Mariana Minerals will no doubt look to get some miles on the clock at Copper One before it starts talking publicly about the economics of “software-first” mining, refining and recycling.
The Silicon Valley company, which has received equity funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Breakthrough Energy, has amped up promotion of its ambitions with a formal reopening of the former Lisbon Valley operations in Utah, USA. “Mariana’s mission is to fundamentally reinvent how infrastructure is built, how mines are operated and how refineries are operated,” the company’s founder and CEO Turner Caldwell said at an event attended by politicians, investors and selected media.
Utah governor Spencer Cox was reported to have said Mariana’s Lisbon Valley restart – complete with robotic Boston Dynamics quadruped, semi-autonomous drills and MarianaOS mine management platform – was “one of the most important in our state’s history and in our country’s history and maybe in the history of the world”.
Cox has been pressing to draw investment to Utah’s mining and energy industries during Donald Trump’s second term as US president, expediting project approvals and offering other incentives. Lisbon Valley is a brownfield mining and copper refining site in San Juan county with a very long history of mixed fortunes. High costs and worker shortages were reportedly to blame for a 2024 mining shutdown, though SX-EW copper refining continued. Caldwell wants to spend $1 billion or more expanding copper output over a decade – starting with a plan to increase copper cathode production to 50,000 tonnes a year by 2030 – if he can make the economics stack up.
In the process the local workforce would grow from 80 or so to circa-300.
While the reopening ceremony heard a combination of mine fleet, plant and survey automation, and Mariana’s proprietary operating systems, could cut “refining costs by 30% and mining costs by 50%”, there are no reference points for these numbers.
“Copper One will be the first mine where delivering end-to-end autonomy is the priority, where it is being rapidly deployed across mining and refining operations and coordinated by our internal software stack. That is what MarianaOS makes possible,” Caldwell said.
“We chose to prove it here because the stakes are real: the US has a structural copper deficit and the window to close it is narrowing. We are producing now and ramping output aggressively with the primary goal of achieving fully autonomous mining operations.”
While a Forbes site report describing the world’s first autonomous mining operation ignored mines in Australia, China, Chile and even nearby Arizona, where US copper major Freeport-McMoRan says Bagdad is now the “first major mine in the US to operate a fully autonomous haulage fleet”, Mariana is proposing to “orchestrate” automated activity centres seamlessly via an AI-assisted control platform.
Public reporting out of China suggests this has been achieved there, though, as in the US, verification of these things is problematic.
How will Mariana – which has raised c$85 million of venture finance – fund its proposed Copper One expansion? The company aims to generate free cash flow in Utah, at elevated copper prices, and has ambitions to produce direct lithium extraction (DLE) lithium in Texas.
“As new generations come in they’re going to do new things and challenge the status quo,” Caldwell said.
“The US has gotten really comfortable with operating in a way where we do some things here, but we do a lot of things elsewhere. And sometimes it takes a generational shift to ask the hard question, why can’t we do that here?”
