Freeport-McMoRan’s Leach Initiative, Explained

What the Leach Initiative Is

On nearly every earnings call, Freeport-McMoRan management returns to the same theme: a low-cost copper growth engine sitting inside its existing mines. The company’s leach initiative is one of four 2026 focus areas, alongside restoring Grasberg, brownfield expansions, and broader innovation.¹ Management presents it as a low-cost, high-value source of incremental copper inside existing operations.

The opportunity is unusual. Over decades of mining in Arizona and elsewhere, Freeport has stacked vast quantities of low-grade ore onto leach pads and stockpiles. Conventional leaching dissolved the easily recoverable copper, but a large share of the metal stayed locked in the rock. The company estimates roughly 42 billion pounds of contained copper sits in these historical placements, beyond previously assumed recovery levels and not counted in its mineral reserves or mineral resources.¹

The leach initiative is the effort to recover a meaningful slice of that stranded copper. Because the material has already been mined, hauled, and crushed, there is no new digging required. Freeport is essentially squeezing more metal out of rock it has already paid to move.

The Technology: Heat, Additives, and Leach Everywhere

Leach recovery can be limited by solution contact, mineralogy, permeability, and reaction rates. Freeport’s program attacks those constraints through three levers.¹

The largest is heat. Heating a stockpile can accelerate the chemical reactions that dissolve copper minerals. Freeport’s “Leach to the Last Drop” program tackles this directly, and in 2024 the company was selected to receive up to $80 million from the U.S. Department of Energy through a cooperative agreement toward a roughly $175 million project to use clean geothermal heat, battery storage, and a microgrid to warm stockpiles at its Morenci and Safford mines in Arizona. That project alone targets up to 25 million additional pounds of copper a year and is expected to take five to seven years to complete.²

“Now, we are bringing to this project a clean energy element to facilitate extraction of copper that was previously thought to be unrecoverable.”

— Kathleen Quirk, then President, Freeport-McMoRan

The second lever is chemical additives. Freeport develops these reagents in-house to improve leach recovery and how much copper dissolves into solution. In early 2026 the company began large-scale testing of an internally developed additive, with laboratory results on further additives described as encouraging.¹ To accelerate that work, Freeport opened a new Center for Innovative Solutions in Tucson in late 2025, housing more than 200 column cells that simulate heap leaching at small scale so researchers can iterate faster, supported by reagent artificial intelligence.³

The third lever, which Freeport labels “Leach Everywhere,” extends these techniques to more of its stockpiles and pads rather than a handful of test sites. Together the company expects heat to contribute roughly half of the incremental gains, additives about 35 percent, and wider application the remaining 15 percent.¹

A related but separate hydrometallurgical technology is also advancing at Morenci. Its concentrate leach plant uses high-pressure, high-temperature autoclaves to extract copper from concentrate that would otherwise go to a smelter. An expansion commissioned in late 2025 could nearly double throughput from 24 to 40 short tons per hour and offset the purchase of about 140,000 tons of acid.⁴ Unlike the stockpile initiative, this plant processes fresh concentrate, but it reflects the same push to leach more copper closer to home.

Current Production: From 50 to 240 Million Pounds

The initiative is not a laboratory concept. It is already producing copper at scale and growing quickly. Leach output rose from about 50 million pounds in 2022 to 144 million in 2023, then 214 million in 2024, reaching a roughly 240 million pound annual run rate by the end of 2025.¹

Most of the identified contained-copper opportunity is in the United States, led by Morenci, which is also Freeport’s largest U.S. mine and where the company has begun its heat pilot. By the company’s breakdown, Morenci holds about half of the opportunity, other U.S. operations about a third, and South America the remainder.¹

The Cost Story: Copper at Low Capital Intensity

The financial appeal of leaching is capital efficiency. Freeport expects the entire new leach technology program to cost under $1 billion while building toward roughly 800 million pounds a year. For comparison, its proposed Bagdad 2X concentrator expansion would add 200 to 250 million pounds a year at a capital cost of around $3.5 billion.¹

The contrast is stark on a dollars-per-pound-of-capacity basis, and it is the core of the investment case. Conventional expansions require new pits, mills, and tailings infrastructure. Leaching reuses material and facilities Freeport already owns, so the incremental copper arrives without the multi-billion-dollar bill or the multi-year construction risk of a greenfield build.

Because leach copper uses material that has already been mined and placed, management frames it as low-cost incremental production. For context, Freeport’s U.S. operations sold 327 million pounds of copper in the first quarter of 2026 at a unit net cash cost of $2.93 per pound.¹

Future Plans: The Path to 800 Million Pounds by 2030

Freeport’s stated trajectory is to lift leach output to about 300 million pounds in 2026, then 300 to 400 million pounds across 2026 and 2027, and toward 800 million pounds a year by 2030 as additives and heating scale across more stockpiles.¹ Reaching the upper end would roughly triple the late-2025 run rate.

The near-term work is about proving the technology at full scale. Freeport has begun pilot testing heat at Morenci, with additional modular heating units planned, and continues large-scale additive trials. The geothermal “Leach to the Last Drop” project provides a longer-dated, lower-carbon source of that heat.

The initiative is also expanding beyond the United States. At the El Abra mine in Chile, Freeport is pursuing innovative leach opportunities, with heat trials expected in the second half of 2026.¹ Success there would show the playbook can travel to South American operations, where the company estimates a further 16 percent of the contained-copper prize sits.

Why It Matters for Copper Investors

Freeport brands itself “America’s Copper Champion,” and its operations account for roughly 70 percent of U.S. refined copper production.¹ The leach initiative is overwhelmingly a domestic story, which matters at a time when U.S. policy increasingly favors home-grown critical-minerals supply.

It also feeds a larger ambition. Freeport sees potential for roughly a 60 percent increase in its annual U.S. copper production over the coming years, with the leach initiative and the Bagdad expansion as the two main building blocks.¹ Leaching supplies the cheap, fast portion of that growth while the larger brownfield projects move through study and permitting.

The risk is execution. The 800 million pound target rests on the heated-stockpile pilots working at scale, new additives hitting forecast recovery rates, and wider “Leach Everywhere” deployment across more material. Lab and early field results are encouraging but unproven at full deployment, and the timeline runs to 2030. For investors weighing copper exposure, the leach initiative is best understood as company-framed, low-capital optionality layered on top of Freeport’s existing production, rather than a sure thing already in the numbers.