The Cuajone porphyry copper deposit is located on the western slopes of Cordillera Occidental, in the southern-most Andes Mountains of Peru. The deposit is part of a mineral district that contains two additional known deposits, Toquepala and Quellaveco. The copper mineralization at Cuajone is typical of porphyry copper deposits.

The Cuajone deposit is located approximately 30 kilometers north-west from the Toquepala deposit and is part of the Toquepala Group, which dates back approximately 60 to 100 million years (Upper Cretaceous to Lower Tertiary). The Cuajone lithology contains volcanic rocks from the Cretaceous to the Quaternary period. The deposit contains 50 rock types including, pre-mineral rocks, basaltic andesite, porphyritic rhyolite, Toquepala dolerite, Toquepala rhyolite and intrusive rocks, including diorite, porphyritic latite, breccias and dikes. In addition, the following post-mineral rocks are present: the Huaylillas and Chuntacala formations, which have been formed by conglomerates, tuffs sequence, traquites and agglomerates. These formations date from nine to 23 million years. There is also the occurrence of Quaternary rocks, which were formed by alluvial and colluvial mainly located in slopes of hills and streams.

The mineralogy is simple and is evenly distributed. It is mainly composed of minerals such as chalcopyrite (CuFeS2), chalcosine (Cu2S) and molybdenite (MoS2) with occasional presence of galena, enargite and tetraedrite, none of which have economic value.

The Cuajone operations consist of an open-pit copper mine and a concentrator located in southern Peru, 30 kilometers from the city of Moquegua and 840 kilometers from Lima, at an altitude of 3,430 meters above sea level.

The Cuajone operations utilize a conventional open-pit mining method to collect copper ore for further processing at the concentrator.

Our Cuajone operations use state-of-the-art computer monitoring systems at the concentrator, the crushing plant and the flotation circuit in order to coordinate inflows and optimize operations. Material with a copper grade over 0.35% is loaded onto an overland conveyor belt and sent to the milling circuit, where giant rotating crushers reduce the size of the rocks to approximately one-half of an inch. The ore is then sent to the ball mills, which grind it to the consistency of fine powder. The finely ground powder is agitated in a water and reagents solution and is then transported to flotation cells. Air is pumped into the cells to produce foam for floating the copper and molybdenum minerals, but separating waste material called tailings. This coppermolybdenum bulk concentrate is then treated by inverse flotation where molybdenum is floated and copper is depressed. The copper concentrate is shipped by rail to the smelter at Ilo and the molybdenum concentrate is packaged for shipment t ........