Colombia produces numerous mineral products such as oil, coal, gold, silver, platinum, nickel, emerald etc. and is thought to have still greater potential resource supplies. On the other hand, Japan depends on other countries for most of its supply of mineral resources and it is very important to insure the supply of these resources. As for copper, our country once was an exporting country of this material, but in 1990, 99.6% of Japanese demand for copper was met through import. At that time, in 1990, the El Roble mine was developed by a joint venture as the first mechanized underground copper mine in Colombia.
The El Roble mine is located at El Carmen de Atrato which is about 80km southwest of Medellín, Colombia. The ore deposit is of submarine volcanogenic massive sulfide type and a high grade copper-gold deposit. The reserves of minable ore is about one million metric tons with copper content of 3.8%, gold content of 2.7g/t and silver content of 8.4g/t.
A lot of laboratory works and detailed field surveys were conducted during the exploration program and provided effective guides for the exploitation. In particular the lithogeochemistry of minor elements and stable isotopes of the host rocks proved of great use for determination of targets in this area.
The geology and ore deposit of the mine are described, and an example of the explorations by a Japanese company in overseas countries is reported in this paper.
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