South32’s Hermosa Mine Clears a Decade-Long Permit Curse

The U.S. Forest Service issued a final Record of Decision in early July for South32’s Hermosa project in southern Arizona, making Hermosa the first mining project to complete the federal government’s FAST-41 expedited permitting program. What is normally a decade-plus federal review for an Arizona mine took the Hermosa team about two years.

At a glance

• The Forest Service’s Record of Decision covers infrastructure on public land: a transmission line, a secondary access road, a dry-stack tailings facility, and water discharge points.
• Hermosa entered the FAST-41 program in 2023 as the first mining project ever added to it, and Arizona’s own state mine permit was already in hand.
• The project targets zinc, manganese, and copper, three of the five federally designated critical minerals it could ultimately produce.
• South32 estimates 800 to 900 jobs during peak construction and operations, with a goal of filling 80 percent of them locally.
• Production shafts are set to reach final depth by the end of 2026, with underground mining starting in late 2027 and first production targeted for early 2028.

What is FAST-41 and why does it matter here?

FAST-41 is a federal program that assigns a dedicated project manager to coordinate the agencies reviewing a covered infrastructure project, instead of leaving a developer to navigate the Forest Service, the Army Corps of Engineers, and other agencies one at a time with no single point of contact. Hermosa became the program’s first mining project back in 2023, a marker of how seriously Washington has started treating domestic critical minerals supply as an infrastructure priority.

Arizona mine permits have often taken longer than a decade to clear every federal review, and that track record has been a real deterrent for anyone weighing where to build the next US mine. Hermosa president Pat Risner called finishing a large, complex mining project’s federal permitting in two years "a big accomplishment," and the timeline gives regulators and developers elsewhere a working blueprint instead of a hypothetical one.

Why are zinc and manganese critical minerals?

Both metals sit on the federal government’s critical minerals list, and Hermosa is positioned to produce a meaningful share of the domestic supply of each. Zinc galvanizes roughly half the world’s steel, coating it in a sacrificial layer that corrodes first so the steel underneath does not rust. Manganese goes into nearly every ton of steel made and increasingly into lithium-ion battery cathodes, which is why South32 has described Hermosa’s manganese deposit as large enough to meet meaningful US demand on its own. Copper, the state’s signature metal, rounds out the critical minerals mix at the project’s Peak deposit.

Today, most of the manganese used in American steel and batteries is imported, and a domestic mine that can supply it changes that math directly rather than through a substitute or a recycling stream.

What happens next at Hermosa?

With the federal Record of Decision final, South32 can move ahead on the infrastructure the approval covers, alongside work already underway on the underground mine itself. The company expects both production shafts to reach their final depth before the end of 2026, with underground mining starting in late 2027 and first production early in 2028, the start of a projected 70-year operating life. South32 has also committed to more than 140 conservation and mitigation measures and has been consulting with 12 tribes since 2019, three years ahead of when federal rules would have required it, with a community benefits agreement expected by the end of the year.

A remote operating center is planned for Nogales, and an electrician training program tied to the project graduates its first class in August 2026, early signs of the workforce Hermosa is building around Santa Cruz County ahead of first production.

Arizona’s mining story keeps expanding

Hermosa lands in a state already carrying about 70 percent of America’s copper supply, mostly from Freeport-McMoRan’s Morenci complex in the state’s eastern mountains. Our Arizona master report covers that copper legacy in full, from the Copper Queen mine in Bisbee to the porphyry deposits that made Arizona the backbone of American copper production. Hermosa adds a second thread: a zinc and manganese district built from the ground up under one of the federal government’s newest permitting tools, in the same state that put a miner on its seal.