At the height of its operations, Kennecott Utah Copper employed 8,000 people and was pumping about $1 billion annually into Utah's economy through payroll, taxes and spending.
Today, the 100th anniversary since the original Utah Copper Co. was formed, the giant Bingham Canyon Mine continues to play a significant role in the state's economy.
"Throughout its long history, Kennecott Utah Copper has employed more people, fed more families and, through its taxes, educated more children than any other business in the state," said Bill Champion, Kennecott's president and chief executive officer, in a prepared statement.
That opinion is shared by James Wood, interim director of the University of Utah's Bureau of Economic and Business Research.
"It would be hard to argue against that," Wood said. "They have been here for so long, and they have been a major player for most of that time. . . . I can't think of any other company that you could point to and say this is a rival."
Yet a century ago few could have imagined the company's economic destiny.
Back then, when Missouri native Daniel Jackling, founder and president of Utah Copper Co., offered a new concept of mass producing low-grade deposit copper ore, people scoffed.
"At the turn of the century it was believed that to mine copper profitably you needed an ore grade of about 10 percent. The ore grade at Bingham was 2 percent, which would mean that it would yield only about 38 pounds of metal per ton of ore," said Louis Cononelos, Kennecott spokesman.
But Jackling's proposal, to mine ore from the surface using steam shovels that could pick up about a ton of rock, proved a success.
The endeavor soon turned into a massive industrial operation, with ore transported by locomotive to mills and smelters, where it was processed and purified.
"It never had been done before in the world," Cononelos said. "No one had ever attempted open-pit copper mining or surface copper mining. . . . But within a very short years this became the largest industrial mining enterprise in the world, so it was pretty remarkable."
Sen. Ed Mayne, D-West Valley City, remembers when he was hired on by Kennecott as track layer in the summer of 1964.
Mayne, who went on to work in the company's drill and blast department and then in track machines, said he landed the job after his first year of college, spending 15 years with the company.
"I hired on as summer employment, and it was a long summer," he said. "And the reason why is the wages were good and the benefits were good. . . . It was hard work and you depended upon the people that you worked with for your life. It was a dangerous occupation. The people is what I'll always remember."
Today, the company's original steam shovels have been replaced with modern electric shovels, capable of picking up 98 tons of rock. And the 7,000-foot-high mountain that stood a century ago has been transformed into a three-quarter-mile deep pit, spanning 2.5 miles in width — so big that NASA says it can be seen from orbit.
Nearly all of Kennecott's copper is sold to industries within the United States, where it is manufactured into electric wire.
And Kennecott, which acquired full control of Utah Copper in 1936, is now a subsidiary of London-based Rio Tinto plc.
But perhaps Kennecott's greatest challenge lies in its next 100 years, as analysts predict little upside in future prices while the U.S. copper industry languishes.
"Let me put it very simply: 50 percent of the domestic copper industry is shut down. It's idled. Some of it will probably never come back," Cononelos said. "We have to continue to find ways to reduce costs and improve productivity if we're going to stay competitive and stay in operation."
On Tuesday, copper was trading at 79 cents a pound on the New York Mercantile Exchange. In the past five years the metal has averaged about 75 cents a pound. However, in the preceding decade it averaged around $1.
Neil MacRae, a sales manager with AME Mineral Economics, a mineral research company based in Australia, said the depressed prices are the result of an oversupply of copper on the market.
"There is a lot of different low-cost producers in Chile and Indonesia where Canada and the U.S. just can't compete with labor costs," MacRae said from his office in Vancouver, British Columbia. "It seems like the North America mines are the first ones to be idled or suspended until prices increase."
Cononelos said he hopes the company is around 100 years from now.
"Realistically, we have about 10 plus years of open pit mining," he said. "We're trying to find ways to extend that. We hope to be able to get the capital to take the mine underground at some point in the future, which will also extend its life. But none of those are givens. . . . If we do it right we can get another generation or two of employment out of that big operation."
E-mail: danderton@desnews.com