What does Chile produce and export?

The Nazca plate slides beneath South America along the Chilean coast, and the melting that follows has repeatedly pushed hot, fluid-rich magma into the crust. Where those fluids cooled, they left copper spread thinly through enormous volumes of altered rock: porphyry deposits, low in grade but vast, and shallow enough to be mined by open pit. Chuquicamata has been worked since 1915, El Teniente since the nineteenth century, and Escondida, found in 1981 under barren gravel with no surface trace, became the largest copper mine in the world. Chile mined 23% of the world's copper in 2025 (USGS) and held 29% of world copper export value in 2024 (CEPII BACI), the largest share of any country.

Ownership has swung twice. Foreign companies developed the mines in the early twentieth century; the nationalization of 1971 created the state producer Codelco, which still holds the largest deposits; and a foreign investment framework written in 1974 brought private capital back for everything found since. The result is a divided industry in which a state company and international miners work the same geology under different rules, and in which royalty and tax debates recur whenever the metal price rises.

The Atacama makes the mines both cheap and constrained. Almost no rain falls, so pits stay dry and ore is easy to move, but there is no water for the concentrators that grind and float sulfide ore. Mines now desalinate seawater and pump it more than two kilometers uphill, an energy cost that rises as pits deepen and grades fall. Some deposits avoid milling altogether by leaching oxide ore in heaps and plating cathode directly on site, which is why part of Chile's exports leave as refined metal and part as concentrate for smelters in Asia. Energy is the other constraint: Chile has almost no hydrocarbons of its own, and after Argentine pipeline gas was cut in the mid-2000s it built terminals to import natural gas as a liquid, alongside imported crude oil and fuel for the mining fleet.