The method he's showing is called froth flotation. He's not mentioning an important part of the process. The process of electrolysis leaves behind "anode slimes". Two of the more common metals in the slimes are gold and silver. The slimes often provide a significant part of the income of the mine.

Humans have figured out how to do some wild shit

When you begin to understand things like this, you really appreciate that as end user consumers we can get daily items like this for fairly cheap

the fact that someone looked at the way Factorio smelts copper and said, "hmmm not realistic enough" and then made a mod that mimics this process is crazy.

As an electrician who pulls this stuff everyday at work, I find this pretty fascinating.

"Jesse, we need to cook 99.99% pure Copper"

Also forgot to include the part about the companies abandoning the mines after they run dry, turning them into toxic death lakes when the rainfall fills them. It's a necessary part of the process.

99.99% pure. "Tight! Tight, tight, tight!"

my minecraft furnace ain't doin allat.

Cover all metals that you can be done or extracted by electrolysis

"Ahhhhh, wire." "Yo, Mr White."

"This copper is 99.9% pure" -Heisenberg

Now I understand the Ea Nasir customer complaint tablet from Ancient Mesopotamia about copper quality

"that's it" it amazes me that people actually figured out how to do all this

Now we just need a video on how crackheads steal the copper and the cycle will be completed.

"That's it" really underscores the fact that someone developed the process of this amazing feat we take for granted.

Copper is one of the most cool metals. It's very malleable, resists corrosion, conducts electricity well, can form a protective layer of patina when outdoors, and it even has antimicrobial properties! The color is also fairly unique.

They really went "99%? Nah fam, over here we do 99.99%"

There is a copper mine near my hometown called "Copper Mountain Mine". I always wondered what they do there.

That's insane that copper is comprised of only 1% of those rocks in that truck load

I'll finish since the video didn't. After the cathode is put into the furnace, it melts down and the liquid copper is poured out into a continuous bar. While hot, the bar is pulled through progressively smaller and smaller plates with holes in them called dies. From what I've seen, there is a large size finished wire that is transported to other drawing facilities to be further drawn to smaller sizes for different uses.

This is way different than how the tweekers in my city do it.

As a trucker, I used to ship those coiled up copper wires. I only carried six of them because those things are extremely heavy

Whoever figured out that process deserves some recognition

Thank you! My father was a metallurgist many years ago. He poured large manganese bronze propellers for tankers, subs, aircraft and cargo carriers. I miss his metallurgy lectures. I’ve forgotten most of it now but I think I was the only one in my fourth grade class who knew the difference among copper, brass, and bronze! We loved visiting his foundry. Thanks again for the memories!

It’s fucking wild how it’s only 1 percent copper yet we extract so much of it on a daily basis that copper is considered a cheap metal

I feel like you should have said "... To the shiny copper wires we know and scavengers love!"

Wow. Loved the shot. Covered the basic for layman perfectly. Thank you.

Crazy how much goes into things we take for granted every day.

I remember when me and my dad would go copper mining during the recession in abandoned homes

those bubbles are truly satisfying to watch

"How copper wire is made: Copper is shipped to manufacturers of wire, who then turn the copper into copper wire." Wow. Such knowledge. Much education. So profound.

I tried to refine copper at university and realised bronze age people had better lab equipment than me.

Im never going to complain about the price of cable again. Scrap dealer prices are excellent at the moment.

So, what I’m learning is that without society everything goes away because it is reliant upon technology which is reliant upon a super complex refining process involved with copper wiring.

That's so cool I came across this. I made wire for 8 years and ran the rod breakdown machine which took the rod wire you show at the end which is 8 mm if i remember right (been 10 years since I left) which drew it down to between 14 awg and 20 awg and I ran the multi wire which used those reels to draw from 35 to 44 awg with.14 ends and did annealing, braiding and was head player running tin player and silver player we built ourselves and I got to operate when the engineers didn't understand striking it and I did from plating for another company for 2 years prior. Miss that place and making wire. Crazy thing is we did it.by hand for thousands of years making dies by hand and urine as a drawing solution.

I’ve seen the process in AZ. He left out the fact that the main ingredient in that green slurry is pine oil. It’s the best smelling factory you could imagine.

