The southern Mongolian mine Oyu Tolgoi, or Turquoise Hill, is named after the area’s rocks, stained by oxidized copper.
Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/BloombergCleaner Tech
Copper Mine Flashes Warning of ‘Huge Crisis’ for World Supply
The transition to clean energy depends on copper, but a vast Mongolian mining project offers a glimpse of the metal’s troubled future.
Accompanied by tinny taped music and overall-clad workers, Rio Tinto Group executives and Mongolian officials gathered a kilometer beneath the freezing Gobi Desert earlier this year to open one of the world’s richest underground copper mines.
It was a celebration four decades in the making.