Digging Deep with Major Miner Vicky Peacey

This episode is sponsored by Culligan Water

In the latest installment of The Adrenaline Zone, Sandy and Sandra spotlight the fascinating world of mining, digging into the depths of this vital industry, exploring its intricacies and challenges. The episode kicks off by introducing Vicky Peacey, the General Manager of Rio Tinto's Resolution Copper Mine in Arizona. Situated a staggering 7,000 feet underground, this mine ranks among the largest copper resources in North America. With Sandy and Sandra, she immediately immerses listeners in the world of mining, emphasizing the significance of copper across various sectors, from electronics to automotive manufacturing.

Vicky goes on to share her personal journey into the mining industry, revealing her familial ties to mining and her academic pursuit of a master's degree in civil engineering. She highlights the industry's wide range of opportunities, spanning technical roles to environmental stewardship and community partnerships. Her diverse career includes experiences in pit mining, environmental remediation, and working underground. These varied experiences have taught her that mining is not just about engineering and technology but also about bridging the gap between the industry and the community.

The podcast doesn't limit its focus to copper alone but also delves into the importance of other minerals extracted from mines, like aluminum for smartphones and iron ore for steel production. Vicky emphasizes the mining industry's significant contribution to manufacturing and technology sectors, showcasing its relevance in our daily lives. As the conversation unfolds, she also touches on the importance of domestic mineral and metal production, particularly in the context of global decarbonization and electrification efforts. Copper, in particular, emerges as a vital component in the transition to cleaner energy sources.

Safety takes center stage in the mining industry, and Vicky explains the stringent safety measures in place. Sandra draws parallels between mining and other high-risk sectors like space exploration, highlighting the critical role of risk assessments and emergency response preparedness.

The podcast also addresses environmental aspects of mining, including tailings management and responsible waste handling, as Vicky underscores the industry's commitment to mitigating its environmental impact. The episode acknowledges the criticism often directed at mining due to its presence in local communities. Vicky recognizes the industry's responsibility to engage with and educate the public about its operations, emphasizing the importance of improving communication and addressing concerns to reshape public perception.

Be sure to tune into today’s highly informative and entertaining episode as it covers everything from the mining industry's significance in various sectors to the complexities of ensuring safety, environmental responsibility, and community engagement. 

If you enjoyed this episode of The Adrenaline Zone, hit the subscribe button so you never miss another thrilling conversation, and be sure to leave a review to help get the word out to fellow adrenaline junkies.

Transcript

Vicky Peacey: Safety is the most important thing. And this mining method, underground mining like this has been around for a century. It's not new. It's definitely tried, tested, and it's been part of the fabric of the mining industry for a very long time.

____________________________________________________________

Sandy Winnefeld: The Adrenaline Zone has explored risks and opportunities with plenty of people who spend a lot of time underwater. But today we talked to someone who spends a lot of time underground.

Dr. Sandra Magnus: Vicky Peacey is the general manager for the Rio Tinto's Resolution Copper Mine in Arizona, which is one of the largest copper resources in North America.

Sandy Winnefeld: The heart of the mine is 7000 ft underground. That's 1.3 miles.

Dr. Sandra Magnus: And we were curious about how mines work, the risks involved, and what it's actually like to be that far underground.

Sandy Winnefeld: Many thanks to our sponsor for this episode, Culligan Water. With Culligan's drinking water systems, you can get the ultra-filtered water you need to fuel your high-performance lifestyle right on tap. Learn more at culligan.com.

Dr. Sandra Magnus: And Vicky was kind enough to speak to us from her office in Arizona. So, Vicky, welcome to The Adrenaline Zone. I'm really looking forward to this conversation.

Vicky Peacey: Thanks, Sandra. Really happy to be here today.

Sandy Winnefeld: So again, it's great to have you. We always like to hear about where our guests came from. So what drew you to the mining industry? Is it because it runs in your family? And what kind of education does one get when they want to go into that industry? I would imagine it's not a huge community at the executive level.

