Kennecott Chino Mines Division

This page last updated on January 17, 2012.

(This is a work in progress; research continues.)

Additional Information

Chino Locomotives — A roster of Chino Mines Division locomotives.
"Copper & Nickel Electrics" — An article from Traction & Models magazine, May 1971, about the sale of eight Chino electrics to International Nickel Company in Canada.
Timeline (this page)

Chino Mine

Overview

The Kennecott Chino Mines Division was headquartered at Hurley, New Mexico; the smelter was at Hurley and the mine was at Santa Rita, New Mexico.

The following comes from the web site of the Mining History Association:

The Santa Rita portion of the Central Mining District is dominated by the Santa Rita/Chino open pit. After the Spanish discovery of the copper deposits at Santa Rita, Colonel Manuel Carrasco and Francisco Manuel Elugea received the Santa Rita del Cobre land grant. Small mines produced high grade copper oxide ores but harassment by the Indians kept production small. In the 1880’s, a stamp mill and smelter were built but the venture failed. Next, the Santa Rita Mining Company acquired the property, but failed to discover the main orebody.

The turning point for Santa Rita occurred in 1904 when John M. Scully recognized the similarity between the ores there and those at the Bingham Canyon Mine in Utah. After an extensive sampling campaign, he obtained the necessary financial backing and, in 1908, formed the Chino Copper Company. Open pit production began in 1910 using steam powered shovels and rail haulage in the pit. The first concentrator was built in Hurley in 1911. Flotation circuits were added in 1914. Ore was hauled from the mine to the mill by rail. The company merged with the Nevada Consolidated Copper Company in 1926 and with KCC in 1933. The mine was inactive from October 1934 to January 1937. During part of that shutdown, mine haulage was electrified and electric shovels were purchased. The Hurley smelter began production in 1939.

In the 1950’s, KCC discovered ore under the town of Santa Rita. To expand the Chino pit, the townsite was abandoned. Its residents moved to nearby towns. A new concentrator was built adjacent to the mine in 1982. The Hurley smelter was modernized in 1985 to meet the pollution control requirements of the Clean Air Act. It closed in 2002. Both the Hurley concentrator and smelter were demolished in the mid-2000’s and the sites are being reclaimed by FMCG.

Today the Santa Rita/Chino Mine is 1,500 feet deep, 1.5 miles across, and still growing. After a temporary shut-down in 2008, Freeport-McMoran Copper and Gold (FMCG) resumed production in 2011. Lower grade ores are leached and the copper recovered by solvent extraction/electro-winning (SX/EW). The higher grade sulfide ores are processed at the mill and the concentrates are sent to the company smelter in Arizona.

The following is an excerpt from David Myrick's New Mexico's Railroads: A Historical Survey, pages 185-192.

The copper mines at Santa Rita, now [1993] the property of the Phelps Dodge Company but for many years the Chino Mines Division of the Kennecott Copper Corporation, date back to almost 1800 when a Spanish colonel, Jose Manuel Carrasco, learned of the fabulous deposit. Production began in 1804, making Santa Rita one of the oldest copper mines in the United States. From that time to the present century, life at the mines made the full swing from great activity to a dormant state, depending on the Apaches and other factors.

Shortly before the Santa Rita Mining Company was formed by New York men about 1899, efforts were made to connect the mines by rail with the outside world. There was already the Santa Fe branch from Deming to Silver City, so in 1891 an independent group opened a 14-mile railroad under the name of the Silver City and Northern Rail Road Company from Whitewater through Hurley to San Jose, a station just east of Hanover Junction of today. Six years later this short line was taken over by the Santa Fe and in 1898, the Santa Fe extended the branch another four miles to Santa Rita under the name of The Santa Rita Railroad Company.

The big change came in 1909 when the Santa Rita Mining Company was sold to the Chino Copper Company. The latter company, blessed with strong financial resources, made the purchase after large reserves of copper ore suitable for open pit mining had been firmly established.

