Coverage of tribal natural resources is supported in part by Catena FoundationFor two decades, Resolution Copper has touted its massive mining project 60 miles east of Phoenix as an economic boom for Arizona – even though no ore has been extracted yet.
The promises are thus: when operating at full capacity, the mine will be able to produce enough finished product to meet 25% of the nation's copper demand, generating 3,700 direct and indirect jobs, plus $300 million in tax revenue.
Resolution Copper is still waiting for legal hurdles to clear and permitting to be secured before tapping into the more than 3 trillion-pound ore body – considered to be one of the largest undeveloped copper deposits in North America – nearly 7,000 feet beneath the Apache holy site known as Oak Flat.
From renewable energy to national security, the estimated 40 billion pounds of copper — worth close to $200 billion based on today's market price — is supposed to help U.S. manufacturers produce everyday items like pipes, wiring, batteries, microchips and electric vehicles.
But once that critical mineral is dug up, it will leave the Copper State entirely. Despite the six-decade project still not being greenlit, the pair of global mining giants – BHP and Rio Tinto – behind it hope the huge gamble pays off.
They've already spent more than $2 billion permitting the proposed site.
While they want to send its copper concentrate from Resolution Copper to be smelted in the United States, there is evidence the critical mineral is even more likely to be smelted overseas, and possibly by an American adversary.
'The intent, the desire, the ability for us to do that is 100% there'
Despite all of the mining and processing happening on-site near the historic Arizona mining town of Superior, foreign-owned Resolution Copper still has no other choice – at least in the U.S. – but to ship that copper concentrate more than 700 miles by rail across state lines to the Garfield Smelter on the outskirts of Salt Lake City.
Even Freeport-McMoRan, which owns the only other U.S. copper smelter, in nearby Claypool, Ariz., already sends some of its copper concentrate from Copper State to be smelted and refined in neighboring Utah.
When asked, the Phoenix-based mining rival would not tell KJZZ why.
Rio Tinto Kennecott managing director Nate Foster and his team have spent years trying to figure out how to make that happen with its subsidiary, Resolution Copper, stressing "the intent, the desire, the ability for us to do that is 100% there" but "we just need to see a timeframe and a level of certainty before we can kind of make final plans."
The London-based mining behemoth is the majority shareholder behind the Arizona copper mining project. Rio Tinto bought Kennecott Utah Copper in 1989, but they're not only in the business of processing and refining copper.
Copper sulfide ore bodies are host to many more byproducts, like silver and gold – Kennecott donated millions of dollars worth to cast medals for the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics and 2012 London Summer Olympics – as well as molybdenum, tellurium and even sulfuric acid that's turned into fertilizer for Idaho farmers.
In short, Foster thinks Rio Tinto Kennecott is much more than a mining company.
"When you start talking about data centers and AI dominance, copper is just core to all of that, right?" added Foster. "Mining, we still kind of think of 150 years ago, a canary on the shoulder, and you're going underground. We are a technology company. We're also as much a processing and manufacturing company."
Like those companies, Rio Tinto Kennecott, which employs close to 5,000 workers, has evolved with the times to become more environmentally friendly – from water to energy consumption. The company closed its last coal-fired power plant in 2019 to help meet its global carbon-neutral goal by 2050.
Starting in 2021, Kennecott agreed to annually discharge up to 21,000 acre-feet of treated water into the Great Salt Lake for a decade in partnership with the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources and Audubon Society to address declining lake levels.
Kennecott has also begun building a pair of solar farms that'll generate 30 megawatts – reducing 21,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions in any given year – and claiming that's the equivalent of taking "5,000 gas-powered passenger cars" off the road.
The company is also focused on reclamation projects, like Daybreak, a master-planned community, which was redeveloped atop an EPA Superfund site where Kennecott used to house its evaporation ponds in South Jordan, Utah.
Now, it's where 13,600 homes span 4,500 acres.
"I think the right approach is to say, 'Alright, how are we going to continue to be thoughtfully and sustainably trying to extract an ore body the best that we can?'" Foster explained. "That's a better approach than stories of 100 years ago, mining companies coming in to hit it rich, and then just walk away."
