Copper King Mining Corporation fka CPRKQ

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Kennecott Utah Copper produces approximately 300,000 tons of copper cathode per year.

The copper is mined, concentrated, smelted, and refined at Kennecott's facilities west of Salt Lake City and delivered to our customers by rail. In an industry marked by boom and bust business cycles, Kennecott Utah Copper has reliably provided copper to its customers for almost one hundred years.

The copper ore, which averages about 0.6% copper, is mined at the Bingham Canyon Mine, where open pit mining began in 1906. The ore is crushed in the pit and moved by conveyer belt to the Copperton Concentrator.

At the Concentrator, the ore is ground in huge mills using steel balls and the copper is concentrated by flotation to produce a concentrate of about 28% copper. The concentrate is transported 17 miles to the smelter via a slurry pipeline.


Cathodes bundled and ready for shipment
At the smelter, the concentrate is dried in a large rotating dryer, then sent into a flash smelting furnace. It is separated into three products -- gases, which contain sulfur; slag, which is mostly silica and iron; and copper matte, which is 70% copper. After being cooled, the copper matte is crushed and fed into a flash converting furnace, which removes most of the remaining impurities to produce a molten copper, called blister, which is about 98% copper. Anode furnaces refine it further, and the copper is cast into plates called anodes, weighing about 700 pounds each and containing 99.6% copper.

At the Refinery, racks of anodes are lowered into an acid solution, interleaved with stainless steel cathode starter sheets. For 10 days, an electric current is sent between the anode and the cathode, causing the copper ions to migrate from the anode to the cathode. The other impurities, including gold and silver, fall into the bottom of the tank holding the solution. This process forms a plate of 99.99% pure copper.

An anode will produce two cathodes, each weighing about 280 pounds. The copper cathodes are Kennecott Utah Copper's finished product. They are stripped from the starter sheets, strapped together in 5,000-pound bundles, loaded onto rail cars, and shipped to the customer.




Product Specifications

Copper Cathode in approximately 2.3 metric ton strapped bundles.
Meets or exceeds ASTM Specification B-115-95 for Comex deliverable CATH, Grade 1 (High-Grade) cathode and BS EN 1978:1998 including AMD 5725 for deliverable Cu-CATH-1 LME-Grade A cathode.


http://www.kennecott.com/copper_overview.html