Work on the open it began in 1910 by the Chino Copper Company, with side dump cars taking out copper ore and waste rock. Those cars with ore were delivered to the Santa Fe interchange at Santa Rita for the line haul of nine miles to the concentrator at Hurley (unless they were to go to the ore dump). The cars with waste rock were sent to the waste dump. In the early days, motive power for the Chino mines consisted of 21 0-4-0T locomotives of H. K. Porter manufacture with seven weighing 50 tons and the remaining 14 weighing 45-1/2 tons. Not all of the 21 locomotives were expected to be in service at one time. In 1914, according to one observer, two were generally in the shop and another was "held just outside the shop with steam up ready for instant service."

Mine trackage, which began with a few miles in 1910, grew to 14 miles in 1912 and with subsequent additions, the spur to the northwest ore body built early in the summer of 1914 being an example, total trackage soon measured 24 miles.

The very nature of the mining operation, necessitating the expansion of the pit by cutting away the benches serving as the railroad grade, caused a constant shifting and realignment of tracks. As early as 1914 there were four track gangs each of 14 men assigned to this work. For track work on the waste and ore dumps, the same situation prevailed except that even more men were required, the gangs numbering seven, each with a complement of 14 men.

In later years, Alco and Baldwin supplied the steam power but in 1939, the first steps toward electrification of the pit haulage began with the purchase of seven electric locomotives from General Electric. Electrification of the pit haulage was completed two years later.

As the pit became larger and deeper—by 1963 it was over a mile wide in any direction and 1000 feet deep with 21 bench levels—it became more expensive to remove ore and waste from the pit. Truck operations were instituted in 1952 as a supplement to the pit railroad and efforts were made to speed up train movements and reduce costs. Centralized traffic control was installed for all switches in the pit. Rails in the main tracks, formerly 90 lb. rail (initially 60 lb. rail was used), were replaced with 132 lb. rails. Track repair forces began using powered ballast tampers, track liners, spike pullers, etc. Other procedures were revised.

Still costs continued to climb. A skip hoist, completed in 1962, reduced haulage costs from lower levels by 37 percent. More trucks were purchased and, after careful studies, it was decided to convert the entire Chino pit from rail to truck haulage, with the last ore move from the pit by train taking place on September 5, 1963.

Today [1993] the railroad at Santa Rita is less than five miles in length. Operated in two sections by electric locomotives, one segment moves the cars from the ore bin, fed by the skip hoist at the top of the pit, to the interchange with Santa Fe while the other performs a similar service for ore delivered from the pit by truck. From the interchange at Santa Rita, the Santa Fe assembles trains of 50 cars for the haul to Hurley, dumping the ore into the bins of the primary crusher at the concentrator at Hurley. Since 1939, when the smelter was built at Hurley, outbound traffic handled by Santa Fe is in the form of copper anodes for the refinery. (New Mexico's Railroads: A Historical Survey, Revised Edition, by David F. Myrick; 298 pages; University of New Mexico Press, 1990; paperback edition, 1993; ISBN 0826311857)

Timeline

Brief timeline:

1889 — Santa Rita Mining Company purchased the Chino property.
1909 — The Chino Copper Company was formed, and assumed control of the property.
Mid-1920s — Chino Copper Company merged with Ray Consolidated Copper Company and later with Nevada Consolidated Company to form Nevada Consolidates.
1933 — Kennecott Copper Corporation purchased Nevada Consolidates and the Santa Rita Mine.
1980 — In the face of declining copper prices, Kennecott Copper Corporation sold a 1/3 interest in the Santa Rita mine to Mitsubishi Corporation.
1986 — Kennecott sold its remaining 2/3 interest in the Chino mine and the Hurley smelter to Chino Mines Company, a subsidiary of Phelps Dodge.
December 2003 — Phelps Dodge completed acquisition of Heisei Minerals Corporation's 1/3 general partnership interest in Chino Mines Company. Heisei was a joint venture between Mitsubishi Materials Corporation and Mitsubishi Corporation.
March 19, 2007 — Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc. acquired Phelps Dodge Corporation, including Chino.

1910
Open pit operations began at the Chino mine.

October 1934
Kennecott closed its Chino mine due to low copper prices. (New York Times, December 19, 1936)

January 1, 1937
Kennecott reopened its Chino mine. The Ray mine (closed in April 1933) was reopened at the same time. (New York Times, December 19, 1936)

1940
Electrification of the rail haulage system at Chino was completed, and the last steam locomotive was retired. (Parson 1956, page 126)

The first seven of a total of fifteen 75-ton electric locomotives were delivered, numbered as Chino Copper Company 50-56. A seventh locomotive came later in 1940, and five more came in 1941 and 1942. The last two, numbered as Chino 63 and 64, were delivered in late 1950.

