Three people in high-visibility gear standing in a timbered underground drift, lit by a single lamp
A tracked crushing and screening plant working an ore stockpile below desert mountains
A loaded haul truck working through dust at a mine site at golden hour

American ground

Mined in America.Refined somewhere else.

Underground development at a US operation. The rock, the crews and the skill never left the country. The furnaces did.

Browse 246 US operations Read the history
2
primary copper smelters still operating in the United States — Garfield, Utah and Miami, Arizona
USGS MCS 2026 · 2025
54
nonfuel mineral commodities for which imports supplied more than half of US consumption
USGS MCS 2026 · 2025
~70%
average share of global refining held by one country across 19 of 20 strategic minerals
IEA Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025
246
US mines, mills, smelters, refineries and separation plants catalogued — 154 still working, 92 closed or idled
This directory · 41 states

Four hundred years, in eight turns

The full account is on the history page

1646 Saugus The colonies' first successful integrated ironworks. Within a century America is making about as much iron as Britain itself.
1845 The Keweenaw Michigan copper supplies 96% of American production by 1849 and wires the telegraph age.
1859 The Comstock Nevada silver forces the engineering — square-set timbering, the Sutro Tunnel — and helps make a state.
1872 The Mining Act Grant signs the law that still governs hardrock minerals on federal land today.
1903 Jackling's bet Bingham Canyon proves 2% copper can pay if you move enough rock. Every large mine on earth descends from it.
1942 The arsenal Aluminum capacity more than doubles in a year; synthetic rubber goes from 231 tons to 920,000.
1973–80 High water Steel peaks at 137 million tonnes, aluminum at 4.65 million from more than thirty smelters, with 16 copper smelters running.
1981– The middle falls out Copper halves, eight smelters close in five years, and the ore starts going abroad to be made into metal.

What actually went missing

Every figure sourced · see the caveats

The familiar version of this story is that America stopped mining. That is not quite what happened, and getting it wrong makes the argument easy to dismiss. US nonfuel mineral production was worth $112 billion in 2025, up from $106 billion the year before. Metal ore mining employment is above where it stood in 2017. The US share of global exploration spending has gone up over the past seven years, from 9% to 12%.

What collapsed is the step between the mine and the manufacturer. Smelting, refining, separation, conversion — the chemistry that turns rock into usable metal. That capacity left, and once it leaves, the ore has to follow it.

It is a recent loss. Within living memory the United States ran sixteen copper smelters and more than thirty aluminum smelters, and a single Utah mine supplied roughly a third of the copper the Allies used to win a world war. The furnaces did not fail because the country ran out of ore. They closed in a five-year stretch when the copper price halved and nobody was paid to keep them warm.

7 → 2
Primary copper smelters
Seven primary copper smelters operated in 1996 — three in Arizona, two in New Mexico, one in Texas, one in Utah. Two remain: Rio Tinto's Garfield in Utah and Freeport's Miami in Arizona. Both sites have smelted copper for a century, though Garfield was rebuilt in 1995 and Miami converted to Isasmelt in 1992. Meanwhile the US exported an estimated 340,000 t of copper ore and concentrate in 2025 while running 57% net import reliance on refined copper.
EPA, 2001 · USGS MCS 2026
30+ → 6
Primary aluminum smelters
The US ran more than thirty primary aluminum smelters at the 1980 peak — the Aluminum Association counts 33 — and over 4.65 million t of output. In 2025, three companies operated six smelters in five states — two at full capacity, two reduced, two shut during the year — producing 660,000 t. That is roughly an 86% fall in primary output.
USGS MCS 2026
1% / 80%
Cobalt: mined vs. processed
China mined 1% of the world's cobalt in 2023 and processed 80% of it. The same split repeats across the table: titanium 34%/69%, aluminum 21%/59%, tin 23%/50%, zinc 34%/48%, copper 8%/44%. Ownership of the ore and ownership of the furnace are two different things.
USGS FS 2025-3038
21%
Grassroots exploration share
Of $12.4 billion spent on global nonferrous exploration in 2025, the share going to grassroots work — looking for deposits nobody has found yet — hit an all-time low of 21%, while drilling around existing mines hit a record 45%. The industry is not looking for the next Bingham Canyon.
S&P Global, World Exploration Trends 2026
0
US natural graphite production
No natural graphite was produced domestically in 2025 — the last flake production was in Texas in 1979. Manganese ore at 20% or better has not been mined here since 1970. No primary gallium has been recovered since 1987. Tungsten has not been mined commercially since 2015.
USGS MCS 2026
$3.4B
Modelled cost of one export ban
USGS modelled a complete Chinese export ban on gallium and germanium and found a $3.4 billion hit to US GDP, semiconductor device manufacturing taking over 40% of it. Quantity effects — simply not being able to get the material — drive 94–98% of the damage, not price.
USGS OFR 2024-1057
A mineral processing plant lit up at dusk, conveyors and silos above a settling pond
The step that left. A processing plant running through the night — the kind of capacity the United States has been closing since the 1980s.

Why the middle step left

Smelters are the most capital-hungry, most power-hungry, most permit-heavy link in the chain, and they earn the thinnest margin on it. A copper smelter makes its money on treatment and refining charges — a few cents a pound for taking concentrate and handing back metal. When a competitor will accept zero or negative treatment charges because the state underwrites the plant, there is no price at which an American smelter wins the tonnage.

Aluminum tells the same story in electricity. Primary smelting is, functionally, a way of selling power in solid form. Industrial electricity averaged $73.42/MWh in 2023 across the four states holding idled US primary aluminum capacity — Indiana $82.40, Missouri $79.00, South Carolina $66.80, Kentucky $65.50 — against the $26.50–41/MWh paid by hydro-powered Canadian smelters. That is a $32–46/MWh disadvantage on the single largest input cost.

None of this is a law of nature. It is the sum of power prices, capital cost, permitting time and the fact that nobody was paid to keep the capacity warm. Those are all things a country can decide differently, and several of them are being decided differently right now.

Sources: Columbia SIPA, 2026 · The Aluminum Association, 2025 (industry association)

A haul truck threading between grey crushed-stone stockpiles at a quarry

The ore comes out of the ground here. It is the furnace that moved.

Crushing and screening, Nevada basin

What happens to the ore after that

The round trip, step by step

American ore leaves the country to be turned into metal, and comes back as a finished product with freight, tariffs, a margin for every hand it passed through, and months added to it. The clearest live example is not rare earths — it is nickel, and the United States has exactly one nickel mine.

Follow the round trip →

Where to next

Four centuries

How we got here

From the Saugus ironworks to the last two copper smelters — the rushes, the inventions, the arsenal, and what it all cost.

 The directory

246 operations, 41 states

Every US mine, mill, smelter, refinery and separation plant we could source, filterable by commodity, state, facility type and status.

 Free listing

List your business

Drilling, assay, equipment, permitting, haulage, processing. If you supply American mining, the directory is open to you.