Vicky Peacey: Yeah, I actually come from a mining family. My dad is a miner, my sister, brother in law, my husband, but really, I'd say it was my dad that really encouraged me to take a degree in engineering and he helped me get summer jobs. And it's the wide breadth of interesting issues. Everything is very science-based, it's technology, but a lot of environmental stewardship, innovation, and community partners. The kind of education, I've got a master's of science degree in civil engineering, but it's really all sorts. Technical college degrees like electricians, mechanics, instrument technicians to biologists, archaeologists, financial professionals. It doesn't always come down to education, although it's definitely vital to many fields. It's really more about training and experience. Working, especially underground, is the experience that you gain on the job.

Dr. Sandra Magnus: You're in a management role now. We were just talking before we started recording that you started in pit mining, you did some environmental remediation, you spent some time a little bit underground, but you're at Rio Tinto now. That's a wide variety of experiences. So what are the big lessons you've learned across all of that experience?

Vicky Peacey: The big lesson is there's just such a diversity of interesting issues and things to tackle inside of a mine. I think what really, the thing, if I had to really boil it down to anything is that it's probably much easier to engineer with you and the rock, but when it comes to maybe areas outside of the mine, like communities, social performance, having people understand our business, it's very, very technical, it's very high tech. And I think that we have a long way to go to help sort of change the face of mining, the perspectives that people have to try and stand in our shoes and understand what mining really is and isn't.

Sandy Winnefeld: So, Vicky, there are a lot of different types of minerals that come out of the ground, and they're so important in manufacturing and a whole host of other things that are done around the planet in keeping with those different types of minerals, there's different types of mines. Can you give our listeners kind of an overview of the industry and what kind of stuff are you pulling out of the ground and what kind of mine does it have to be?

Vicky Peacey: Yeah. Well, so Rio Tinto is really the second biggest diversified mining company globally. I'll zoom it down into here in the US, in Canada, North America, I guess we're really the second largest producer of final refined metals and critical minerals. Majority is used for the US domestic market. So everything from high purity aluminum, which is manufactured in our Canadian operations and is used in your iPhones, to the body of the Ford F150, to the Boeing airplanes. Green iron ore, which feeds us steel mills, to borates, which are used in just about everything from detergents to aircraft coatings for entry back into Earth so we don't burn them up. We also are a very big copper producer. We've got 100 years of copper operations at our Utah copper mine, and we produce about 15% of the US demand for copper, along with a whole host of other goodies like gold, silver, molybdenum, that's used to harden steel, and critical minerals that have interesting names like tellurium, which are used on the coatings of solar panels or night vision goggles. So lots of different minerals.

Dr. Sandra Magnus: Wow.

Sandy Winnefeld: So you hear a lot about minerals that are not mined in the US, that are in other countries, and we're sort of hostage to them. Is that because the production costs are so low in those countries, or is it because the stuff is just not in North America?

Vicky Peacey: There are some minerals that are really not present in large quantities in North America. One would be cobalt. So the Democratic Republic of Congo, really, 70% of cobalt comes out of that one single country. The US, though, has a very wide array of minerals. I say the amount of copper deposits. There was a time, actually, when the US was number one global producer of copper. Today we still have lots of copper mines, dozens across the country. And the unique thing about copper is it tends to have a lot of, we used to call them impurities, today we call them critical minerals. So not all copper deposits are created equal, but about half a dozen or a dozen critical minerals can be made from copper, as long as you have a smelter and a refinery that you can pull them out of. So many of these minerals aren't actually mined in their own right, like indium or tellurium. You won't have those types of mines, but you make them as a coproduct of copper.

Dr. Sandra Magnus: I could talk to you for hours. But mining is an endeavor that takes decades so it requires a long term approach. And I was reading about how you were working with the Resolution mine project and the work you had to go through to minimize the risk to environment, to plan, to minimize the business risk, to just manage that risk through every stage. Can you just talk us through the thought process that a company has to go through? 

Vicky Peacey: It really starts with a great amount of care and investment in really gathering baseline information and that starts with the environment that you will potentially be operating in and potentially impacting to the communities that are on your doorstep and are your closest neighbors to maybe Native American tribes that are located further away but that have ancestral ties or historic ties to the same areas. So it is years, decades, really for us two decades of gathering that environmental baseline data as well as the social data with the communities. And when we overlay our plans then we can look at through that multi stakeholder dialogue with communities, tribes, regulators. We start avoiding and minimizing things that are important like recreation, ancestral sites, seeps, springs, waterways, and it’s this collaborative dialogue that takes a long time, years to look at alternatives so that you can avoid the special places that people like and come out with something that is mutually acceptable.  