In 1949, a Baldwin VO-1000 diesel switcher locomotive was transferred from Utah Copper Company's Bingham & Garfield Railway. Delivered as B&G no. 801 in 1942, it became no. 80 at Chino and was used to switch the loaded and empty ore cars at Santa Rita, assembling trains for movement by AT&SF to the Hurley smelter.

In 1954, two large 125-ton electric locomotives were delivered. In 1958, and additional two 125-ton locomotives arrived, making for a fleet of four 125-ton locomotives, numbered as Chino Copper Company 101-104. Photos as late as 1959 show them still with their 100-series numbers, but they were soon renumbered to numbers 1-4.

1964-1965
Chino Mines Division transferred three 125-ton electric locomotives to Utah Copper Division, where they were rebuilt and renumbered to UCD 408-410 for service on the mill car dumpers.

1967
In 1967 Kennecott Copper Corporation at Chino, New Mexico, conducted the first feasibility study and prototype test of trolley-assisted large mining trucks. The truck used was a Unit Rig Model M-100 with a 700 hp diesel engine, General Electric motorized wheels, and 24.00x49 tires. The testing indicated that the truck, carrying a payload of 123 tons up a 1,300 ft ramp at 7 percent incline, was able to increase its maximum speed from 6 mph to 13.5 mph by using trolley assist. The maximum voltage that could be maintained was only 634 volts and it was reasoned that a higher speed would have resulted if a higher trolley line voltage could have been supplied. (Truck Haulage Using Overhead Electrical Power to Conserve Diesel Fuel and Improve Haulage Economics (February 1981), by David M. Lake & William Brzezniak, General Electric Company. Presented at the 110th AIME Annual Meeting)

April 1970
Chino Mines Division sold eight 75-ton electric locomotives to International Nickel Company.

Six of the 75-ton electric locomotives remained in service at Chino until the end of rail operations in 1972.

December 1971
Chino Mines Division transferred its last 125-ton locomotive to Utah Copper Division, where it was placed into service as UCD 778.

1972
Rail operations had ceased at the Chino Mines Division, although the Santa Fe still transported the ore from the mine to the mill. AT&SF moved the ore in its own cars, using its own power and crews, from the truck-to-rail transloading points at the Santa Rita Pit, eight miles to the Hurley mill and smelter, and then supplied the power to push the cars through the dumpers. At the Santa Rita pit, 75-ton electric locomotives 50-64 were used. Until it was transferred to Nevada Mines Division in 1963, diesel no. 80 was used in the assembly yard at Santa Rita to make-up the trains for the Santa Fe to move to Hurley.

(click here for a photo of Chino no. 57, taken by Steve Swanson in 1979)

June 1980
Kennecott Corporation and Mitsubishi Corporation signed an agreement to form a joint venture that would implement a modernization program at Kennecott's Chino mine. (New York Times, June 11, 1980)

Kennecott Corporation had spun off its Chino property under the name of Kennecott Santa Fe Corporation.

December 1980
Kennecott Corporation announced in December 1980 its intent to form a partnership with Mitsubishi for Chino Mines Division. Mitsubishi was to acquire a one-third interest in Chino, which produced 62,000 tons of copper in 1979, compared to Utah Copper Division production of 206,000 tons of copper in same year. (Salt Lake Tribune, December 23, 1980)

March 1981
Chino Mines Company was formed in March 1981 for the purpose of owning and operating the copper mine located at Santa Rita, New mexico, and the copper smelter at Hurley, New Mexico. Chino Mines Company was a partnership whose original partners were Kennecott Santa Fe Corporation, a subsidiary of Kennecott Corporation, and MC Minerals Corporation, a subsidiary of Mitsubishi Corporation. Kennecott Santa Fe owned a two-thirds interest in Chino. MC Minerals Corporation owned a one-third interest in Chino.

