The following is an excerpt from The Miner, a quarterly magazine highlighting the great work happening at the company’s North America mining operations and processing facilities. Read the full story in the latest edition.
If firing up a historic car you haven’t run for a year-a-half sounds like an adventure, imagine the spectacle at the Morenci Concentrator when the team hit the “on” switch on an 80-year-old collection of contraptions the size of a junior college campus.
“The best way to probably say it is we actually started up three times,” said Cameron Deem, Superintendent, Mill Maintenance-Morenci, of the comprehensive restart effort at one of two concentrators at Freeport-McMoRan’s Morenci operations in Eastern Arizona. “We started half the plant for four months, then shut that half down for an electrical upgrade while we started up the other half. Once those upgrades were complete, we started up the whole plant.”
The Morenci Concentrator was shuttered May 1, 2020, in the midst of the pandemic-induced economic downturn. The ensuing economic upswing and demand for copper had the company responding with a similarly urgent desire to bring the concentrator back online as it was when originally cranked up for World War II.
“The concentrator built to supply copper for the war effort in 1942 is the same concentrator we restarted in 2021 to help supply copper for the global electrification effort,” said Jared Sundberg, Manager, Concentrator-Morenci. “It’s a challenging mill to run because of its age and its design, but it’s also a very important mill.”
Team persevered through challenges
The work done to bring the concentrator back to life was performed under a Coronavirus-challenged headcount and an extremely competitive job market for hiring, Sundberg notes.
“It was a big success just to run half a mill while that electrical upgrade was going on, because when we first restarted, we were probably about 25 percent staffed,” Sundberg said. “The collaboration and help we got from other departments and other sites were key. I know you hear that a lot, but it really was, because we needed a lot of help to get this mill going again.”
Read the full story about the Morenci Concentrator coming back online and other features in the current edition of The Miner.