Business
America’s Newest Copper Mine Is Ramping Up in Arizona
A new copper project in Arizona that made its first metal this month is ramping up and is expected to make its owner the country’s third largest producer of refined copper by year-end.
Taseko Mines’ Florence project is targeting annual output of about 85 million pounds of copper cathodes, Chief Executive Stuart McDonald said on the sidelines of S&P Global’s CERAWeek conference in Houston. While that’s just a sliver of growing U.S. demand for the metal that is essential to all things electric, Florence is part of a wave of projects in which miners are deploying unconventional methods to produce more copper from Arizona’s abundant low-grade ores.
Florence utilizes in-situ recovery methods that are more common in uranium mining and involve pumping acid deep beneath the surface to separate copper from the rock, rather than bringing ore to the surface for processing. The copper solution is then piped to a facility on site where it is plated as cathodes that are ready to use by makers of electrical wire and other products.
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