Sandy Winnefeld: It's got to be a capital intensive. The money meter is running for 10 years, so that's a huge part of the business, I'm sure, before you even pull the first thing out of the ground.

Vicky Peacey: Yeah. So a deposit like Resolution Copper is very unique. It is one and a half billion tons at 1.5 %copper, these deposits are not a dime a dozen. They're really like looking for a needle in a haystack. We happen to have Resolution is located in the footprint of an old underground mine called Magma Copper. It's in a district called the Copper Triangle, where mining has really been part of the fabric of the community for 100 years. So there is infrastructure here, there is power so I think that makes that much better. But these types of projects take a lot of upfront investment. We've spent $2.3 billion just collecting the data and gathering the information that you need to put together a plan and navigate the federal and the stakeholder approval processes. And this is pretty routine these days with these types of deposits.

Sandy Winnefeld: Wow. So how about once you get all the approvals and everything's out of the way, there's a construction phase, you start basically digging. How do you do that? How do you do it safely? How do you stabilize the tunnels? What kind of equipment is involved? What is this like when you're going– Everybody can visualize a pit mine, but how about going that deep underground?

Vicky Peacey: First of all, it's all about safety, and you risk assess and understand what are all of the issues that you could run into. And you make sure that you have a management plan for everything. But we have to make sure that everybody goes home safely, whether we're working on surface or working underground. And then again, that's the data that you collect slowly and progressively, as you're sinking a shaft down the 7000 ft, tunneling underground out to the ore body. Every bit of geotechnical data, air quality data, goes in and you constantly refine and build your mine plan. So safety is really instrumental in every aspect of the design, from ventilation to cooling to guarding of equipment.

Sandy Winnefeld: A lot of risk analysis.

Dr. Sandra Magnus: There's a lot of overlap, I think, between how you guys approach a problem and how we approach a problem in the space industry, we live and breathe risk assessments. 

Vicky Peacey:We live and breathe risk assessments. Yes, all the time.

Dr. Sandra Magnus: So how do you actually get down to 7,000 ft? You got elevators, or how do you guys move people around in a mine like that? How do they know where they're going?

Vicky Peacey: Yeah, there's a lot of different ways to get to an underground deposit, but a deposit like Resolution, where the top of it is 5000 ft below the ground and the bottom is down to about 6900 ft, you have to sink something that's called a shaft, or many shafts, which is really a very long, straight tube that goes from surface all the way to the base of the deposit. And then after that, you do a tunnel or a series of tunnels underneath the deposit, and then eventually drill and blast. And gravity brings the ore down slowly and progressively over time. And as you remove the ore, it continues to fall down. So the specific type of underground mining that is suited to this type of deposit, very big, relatively low grade, very deep, is called caving.

Sandy Winnefeld: So how do you get the ore out of there? I mean, it's got to go back up 7000 ft, right?

Vicky Peacey: Yes. I guess this is where really the coolness and the cool factor and the high tech factor comes in. Because it's so deep, we would have a network. So it's going to be like, imagine an underground city, and you have a network of hundreds of miles of underground tunnels. And within those tunnels, there's battery electric equipment or underground type of equipment that is low profile loaders that are scooping ore out. They're loading them into battery electric trucks. The trucks are driving them many, many miles back to where the shafts are located. And that's where you then are going to crush and grind larger rocks into something that's about a soccer ball size. And then you put them in buckets and you hoist them back up to a location either to surface or to another tunnel that'll take it out to a processing facility. So all of this activity is happening underground, and you really won't see much on the surface at all.

Dr. Sandra Magnus: So what's the role of the human being in that process?

Vicky Peacey: Well, a little bit different than an open pit mine, where you typically have someone driving a truck or driving a loader, the human being is really more high tech. So rather than your truck driver sitting in the cab of the truck, that individual will be sitting on the surface in an air conditioned building using a joystick controlling the truck 7000 ft below the ground. So somebody who's in 7th grade today, who's a really great gamer, could be our future haul truck operator when we're up and running.

Sandy Winnefeld: So is there anybody down 7000 ft at all or is it all remotely piloted?

