[SpaceBar]

They got greedy and failed to remove overburden resulting in unstable slopes and eventual failure. As far as the price of copper is concerned, that pit is a shadow of its former output when it was high grade low hanging fruit, and realistically shouldn’t affect copper prices or availability (in a world without speculators).

[thackney]

As far as the price of copper is concerned, that pit is a shadow of its former output when it was high grade low hanging fruit, and realistically shouldn’t affect copper prices or availability

Rio Tinto supplies around 18 per cent of US annual refined copper requirements from the Bingham Canyon mine in Utah.

http://www.riotinto.com/documents/ReportsPublications/corpPub_Copper.pdf

[okie01]

that pit is a shadow of its former output when it was high grade low hanging fruit, and realistically shouldn’t affect copper prices or availability (in a world without speculators).

Shadow or not, "that pit" is responsible for 17% of US consumption of copper and 1% of total world consumption.