But Foster insists Rio Tinto Kennecott is here to stay.
They plan on mining in the Oquirrh Mountains until at least 2040 at its historic Bingham Canyon Mine – where it's taken 120 years to dig three-fourths of a mile down – considered to be the world's deepest open-pit mine.
The Interior Department named it a National Historic Landmark in 1972.
As Earth's biggest man-made hole, it stretches for 2.5 miles – not much bigger than the 2-mile-wide subsidence crater that is expected to emerge before Resolution Copper finishes its block-cave mining thousands of feet beneath Oak Flat over six decades.
"I've probably loaded out of the bottom safely at least 500 times, I would say," said Chris Burson, haul truck operator. "It's about 15 to 20 minutes downhill depending on road conditions, right? And then uphill, is a 35- to 45-minute crawl."
Far from your typical commute, Burson's daily route includes sharing the muddy, unpaved road with diesel dump trucks tipping the scale at over 1 million pounds when fully loaded – twice the weight of the Statue of Liberty.
Up to 10 trips a day, drivers are hauling ore out of the pit all around the clock.
They dump the ore into a crusher – where the rock is then sent on a 5-mile conveyor belt to senior metallurgist Josh Dettamanti and his crew at the concentrator, where they further grind roughly 150,000 tons of mined rock on any given day into a "fine dust."
From there, recycled water at a rate of 25,000 gallons per minute is piped into industrial-sized tanks as part of a flotation circuit that chemically separates traces of the metal that becomes copper concentrate by bubbling up.
"Basically, this is where the magic happens," said Dettamanti. "We add chemicals that bind specifically to copper minerals, and literally, that copper floats to the surface and that's what feeds the smelter."
Beyond its own Bingham Canyon Mine, Rio Tinto Kennecott also relies on copper concentrate being sent from companies like Freeport-McMoRan and its massive Morenci open-pit mine in Greenlee County, Ariz.
Resolution Copper could soon become another supplier, too.
'That sustains Utah and Salt Lake Valley for another 120 years or more'
"I keep looking for Resolution, for jobs opening up," admitted Rio Tinto Kennecott smelter advisor Bob Gardner, an Arizona native who used to work at San Manuel in Pinal County – once the world's largest underground copper mine – until it shuttered when global copper prices dropped in 1999.
He's been open to going back home to the Grand Canyon State, but for now, Gardner is still working at Kennecott. He shared that Freeport-McMoRan is their biggest third-party copper concentrate supplier – despite the Phoenix company operating the only other U.S. smelter, bordering the town of Miami.
"We try to shoot for 1,000 tons per day. Right now, current feed rates are a little bit less than that," added Gardner. "Up here with all these empty rail cars, that's where we receive all of the third-party concentrate at, so we can put it into our flash smelting furnace."
That furnace burns at nearly 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit – roughly a fifth as hot as the surface temperature of the sun. Its 1,215-foot-tall smelter smokestack, overlooking the Great Salt Lake, is the tallest freestanding structure west of the Mississippi River.
Then Kennecott takes 750-pound plates of 99.97% pure copper and, using an electrical current through a chemical process called electrolysis, further refines the material into 99.99% cathodes.
Those sheets are referred to as the "four 9s."
While giving a tour of the facility, third-generation Kennecott employee Brian Bergstrom warned KJZZ about the potential danger of a nearby electrical field, asking: "No pacemakers, you guys are young enough that you don't need them, right?"
"In the tankhouse, there's an electrical field out there," he added, "and it'll mess with your pacemaker, so we don't want to send anybody into cardiac arrest."
While Bergstrom is technically a refinery operations supervisor, he really considers himself a copper farmer "because we plant the anode, plant the stainless steel blank in between them, we grow it for 14 days and then we harvest and in between, we pull weeds."
They can grow up to 64,000 cathodes at any time.
Sheets are bathed in a pungent solution made from copper sulfate and sulfuric acid – an unmistakable scent Bergstrom describes as decaying glue but also an odor that makes him feel at "home," adding "after about two weeks, you don't smell it anymore."
