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Editor's note: This article is a part of a series reviewing Utah and U.S. history for KSL.com's Historic section.
SALT LAKE CITY — In May 2019, days before the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad, then-Utah Gov. Gary Herbert unveiled a new commemorative spike meant to symbolize the state's contribution to the major U.S. event.
California, Arizona and Nevada leaders all brought ceremonial spikes made of gold, silver and iron to the Wedding of the Rails at Promonitory Summit back in 1869. A century and a half after the fact, Herbert figured copper would make the most sense for Utah's spike.
"What other metal would you rather have? I think copper is very fitting," he said at the time.
Utah copper returned to the news again this week with Rio Tinto's announcement that it will invest $55 million in development capital to resume underground copper mining at its Kennecott Copper Mine in Bingham Canyon. This investment is projected to yield 30,000 tons of "high-quality" copper in the next five years, according to Nate Foster, interim managing director at Rio Tinto Kennecott.
The amount of copper is expected to provide electricity to over 1.2 million U.S. homes. Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson added that the investment is also impactful because the growing energy sector could result in a demand for minerals six times the current amount by 2040, and the demand for minerals that power electric vehicle batteries could grow by 40 times.
Tuesday's announcement is just the latest development in Utah's copper history, especially at Bingham Canyon. Here's how the mine and copper have factored in the past, both in Utah and the rest of the world.
Origin of the Bingham Mine
Bingham Canyon copper mining dates all the way back to the 1860s, but the story of the mine that's known today begins in 1887 when Enos Wall, a career miner, visited Bingham Canyon and found potential for low-grade porphyry copper deposits, according to Louis Cononelos and Philip Notarianni, who wrote an article on the mine for Utah History Encyclopedia. Underground copper mining began three years later, paving the way for eventual massing mining operations and two rival mining companies that eventually merged in 1910.
Wall co-founded one of those, the Utah Copper Company, in 1903, which began by constructing a mill at nearby Copperton that could handle 300 tons per day, Cononelos and Notarianni noted. But getting the mine off the ground wasn't easy.
With the gold and silver mining still highly profitable, Wall's efforts to finance a copper mining operation were unsuccessful and, in 1903, "he sold the property on option to a group of investors who had become interested in the prospect through the efforts of Daniel C. Jackling," historians wrote in a document for the National Register of Historic Places.
It became the first open pit copper mine in the world a year later. The mine continued to expand when the Kennecott Copper Corporation entered the picture in 1915, purchasing a quarter of the Utah Copper Company. By 1919, Utah had become the fourth-largest copper producer in the nation simply from the vast production in Bingham Canyon.
It wasn't until 1936, nearly two decades after Wall's death, that Kennecott absorbed the remainder of the Utah Copper Company. A few years later, it would become an important mine for the nation.
A place in history
World War II resulted in a spike in copper production, and the Bingham Canyon mine ultimately produced nearly one-third of all the copper used by Allied Forces during the war, according to Cononelos and Notarianni.
"(The) Bingham Canyon mine established new world records for copper mining ... during World War II," they wrote. "During the war years, many women worked in the mine, mills, and smelter. In 1944, the construction of its own power plant rendered Kennecott independent of outside sources for electrical power."
The National Register of Historic Places document about the mine filed in the 1980s noted that it had produced more than 24.6 billion pounds of copper just from 1904 to 1982. It also went through a series of ownership changes before its current owner, Rio Tinto, acquired it in 1989.
There are critics of the mine's history, though. The organization Earthworks, for example, argued in a 2011 paper that mining in the canyon "resulted in damage to fish and wildlife habitat, extensive water pollution and public health and safety risks." These risks are why local environmental groups were skeptical of this week's announcement.
But given all its history — good and bad — it's no surprise that the Bingham Canyon Open Pit and Copper Mine became one of the first Utah sites ever added to the National Register of Historic Places, in 1966.
Today, the mine is known as "the world's biggest manmade excavations and among the deepest open-pit copper mines," according to Mining Technology. It produced 159,400 tons of copper last year, in addition to sizeable amounts of gold, silver and the chemical element molybdenum.
The next investment, which will expand operations yet again, is just the latest chapter in the mine's history.
"We are confident these innovations will go down as a game-changer in the long and rich history here at Kennecott," Foster said.
