World
Written on April 7, 2008
Smoke and debris rocket into the air, then the ground shakes as far as 600 meters away. Seconds later, a boom rings out as explosives pulverize 190,000 tonnes of rock near the base of Chile’s Andes mountains.
It will take three days for miners driving monster trucks to remove the mineral ore, as the copper-rich rock is called, and more than a few more to crush and process some of the purest caliber copper known to man.
Everything about Escondida is a superlative. It’s the world’s largest copper mine in the world’s largest copper producing country and it is easily visible from outer space.
“I think Escondida is a world-class ore body and probably one of the biggest ever discovered,” said Diego Hernandez, the president for base metals for majority-owner BHP Billiton, the world’s largest diversified miner.
Not satisfied to simply be producing nearly a quarter of Chile’s copper, nearly 1.5 million tonnes last year, Escondida is looking for more, and expects a three-year-old exploration program to extend the existing 40-year mine life with new discoveries soon.
Managers are looking at several alternatives to maintain record output at the mine, whose name in Spanish means “hidden” because geologists in the 1980s failed repeatedly to find copper at the site before striking it rich on one last try.
Local mythology holds that David Lowell, a legendary geologist, found the deposit by ignoring conventional wisdom and sinking a drill bit on the top of a hill, instead of at the bottom.
“Why’d they drill there? Hah .. payday loans. any answer I could give would be an old wives’s tale,” Sergio Valenzuela, a mine spokesman, said after a recent visit to the mine.
Filed in: term.