The US Has More Copper Than China But No Way to Refine All of It
The industry will need to overcome high energy and labor costs, environmental regulations and a glut of cheap Chinese competition to make US copper smelting great again.
Vessels and residual ore at the idled Asarco smelter in Hayden, Arizona.
Photographer: Caitlin O’Hara for Bloomberg Businessweek
Freeport-McMoRan Inc.’s only US copper smelter—a hulking metal-processing facility at the edge of an old Arizona mining town—spits neon flames from its furnace like an industrial volcano. Here, hundreds of employees work around the clock to transform vats of concentrated molten metal into neat, purified slabs, which are then shipped to a refinery in El Paso, Texas, the next step on their cross-country journey to become coils for electric wiring.
On a sweltering day in May, plant operators are decked out in heat suits and fire-resistant visors, transferring heaps of metallic powder into industrial-scale ovens with machines that look like soup ladles for giants. It’s a rare example of entirely made-in-America copper, an almost extinct part of the supply chain that President Donald Trump is hell-bent on bringing back.