March 2, 1981
"The Kennecott Corporation said it had transferred a one-third interest in its Chino copper mining and processing facilities near Silver City, N. M., to the Mitsubishi Corporation for an initial cost of $116 million. The transfer is part of an agreement announced earlier under which Mitsubishi will put up one-third of the cost of modernizing the facilities, a project that is expected to cost more than $350 million. When the modernization is complete, Kennecott said, copper production at Chino should increase by about 70 percent, to about 110,000 tons a year, from about 65,000 now." (New York Times, March 3, 1981)

March 2, 1981
Mitsubishi of Japan took a one-third interest in Kennecott's Chino Mines Division in New Mexico. The agreement giving Mitsubishi one-third interest in Chino was signed on March 2, 1981. (Deseret News, March 2, 1981)

Mitsubishi's one-third interest in Chino was $116 million, to pay for modernization. One-third of copper production to go to Mitsubishi. No change in name, all 1,800 employees will remain as Kennecott Minerals Company. (Salt Lake Tribune, March 3, 1981)

September 1986
Kennecott announced that it would sell its two-third interest in Chino Mines Company to Phelps Dodge Corporation. A subsidiary of Mitsubishi Corp. owns the other one-third interest in Chino Mines. (Houston Chronicle, September 12, 1986)

January 1987
Effective on January 1, 1987, Phelps Dodge Chino, Inc. (formed in 1980) purchased Kennecott Santa Fe's two-thirds interest in Chino. At approximately the same time, Mitsubishi restructured its ownership of Chino resulting in Heisei Minerals' ownership of Mitsubishi's one-third interest in Chino. Phelps Dodge Chino, Inc. became the managing partner of the Chino mine.

June 15, 1990
Southwestern Railroad is a copper hauling line based in Hurley, New Mexico. Southwestern Railroad falls under the Western Group umbrella, which also includes the Cimarron Valley (in Kansas, Oklahoma and Colorado), the Arizona Central/Verde River Canyon Excursion train (in Arizona), and the Southwestern Railroad's Shattuck branch in Perryton, Texas.

Southwestern Railroad began operations on June 15, 1990 when it acquired all of Santa Fe's trackage north and west of Whitewater, New Mexico, including the former Santa Fe trackage that served the Santa Rita mine and the smelter at Hurley. Whitewater is about nine miles south of the smelter at Hurley, and about 19 miles south of the Chino copper mine at Santa Rita. In June 1994, Southwestern Railroad extended their trackage by the purchase of the former Santa Fe line between Deming and Whitewater. In 2001, BNSF sold the former Santa Fe Deming Subdivision to Southwestern Railroad, 60 miles northeast from Deming to Rincon, New Mexico.

Southwestern's primary customer is Phelps-Dodge, the copper-producing giant. Southwestern Railroad presently serves the open pit copper mines at Chino (north of Hurley) and Tyrone (west of Whitewater), as well as a smelter at Hurley. All Hurley-area traffic is copper-related: inbound loads of copper ore, additional loads of copper ore moving from the mining areas to the smelter, outbound loads of copper anodes and cathodes, and outbound loads of sulfuric acid, a byproduct of the smelting process. (Southwestern Railroad, including photos) (New Mexico Copper Haulers, including photos)

July 31, 2003
Phelps Dodge purchased Heisei's one-third interest in the Chino mine. (U.S. Geological Survey Minerals Yearbook, 2003)

November 19, 2006
Phelps Dodge announced that it would be acquired by Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc. The purchase price was reported to be US$25.9 billion in cash and stock. (Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold news release dated November 19, 2006)

March 19, 2007
Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc. completed its purchase of Phelps Dodge Corporation, creating the world's largest publicly traded copper company. At that time, Chino Mines Company became a subsidiary of Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold. The purchase price was reported as $26 billion. (Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold news release dated March 19, 2007)

Copper giant Phelps Dodge became the sole owner of Chino Mines in 2003 when it bought the remaining third of the company that had been controlled by Heisei Minerals Corp. (a subsidiary of Mitsubishi Materials Corporation). Chino Mines joined Freeport-McMoRan when that company acquired Phelps Dodge in 2007.