Man. How wild would it be to give a tour of a factory like this, explaining the entire process in painfully high detail, to someone like Benjamin Franklin. His fascination and joy at seeing how fair science has come would be heart warming.

Dude that froth thing is out of this world!

This leaves the question of how humans used to do it back in the Bronze, iron and copper ages Because yes, there's a copper age, apparently

True for copper sulfide ore. Copper oxide ore gets stacked in huge mountains and leached with sulfuric acid. The pregnant leach solution goes to an electrowinning plant where the copper gets plated out via electrolysis. Simpler process that doesn't require a smelter.

As a plumber, I love copper. It is genuinely one of my favorite metals! Great and informative video!

Holycrap! Imagine the guy who was first deciding the process to actually get copper.

It’s absolutely amazing that human beings have come up with such processes that the vast majority have no idea makes their lives so much easier.

Copper is so unbelievably important for electrical purposes. It's *everywhere.*

People wonder how we built the pyramids like we didn't figure this shit out.

Thank you for an excellent explanation on the copper cathodes processing methods..... 👏🏿👏🏿👏🏿👏🏿

And that's how Toph learned metal bending... ✊🏻

This is one method to get the copper. At the mine I worked at we sprayed sulfuric acid on big piles of ore, heap leaching. The acid would leach out the copper into the solution. That would then go to a leach pond that one the way up to the refinery would need to clarified, either with a clarification step or through filter media. Once the clarified solution, pregnant leach solution or pls, made it to the refineryit would enter the solvent extraction stage (sx). In the first stage and organic layer floats on top the aqueous layer (pls), in this stage the copper is “pulled” into the organic layer above, basically kerosene or better known as jet fuel. The aqueous layer in the first stage is recycled back to the front end of the stage to ensure maximum recovery. The organic layer then is pumped over to the second stage, where the aqueous solution then floats on the organic layer and the copper is “pulled” into the aqueous layer. The organic layer then gets pumped to a filter to pick up any solids or floaters that may have been picked up, with the filtered organic solution going back to front of stage 1. The copper rich solution from stage 2 is then pumped to the elctrowinning process, known as the tank house. The copper rich solution is pumped through troughs with a substrate to adhere to. The plates at our tank house were very thin copper sheets other plants had thin stainless steel sheets that would split the copper plate off. In the troughs are alternating copper (cathode) and lead (anode) plates. Every plate has a hanger that laid on a bus bar to deliver the electricity to cause the electrolrecipitation on the copper starter plate. The power applied to the process determined the cycle time for collecting the completed plates and putting new starter plates in. Once the copper was pulled out it then was inspected for lead deposition and the smoothness of them, they stack better when smoother and are easier to truck out. Some were cut and sent out for assay to determine purity thus resulting the rating. I can’t remember the ratings, but a certain grade would go to a company owned refinery to be purified further and then made into wire or other products. The above grade would be sold directly to copper product suppliers. Sorry for the novel, hope you learned something.

"how ore is made to wire" "ore made to slab, it's done"

Metals are so fascinating man.

It's Incredible just how labor and resource intense this process is!

No wonder copper always has value, this process is wild to get it in the first place

Those surviving 0.01% gonna start their villian arc

I am a crane technician. I get to go into the facilities responsible for every step of this process. Its amazing to watch

Nice, quick, concise video.

I’m a truck driver. I’ve actually hauled those plates to those facilities before

The metal I am most curious about is Tungsten, as that metal has a high melting point and is not very common.

Well this is very interesting and I have seen the process one almost thinks that copper isn't that overpriced anyway now. Almost makes me think that way.

Ea-Nasir needed this.

Whoever came up with this long yet intricate process needs to be given credit, imagine the science and math that went behind building all the machines and steps to do this?

Not me reciting my chemistry text book 😂

Me in the gym between sets “I don’t need rest I need answers.”

Saw something like this not too long ago at the Royal Canadian Mint. Gold and silver are smelted down from bars, formed into sheets, coins are cut and they dump the coins in the water and run a current through it to get the graphics decorated with whatever gold / silver embellishments.

