Engineering Manager

Meet Copper One: the mine designed to run itself. Copper is in your walls, your phone, your car and the cables that carry electricity to all of them. If you've been following Mining Next, you already know the scale of what's coming - its article Mining in 2026: More Demand, More Problems, More Technology covers how demand for copper is set to surge by 28% by 2040, driven by electric vehicles, renewable energy and grid expansion. Mariana Minerals states that by 2050, global copper mining and refining capacity will need to double, producing more copper in the next 25 years than in all of human history combined. The mining industry knows the number. What it hasn't cracked yet is how to deliver it. The Problems. Most copper mines in operation today aren't young. According to Mariana Minerals, more than half of the world's operating copper mines are over 20 years old. The older a mine gets, the lower the ore grade tends to be - meaning you dig more, spend more, and get less copper per tonne of rock moved. Finding new deposits isn't filling the gap either. Large copper discoveries have declined sharply since the 1990s, with reserve growth now mostly coming from expanding existing deposits rather than finding new ones. Then there's the people problem. Over 200,000 workers in the US mining workforce will retire this decade, while fewer than 400 mining engineering students graduate annually in the United States. The experienced workforce is walking out the door faster than replacements are being trained. This isn't news to anyone following the industry - as Mining Next covered in its article Building the Next Generation of Mining Engineers, mining executives are already struggling to recruit and retain talent, particularly in digital and planning roles. On the supply chain side, the US has a structural refining problem. Domestic refined copper output has fallen by roughly 50% over the past 25 years, and even copper that is mined or collected locally often gets exported for processing abroad before being shipped back. The US exported nearly 950,000 metric tonnes of copper scrap in 2024 - the largest volume of any country in the world, with over 40% going to China. One company in Utah thinks the answer to all of this is to take the human out of the equation as much as possible. Meet Copper One. What is Copper One? Copper One sits in southeastern Utah and has been running for over 15 years. The site combines an open-pit mine with a heap bioleaching operation and a hydrometallurgical refinery - the full chain, from digging rock to producing finished copper cathode ready for the US market. International Mining reported in March 2026 that Mariana Minerals acquired the Copper One site, previously run by Lisbon Valley Mining Company. Quick explainer: heap bioleaching involves stacking ore on lined pads and flooding it with an acidic solution that dissolves the copper out of the rock. That copper-rich liquid then goes through solvent extraction and electrowinning (SX-EW) - a chemical and electrochemical process - where copper is extracted and deposited as high-purity copper cathode, ready for use in manufacturing. It's not a new mine. What's new is the operating model. Mariana Minerals is positioning Copper One as what it calls the "world's first autonomy-first mine and refinery" - a site where AI and autonomous systems are the backbone of operations. Geomechanics.io, which covered the project from an engineering perspective, notes an important distinction here: this is a brownfield retrofit, not a greenfield build. That means existing pit geometries, haul road layouts and heap pad configurations all constrain how new autonomous systems can be integrated. It's a significantly harder engineering challenge than designing autonomous systems from scratch. MarianaOS: the platform running it all. Mariana Minerals' answer to operational complexity is MarianaOS - a software platform with three modules * MineOS handles the mine, * PlantOS handles the refinery, * CapitalProjectOS handles project delivery. As International Mining reports, MarianaOS connects mine planning, fleet orchestration, plant control, maintenance and supply chain management into a single platform - giving teams a real-time view across the entire operation. On top of that integrated data layer, machine learning and reinforcement learning optimise drill patterns, haulage routing, plant throughput, reagent use and energy consumption, continuously learning from outcomes. Reinforcement learning is a type of AI that improves by testing decisions and adjusting based on what works - similar to learning from experience, but running continuously and at scale. Geomechanics.io highlights a key shift: rather than optimising individual control loops in isolation, the philosophy is moving towards coordinated control across the entire refining circuit. In plain terms, instead of each part of the refinery doing its own thing, the whole system is steered as one. Human operators aren't removed. International Mining notes that engineers, geologists, operators and planners continue to validate models, monitor the operation, and handle tasks the system cannot automate. Full autonomous implementation at other sites has historically required custom development with third parties, taken over a decade, and still relied heavily on human oversight. MineOS is designed to compress that timeline. What to watch. Geomechanics.io observes that deploying autonomy into a brownfield site with 15 years of prior operation offers a live test case for whether autonomy retrofits can work without major re-excavation or infrastructure rebuilds. The industry will be watching whether the results match the ambition. Mariana Minerals has said further updates on deployment progress will follow in the coming months. Stories like this one are exactly why Mining Next do what Mining Next do - follow Mining Next and stay ahead of the industry.

