Vancouver — The mining unit of
The company expects that 500 construction jobs and 230 permanent jobs will be created by restarting the concentrator and building and operating the concentrate leach facility. Both projects are expected to be in operation by 2007.
The new concentrate-leaching and direct-electrowinning plant will use proprietary technology developed by the company to process mixed primary and secondary copper ores. The process was successfully tested at a demonstration plant at the company’s copper mine in Bagdad, Ariz.
The concentrate leaching facility will be incorporated into the existing leaching and electrowinning complex at Morenci, which treats oxide ores and is the largest such facility in the world.
The newly developed technology — used in conjunction with a conventional milling and flotation concentrator — allows sulphide ores to be transformed to copper metal through the pressure-leaching and electrowinning process, instead of smelting and refining.
The new projects will affect several of the company’s other facilities in the southwestern U.S., notably the Miami refinery in Arizona, the Chino smelter in New Mexico, and the Tyrone and Cobre mines in New Mexico. These assets were deemed “impaired” and were written down from their total carrying value of US$442 million by about US$420 million (or US$321 million after taxes).
Phelps Dodge currently produces more than 2 billion lbs. of copper annually, or about 60% of total U.S. production, from six mines in Arizona and New Mexico. The company also operates a molybdenum mine in Colorado, and several copper mines in Chile and Peru that collectively produce nearly 1 billion lbs. of copper annually.
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