Click here for the entire series about copper: http://thetyee.ca/News/2014/03/24/Travels-with-Copper/
Tyee contributing editor Christopher Pollon criss-crossed the Pacific on the trail of BC copper. Here’s why.
I’m standing on top of five billion pounds of copper on a sunny August afternoon in southwest British Columbia near Princeton, trying to figure out where it all goes.
Dust and smoke rise, as explosives shatter seams of rock into moveable chunks 350 metres below me. Bungalow-sized Komatsu trucks (the tires alone cost $40,000 each) wind downward around the terraced edges of the pit toward North America’s biggest hydraulic shovel which can scoop up 80 tons of rock in a single bite. Deceptively toy-like from a distance, the moving parts of the mine perform their ritual 24 hours a day, seven days a week. “Mining on this scale is what makes it economical,” Don Strickland, Copper Mountain’s VP of Operations, tells me.
By last century’s standards, there’s not enough high-grade ore here to warrant mining it. But ever-bigger equipment and new processing methods have made it possible to move — and mine — mountains. With historically high copper prices over the last five years, and most of the world’s best deposits already tapped, Copper Mountain can afford to break and crush 150,000 tonnes of rock a day that will produce just 90 tonnes of refined copper down the road — and still make a profit.