Vicky Peacey: Yes. Of course, ventilation and cooling is very important. We constantly make sure there’s fresh air and cooled air that’s– The temperature of ore mine is about 165°F. So we still have to send people down to maintain equipment. And the network of infrastructure that sits in the hundreds of miles of tunnels in this underground city, imagine the network of electrical lines, HVAC systems, pipelines through all those hundreds of miles of tunnels. There’s a lot. Sow when we start to think about it, the number of jobs were thousands, it doesn’t reduce the jobs but the type of job is different. So two-year trade school, electricians, mechanics, instrument technicians are the type of jobs.

Sandy Winnefeld: So if I got this right, most of this is remotely piloted vehicles that are doing the grinding and the crushing and the movement of the ore, but every now and then, you have to send a human down into 165°.           

Vicky Peacey: The host rock at the bottom, uncooled, is 165°. But we have a massive air conditioning and ventilation that keeps it at about somewhere between 70° and 80°.

Dr. Sandra Magnus: Wow. And this is sort of, just for our listeners sake, it's a three-dimensional structure because you've got levels, right? Or are you just operating on one level? But you're operating on multiple levels at a time?

Vicky Peacey: Potentially, there would be multiple levels. There would be right laterally multiple levels. And the footprint of this deposit is huge. It's really hard to put it into perspective, but 1.5 to 8 billion tons, it will take us at years, decades to mine through this. And it is slow and progressive over time.

Dr. Sandra Magnus: So I have to ask, how do people not get lost? I mean, you have street signs. We have a location coding system on the space station so that we know. Lab 1, Deck 5. We know exactly where that is in the Lab. So we can go find our equipment. You probably have a similar system.

Vicky Peacey: Exactly. Everything is totally engineered. Every level has a level station name. And just like you would in your own town, you have signs. So the tunnels are roads. Everything is signed. And we'll have WiFi, radios. You'll have to communicate constantly. And we do have tracking devices, so we know where equipment is at any one time. So everybody can find their way in, find their way out, and we can find anybody if equipment is down.

Sandy Winnefeld: Yeah, we talk about iron workers that go up and work on skyscrapers hundreds of feet above the ground. I would imagine there's a little bit of a psychology associated with going that deep underground. Maybe like the same as the submariner. It's like, “Okay, this is what I do. I trust the equipment.” But is it kind of weird being down that far underground? Do people kind of think about that?

Vicky Peacey: You have to come and visit, and I think you need to come in. 

Dr. Sandra Magnus:I would love to come and visit.

Vicky Peacey: The openings in the voids are very big. So the shafts are 30 meters in diameter. The tunnels are very large, so you're not in these tiny little openings. So that brings a degree of comfort. And once you're down there, you really don't notice that you're that far underground. But, yeah, no, I think it does have to get used to doing that and working underground, but it's very very safe. Again, we live and breathe risk assessments, safety is the most important thing. And this mining method, underground mining like this has been around for a century. It's not new. It's definitely tried, tested, and it's been part of the fabric of the mining industry for a very long time.

[Advertisement]

Dr. Sandra Magnus: You’re passionate about pushing yourself to always be better. Culligan’s water experts feel the same. 

Sandy Winnefeld: That’s why their smart reverse osmosis filtration systems do more than offer ultra refreshing, pure tasting water. Their app also lets you set water drinking goals, seek water quality information, and get filter change alerts. And with cleaner, safer, great tasting water, available right from the tap. You can also feel good about all those single use plastic bottles you’re saving from landfills.

Dr. Sandra Magnus: Get started with water you love today. Schedule your free water test at culligan.com.

 [Advertisement]

Dr. Sandra Magnus: So, you know, on space station and for shuttle, too, we train for specific kinds of emergencies. Fire, in our case, a depressurization event and a toxic atmosphere. So what kind of emergencies and training do you guys talk about? Safety and trying to get people to react instinctively in case of an emergency. What kind of things do you guys train for and plan for?

Vicky Peacey: Very similar. We have emergency response team and we're also heavily regulated. The Mine Health and Safety Administration is a federal agency that oversees the mining industry.

Dr. Sandra Magnus: Who knew?

Vicky Peacey: And so there are rules and regulations on everything from operations to specifically emergency response. So fire is one. Obviously, air and oxygen particulate. So we have an emergency response team. We have constant drills that we're always testing to make sure that we have plans in place and safety procedures and emergency response. And we test it on a constant basis. And we practice to make sure the teams are fully equipped, have all the training and everything they may need to respond.

