Utah Mining, Bingham Canyon and the Quiet Giants of the Beehive State

Utah’s mining story is one giant hole and a set of quiet monopolies. Bingham Canyon has produced more copper than any mine in history, and away from the headlines Utah supplies materials almost no other American source can: beryllium, primary magnesium, and the country’s only conventional uranium mill. This is our living master report on Utah mining, updated as Season 1 of Hunting Hidden Treasures comes through.

The canyon that became a mountain in reverse

Miners started working Bingham Canyon in 1863, but the revolution came in 1906, when Utah Copper bet that mining vast amounts of low-grade ore in an open pit could beat chasing rich veins underground. The bet invented modern open-pit mining. More than a century later, Bingham Canyon is the largest man-made excavation on Earth, roughly two and a half miles across and over half a mile deep, and it has produced more copper than any mine in history, along with serious gold, silver, and molybdenum.

Utah also rode the 1950s uranium boom, when Charlie Steen’s Mi Vida strike near Moab set off the last great American prospecting rush and made the Colorado Plateau the center of the atomic age.

Utah today

Rio Tinto’s Kennecott operation still runs the Bingham Canyon mine, concentrator, smelter, and refinery end to end, one of the only places in America where copper goes from ore body to finished metal in one place, with tellurium for solar panels recovered from the refining stream. In the west desert, Materion’s Spor Mountain mine supplies most of the world’s beryllium, a metal aerospace and defense cannot function without. US Magnesium pulls the country’s only primary magnesium from Great Salt Lake brine. And in the southeast, Energy Fuels’ White Mesa Mill near Blanding is the only operating conventional uranium mill in the United States, now also processing rare earth material.

Who matters in Utah

• Rio Tinto Kennecott, running Bingham Canyon, America’s ore-to-metal copper flagship.
• Materion, mining Spor Mountain beryllium, most of the world’s supply.
• US Magnesium, the only US primary magnesium producer, from Great Salt Lake brine.
• Energy Fuels, operating the White Mesa Mill, the country’s only conventional uranium mill.

We add companies to this report as work in the state moves, whether or not they are tour partners.

On the Season 1 tour

Episode 7 stands on the rim at Bingham Canyon, where the scale of what one mine can supply, copper, moly, gold, and even solar-panel tellurium, makes the whole mine-to-product thesis visible in a single view.