22.67bn at current prices.
GEOLOGY AND RESERVES
The classic copper porphyry orebody is not only huge but also enjoys a fairly uniform distribution of sulphide mineralisation, mainly chalcopyrite. The existing pit will be worked out by 2013, but open pit and then underground mining will continue after that. As of end-2005, proven and probable open-pit reserves totalled 667Mt grading 0.54% copper, 0.043% molybdenum, 0.32g/t gold and 2.59g/t silver. Total open-pit and underground mineral resources were 960Mt at 0.7% copper, 0.3g/t gold, 0.03% moly and 3.1g/t silver.
OPEN-PIT MINING
The Bingham Canyon pit is now 4km across and very deep. Mining uses a rotary drilling/blasting – shovel/truck – in-pit crushing system, with two to four blasts per day. To contain costs, management has been quick to utilise the most cost-effective drilling, loading and haulage equipment and management tools available.
One of the first of the recent series of major investments was an in-pit, semi-mobile gyratory crushing unit linked to the Copperton Concentrator by an 8km conveyor system. This reduced haulage distances from the working faces substantially but even so the mine needs a large fleet of Caterpillar mechanical drive and Komatsu electric-drive trucks, mostly of 218t-capacity, to service ten P&H electric rope shovels.