Tenke Fungurume and Kamoa-Kakula in the Top 10 most valuable mines in the world
The mining industry relies on a relatively small number of giant deposits to fuel its growth – and new discoveries of this nature are rare. Using data from Miningintelligence, MINING.COM has compiled a ranking of the world’s 10 richest working and precious metal base mines by calculating the overall value of mineral resources based on prevailing prices.
On this list, we discover two mines located in the Democratic Republic of Congo, namely Tenke Fungurume which is in 7th place and Kamoa-Kakula which is in 9th place.
The discovery of Tenke Fungurume in the Congo dates back to the 1970s, but Kamoa Kakula stands out for its youth with its first production only in May 2021, although the high-grade copper deposit in the DRC was first discovered in the early 1970s. 2000s.
Number 1 on the list was Norilsk Nickel’s eponymous operations in Russia’s far north dating back to 1960, with the discovery of the Talnakhskoye field as the refinery handling Soviet nickel production started decades earlier. Today, a complex of several mines around Norilsk extracts the metals Ni, Cu, Pt, Pd and Au from the magmatic sulphide deposit.
The second most valuable ore body in the world mined today – Olympic Dam in South Australia – was discovered in the mid-1970s, while No. 3 Mogalakwena in South Africa began operations in the 1990s. Escondida , the world’s largest copper mine, located at No. 4 on the list, was discovered in 1981 but would not reach current production of over a million tonnes per year until 2004.
Although these mines are approaching middle age, they are relatively new given that No. 8 Morenci began operations in 1873, mining activity at no. 4 Collahuasi dates back to the 1880s, No. 10 Los Bronces went into production in 1916, and Grasberg (then Ertsberg or Ore Mountain) was first explored in 1936. Indeed, the top 20 copper mines in the world have a weighted average age of nearly 100 years since initial discovery.
The Tenke-Fungurume group of deposits were discovered in the late 18th century, not in the 1970s. One can literally trip over it with the large outcropping area and the absence of trees caused by the high copper concentration in the ground. The first drilling on the deposits were done in 1918 and by 1970 there was more than 200,000m done. They were not exploited for a century because they are mostly oxide ore at the surface and it was not easy to process at the time. Most mines in the copperbelt were targeting sulphide ore in the 20th century.