The Cobre Panama process is a standard open pit mining and milling of a porphyry copper deposit. The process begins with the open pit mining of ore and transportation to the plant via overland conveyors.  The extracted rocks with no mineral content are stored in deposits next to the pits for reclamation by re-vegetation.  Meanwhile, rocks with high copper content are transported to the flotation plant.

At the plant, the ore is milled in a grinding circuit.  The ground ore is then processed via flotation in 300 sq. m tank cells to produce a rougher concentrate and tailings, which are ground rocks containing no minerals.  The tailings are sent to the tailings management facility and the rough concentrate is upgraded to two products: a copper concentrate in cleaner cells and molybdenum concentrate in a molybdenum circuit.  Then the copper mineral is separated from the rock.  The copper concentrate is transferred through a subterranean slurry pipeline from the flotation plant to the port installations on the Atlantic coast, where it is filtered.  From the port, the concentrate is exported by ship to various smelters where copper metal is made from the concentrate.