Dr. Sandra Magnus: Yeah, it sounds very very very similar to what we do.

Sandy Winnefeld: As we were talking, Vicky got me wondering, what is the deepest mine that you're aware of that– Is 7000 ft about as far as you can go? How far do you go?

Vicky Peacey: Yeah. Well, so we're not the deepest mine. Resolution is about 6940 ft. But the deepest mine–

Sandy Winnefeld: Give or take. 

Vicky Peacey: Yeah, give or take. Deepest mines are in South Africa. Anglo Gold has a mine in Johannesburg and it's 13,200 ft. So two and a half miles. That's very very deep. There are mines in Canada, one's called Kid Creek, and that's 9800 ft. We just recently also, Rio Tinto brought on the first new underground block cave mine to be very similar to Resolution. And that's about 4500 ft deep.

Dr. Sandra Magnus: So do you guys have an organization where you swap safety stories and share learning points around safety? Because we kind of have something like that across the space agency.

Vicky Peacey: We do, yeah. So we do within our company, we have these centers of excellence. We have an underground center of excellence, which we have mining experts, underground mining experts from across the globe. So at all of our underground mining facilities across the world, we share expertise. And then we're also part of industry groups. So the International Council on Mining and Metals is a forum where not just underground, but everything is shared. And it's about best practice, and it's about elevating the industry that our peers, we share best practice and we do the right thing.

Sandy Winnefeld: So I imagine one of the most dicey things that your team has to deal with is explosives. You're blasting this stuff out, you're underground, you're blasting it out. Special training, special techniques. I mean, people have probably done this for decades that are in charge of it. Tell us a little bit about handling the explosives and how you handle that risk.

Vicky Peacey: Yeah, just like you said, in the mining industry, been around for over 100 years. Explosives are day to day right in the fabric of what we've done. And they have very serious procedures and practices. So I'll go back to strict guidelines and regulations that are set forth by the Federal Mine Health and Safety Act. Number one, as well as alcohol, tobacco and firearms. So both of those federal agencies have extensive regulations on how to handle, manage store explosives. They have to be stored in a specific own area. You have to have special training in order to actually transport them and handle them. You take account of what's on site at any given time. So it's very heavily regulated and we take it very seriously.

Dr. Sandra Magnus: You talked about the regulations. The US has some, but all the regulations in different countries are not necessarily the same. I trained in Russia for a while, and we had this out on this creaky boat doing sea survival. And our OSHA guys came over and they were making all these comments and I was just kind of laughing because that's not the culture over there in Russia and in different countries. So the different countries have different– How do you guys deal with that? Because you have standards. You have to live up to here and you want to make sure your people are safe, but yet you interface with these other countries, and it's a completely different concept. How do you guys deal with it?

Vicky Peacey: Well, you have to follow the law in the jurisdiction that you're operating in. That is when it– So I'll say Rio Tinto has corporate global standards for health, safety, environment, communities, social performance, cultural heritage so that there is a standard across the globe that is best practice. In the US, I would say though we are the gold standard of regulations. It's probably really tough to find another country that is as highly regulated, but that's a good thing. So obviously we've talked about MSHA, Mine Safety and Health Administration. OSHA applies as well, ATF. So health and safety is highly, highly regulated. We also have environmental regulations, everything from the Federal Clean Water Act to the Federal Clean Air Act to the Safe Drinking Water Act, the National Historic Preservation Act. There's many, many hundreds and hundreds that is either at the federal level, the state level, the local level, and it's just part of doing business. We've been operating in the United States whether it's our boron facility beside Edwards Air Force Base to the copper facility in Utah, we've been operating for 100 years with these regulations. It's just day to day.

Sandy Winnefeld: Well, and frankly, we used to hear decades and decades ago, when I was a little kid, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, that mine accidents were not uncommon. But now, knock on wood, in the US, you just don't hear about them very much while you still hear about them overseas. So what you're saying makes sense that we do have the highest standards around the world for safety?

Vicky Peacey: I think so. And environment, really both.

Sandy Winnefeld: So, question for you on the ore. It comes up. It's now on the surface, it's soccer ball size. It's got to get turned into something else. Do you do that on site, or do you move it, transport it to another facility to kind of take the next steps to turn it into something that's actually usable?

