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Mines/United States

Safford mine

Safford mine, United States. Producing, open pit, mining copper.

Why Safford is famous

Open-pit copper mine in Arizona. In 2025 the Lone Star deposit was the only one actively mined; output was 287 million lb of copper.1,2

Story cards

What kind of deposit

Porphyry copper

Safford today

Where copper is mined todayMining in United States

Where next

Mines

An example ofMorenciArizona open-pit copper: Safford's Lone Star deposit made 287 million lb in 2025.1

Deposit types

An example ofPorphyry copperSafford belongs to the porphyry copper family of deposits.3

Sources

  1. Form 10-K for the year ended 31 December 2025 Freeport-McMoRan Inc (SEC)
  2. data/minerals/operations.csv Prospector Trails (internal)
  3. Mineral Deposit Models (Bulletin 1693, Cox and Singer, eds., 1986) US Geological Survey

From the Prospector Trails mining history dataset: each fact links to the source it was checked against. Figures are as the source gives them, in the money of their day. Not investment advice.

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Cover photos from Wikimedia Commons: Chuquicamata from the ISS by Alexander Gerst (ESA), CC BY-SA 2.0.