Machinery washes off all the electrolytes, so customers can get a clean cathode.
That copper is then pried from stainless steel – stamp-punching each 300-pound sheet of American-made copper and stacking them into 5,500-pound bundles that are directly sold to manufacturers, mostly wire and pipe producers in the Midwest.
"So we take a little button, we collect nine cells worth of copper, and then we smelt that, take a pin tube out of it," added Bergstrom, "and then we can tell what grade of copper we're getting, whether it's four 9s, three 9s, high lead, low arsenic, whatever."
Their warehouse is like the Fort Knox of copper.
"Got about 14,000 sheets in here right now and again," said Bergstrom, counting rows of copper sheets sitting on the concrete floor. "Everything we produce today will be ready to put on a rail car or truck tomorrow, so we try not to hold on to it very long."
Unlike most mines, Rio Tinto Kennecott isn't tucked away, but in fact, a close neighbor – being less than 30 miles south of downtown Salt Lake City.
Its facility sits on some 95,000 acres – nearly a third the size of Phoenix – and that's something they're proud of, with Foster emphasizing "our mindset is, approximately 1.5 million people can see our operation on any given day."
"There's very few places, if any, in the mining world where you go from digging dirt to finished product within a few-mile radius," added Bergstrom, reiterating Resolution Copper has a role to play. "Once it gets approved and we can start bringing some of that ore here, that sustains Utah and Salt Lake Valley for another 120 years or more."
'Why are we giving the copper to the People's Republic of China?'
But San Carlos Apache Attorney General Alex Ritchie has been sounding the alarm.
"Why are we giving the copper to the People's Republic of China?" asked Ritchie. "Nobody is talking about that. Instead, we're talking about tariffs that are going to be placed on China bringing copper in."
While Resolution Copper is headquartered in Superior, the UK-based Rio Tinto recently donated $1 million to support flood relief efforts following a barrage of flash floods devastating the nearby towns of Miami and Globe – where many of the company's employees reside.
At the same time, Resolution Copper has been trying to reconcile this narrative about foreign influence on social media in recent weeks, like in one post by Bryan Seppala, the company's principal advisor of economic development and social investment.
"People say Resolution Copper is foreign-owned like the benefits won't help us here. But here's what matters: the jobs, the impact, they stay right here," said Seppala. "It is a U.S.-based project backed by global companies, but built to deliver real benefits for our community and our country."
One of the company's taglines, lately espoused by Seppala, has been "Arizona's copper for America's future," but it's a future that could be shipped off to Southeast Asia – or even China – depending on who you ask, like San Carlos Apache Chairman Terry Rambler.
"Resolution Copper is lying to the American public and Congress," Rambler told KJZZ, "by falsely claiming its copper will be used to meet 25% of America's copper demand and will play an essential role in developing America's renewable energy economy."
"This copper is going to China, simple," added Ritchie. "Ask your congressman, your congresswoman, your senator, 'why are you allowing the copper to go to China?'"
When pressed, Sens. Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly would not tell KJZZ where they stand on this mining issue, or about Arizona's natural resources potentially being shipped overseas to China – possibly to never return.
Congresswoman-elect Adelita Grijalva has been the loudest Arizona Democrat decrying Resolution Copper. Her dad, the late Rep. Raúl Grijalva, was the most vocal defender of Oak Flat for more than a decade on Capitol Hill.
"We're trying to make it seem as if these mining projects are actually going to contribute to the proclaimed need for these resources in the U.S. and they're not," Grijalva told KJZZ. "The environmental devastation does not outweigh a couple jobs."
Rambler reiterated "all of the evidence indicates that Resolution's copper will be exported overseas for refining and the most likely country is communist China," insisting there's "no direct benefit to the U.S. renewable energy economy, while providing a huge benefit to America's primary adversary."
'The American public is just getting screwed here'
Oak Flat mining opponents point to a pair of appraisals kept secret until the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity won a public-records lawsuit earlier this year. Resolution Copper fought in federal court to keep details about its land exchange with the U.S. Forest Service confidential, citing proprietary reasons.
