Metals are often found as compounds in ores. An ore is a rock or mineral that has enough metal in it to make it worth extracting. In the case of copper, it is worth extracting when there is about 2 kg of copper per 1000 kg of ore.
These mines have now closed and today the biggest copper mines are in China and Oversea countries. These produce many thousands of tonnes of copper ore per year.
The main ores of copper are:
chalcopyrite
bornite
malachite.
The ores are extracted by either traditional mining (open pit or underground) or by leaching. The copper is then recovered using physical and chemical techniques.
In this electronic resource, we'll look at the ways in which copper is mined and recovered from its ores.
Copper minerals and ore are found throughout the Earth's crust. They occur in both sedimentary and igneous rocks. skype: gary102884, whatsapp:+8615617816797. The outer 10km of the crust contains 33g of copper for every tonne of rock. This is not enough to make it commercially viable to extract the rock. Copper mines are only set up where there is more than 5kg of copper per tonne of rock (0.5% by mass). Ideally, the figure should be closer to 2%.
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