Codelco's El Teniente Division Studies Cobalt Recovery from Tailings

en.Wedoany.com Reported - Chilean state copper company Codelco has disclosed that its El Teniente division is studying the recovery of cobalt from mine tailings. The project is led by the Geology and Metallurgy Department with support from the Process Engineering Department. The study covers both historical tailings and fresh tailings generated by current production processes, with the goal of assessing cobalt occurrence characteristics, recoverability, and potential for subsequent commercialization.

The study has so far conducted mineralogical and geometallurgical characterization of historical samples from the Barahona tailings storage facility and tailings from El Teniente's existing process, and has further carried out selective pyrite flotation tests. The research team is focusing on evaluating the cobalt content in pyrite from different orebody sources, as well as the feasibility of upgrading cobalt grade through flotation to produce a concentrate that can be further processed.

The project is still at the experimental research and process validation stage and has not yet entered the pilot plant construction, industrial production, or formal investment decision stage. At this stage, the cobalt resource tonnage, average grade, test recovery rate, planned processing scale, investment amount, and industrialization timetable for the tailings have not been disclosed. Therefore, it cannot be described as a confirmed cobalt production project.

The research team has presented interim research results at the Flotation 2025 conference held in South Africa at the end of 2025 and at the Procemin Geomet conference held in Santiago in 2026. The former focused on the historical Barahona tailings, while the latter further presented research progress on tailings from current production.

El Teniente's existing copper mining system has long produced copper and molybdenum products. Codelco is currently advancing mine life extension projects including Andes Norte, Diamante, and Andesita in parallel, with the goal of maintaining ore processing capacity of approximately 137,000 tonnes per day and extending the mine life by more than 50 years. The tailings cobalt study is a re-evaluation of by-product resources within the existing mine process and is being advanced separately from the above-mentioned main mine expansion projects.