Welcome to Rio Tinto Kennecott Tour

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Visitors Experience

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Welcome to Rio Tinto Kennecott, where we mine and process minerals and metals that are essential for your everyday life. I'm talking your car, electronics, even medicine and shampoo, all rely on materials we produce here. This tour takes you through our entire operation from mine to refinery. I'm Lonzo, your guide for this virtual tour. Before we begin, let me give you a few important tips to navigate through our operation. To continue to the next stop, click the "Next" arrow button. Then select if you want the 360-degree view, photos or video from the icons below. To jump to an area, click where you want to go from the dropdown menu on the left. Let's get started where it all begins at the Bingham Canyon Mine.

Bingham Canyon Mine

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Blast Site

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Hear that? That's the sound of 1,200 pounds of explosives safely extracting minerals under the earth. Our geologists identify locations with ore, or rock, which contains copper and other minerals. Then our operators drill 12-inch diameter holes 56 feet into the ground. To get to the ore, we fill those holes with explosives and BAM – the loose rock covers the ground for our shovels to collect. Our highly-trained crews safely drill and blast about 300 holes every day to produce a half million ton of loose rock. The boulders are loaded by mega machines and hauled away for processing.

Haul Truck/Shovel

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Gigantic shovels lift up to 100 tons of ore in a single scoop. That's the same weight as 33 pickup trucks. Our shovel operators sit nearly three stories above the ground to scoop and dump a 320-ton load into our massive haul trucks. Want to know what it's like to drive a house? Our haul truck operators know. At 30 feet wide and 40 feet long, our trucks are the size of a two-story, 2,400-square-foot home. Every day, our haul trucks drive hundreds of miles to safely move ore and waste rock in the mine.

In-Pit Crusher

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Our huge hauling machines unload ore into one of the world's largest crushers. Here the large chunks of ore are safely broken down into smaller pieces – about basketball size – at a rate of 10,000 tons per hour. To minimize our environmental impact, residual dust is captured by a device called a "bag house." Just picture an enormous vacuum. The crushed ore is then transported five miles on a series of conveyor belts – including a three-mile tunnel through the mountain – and past six transfer stations before arriving at an a-frame stockpile. The whole five-mile trek takes about 29 minutes. For you on this tour, a couple of seconds.

Truck Shop

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We are taking a quick detour to the truck shop. Haul trucks get a lot of attention, but they're not the only star of the show. The mine has more than 180 vehicles, including loaders, scrapers, excavators, pickup trucks, vans and maintenance equipment. Our 50,000 gallon water trucks help with dust control. We even use remote-controlled dozers and loaders and the only fully autonomous drill in North America. All of this equipment requires consistent maintenance at our truck shop to ensure safety and efficiency. Our fleet travels 10,000 miles every day and each haul truck needs a 12-foot tall tire replaced about every nine months. And you thought changing your car tire was hard work.

Concentrator

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You're looking at our concentrator, our second step in the production process. Here we safely separate valuable minerals from the ore and make them into a concentrated liquid. The conveyors you see carry the a-frame stock pile to the grinders to crush the basketball-sized boulders into fine powder. Next in our flotation cells, we separate out the valuable minerals and create liquid concentrate. We send the concentrate, which is 26 percent copper, 17 miles north to the smelter via a six-inch steel pipeline. Be sure to check out the a-frame, grinding mills and flotation cells before you visit the smelter.

A-Frame

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Grind Building

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It's loud in here! We break down more than 175,000 tons of ore a day though a two-part process. First, the ore is sent to a Semi-Autogenous Grinding – or SAG – mill that grinds the ore using water and five-inch, 22-pound steel balls. It's like bumper cars inside the mills as the rocks hit the steel balls and other rocks to break into smaller pieces. Each SAG mill feeds two ball mills that use smaller three-inch balls. When we're finished, the ore comes out a fine, dark powder that is sent to flotation.

Flotation

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After being ground into a slurry, the ore is poured into these 300 cubic meter capacity flotation cells – some of the world's largest. Here we mix it with the perfect combination of water, air and chemicals. This causes the copper, molybdenum (or moly as we call it) and other valuable minerals to stick to air bubbles that float to the top of the tanks. The bubbles flow over the top as a concentrate that is further separated into moly and copper concentrates. The moly concentrate is shipped by truck from the concentrator for further processing. The copper concentrate is shipped via pipeline to the smelter. All the material that sinks to the bottom is sent to our tailings impoundment for safe storage. Our cells safely concentrate more than 1 million tons annually. Now off to the smelter…

Smelter

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Check out our smelter stack. It's Utah's tallest structure and is nearly as high as the Empire State Building. At our smelter, through safely heating, melting and applying chemical reactions, the copper is stripped from the other elements to produce 99 percent pure copper. And all those clouds you see are primarily just steam. Our state-of-the-art smelter captures 99.9 percent of the gases and particulates, making it the cleanest in the world. We also recover heat from the furnaces to co-generate 60 percent of the smelter's total electricity.

