Turning dust into dollars

Lomas Bayas is one of the world's lowest grade copper mines. Many companies class this material as waste. We don't. We relentlessly seek to extract value from lower-grade resources.

How low can you go?

I'm General Manager of Technical Support in the division. When I arrived in 2002, Lomas Bayas was owned by Falconbridge. The highest copper grade was 0.3% and the lowest 0.2%. Close to Lomas Bayas, we have another deposit: Fortuna de Cobre (Lomas Bayas II) with an average copper grade of 0.28%. The normal cut-off grade in Chile for copper is 0.3% to 0.4%. Many companies class this material as waste, but we don’t.

Xstrata took over Lomas Bayas in 2006 after buying Falconbridge. As General Manager, I submitted a pre-feasibility study to develop the Fortuna de Cobre deposit. After building the business case, the Environmental Impact Study for the project was approved.

Extracting the value

The only way to extract value from Fortuna de Cobre is to increase production, gain economies of scale and reduce operating costs. We increased production at Lomas Bayas from 60,000 tonnes of copper per year to 75,000 tonnes. It has improved costs, but also reduced the life of Lomas Bayas from 2020 to 2012, though increased profits have provided the capital investment to develop Fortuna de Cobre and extend the operation.

“You need your people working as a team with focus and passion to extract the value.”

We started production from Fortuna de Cobre in early 2011, converting very low-grade ore resources into ore reserves and at the same time extending the mine life to 2024.

Next year maybe 100% of our production will come from Fortuna de Cobre. We have perhaps the lowest low grade copper production in the world, so it’s a remarkable story and we did it ourselves.