The history of Phelps-Dodge dates back to 1834, when Anson Phelps, a one-time saddle maker, and his son-in-law, William Dodge, a merchant in dry goods, joined forces to organize a New York City-based mercantile company. At first it traded American products to England in exchange for copper, iron, tin and other metals. After growing into an accomplished mercantile and metals company, the company entered mining in 1881 by investing in the Detroit Copper Mining Co. in Morenci, Arizona. Phelps-Dodge quit the import-export business altogether in 1906.

Phelps Dodge developed copper deposits in Arizona and New Mexico, ultimately obtaining mines in Chile and Peru as well. The company was among the first in the industry in the early twentieth century to convert to open-pit mining from the conventional underground method. In the mid-1980s, Phelps Dodge was the first to use "solution extraction and electrowinning" on a large commercial scale.

June 5, 2007
The smoke stacks at the former Kennecott/Phelps Dodge smelter at Hurley were demolished as part of the site's reclamation. (YouTube video)

2010
The Chino mine and processing facilities are located at Hurley, New Mexico, near the historic mining community of Silver City. It is one of the largest open-pit copper mines in the world. The Chino mine covers over 9,000 acres. The pit is 1.75 miles across. Chino is a porphyry open-pit copper mine and was one of the first low-grade, open-pit copper mines in the world. (Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc., Who We Are, History)

Chino was reactivated in 2003 after mining operations were idled in 2001 due to low copper prices.

Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc. (FCX, their NYSE ticker symbol) is an international mining company with headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona. FCX operates large geographically diverse assets with proven and probable reserves of copper, gold and molybdenum. FCX is the world’s largest publicly traded copper producer. FCX is also the world’s largest producer of molybdenum and a significant gold producer.

The company’s portfolio of assets includes the Grasberg mining complex in Indonesia, and significant mining operations in the Americas, including the large scale Morenci and Safford minerals districts in North America and the Cerro Verde and El Abra operations in South America, and the Tenke Fungurume minerals district in the Democratic Republic of Congo. At December 31, 2010, FCX had proven and probable copper reserves of 120.5 billion pounds.

The open pit mine presently covers an area of approximately one square mile at the perimeter, with additional areas on the perimeter used as rock stockpiles. The uppermost level in the pit is located on the east side at the 6,750 foot elevation and the lowest level in the pit is currently at the 5,400 foot elevation. Mining takes place on a 3-shift-per-day, 7-day-per-week basis.

Material is designated as sulfide ore, leach ore, or low-grade leach ore. Loading of the materials in the Santa Rita Pit is accomplished with electric shovels varying from 17 cubic yard to 56 cubic yard dipper capacity. The size of dipper used is dependent on whether the shovel is operating in high or low density material.

The existing haulage truck fleet moves approximately 60,000 tons per day of ore, 151,000 tons per day of leach rock, and 228,000 tons per day of waste rock. Ore is delivered to the concentrator primary crusher; leach ore and no-leach rock are delivered to stockpiles on the perimeter of the pit. Haul distances are currently averaging about 13,000 feet with 600 feet of lift.

Equipment at the mine includes a P&H 2800XPA shovel and Caterpillar 797 360 ton capacity haul trucks.

The Chino concentrator restarted operations in January 2004 after a three-year break. Production has continued at the solution extraction/electrowinning (SXEW) plant throughout these periods. The smelter stopped operating in 2002 but resumed operations in 2004 and production has increased since then. In 2005 the smelter was permanently closed.

The highest quality ore from the mine (0.65% copper) goes through crushing, grinding, and flotation processes. The end product is copper concentrate containing up to 30% copper, which is pumped through a pipeline to the Chino smelter.

At the smelter, dried copper concentrate is fed into the furnace with 97% pure oxygen. The concentrate particles "flash" and melt. Molten slag is separated from the copper-rich molten matte. Further processing converts the matte from 60% to 99.8% copper, which is poured into anode molds on a casting wheel. Each copper anode weighs 850 pounds.

The Solution Extraction-Electrowinning (SX-EW) plant produces copper anodes that weigh about 200 pounds each. This 99.99% pure copper is the highest quality copper produced at Chino. Chino is one of the SX/EW facilities producing copper cathode as feedstock for Phelps Dodge's rod mills.

(click here for an explanation of the solution extraction/electrowinning process at the Arizona Mining Association's web site)

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