The nonprofit has called the pending land swap "a sweetheart deal."
"The American public is just getting screwed here, and the only one who's coming out ahead is the mining company," said Marc Fink, senior attorney with the nonprofit. "Who's getting anything out of this, other than the mining company?"
Independent mineral appraisers hired to author those valuations concluded that Resolution Copper will most likely smelt its Arizona bounty in Southeast Asia – not Rio Tinto Kennecott near Salt Lake City.
Hence why critics suggest "Southeast Asia" is an intentionally vague description, meant to hide the fact that the copper will actually end up in China, given state-owned Chinalco – the Aluminum Corporation of China – is the largest single-shareholder in Rio Tinto.
When asked, Resolution Copper told KJZZ Rio Tinto's goal is to keep its portion of copper concentrate here in the U.S. to "feed the domestic supply chain," but they're making no guarantees it won't end up where opponents say it could.
Either way, Fink thinks it doesn't matter.
"The tribes are going to lose their sacred site permanently and completely forever. The environment is going to get destroyed," he added. "They're going to be using tons and tons of water. The government's getting $10 million worth of land, and the mining company is getting billions of dollars to take copper over to Southeast Asia."
'That reliance is only going to get worse'
While Rio Tinto Kennecott believes it has capacity, the San Carlos Apache Tribe remains skeptical. In all, that Utah facility can smelt 300,000 tons annually. An industry market report the tribe paid for – penned by the International Copper Study Group – suggests Kennecott could only produce up to 280,000 tons of copper as of last year.
"But there is capacity," said Vicky Peacey, president and general manager of Resolution Copper, "and we want to keep the last remaining smelters and refineries that we have at full capacity, and adding Resolution Copper would help do that."
However, if Kennecott's Garfield Smelter is already running at full capacity, there wouldn't be any more room for the Resolution Copper concentrate coming from Oak Flat. With only a pair of U.S. copper smelters online between Utah and Arizona, most companies have made the decision to ship their precious metals elsewhere.
Going overseas has been an industry standard for decades now.
"If you dig into that, it has to do with costs," said Steve Trussell, executive director of the Arizona Mining Association. "It has to do with environmental controls. It has to do with a lot of variables and factors that made us decide to offshore."
But the real question, asks Joseph Van Orden, who teaches global supply chains at Arizona State University's W.P. Carey School of Business, specializing in critical minerals: "Is it one of our strategic allies?"
He believes the best bet is to smelt Arizona copper in the North American free trade bloc of Canada and Mexico – longtime U.S. allies President Donald Trump has been alienating them lately – emphasizing "copper doesn't need to move halfway around the world before we use it."
Trump has taken keen interest in keeping America's critical minerals closer to home, signing executive orders aiming to ramp up domestic production while backing the massive Arizona mining project near the town of Superior.
He even invited the CEOs of BHP and Rio Tinto to the Oval Office.
During an April panel at the Phoenix Global Forum, former Deputy Interior Secretary Tommy Beaudreau – serving under Joe Biden – believed "there's no project that is as shovel-ready to start meeting the United States and global demand on copper than Resolution Copper."
It's a sentiment shared by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, saying in a statement following the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals stay in August blocking the federal land swap – hours before the exchange – that this project is "vital to America's long-term security, energy infrastructure and global competitiveness."
Burgum also recognized that the U.S. "remains dangerously dependent on foreign-controlled copper supply chains."
Supply chains, like the ones that Resolution Copper may have no other option but to rely on – if or whenever mining at Oak Flat begins. In the meantime, critical minerals are essentially fueling the new global arms race.
"I definitely think the president has a plan to answer the call that many people, when polled, believe that a domestic supply of these minerals is critical, from a national defense to a quality-of-life standpoint," added Trussell. "The plan is probably prompted by concern over adversarial countries having control of a lot of the reserves and taking many of those out of export, like gallium, germanium, antimony, rare earths and so forth."
This agenda has been welcomed by industry leaders backing Resolution Copper like Mark Compton, executive director of the American Exploration and Mining Association, but he even acknowledges "we're never going to be 100% mineral-independent for all commodities."
