Two neighbouring Arizona copper properties that spent decades in different hands are now one project. On October 15, Faraday Copper announced it had closed the purchase of the San Manuel project from a BHP subsidiary, pairing it with its existing Copper Creek project under a new name: the Redhawk Copper Complex.
- The combined complex covers roughly 35,000 acres of private land in Pinal County, about 100 km northeast of Tucson — San Manuel alone adds around 27,000 acres, plus road, rail, gas and power access.
- BHP was paid in Faraday shares: about 131.6 million shares issued as consideration, taking BHP entities to roughly 137.99 million shares, or about 32.0% of Faraday (non-diluted). The shares issued and transferred at closing were valued in aggregate at about $657.9 million on a five-day VWAP basis.
- Two BHP executives — Elaina Ware and Dominic Perrottet — join Faraday's board.
- Drill rigs are mobilized: an initial 24,000 metres at San Manuel and Kalamazoo, aimed at confirming historical resource estimates and gathering modern metallurgical and geotechnical data. Drilling was expected to start within days of the announcement.
- Faraday targets updated mineral resource estimates for both projects by mid-2027, and a Phase I prefeasibility study in 2028 focused on copper cathode and open-pit sulphide production, with underground material (Kalamazoo, American Eagle, Keel) as a later Phase II.
A famous mine, a long pause
San Manuel is not a greenfield speculation. The release recounts that the legacy operation — underground block cave plus open pit — produced more than 4.2 million tonnes of copper between 1955 and 1999, and describes it as one of the largest underground mines in the United States in its day. Copper Creek, next door, already carries a current NI 43-101 resource and a 2023 preliminary economic assessment, built on more than 280,000 metres of drilling; Faraday notes only 17 of more than 320 mapped surface breccias are inside that 2023 estimate.
The honesty box
The San Manuel numbers that make the district look large are historical estimates, prepared before NI 43-101 existed and built on a US$0.80/lb copper price assumption. Faraday itself says a qualified person has not done the work to classify them as current resources, and that they should not be relied on for economic evaluation. That is precisely what the 24,000-metre program is for. The development pathway described — cathode first, then open-pit sulphides, then underground — is conceptual and still needs studies, permitting and economics.
What to watch
Whether the confirmation drilling reproduces the historical San Manuel and Kalamazoo estimates closely enough to convert them into current resources by mid-2027 — and how a project whose seller now owns about a third of the buyer sequences cathode production against the much larger sulphide plans.