STRABAG’s €800m Chuquicamata Underground win: design and schedule notes for engineers
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan
First reported on International Mining – News
30 Second Briefing
STRABAG subsidiary ZÜBLIN has secured two contracts worth a combined €800 million from Codelco for the Chuquicamata Underground Mine “Mina Norte”, one of its largest Chilean mining projects. The work forms a core part of converting Chuquicamata from the world’s largest open-pit copper mine into a long-life underground operation, with completion targeted for 2031. For geotechnical and civil contractors, the scale and schedule signal sustained demand for large-diameter underground excavations, ground support, and complex underground logistics in the Atacama’s high-stress, arid conditions.
Technical Brief
- Project scale places it among STRABAG’s largest mining assignments in Chile to date.
Our Take
STRABAG’s role at Chuquicamata in Chile sits alongside its heavy underground portfolio on HS2’s Euston tunnels, suggesting the group is leveraging deep tunnelling know‑how across both mining and transport sectors rather than being tied to a single market cycle.
With copper as the core commodity and completion at Chuquicamata scheduled around 2031, this long-dated work provides STRABAG and ZÜBLIN with counter‑cyclical revenue visibility compared with shorter UK infrastructure contracts highlighted in our other STRABAG coverage.
Among the 1100 Mining stories in our database, copper projects in Chile like Chuquicamata are prominent in the ‘Projects’ and ‘Contract Award’ tags, signalling that Codelco‑linked work remains one of the more reliable pipelines for large-scale underground construction contractors.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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