RIO Tinto has moved closer to opening one of the world’s largest copper mines in Arizona after winning a protracted legal battle over land rights, though the company has signalled it may need to export some of the project’s output given the deteriorating economics of smelting in the US.
Reuters reported on Wednesday that the miner had secured control of land needed to develop the Resolution Copper project earlier this month, resolving a years-long dispute that pitted rising American demand for the metal against the religious rights of the San Carlos Apache people. Rio has since launched a $500m drilling programme to assess the 30% of the deposit it could not previously access.
“We are quite committed to bringing copper on as quickly as we can,” Katie Jackson, head of Rio’s copper business told Reuters. “This is something we want to do in the early- to mid-2030s.”
Resolution is projected to produce more than 40 billion pounds of copper over its life, potentially supplying more than a quarter of US demand. But Jackson acknowledged that domestic smelting has become uneconomic as treatment and refining charges have turned negative.
“The current structures don’t support the Kennecott smelter,” she said, adding that Rio had been telling US policymakers “that the current set of mechanisms and tariffs around copper don’t solve that problem.”
Jackson also confirmed that Kennecott’s underground mine in Utah would remain closed for several weeks following a worker fatality, the second death at Rio’s operations this year.
“We will never be able to make mining a zero-risk business, but we should be able to make it a zero-harm business,” she said.
