VOL. 07 | ISSUE 3 | September 2024
Leach to the Last Drop Success Getting Attention Outside the Company
Now that it’s proved itself, Leach to the Last Drop has caught the attention of competitors, the media and the financial community.
Kathleen Quirk, President and Chief Executive Officer, said during an April 2022 earnings call that Freeport’s leaching initiative had the potential to deliver 200 million pounds or more of copper per year – previously considered unrecoverable – from existing stockpiles.
That is the equivalent of opening a new mine without the associated capital costs, regulatory burdens or construction delays, she said at the time. The copper could be produced at a lower cost and in a more environmentally friendly manner than traditional mining.
“I do believe that others around the industry will pick up (leaching) over time,” Quirk said during a global mining conference in 2022. “The size of the prize is so significant.”
Leach to the Last Drop has met those early optimistic predictions. In 2023, the year ended at an annualized production rate of 200 million pounds of copper that otherwise would have gone unrecovered. With scaling and innovation, the estimates are it could account for 400 million pounds of additional copper annually in the next few years, with the ultimate goal of eventually achieving 800 million pounds annually.
“Everybody is chasing us,” said Justin Cross, Vice President-Operational Improvement. “Leaching is going to be a huge part of copper mining in the future, a bigger part than it is today because of all the things it has going for it – less carbon intensity, less water intensity, less capital intensity. We are well positioned to get there first, but there is a tremendous amount of energy and resource in the industry shaping the future of hydrometallurgy.”
We are building the plane as we fly it. The ideas are coming from everywhere – from the front line, from our vendors, from our competitors, management. This is a call to action for the entire company, and it’s almost impossible to replicate. While we are solving many technical problems, the collaboration of the Freeport team is truly at the core of our success and will be even more so going forward.
Uniquely positioned assets
Freeport is in a unique position to benefit from more sophisticated leaching because of the size, number and residual copper volumes in our existing stockpiles, Cross said.
Leach to the Last Drop began as an analysis of the company’s 50 existing stockpiles following a model called PAU – previously assumed unrecoverable, Cross said. People from frontline operators to scientists, data specialists and company leaders collaborated to develop new tactics to target that copper.
Pranav Attavar, Superintendent-Leaching Continuous Improvement (right) and Joel Russell, Engineering Specialist II, review data which is an important part of Leach to the Last Drop in Morenci.
“We are building the plane as we fly it,” he said. “The ideas are coming from everywhere – from the front line, from our vendors, from our competitors, management. This is a call to action for the entire company, and it’s almost impossible to replicate. While we are solving many technical problems, the collaboration of the Freeport team is truly at the core of our success and will be even more so going forward.”
Other companies are pursuing advanced leaching techniques to extract more copper from their own assets. Where it makes sense, Freeport will use the products of other companies, apply their discoveries and even partner with them to develop mutually beneficial new products like chemical additives.
Jason Green, Project Engineer II (left), and Hector Romo, Lead Engineering Technician, are both part of the Continuous Improvement team at Morenci that is finding new ways to extract copper from existing stockpiles. They watch as drip lines are installed to reach copper in the side slope.
But much of Freeport’s innovation was developed internally. Nearly 100 patents have been issued to the company in the past 10 years, most dealing with the leaching project, and others are pending.
The goal is to unlock the copper as safely, quickly and efficiently as possible, Cross said. Given the estimates that global electrification will cause demand for copper that will far outpace supply in the coming years, new approaches to copper mining will be needed.
“We really are tapping into the collective brainpower that exists to get to a solution as fast as we can,” Cross said. “We are more focused on solving the very next problem than with what the perfect long-term solution is. This bias for action is generating immediate value that yields better solutions and ideas. This balance of a long-term vision and near-term execution is building our confidence and accelerates learning in a very healthy way.”
One of the early successes of Leach to the Last Drop was installing covers to increase the heat in the stockpiles.
Freeport’s ‘secret weapon’
It’s not just other mining companies that are noticing Freeport’s leaching success. It also is getting attention in the financial community.
“Freeport’s operational excellence and development expertise has long been recognized as a strength by Wall Street,” said David Joint, Vice President-Investor Relations. “Our team’s early success in our innovative Leach to the Last Drop initiatives have not gone unnoticed, and analysts and investors have begun ascribing values as our operations enhance recoveries and add new volumes to our production profile from historical stockpiles. As Freeport continues to build momentum through these important new operating practices, these successes should further elevate our position as foremost in copper.”
The investment advice company Motley Fool recently called the leaching breakthroughs Freeport’s “Secret Weapon.”
An April 2024 report from BNP Paribas, a multinational bank and financial services holding company, described the company’s success as a “meaningful and unique opportunity.”
The additional low-cost copper could add about $15 billion in value to the company, or the equivalent of about $10.57 per share based on copper selling at $4 per pound, according to the analysis.
“Our conclusion is simple; achieving leaching targets is extremely valuable accretive,” BNP Paribas said. “A combination of low cost and long life offers significant value at a wide range of copper prices.”