Speaking in an interview, Katie Jackson – who was appointed to her role in September 2024 after a career in the energy markets – said that her professional background allowed her to see comparability to mining. She gave her insights into how tariffs create volatility in the copper market but a long-term conviction still remains.
“This is obviously a period of volatility, but I am coming into the business from energy, which is a business where you have a long-term horizon and need a conviction in terms of supply and demand fundamentals as the basis for investments. I think mining is very similar,” she said during the annual CESCO industry week in Santiago, Chile.
“Fundamentally, I think everybody still sees that the world is electrifying at pace. Copper is lucky enough to be the best way of conducting electrical current, and that’s not changing any time soon,” she told Fastmarkets.
“At the moment, we see the tariffs and geopolitical backdrop as volatility rather than a fundamental shift on our long-term conviction,” she added.
Copper market and impact of tariffs
The US has imposed 125% tariffs on imports from China, which in turn will have 84% tariffs on imports from the US beginning at 12:01am US Eastern time on Thursday April 10.
Additional reciprocal tariffs by the US on 60 other countries briefly took effect, but have now been paused for 90 days; in place of the paused tariffs, a universal 10% tariff – from which copper is currently exempt – continues.
Copper is also currently subject to a Section 232 investigation, which could see further tariffs imposed.
Jackson acknowledged that tariffs would have a positive impact on copper in some places such as the company’s domestic copper business in the United States, where it operates the Bingham Canyon mine at KUC in Utah.
“But also, we’re on the other side of tariffs with an aluminium business in Canada, so there will be opportunities and challenges,” she added, referring to the Section 232 tariffs on imports of aluminium into the US.
“The fundamentals of the market haven’t changed: where copper is geographically located, where the centers of demand are – none of this has fundamentally changed. So, it’s much more about tweaking around the edges at the moment,” she added.
Key objectives of the tariffs are reshoring and getting manufacturing jobs back to the US, a push that is being replicated by governments around the world while they seek to secure supply chains.
Jackson said the rising interest in critical minerals and their supply chains is a positive step.
“I was working in oil and gas at the time of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when everyone suddenly learned the reality of how European gas flowed. So it’s actually quite good that governments are paying a bit more attention to how supply chains work,” she told Fastmarkets.
“Arguably there hasn’t been much discussion of it in copper over the past few years and I think US interest in a domestic copper industry is fundamentally positive,” she added.
Rio Tinto wants more US projects
According to Jackson, Rio Tinto wants to be able to bring on more projects in the US, just like it is doing in Chile at its Nuevo Cobre venture with Codelco, plus is committed to ramping up and growing Oyu Tolgoi in Mongolia.
“We are making multi-decade investment decisions and really that sees out political terms and becomes much more of a fundamental industrial logic conversation. I also think it’ll be interesting to watch the role of recycling in these supply chains,” she added.
The push to produce more critical minerals like copper in the US is a key part of the reshoring ambitions. Jackson noted that Rio Tinto is already an integrated producer in the US, with its KUC operations going from concentrator, smelter and refinery, through to a tailings storage facility.
Rio Tinto produced 697,000 tonnes of mined copper and 248,000 tonnes of refined copper last year. Of this, 123,400 tonnes of mined copper of 193,200 tonnes of refined copper was produced at KUC. The lion’s share of its mined copper production comes from Escondida in Chile, in which Rio Tinto has a 30% stake.
“I think fundamentally, if you look through decades, people will mainly conclude that the most attractive part of the value chain and the part of the value chain where a company like Rio Tinto has historically really added value, is in the upstream space: exploring, developing and bringing on new mega projects,” she said.
“That will always be the first place that we get the marginal dollar of investment. But I also think we have to work with partners and try and look at how we can facilitate the right projects,” she added.
Resolution could mean more domestic copper supply
There is also a commitment by the Trump administration to speed up the permitting process for critical minerals projects in the US, which can run for almost three decades.
This could include Resolution, a joint venture with BHP which has the potential to supply up to 25% of US copper demand.
“From our perspective, we hope that the focus of the administration on more domestic copper gives us tailwinds, but we’re still in the same process that we were in before,” Jackson said.
“There is a subsequent set of permits that we’ll obviously need to get. It’s very important to do a proper job permitting projects. It’s not that we want to sacrifice quality, but we want to reduce the time it takes for approvals,” she noted, adding: “There’s a real need to do that if we’re going to meet what’s coming.”
Before this can happen, however, the Resolution project needs to resolve a legal process.
“Fundamentally, we’re still going through the same process at Resolution, which is that we are waiting for the US Supreme Court to decide whether to hear the Apache’s stronghold case against the US Forestry Service,” Jackson said.
“There is an expectation that decision will come in this session, which ends on June 30, although it has been deferred many times already,” she added.
If the decision is in favor of the project, Jackson said the process toward a final environmental impact statement being issued again and a land exchange taking place, could complete later this year.
But the partners will not get access to the site until the land exchange takes place and have not yet drilled through 30% of the orebody, she said.
“A positive decision would give us the opportunity to commit to a work program, to do more exploration and to really then finalize the mine design to progress. Of course, we want this to move forward, as we have been working on the project for some time,” she told Fastmarkets.
KUC expansion and projections
The company is also expanding the North Rim Skarn (NRS) of KUC’s Bingham Canyon mine. The project will access the higher-grade underground mine, Jackson said, and will deliver around 250,000 tonnes of additional mined copper through to 2033 alongside open cut operations.
“As we also experienced in the Oyu Tolgoi underground, it’s quite a learning curve, and we’re on that curve now. Development rates are coming up and it’s going reasonably well,” she told Fastmarkets.
She said that Rio Tinto is working to transform the mine in a number of different ways to get through the period of lower production and then anticipates being able to take the next set of investment decisions.
“For instance, there’s another pushback coming at KUC that would actually take the mine life into the 2040s and fundamentally, given current projections for demand, it really makes sense to pursue brownfield sites, fully permitted, in the US,” she added.
In Hotter Commodities, special correspondent Andrea Hotter covers some of the biggest stories impacting the natural resources sector. Read more coverage on our dedicated Hotter Commodities page here.