"As mineral demand soars and skyrocket even more, we can't solely just depend on allies as we move away from our dependence on China," he explained. "We have become dangerously reliant on foreign sources of minerals, and that reliance is only going to get worse."
"The bottom line is we need secure mineral supply chains," Compton underscored, "and if we are overreliant on adversarial nations, there isn't a guarantee that those refined products are going to make [their] way back here for our manufacturing needs."
Arizona state Republican lawmaker Nick Kupper thinks it poses "a national security threat at that point," adding "China, depending on what kind of geopolitics, could refuse to either take [copper] in the first place or refuse to send it back to us."
Kupper sponsored a failed bill to prohibit foreign adversaries from purchasing critical infrastructure across the Grand Canyon State. His Republican colleagues tried stopping China and others, like Russia and North Korea, from buying Arizona soil, but Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed that measure in June.
"I think this problem requires a different tact," added Kupper. "Rather than telling a company you can't send it to China – let's try to increase our capacity here."
That could take decades.
Chile has been long considered the king of copper – accounting for almost a fourth of all copper production worldwide, according to the International Trade Association. But China is still the top copper refining country globally, home to over 200 smelters that are estimated to generate more than $250 billion annually.
China announced earlier this month that it plans to slap export controls on rare earth metals, prompting Trump to reignite his trade war by threatening to impose a 100% increase on all Chinese imports.
Much like copper, rare earth metals are essential for manufacturing all sorts of things, including batteries, cellphones and semiconductors. Today, China controls roughly 90% of that processing and refining capacity globally.
"Make no mistake, this is China versus the world," said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Oct. 15. "They have put these unacceptable export controls on the entire world."
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer called this move "nothing more than a global supply chain power grab." Bessent believes China "can't be trusted," adding "we are not going to let a group of bureaucrats in Beijing try to manage the global supply chains."
Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping plan to meet in South Korea this month.
While Trump keeps slapping China with tariffs, Michael Finch, head of strategic initiatives at the London-based Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, shared that it's caused "wide-reaching impacts" from rerouting trade to tariffs being priced into fluctuating copper values.
Unlike China's rare earth minerals monopoly, Finch believes the global copper market is far more fragmented – so that risk of refined product not returning to the U.S. is "relatively small," suggesting "if China were to weaponize refined copper, quickly the taps could be cut off, when it comes to concentrate supply."
While Chile is the single biggest copper supplier to the U.S., much of its supply is shipped off to China and that country's dominant refineries industry.
China is also behind the Democratic Republic of Congo and Peru when comparing annual copper production outputs. But any copper processed there would still be subject to any tariffs amid Trump's renewed trade war with China.
'A lot of it is leaving the United States'
Over the project's lifetime, Resolution Copper estimates that ore sitting beneath Oak Flat could be refined into 40 billion pounds of finished product. But that supply isn't solely for the Copper State alone.
"Very little of the copper that we mine stays here, because it produces way more copper than we'll ever need in Arizona," said Benjamin Ruddell, an Northern Arizona University professor who researches the concept of virtual water. "So that copper mine is there for the global economy."
Virtual water is essentially a way to track how the Southwest's finite supply is used for goods and services and where it ends up, with Ruddell noting "a lot of it is leaving the United States, and it means that others, somewhere else in the world don't have to use their water."
Much like Saudi Arabia-backed Fondomonte, which grew alfalfa using Arizona groundwater before exporting it to the Middle East until the state ceased its pumping in La Paz County.
"It uses water, it creates jobs here, and that's just the same as any other economic activity," added Ruddell, "except that there are a lot of other water users that are dramatically more economically efficient than growing alfalfa."
And mining copper.
In a recent Morning Consult poll of 800 state residents, a little more than a fifth of them say Arizona should prioritize "mineral extraction companies that mine coal, lithium and other natural resources" for future water uses – while nearly three-fourths of those surveyed suggest prioritizing drinking water and food production.
EDITOR'S NOTE: This story has been updated to correct Nate Foster's title. He is managing director at Rio Tinto Kennecott.
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