The following is an excerpt from The Miner, a quarterly magazine highlighting the work happening at the company’s North America mining operations and processing facilities. Read this story and other features in the current edition of The Miner.
(April 22, 2024) There were a lot of theories and data analytics that made scientific sense behind Leach to the Last Drop when the initiative was launched on a large scale at sites throughout the Americas about two years ago.
Heat would fuel the chemical reactions to unlock the copper.
Data could be used to map the optimal flow of acid.
Side slopes, benches and roads could be irrigated so that whatever copper they held could be recovered.
What was lacking at the time was confidence that it would all work out as anticipated in the real world, and whether it would be economical.
Two years later, the initiative to unlock 40 billion pounds of untapped copper in existing stockpiles achieved the optimistic expectations of the time.
The company hit its first-year goal of reaching a 200-million-pound annual run rate from the innovative leaching techniques in 2023. In fact, Leach to the Last Drop has proven so successful that it is anticipated it will account for 800 million pounds of copper annually within the next three to five years.
“It’s going very, very well,” said Justin Cross, Vice President-Operational Improvement. “We’ve grown our conviction in it. A year ago, it was tough to see how we were going to get to the 200-million-pound run rate. Fast forward a year, and we’ve gotten there. I would say it’s exceeding my own expectations about how far we’d get.”