With United States President Donald Trump now in office for his second term at the helm, the long-stalled Resolution copper development in Arizona - a JV between the world’s two largest miners - may be coming to just that: a resolution.
The 55%-owned Rio Tinto (ASX : RIO) and 45%-owned BHP (ASX : BHP) Resolution project could provide >25% of U.S. copper demand for decades to come, yet it has been strongly opposed by Native American groups that say it would destroy a sacred Apache tribal site.
For the miners, it has been a frustrating and arduous process trying to get the purported 18.1Mt of copper deposit into production, with US$2 billion already spent by the JV just to see it held up in a more than decade-long legal stoush.
Rio is betting that Trump will finally give the green light to its giant copper mine as part of an expected wave of U.S. domestic projects expected to be approved by the new administration.
Back in December, Trump said any person or company investing at least $1 billion into the U.S. “will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all environmental approvals”.
“I do think that we have really good chances now to progress that project,” Rio CEO Jakob Stausholm said in an interview with the Financial Times.
“We have made a lot of progress.”
It's making progress elsewhere too - both on the M&A front with its foray into lithium after spending $6.4 billion on acquiring Arcadium late last year, rumours of a merger with Swiss-based Glencore to become the world's biggest mining company and offering to settle an ongoing tax dispute over the Oyu Tolgoi copper-gold mine with a $295 million payment to the Mongolian government, as reported yesterday by the Australian Financial Review.
At the time of writing, Rio Tinto's share price was at $119.61, with a market cap of around $168.65 billion. BHP's share price was at $39.80, with a market cap of approximately $201.94 billion.
