Unique facility in the Panamanian rainforest

The aim with any tailings storage facility is to find a way to safely and responsibly dispose of the unwanted products of mining and refine your desired material, in this case copper. The size and location of Cobre Panama presents an interesting challenge for our tailings team to ensure that we can do just that.

With the rich biodiversity that surrounds our operation in the heart of the Panamanian rainforest, we can’t risk any damage to, or problems at, our tailings storage facility – regardless of what might cause it. In order to safeguard against this eventually, we have conducted sophisticated failure mode analysis and designed the facility to counter all the worst-case scenarios.

There are four factors that combine to make this such a unique situation: the size of Cobre Panama, the effect of rainfall, the potential for seismic activity, and the operation’s remote location.

Size
Cobre Panama is one of the largest copper mines in the history of the world. We are extracting copper from dense rock that is then turned into a much less dense slurry, which ends up twice the volume of the rock that is extracted. This means that the tailings facilities we are creating have to be huge to accommodate our needs. We currently have two facilities with the combined length of the two banks around 7km long and 60m high so far.

Rainfall
It will come as no surprise that rainforests have a lot of rainfall – each year the Panamanian rainforest expects to have around 4.5m of rainfall. We have to build a facility that is able to take on huge amounts of rainfall in a single 24-hour period. Our facility has been designed to accommodate almost 1m of rainfall in 24 hours and 1.5m in 72 hours. These numbers are based on safeguarding the facility against a worst-case scenario of rainfall, as imagined by our own in-house catastrophe analysis specialists.

Seismic activity
Whilst the operation is not open to the same level of seismic activity that you can expect to find in some of the most active locations in the world, there is a still a considerable amount that we have had to factor into the design and engineering of the tailings facility. We have designed our facility to withstand earthquakes more powerful than ever experienced in Panama’s history to date. Essentially, whatever the earth and the sky throw at our tailings facility, it has been designed to weather it, and to stand strong.

Working in remote locations
The final factor that has required some unique management is the remote location in which we have been working. Cobre Panama is deep within the Panamanian jungle, so we have had to overcome challenges around bringing the right people and equipment to our site so we can create a world-class tailings facility.

Our vast team, of analysts, quality assurance experts, quality control team members, engineers, designers, and many other roles, have come together to build a truly unique tailings management system. A real point of pride for this team is the feedback we get from external safety inspectors and others when they tell us that this might well be one of the best facilities that the world has ever seen.