Carved into a mountain range in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, where temperatures often reach 118F (48C), a vast mining complex more than a century old is on the front lines of a race to unlock millions of tons of copper.
After 154 years of digging at Morenci, all the easily recoverable copper has been mined. Left behind are towering piles of waste rock that hold nearly ten-million tons of the metal seen as critical to global electrification. It’s a cache that could prove key to President Donald Trump’s ambition to boost US production of critical minerals.
Freeport-McMoRan, which owns Morenci, is trying to develop technology that can burrow within those gigantic waste piles and extract low-grade copper that miners previously saw as too expensive and difficult to process. While the technology is still in its infancy, the US company is betting it can eventually retrieve the material in a way that’s cheaper, faster and greener than traditional mining.
For the rest of this article: https://www.miningweekly.com/article/an-american-mine-still-has-millions-of-tons-of-copper-if-companies-can-get-to-it-2025-04-02