Copper Mining: Producers, Mines and Markets

Which countries mine the most copper

Copper mining is concentrated in a short list of countries. The U.S. Geological Survey puts world mine production at about 23 million tonnes of copper in both 2024 and 2025, and Chile alone supplies close to a quarter of it. The Democratic Republic of the Congo has moved into second place on the strength of the Central African Copperbelt, ahead of Peru, while China, Russia and the United States make up the next group.

Copper content, metric tons. Source: USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026, Copper (February 2026). Australia reports 100 million t of reserves on the USGS basis, 27 million t on the JORC-compliant basis.

Mining and refining sit in different places. China mines under 2 million tonnes a year but refines close to half the world’s copper, much of it from concentrate shipped in from South America and Africa. That gap is why “largest copper producer” can mean different countries depending on whether someone is counting mine output or refined metal. Our country ranking of copper producers and the copper reserves by country guide go through both lists.

The largest copper mining companies

On the company side, the list of the biggest copper miners usually includes Freeport-McMoRan, BHP, Codelco (Chile’s state-owned miner), Glencore, Zijin Mining, Southern Copper, Anglo American, Antofagasta and Rio Tinto. The order changes from year to year as mines expand, run into trouble or change hands, so check the date on any ranking you use. Our list of the largest copper mining companies sets them side by side with their main mines.

Where copper deposits come from

Most copper comes from two kinds of deposit. Porphyry deposits form above cooling bodies of granite-like magma, where hot fluids spread copper sulfides through a huge volume of fractured rock. They’re low grade but enormous, which suits open pits and block caving. Escondida and Oyu Tolgoi are both porphyry systems. Sediment-hosted deposits form when metal-bearing brines move through layered sedimentary rock, and they are the main source on the Central African Copperbelt in Zambia and the Congo. The USGS estimates that these two types together supply about 80 percent of the world’s copper, porphyries the larger share.

The rest comes from iron oxide copper-gold deposits (Olympic Dam in South Australia is the best known), volcanogenic massive sulfides, skarns and smaller vein systems. Deposit type matters to anyone comparing mines because it sets the grade, the size, the mining method and which by-products come out alongside the copper: molybdenum and gold from porphyries, cobalt from the Copperbelt, uranium and gold from Olympic Dam.

How copper ore becomes metal

Ore from a large copper mine usually carries well under 1 percent copper, so almost all the rock that’s moved ends up as waste or tailings. There are two main processing routes, and which one a mine uses depends on the minerals in the ore.

Sulfide ore: concentrate, smelting and refining

Sulfide ore is crushed, ground to a fine powder and floated in tanks where air bubbles carry the copper minerals to the surface. The froth becomes a concentrate that typically runs 25 to 30 percent copper. Smelters melt it to drive off sulfur and iron, and the resulting anodes are electrorefined into cathode of 99.99 percent copper. Our guide on how concentrate is smelted and refined goes through each step, including the impurities that smelters charge for.

Oxide ore: leaching and electrowinning

Oxide ore near the surface dissolves in weak sulfuric acid. It’s stacked on lined heaps and irrigated, and the copper-bearing solution goes through solvent extraction and electrowinning (SX-EW), which plates copper straight onto cathodes without a smelter. In-situ recovery takes that idea underground: the solution is pumped through the ore body through wells and brought back up, which is how Taseko’s Florence Copper project in Arizona works.

Copper mining in the United States

U.S. mines produced about 1.0 million tonnes of recoverable copper in 2025, according to the USGS. Arizona accounted for roughly 70 percent of that, and copper was also mined in Alaska, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah. Of the 26 mines that recovered copper, 17 produced more than 99 percent of the total. In November 2025 copper was added to the U.S. list of critical minerals.

The U.S. pieces in this hub look at specific operations: active copper mines in Michigan, jobs and tours at the Bagdad mine in Arizona, and Nevada’s Pumpkin Hollow project. For U.S. copper mining companies and their share prices, see the copper prices and market hub. This page sticks to the mines.

How new copper deposits are found

New copper mines take a long time to bring into production, and the slowest stages are usually finding a deposit worth drilling and then getting it permitted. Exploration starts with geology maps, stream and soil samples, geophysics and, increasingly, satellite data. Porphyry systems are a good fit for remote sensing because the hot fluids that brought in the copper also changed the surrounding rock into clay, sericite and iron-oxide minerals, and those minerals have recognizable signatures in shortwave-infrared bands such as ASTER’s.