The Bingham Canyon deposit is a classic porphyry copper deposit containing economic values of copper, molybdenum, gold, silver, and historic lead and zinc production. Peripheral copper-gold skarns, lead-zinc fissures, and disseminated gold deposits are also associated with this copper porphyry system.

Porphyry dikes, faults, and quartz veins are steeply dipping and have two dominant orientations; north-northeast– and northwest-striking. Dikes have a north-northeast strike but they thicken and develop northwest-trending apophyses and host high-grade copper-gold zones at intersections with northwest-faults, indicating that magmatic-hydrothermal fluids were focused by these structural intersections.

Vein truncation relationships coupled with abrupt changes in copper-gold grades, sulfide ratios, and potassic alteration intensity at porphyry intrusive contacts indicate that the mass of introduced copper and gold decreased significantly during successive porphyry intrusive-hydrothermal cycles, presumably due to depletion of metals and volatiles in the underlying magma chamber.

Kennecott is a fully integrated mining operation just outside Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S.

Mining operations at Kennecott is deployed via conventional open pit method and is carried out a sequence of drilling, blasting, loading, hauling, crushing and conveying 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year.

On average, 200 holes 55 feet deep are drilled in a typical day. Each hole is packed with 1,200 pounds of special blasting agents. Explosives are carried out twice a day.

Loading to 320 tons haulage trucks performed by electric shovels (the largest electric shovel has a 56-cubic-yard dipper)

In July 2021, the company announced the approval of a $108 million investment to support an underground mine below the existing open pit, with studies due to be complete by 2024. Potential underground mining would occur concurrently with open pit operations and result in increased copper output.

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The second step of the production process is ore concentrating, which separates valuable minerals from the ore into a concentrated liquid.

The crushed ore is turned into a slurry and transport it to flotation cells. Than additional reagents added to produce a bubbly froth. Ore particles containing most of the valuable minerals adhere to the bubbles, which float over the sides of the flotation cells. Then material is collecting and filtering.

The concentrate, which contains about 26 percent copper and by-products such as gold and silver, moves through a pipeline to Kennecott’s smelter, located about 17 miles to the north, for further processing.

The next stage, smelting, is a process of heating and smelting the copper concentrates to cause a chemical reaction, which removes the copper from other elements in the ore. At the smelter, we produce large 750-pound anodes and transport them by rail to the Refinery. The copper is 99 percent pure at this stage.

The smelter at Kennecott captures 99.9 percent of the sulfur in the feed, making it one of the cleanest in the world. The smelter also recovers heat from the furnaces, which generates 60 percent of the facility’s total electricity.

At the refining stage, the copper is in anode form. We subject 750-pound copper anode plates to an electric current for ten days and turn them into two 300-pound copper cathodes. This further separates the copper from other metals – the result is copper that is 99.99 percent pure.

The last step in the production process is to stamp each bar with Kennecott's brand, the lot number, the weight and the fineness of the metal — that is, the percentage of gold or silver in the bar.