Filter Plant

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After being pumped 17 miles through a pipeline, the concentrate arrives first at the smelter's filter facility where it's dumped into a large storage tank. We safely press it, filter it and dry it with a massive rotating dryer so the concentrate looks like coffee grounds. Now out of the drier and into the fire…Let's head over to the smelting furnaces.

Smelting Furnaces

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After being dried at the filter plant, the powder concentrate is ready for the flash smelting furnace. Burning at 2,400 degrees, we safely melt the powder and separate it into three products: Gases like sulfur dioxide from the furnaces are converted into valuable sulfuric acid used in fertilizers; Slag, composed of silica and iron; and a molten metal called matte copper. We flash cool the matte copper in water and send it to a flash converting furnace to further remove impurities and create molten copper that is 98% pure. A bag house – or giant vacuum – captures any gases released in this process. We invented this flash converting process that is considered the best available technology in the industry. Our last stop at the smelter is in anode casting.

Anode Casting

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You're watching the molten copper being poured into a dual wheel casting machine that molds 750-pound copper sheets called anodes. About 12 of these anodes weigh the same as one pickup truck. That's a lot of pennies. Anodes are 99 percent pure copper at this point. The ones that pass inspection are ready to head to the refinery for the final step in the copper making process. Hop on the train and let's head to the refinery.

Train from Smelter

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We safely load the anodes into rail cars at the smelter for the two-mile ride to the refinery. On average, we make two deliveries every day. Any anodes that don't meet quality standards at the refinery are sent back to be re-melted in the Smelter's shaft furnace. This attention to quality ensures we get the most out of the products we mine.

Machine and Product Control

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Machine and product control (or MPC) serves as an automated process center for the refinery. Here machines safely unload the anodes from the smelter and prepare them in the anode receiving. They are weighed, tested and processed for quality before being sent to the tankhouse. Opposite anode preparation is where finished cathode from the tankhouse is returned to the MPC for shipping preparation. The cathode preparation machines strips the newly created copper cathodes from stainless steel blanks and sends them to shipping. Learn what happens in between anode receiving and cathode stripping in the tankhouse.

Tankhouse

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The tankhouse is where we convert our 99 percent pure copper anode into 99.99 percent pure copper. Here's how it works: The prepared anodes are placed into large tanks full of a special electrolytic solution using large overhead cranes. We safely apply an electric current which causes the copper ions to jump from the anodes onto stainless steel plates. The ions being placed on the stainless steel plates are now called a cathode. After 10 days we remove finished cathodes from the tank and send them back to the MPC. Each anode produces two, 300-pound cathodes. Material that sinks to the bottom of the tanks is called slime and it contains the precious metals that are collected and refined at our precious metals plant. Since we have seen how the cathodes are sent to shipping in the MPC let's head that way.

Shipping

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From the MPC the cathodes are sampled for quality, corrugated and strapped into 5,000 pound bundles. The 5,000-pound cathode bundles are placed into stacks on the warehouse floor. Forklifts load these bundles into railcars where they are ready to be safely shipped off to manufacturers who will use them to make cell phones, computer parts and other materials that make our modern life possible. On average, 10 railcars leave our warehouse each day carrying approximately 185,000 pounds per railcar. The majority of the cathodes are shipped domestically.

Refinery Combined Heat and Power System

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Tailings

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We've walked you through the process of what happens to the copper concentrate, but what happens to the non-mineral product that comes out of the concentrator? The wet slurry, like fine sand, is safely sent 13 miles through a 60-inch concrete pipes from the concentrator to our tailings impoundment near Magna. Here the material is cycloned to separate the course sand from the fine sand. The coarse sand is used to build the embankment and the fine sand is deposited into the interior for permanent storage. Like you see here, and water pools in the center. Nearly 50 million tons of tailings are safely deposited each year, which raises the height of the impoundment walls by about 5 - 10 feet each year. We use automated sprinklers to keep the material wet to minimize dust. We also recycle and pump approximately 80% percent of our water back to the concentrator to reuse in the process.

Inland Sea Shore

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Daybreak

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Let's conclude our virtual tour with a quick visit to Daybreak. Daybreak is 4,100 acre master planned community that we are building on the site of historically impacted mining lands. It is designed to address many of the areas regional growth challenges by reducing air quality and transportation impacts and improving the overall quality of life in the Salt Lake Valley. The vibrant community includes more than 1,000 acres of open space, 22 miles of trails, Energy Star rated homes and multiple LEED-certified buildings, including our headquarters. Our regional headquarters was the first Platinum level LEED building in Utah. One in every six new homes in Salt Lake County is built in our Daybreak mixed-use community, which was built on the principles of sustainable development.

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