Exclusive: Mariana Minerals taps Pronto to help automate a copper mine |. There is a lot of attention on domestic manufacturing in the United States these days. But for Turner Caldwell, who spent nearly a decade at Tesla, there's not enough attention on the minerals and metals that sit at the very bottom of the supply chain. It's why he left Tesla and started Mariana Minerals in 2024. The purpose of his startup is to become a modern mining (and refining) operation that is set up for growth, because Caldwell has essentially one goal: bring more refined metal into the ecosystem. To do that, his company is trying to automate almost every aspect of a mining operation imaginable. The latest piece is vehicles. On Thursday, Mariana Minerals announced a partnership with Pronto, a startup that's developed self-driving systems for haulage trucks and other off-road vehicles used at construction and mining sites. It's the first deal that Pronto has struck since being acquired by Atoms, the new robotics venture run by Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick. The acquisition reunites Kalanick with Pronto founder Anthony Levandowski, the former star Google self-driving project engineer and controversial entrepreneur behind Otto, which Uber acquired in 2016. The partnership with Pronto will see autonomous haulage trucks begin operating next week at Copper One, a formerly idled copper mine in Utah that Mariana purchased last year. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. But the partnership is about more than just having autonomous trucks operating onsite, Caldwell told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. Pronto's autonomy system will be directly integrated into the software Mariana has developed to run operations at the mine, which it calls "MineOS." That will make it possible to autonomously dispatch the trucks and coordinate their routes without a human in the loop, he said. This is part of Caldwell's broader vision for how a mine should be run going forward. It involves multiple operating systems that use reinforcement learning to automate and, eventually, coordinate operations across the entire mine. Techcrunch event San Francisco, CA | October 13-15, 2026 "The big Western mining companies look exactly like Ford and GM before Tesla. They look a lot like NASA before SpaceX. They look a lot like the big defense primes before Anduril," he said. "The rate at which software is up-taken and technology is up-taken into the space is fundamentally set by the operating teams who don't really have incentive to change how they operate, right? If they're able to make their KPIs, you know, the spreadsheets, the walkie talkies, the paper reporting - it works just fine." In Caldwell's view, this limits a mine's output and leaves obvious efficiencies on the table. But he also thinks it's existential. "Because Western mining companies don't build a lot of net new infrastructure, the talent pool hasn't been actively attracted to it, and so the labor force is diminishing," he said. That means mines are going to be stuck trying to do more with less. Caldwell sees Mariana's software-first approach as the solution to this problem. That could be good for Mariana, clearly. But if the approach is successful, it could also benefit other mines. Selling Mariana's coordination software is on the table, especially once it's proven out, Caldwell said. But Caldwell said he was not interested in doing that from the start. The "core business should be selling metal," he said. "The company is the coordination layer. And so, if you're doing that, like, at that point, you might as well go and vertically integrate, and go down into making the metal, instead of just selling software," he said. "I think SpaceX would not be a very large company selling [rocket] re-landing software to NASA." Plus, owning and running the mine is crucial to the reinforcement learning loop, Caldwell said - not just because it allows for better control and higher-fidelity data, but also because it could eventually help inform decisions that are hard for humans to see right now. Caldwell likened this to how AlphaGo, the chess-playing software developed by DeepMind a decade ago, began making moves humans hadn't considered once it had trained on enough data. Despite all this talk of automation, Caldwell said he's not trying to remove humans from mining operations. Like many other founders working in the sector, he believes Mariana will actually expand that already winnowing talent pool. "Part of this is a labor cost reduction, but that's not really the goal," he said. "The goal is actually enabling more productivity with the constrained labor pool that we have. Automation, and autonomy, is going to create more jobs, because we will have more mines that are operating."