99.99% purity, you say? -chicken man

Copper is also used for pipes since it's corrosion resistant. It's used for decorations too although brass is more common since it's harder than copper I think. As a musician, I see that timpanis have copper sheets around the bottom. Copper used to be used more for things like roofing, buckets and some tools, cookware, decorations, etc. But it's gotten expensive and now been replaced by plastic, steel, aluminum, and other materials. It's also used in radiators in ACs and for tubing in refrigerators and. As a scrapper, I know that older electric motors and transformers used copper windings. Nowadays, some still do, but many appliances and tools use aluminum instead because it's cheaper, which is disappointing as a scrapper because copper is worth about 10 times as much as aluminum. If you're wondering, in America the scrap price is $3-$4/lb. To compare, for regular light steel and iron(everyday scrap like appliances or an old lawnmower), the scrap price is only about $0.08/lb. This is the lowest price, as you're selling the metal to a third party buyer, which then separates the metals to sell to another company which further separates and processes the metal, which is sold as raw material to many other companies. It all starts at the scrap yard, which pays the lowest price for the material, which makes sense because it then goes through a lot of other buyers until it's made into it's final product and sold on the open market.

As somebody that picks up at a copper mine, it's shipped out on giant rolls, in an oversized wire form, although sometimes it will be in a square wire form too.

The sheer amount of electricity and materials that are required to produce these extractions is insane. I can't imagine the costs of replacing the grinding materials.

The engineering and design behind all the machines and robots is mind blowing!!

I remember as a lad growing up in a prosperous copper mining town. The concentrate to smelting process provided the backbone of the economy. Open pit mining sure leaves an ugly scar on the land but you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. 1 percent ore. You have to move a lot of earth to make a profit.

Very cool! Thanks for sharing.

"Dribble Dribble Dribble" 😂😂 Paul Petty Pierce

This video is totally metal. Thanks for this!

Last video is from the plant I work at haha

That 0.01% left over: “I’m still worthy!”

Crazy how someone figured out how to get copper from rocks!

Having relied on scrap medals as my main way of survival economically, those solud copper squares look absolutely gorgeous to me.

We needed this level of quality from Ea Nasir.

Kudos to all the scientists (100 - 200) that contributed to that marvellous process.

Makes you wonder in amazement how they were able to extract metal in the Bronze Age. Great video

The first copper wire was made when two Scotsmen found a penny in the same time.

Please make a video about aluminum and magnesium alloy.

The tweekers droolin when they see those copper wire spools

I worked in that industry. There's two ways, depending on the ore. One place had oxide ore and no fire was used at all. They pile it up and and circulate acid through it. It leaches the copper out as a solution which goes directly to electrolysis.

The minds that worked out how to extract these minerals are amazing

Chile is very copper rich and when I went there on a trip I found their local amusement park (named fantasilandia) had some copper handrails!

Sad to hear it. Your channel has been a blessing.

The video gives pretty nice short explanation on how its done, however there's more details between and within each of the steps, and this mostly focuses on the concentration and pyrometallurgical treatment of copper concentrates. My suggestion for next video: copper hydrometallurgical production, silver/gold recovery via leaching and electrowinning, zinc, nickel, lithium or cobalt production.

It is hard to imagine our ancestors 3000 years ago using this process to make copper tools.

Good brisk description of a very complex process. The amount of science involved is mind boggling haha

Frothy metal milkshake was not something I expected to see today….

What a coincidence, today I read about that in metallurgy (chemistry) and KZfaq recommend this to me

Always fascinating to see copper froth.. The forbidden/electrifying soap bubbles.

I live in Michigan, up in the UP are aware some of the purest forms of copper are found in mines, I asked a minor up there what happens when they find large chunks of very pure copper, They said that it's actually difficult to extract at the higher purity levels because it becomes difficult to process it on a manner to get it out of the underground mines. High purity copper underground apparently wicks away too much heat to use heat cutting methods and doesn't come out real well from mechanical methods because it gums up the cutting surfaces.

Satisfactory teaching me the importance of purifying my copper for better processing of modular frames

That was the best short I've seen in a year.

I worked at Duval Copper plant Battle Mtn,NV. It was a leach system that went to a giant battery.

How humans extracted copper before modern machinery is truly beyond me.

Dat bubble junk part, is pretty kewl.

And people say I only use "natural" products. Yet the "natural" copper underwent multiple processes using modern technology