Chile is the world’s largest copper producer, supplying roughly a quarter of global output alongside significant volumes of lithium, molybdenum, gold, silver, iron, and iodine. This project builds a directed network of the Chilean mineral supply chain, connecting 461 facilities across extraction, processing, and export stages using official production statistics, georeferenced facility registers, and customs records.
Understanding how minerals flow from mine to market requires connecting several layers of data that are typically published in isolation. Chile’s copper commission (COCHILCO) publishes production volumes by company; the geological survey (Sernageomin) maintains a georeferenced register of mining facilities; and customs agencies record which ports ship which products to which countries. None of these sources, on their own, describes the complete supply chain. This project assembles them into a single directed network where each node is a physical facility and each edge represents a material flow between stages.
The pipeline matches COCHILCO production data to individual facilities, estimates monetary values using 2024 commodity prices, and constructs edges from mines through processing plants and smelters to export ports and destination countries. Copper and molybdenum are matched at the company level. Gold, silver, iron, and zinc are allocated to facilities by distributing regional totals proportionally to declared resource tonnages. Non-metallic minerals (lithium compounds, iodine, nitrates, potash, salt, and others) are allocated equally among facilities in the matching region that are tagged with the relevant commodity.
The treemap below shows Chile’s estimated mineral production value in 2024, broken into four groups: base metals (copper, molybdenum, iron, zinc, lead), precious metals (gold, silver), battery and strategic minerals (lithium carbonate, lithium hydroxide, lithium sulfate, iodine), and industrial minerals (nitrates, potash, salt, boric acid, and others). Rectangle size is proportional to estimated USD value. Copper accounts for roughly $48 billion of the $62 billion total, which compresses all other minerals into a narrow band of the chart. The non-copper breakdown is shown separately further below.
Chilean mining activity concentrates along the northern half of the country. Antofagasta hosts 136 facilities (including Escondida, the world’s largest copper mine, and the Salar de Atacama lithium operations), Atacama has 95, and Coquimbo 48. The map below plots every producing facility, sized by estimated value and colored by mineral group. The geographic pattern is clear: large-value copper and lithium operations cluster in the Atacama Desert, iron mining sits in Atacama and Coquimbo, and smaller industrial mineral operations are scattered further south.
The stacked bar chart ranks producing facilities by total estimated value. Each segment represents a different mineral, so a copper mine that also produces molybdenum and gold will show multiple colors. A button in the top right switches to a copper-excluded view, which re-sorts and rescales the chart to show which facilities matter most outside of copper. Clicking individual minerals in the legend also toggles them on and off.
Where the pipeline allocates production equally across facilities in the same region (for minerals without company-level data), those clusters are collapsed into single entries labelled with the count of grouped facilities, to avoid overstating the number of distinct operations.
The tile cartogram below compares Chile’s 12 producing regions on three dimensions: estimated mineral value, surface area, and population. Each tile represents a fixed unit (approximately $1 billion in value, 10,000 km² of area, or 250,000 people), so the number of tiles in each column directly encodes magnitude. The countries tends to hold most of its mining deposits in Antofagasta and Atacama, while most of the population lives in and around the area of Santiago, the capital.
The sunburst below provides a different cut of the same data, drilling from region (inner ring) to mineral group (middle ring) to individual mineral (outer ring). Regions with less than 2% of total value are collapsed into “Other regions”, and minerals below $300 million within a given region-group pair are grouped into lighter-shaded segments. Hover over any segment for the full value.
Export routing in the pipeline combines COCHILCO national-level volumes by destination country with Aduanas customs records showing the share of each product passing through each Chilean port in 2024. The choropleth below maps export destinations for all minerals on a log-scaled color axis. Buttons across the top switch between an all-minerals aggregate and the three largest export commodities (copper, lithium, iodine); a dropdown on the right provides access to the remaining minerals. Each commodity uses a distinct color palette.
China is the dominant buyer of Chilean copper, absorbing roughly 54% of total copper exports. Japan (~11%) and the United States (~10%) follow. For non-copper minerals, destinations are more dispersed: lithium goes primarily to China, South Korea, and Japan for battery production; molybdenum to Belgium, the Netherlands, and South Korea; iodine to the United States, Belgium, and China. Gold is routed via air freight to refining hubs in the UK and Switzerland.
Copper’s scale ($48 billion) compresses the rest of Chile’s mineral economy in any chart that includes it. The horizontal bar below isolates all non-copper minerals on a logarithmic axis, making it possible to compare categories that span several orders of magnitude. Lithium carbonate ($3.3 billion), gold ($2.2 billion), molybdenum ($1.8 billion), and iodine ($1.7 billion) form a second tier of billion-dollar minerals. Further down, nitrates, iron, silver, and lithium derivatives sit in the hundreds of millions, followed by industrial minerals (potash, salt, boric acid, ulexite) in the tens of millions.
The map below combines the facility-level data with the supply chain edges into a single aggregate view: mines and processing plants are sized by estimated value, domestic edges show material flows between stages, and export routes connect ports to their main destination countries. This is the full network in one picture, from extraction through processing to international markets.
How ore reaches export depends on its type. The pipeline models several distinct processing chains:
Sulphide ores are crushed and floated to produce concentrate (25–30% Cu), smelted to blister (~99% Cu), and electrorefined to cathode (99.99% Cu). Much is exported as concentrate due to limited domestic smelting capacity.
Oxide ores are leached on heap pads and treated by solvent extraction and electrowinning (SX-EW) to produce cathode directly, bypassing the concentrator-smelter chain.
Recovered as a by-product of copper flotation. Molybdenite concentrate is separated and roasted to produce molybdenum oxide, most of which is exported.
Extracted from brine at the Salar de Atacama by SQM and Albemarle. Brine is pumped into solar evaporation ponds and concentrated before chemical processing into lithium carbonate or hydroxide.
Chile’s copper commission. Company-level production for copper and molybdenum, regional aggregates for all other minerals, export destination volumes by product type, and commodity prices from the annual statistical yearbook (Anuario). Data period: 2005 to 2024.
Georeferenced register of all mining facilities in Chile: mines, concentrators, SX-EW plants, smelters, refineries, and ports. Includes coordinates, operator names, facility types, and reserve/resource tonnages.
Port-level export records providing shipment volumes and FOB values by product type and destination country. Used to derive port shares and validate the pipeline’s export routing. Reference year: 2024.
Parsed from COCHILCO Anuario tables (LME copper, exchange-reported metals, lithium/iodine bands), supplemented by implied FOB unit values from export data and USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries for industrial minerals without exchange prices.