Challenges
Kennecott Utah Copper operates the Bingham canyon mine concentrator plant, a smelter and a refinery. Ore from this mine is concentrated into slurry, piped to where the smelting process occurs, and then sent to the refinery. Efficient operation at the concentrator stage is critical to maintaining uptime of the smelter. Each year the concentrator plant is shut down a total of 36 times. This is necessary to maintain critical equipment while essential repairs and upgrades are completed. The issue at Bingham was that the length of downtime was causing a bottleneck in the overall process.