27/09/2019
MINING SERIES - Copper
The mining industry is easily recognized as one of the most valuable sectors of an industrialized economy because of its linkage to other sectors of development and its enormous capacity to support and simulate growth in virtually all sectors of the economy.
In fact , it can be said that the more a nations mining industry grows , the more they prosper economically and examples can be seen across the world from Canada to Australia, India, they all have a vibrant mining industry.
One of the industrial minerals that can be found in Nigeria which enjoys global demand is copper ore.
There are between 150 and 180 copper minerals that occur naturally as ores having distinctive colours of blue, bluish green or greenish crust especially the ores from Northern Nigeria. The commonest and the most important form mined are native copper (Cu); oxides of copper: cuprite (Cu2O); tenorite (CuO); and a variety of copper sulphides such as bornite (Cu5FeS4); chalcocite (Cu2S); tetrahedrite [(CuFe) 12Sb4S13] and chalcopyrite (Cu2Fe2S4) check our website; www.farhberge.com for more information
There is an estimated 5.8 trillion pounds of copper on Earth. A little more than half a trillion has been extracted since humans first began mining it. Less than 12 percent of the planet’s copper supply has been mined between 8,000 BCE and today.
Copper is also one of the world’s most recycled metals, partly because of the ease of melting it down and creating new product.
It is estimated that Nigeria has over 10,000,000 tons of Copper ore deposit. Copper is an element, reddish brown in color, having atomic number 29 and pertaining to the scientific symbol ‘Cu’. Coming from the same family of silver and gold, this element shares numerous common characteristics with those precious metals.
Copper is found alongside many other types of ore. It can be found near gold, silver, zinc, lead, and other types of metal deposits. When mixed in with other ores, copper is not usually found in great abundance.
Until the development of the modern copper mining process, it was typically a byproduct of mining for other metals. The deposits that contain the largest quantities of copper are called porphyry deposits, and the process of extracting it usually involves drilling an open pit into a layer of sedimentary rock. Learn more from our website www.farhberge.com
This element is a highly ductile and malleable element and a very good conductor of electricity. That is why it is highly used in the electrical appliances as a thermal and electrical conductor and in building wires.
The market for copper ore especially the overseas market in China is large, expanding and sustainable because of the numerous uses of copper ore. Buyers usually would like to secure steady source of supply of these products.
An exporter that is able to secure a contract at the right price would have an uphill task meeting the demand of the buyer because the output from the mines in Nigeria is low due to the use of crude implement. You can imagine a situation whereby the daily need of the factory of the buyer is 600/MT and the exporter would struggle to supply 500/MT on a monthly basis.
The return on investment on the export of copper ore is estimated between 10%- 15%.
Half of all the world’s copper is found in four localized regions: South America, South Central Asia, Indochina, and North America. The rest is spread throughout the world.
Copper has been found on almost every continent. It has also been mined in Central America, the Caribbean, Northeast Asia, North Central Asia, the Southeast Asian Archipelagos, Eastern Australia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. One of the largest current sources of copper mining today is in Chile.
To understand how copper is formed, it helps to look at how porphyry deposits—the largest current sources of copper ore—form. The ore bodies form in hydrothermal veins that are born in underground magma chambers far below the deposit itself. The high temperature of volcanic magma creates hydrothermal veins, allowing some of the heat to escape near the upper layers of the Earth’s crust.
This is why copper is often found in the sedimentary layer, where sand and mud are compressed until they form a layer of sedimentary rock on the surface of the earth. Copper ore gets trapped in oxidized zones within these types of rocks.
Copper is also commonly found in the oxidized zones of mineral deposits and in basalt cavities that have been in contact with hydrothermal veins. The presence of volcanoes in a region is often a good indicator of the presence of copper because that is where basalt cavities are in abundance near the sedimentary layer of the Earth.
Copper ore has been one of the industrial minerals that have been discovered in Nigeria, Western part of Africa. Its occurrence and distribution is mainly in the Northern Part of the country such as Nasarawa, Plateau, Zamfara, Bauchi, Adamawa, Gombe State, Abia and Kano State.
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