The El Abra mine is a porphyry copper deposit that has sulfide and oxide mineralization. The predominant primary sulfide copper minerals are bornite and chalcopyrite. There is a minor amount of secondary sulfide mineralization as chalcocite. The oxide copper minerals are chrysocolla and pseudomalachite. There are lesser amounts of copper-bearing clays and tenorite.

El Abra is an open-pit copper mining complex that has been in operation since 1996 and is located 47 miles north of Calama in Chile’s El Loa province, Region II.

The available fleet consists of twenty-three 242-metric ton haul trucks loaded by four shovels with buckets ranging in size from 29 to 41 cubic meters, which are capable of moving an average of 224,000 metric tons of material per day.

The El Abra operation consists of an open-pit copper mine and a SX/EW facility with a capacity of 500 million pounds of copper cathode per year from a 125,000 metric ton-per-day crushed leach circuit and a similar-sized ROM leaching operation.

For ore subject to the SX/EW process, the ore is placed on stockpiles and copper is extracted from the ore by dissolving it with a weak sulphuric acid solution. The copper content of the solution is increased in two additional SX stages, and then the copper-bearing solution undergoes an EW process to produce cathode that is, on average, 99.99 percent copper.