Vicky Peacey: Yes. So you want to have all of your facilities, mining to processing as close as possible. That's what makes the most sense. So once the ore is crushed right to the soccer ball size, it would go on a series of conveyors, again underground to a processing plant. So it takes soccer ball size ore, which might have 1% to 2% copper in it, somewhere in there, and you crush it through a series of crushing mills and then put it in a series of we call them flotation, but they're like these cells that have water and reagents, like alcohols, that make bubbles. And funny enough, the copper materials stick to the bubbles and they go to the surface, and you skim off the surface and you make something that's we call it concentrate or copper concentrate, which is about maybe about 30% copper. So it goes from about 1% to 30% by crushing, grinding, concentrating in a facility that is located adjacent to the mine.

Dr. Sandra Magnus: So what do you do with the waste products of all the stuff that's not the copper? You've extracted the copper, but there's still a lot of leftover rock and things. What happens with all of that?

Vicky Peacey: Is it okay? Maybe I'll just finish off from 30% copper. I'll go really quickly. And after that, it goes to a smelter and a refinery. So Rio Tinto hazards. There was a time when there were two dozen smelters and refineries in the United States that made copper because the US was number one globally as far as copper production until about the late 1980s. There are two copper smelters and two copper refineries left in the United States that operate today. So we do have one. So after that, you take the concentrate, it goes to a smelter, and you sort of cook the rock and melt it, and it further separates to about 99% copper. And then after that, it goes to a refinery where you electro win. So you have an anode with copper that plates copper in an electro refinery over to a cathode, and you make 99.99% copper. And we make about 15% of the US demand today for copper, as well as all the other goodies that come along with it.

Sandy Winnefeld: And those come out as ingots?

Vicky Peacey: It comes out as a cathode. So like a very big sheet that's about maybe 3 ft by 4 ft. and then goes to market. The uneconomic, so after you crush and grind, we go back to the concentrator, where we're making 30% copper concentrate. The crushed, ground up, sand-like material that's left over is called tailings. And tailings are highly regulated. They don't contain economic minerals in them anymore, but they contain very small quantities, maybe parts per million, parts per billion, parts per trillion of lead or cadmium, these sort of other metals. And so they are highly regulated, federal, and state regulations, they must be specifically cited, engineered, stored, and then monitored very closely over the life of the mine to make sure that we don't have dust that can create air issues or seepage that can create groundwater issues.

Dr. Sandra Magnus Are you putting them back in pockets of the mine you're not using anymore? That’s a lot of stuff.

Vicky Peacey: Depends on the underground method. In some cases, you can put tailings underground. For a block cave mine, you can't because the voids end up being consumed by broken rock, so they would be stored on the surface.

Sandy Winnefeld: Interesting. We talked earlier about the huge upfront investment, $2 billion already put into this project. And how soon do you expect, assuming all regulatory approvals and that sort of thing, to actually start bringing material out of the mine? Or are you already? 

Vicky Peacey: Maybe about sort of six to ten years before we can– What we'd have to do is develop out the tunnels out to the ore body. And that will take time. Where the shafts are located, compared to where the ore body is located is quite a distance away. But in that time so there'd be years and years of underground development work, many billions more that you wouldn't see anything on the surface.

Dr. Sandra Magnus: I'm going to take us on a tangent for a minute because listening to this, I knew this was going to be a great conversation because there's so many parallels with space. There's a lot of parallels between how you guys have outfitted and are managing your minds with the mix of people and automation that I think have lessons for how we eventually go back to the moon and set up our infrastructure there. It would be interesting to have some of the NASA architects come and chat with how you guys operate to draw some of those knowledge.

Vicky Peacey: Well, you would know better. That would be absolutely fantastic. If there's a way that we can share our best practice and learning with NASA, we would love to host a team to come underground and take a look and see if we can share best practice. Nothing would be cooler.

Dr. Sandra Magnus: Yeah, I'm going to drop a little, “Hey, you guys, we had this neat conversation. You need to go talk to these mining people because there's a lot of parallels. So many parallels.”

Sandy Winnefeld: So, Vicky, you talked a lot about the different threads, not only environmental, operational, and the local population and indigenous people and that sort of thing. And it sort of leads me to think you're living at the intersection of two interesting threads. On the one hand, mines produce materials that we need. They're absolutely essential to technological progress, to our preferred lifestyles, and in some cases to actually our very survival. On the other hand, nobody wants to have one in their backyard. So how do you manage the criticism or carefully handle the fact that you're sometimes doing things in places that people would rather you not be doing because it's in their backyard. How do you handle that?

