The open-pit Kalumbila copper mine, also known as Sentinel Mine, is located 150km west of Solwezi in the North Western Province of Zambia. The mine, owned by Canadian company, First Quantum Minerals since 2010, has one of the largest reserves of copper in the world, estimated at one billion tonnes of ore grading 0.51% copper. The plant has the capacity to treat 55 million tonnes of ore to produce 300 000 tonnes of copper per annum and represents a USD2.1 billion investment – Zambia’s largest infrastructure investment since the Kariba Dam was constructed in 1959. Mining capacity will eventually extend to around 65 million bulk cubic metres of ore and waste mined per annum.
The operation takes the form of a large open pit mine, with copper ore extracted using conventional methods with large scale heavy equipment such as electric-powered face shovels with 57m3 buckets and hydraulic excavators working together with a fleet of ultra class haul trucks. Crushing takes place in the pit using mobile gyratory crushers, which are fed into secondary crushers and then sent to massive 44-foot length, 22-megawatt Ball mills, some of the largest of their type in the world. (https://www.first-quantum.com/English/our-operations/default.aspx )
