How the largest copper mine in the world works: renewable energy, 30 daily flights and the example for the RIGI projects to come

The phrase without exaggeration makes sense when the numbers appear. Escondida, owned by the Australian BHP (57.5%), Río Tinto (30%) and the firms JECO Corp. and JECO 2 Ltd. (12.5% combined), produced 1.26 million tons of copper in 2025, more than double that of the second producing mine of the global ranking.

It is, by a wide margin, the largest copper mine in the world and is located in the Atacama Desert, 3,100 meters above sea level, just 90 km from the Argentine border.

And it will be for a long time. The production it plans to achieve Vicuña (the joint venture that BHP has with the Canadian Lunding Mining), in San Juan, is comparable, for example, with that of the second mine in the world ranking, a reference that also allows us to dimension the scale of the Argentine project.

Behind Escondida’s figures, there is an economy that goes far beyond the mineral that is exported to the world. In 2025, it paid in taxes and royalty to the Chilean State more than US$ 4.3 billion and, in addition, purchased goods and contracted services from 1,892 suppliers for a total of US$ 5,427 million. According to the mining company Clarín, the 95% are companies from Chile and only 5% foreigners.

Since 2019, Escondida, as they explained, has had a “Local Purchase Program” with favorable conditions for SMEs in the area, such as seven-day payment. In Chile, This type of initiative responds to business policies and not to an obligation established by law..

In Argentina, on the other hand, the RIGI asks for a 20% national purchasing floor and some provinces such as Salta, Catamarca and San Juan, which do not yet produce, but have copper projects in the pipeline, moved forward with regulatory frameworks that require between 70% and 60% provincial purchasing.

The economic weight is also seen outside the mine: Antofagasta, a city of 400,000 inhabitants, today has 30 daily flights. In Argentina, not counting Buenos Aires, which is only compared to Santiago in Chile, only Bariloche has a level of air connectivity close to that figure and it is not stable all year round. It is also a way to measure how much economic dynamism a mining operation of this scale generates in its environment.

The name of the mine is no coincidence: for almost ten years, several companies, including the Chilean state-owned Codelco, had explored that area of ​​the desert without finding anything, until the deposit appeared in the last 250 meters of available budget that an American firm had to continue searching. Today, the mine has two open pits (also called “open pits”). The main one is 3.5 km long, 2 km wide and 900 meters deep: it is the deepest open pit operation in Chile, and probably the world.

The operation started in 1991 with a single concentrator plant and since then it has produced more than 34 million tons of copper and came to represent more than 3% of Chilean GDP. In 2015, it had already added two more plants and became the first mine in the world to operate three concentrators at the same time, with a combined capacity of 460,000 tons per day: enough copper, according to the company, to manufacture 25,000 electric cars.

The copper concentrate is 80% of what Escondida produces, which travels to Puerto Coloso for a 170 km mine pipeline which transports about 4 million tons a year, a work that revolutionized the mining industry when it came into operation in the 90s. The remaining 20%, depending on the type of mineral, is processed as cathodes, which are copper plates practically ready for industrial use, and travel by train 216 km to the port of Antofagasta.

The Escondida property, responsible for 25% of Chile’s copper and 5% of world production, occupies 40,000 hectares, an area comparable to that of Greater Santiago, with four camps that add up to more than 9,300 rooms: “the largest hotel in Chile”, according to its employees, who do not miss the opportunity to mention each record of the operation to the group of Argentine economists and journalists who visited the mine at the end of July.

Employs more than 10,000 people -4,000 direct and 6,000 through contractors-, many have developed their entire careers in Escondida, in fact, the Mine Production management is in charge of engineer Luis Cáceres, who has been working in the company for 31 of the 35 years of the project, and more than 45% today are women, who also hold more than half of the leadership positions.

This was noted on the tour: the majority of those who received and guided this medium were women, at all ranks. The management of the concentration plants, in fact, is in charge of Olga Alfaro Toledo, the first woman to hold that position in the history of mining. The pride in this progress is evident in every detail, even the six-color flag that represents inclusion is present at different points of the operation.

With more than three decades in production, today Escondida face a natural phenomenon: As a deposit is exploited, the ore that remains has less and less copper per ton of rock (in mining jargon it is said thatore grades are increasingly lower). That means more rocks have to be moved to get the same amount of metal, which makes the operation more expensive.

To compensate for it, BHP announced an investment plan of more than US$10 billion for the next decade, more than the Vicuña firm has committed to a RIGI in San Juan for the integration of the Josemaría and Filo del Sol projects. The plan for the future of Escondida, which includes the installation of a new concentrator plant, is not about growth, the company clarifies, but rather a bet to sustain production at current levels, in a world that will need 70% more copper by 2050.

According to their spokespersons responded to Clarín, Escondida is still It has about 80 more years of useful life left. That projection, however, depends on the business remaining profitable: if the price of copper does not compensate for the increasing cost of extracting it, those years of reserves will not necessarily translate into real production. This is precisely what BHP’s million-dollar investment seeks to ensure.

Water and energy take another chapter. Since 2021, 100% of the energy that Escondida consumes is renewable, and since 2019 it has not used a single drop of groundwater: everything comes from seawater desalination, with a capacity of 3,700 liters per second and an investment of US$ 4,000 million over 15 years.

This level of sustainability comes at a cost: desalinated water is five times more expensive than conventional water, and 30% of Escondida’s energy is allocated precisely to desalinating it. The entire operation represents, by itself, 6% of Chile’s total electricity consumption.

After a day touring Escondida, the feeling that remains is that of having entered a world apart: each management functions almost as its own team, within an operation that, on the scale of the Atacama Desert, It seems to have no roof.