Vicky Peacey: It's definitely the deposit is where it is. So nature puts it where it is. So it's very difficult when it is there. The industry has changed a lot. We talked about it being very highly regulated. There are international best practice standards, industry groups that really bring the industry up. We have to do a better job of communicating to the public. There was a time when there were 80 mines in the US. Two dozen smelters and refineries. Everybody really understood much better what mining really was and wasn't. And the industry has become a lot smaller in the US over time. So we've got maybe a dozen mines, only two smelters and refineries. So we really need to invest again back into K-12 education, partnering with universities, and really putting ourselves out there to communicate really about what the industry is or isn't. I think that we still have a long way to go. We can still do a better job, but the criticism is fair and I think the industry needs to step up and do a better job. 

But this is really the type of intelligent debate that we need to have. We need these metals. We want more domestic production. We have to close supply chain gaps. Everyone else is going to be decarbonizing at the same time as the US, and copper especially, is the metal of electrification. So we need to make sure that we are listening to communities, that they're helping shape the project, that we are making concessions and foregoing maybe portions of the ore body that help preserve special places, and that we're doing a better job to mitigate nature positive, save species, use less water, all of that.

Sandy Winnefeld: Boy. Speaking of the ore body, I meant to ask earlier, how on earth do you find copper when it's 7000 ft underground? How do you know it's there?

Vicky Peacey: Well, we were lucky in this instance because we're in the footprint of the Magma Copper Mine. Maybe back up a little bit. We're in the copper mining district of Arizona, which is called the Copper Triangle. Arizona is a copper state. 70% of US copper comes from Arizona. But this specific location, about 60 miles east of Phoenix, is called the Copper Triangle. So there's this trend, or we call it a pediment of copper. And you can kind of plot all the copper mines that tend to follow mountains from Alaska through the mountain ranges, down the Pacific Northwest through to the southwest down into Mexico. So there's that trend that exists. 

In our specific case, The Magma Copper Mine, which is Resolution sits within that footprint, was discovered back in the early 1900s and mined as a vein mine. It was 25 million tons of about 5% copper. And they got to the very base of it at about 4500 ft, and they got to the limits of that deposit. They did some underground exploration from 4500 ft and they touched what they believed was the outer edge of the Resolution deposit, which is a large copper porphyry. So not a vein mine, but this 1.5 billion tons at 1.5%. And so Magma Copper was bought out by BHP, and then Rio Tinto became the operator. And the Magma geologists really made the discovery. They knew something big was there. So Rio Tinto exploration just simply extended their drill holes from surface and from underground and made the discovery, but very challenging. I said earlier you could have thousands of potential properties and maybe one in 1000 might become something that's worth taking the next step to look at and then a small fraction of those. So Resolutions top three copper deposits in the world, again, they don't exist. And when you have them, it's truly special.

Dr. Sandra Magnus: That goes back to that huge upfront effort that you have to expend to find the mines. You know, we've really enjoyed talking with you. I could probably go for hours, but we're kind of running to the end of the reel here, and we really appreciate, Vicky, your time. And I would love to come out and see it because I think seeing a mine like this, you have to understand the scale you have to actually experience it.

Vicky Peacey: I agree. Open door, please. Would love to host both of you and a large contingent from NASA.

Dr. Sandra Magnus: I'll pass that along.

Sandy Winnefeld: That sounds great.

Dr. Sandra Magnus: Thank you so much.

Vicky Peacey: We'll do science. We'll nerd out.

Dr. Sandra Magnus: Absolutely.

Vicky Peacey: Thank you.

Sandy Winnefeld: Well, thank you, Vicky. Really appreciate it.

Vicky Peacey: Bye.

Dr. Sandra Magnus: That was Vicky, PC General Manager for the Resolution Copper Mine in Arizona. I'm Sandra Magnus.

Sandy Winnefeld: And I'm Sandy Winnefeld. Thanks again to Culligan Water for sponsoring this episode. It's time to get the water you love. Learn more at culligan.com.

Dr. Sandra Magnus: We'll see you next week with another episode of the Adrenaline Zone.