Freeport-McMoRan Inc.

Freeport-McMoRan Inc. is a global mining company that produces copper, gold, and molybdenum through large-scale mining and mineral-processing operations in the Americas and Indonesia. Kathleen L. Quirk is the company's CEO. Water is essential to its ore processing, leaching, tailings management, dust control, and reclamation activities. Its water program emphasizes extensive recirculation, alternative water sources, site-level accounting, and location-specific risk management.

Freeport-McMoRan's strongest water-stewardship success is its large-scale circular-water system. In 2024, recycled or reused water supplied 83% of total operational water, producing an 89% water-use efficiency rate. At Cerro Verde and El Abra, the two operations classified as having high or extremely high water stress, recycling and reuse reached 90%. These sites utilized 713.5 million cubic meters of water while requiring only 74.8 million cubic meters of new withdrawal and recording no off-site discharge.

The company supports this performance through detailed water-balance ledgers at each operation. These models combine withdrawal, consumption, storage, discharge, groundwater, and hydrological data to identify losses, recycling opportunities, supply risks, and water-quality concerns. It also completed site-specific stewardship plans for Cerro Verde, El Abra, Morenci, and Sierrita, covering water stress, climate conditions, supply reliability, regulatory exposure, local communities, and watershed conditions. Operational innovation further reduces freshwater dependence. At Morenci, helicopters and customized vehicles installed drip lines across previously inaccessible leach stockpiles, improving water-based solution coverage. Company modeling indicates that copper production through leaching is about 50% more water-efficient than mill-concentrator processing.

Freeport-McMoRan also uses municipal effluent at several U.S. and Peruvian operations and desalinated seawater at its Indonesian smelter complex. Atlantic Copper began commissioning a treatment plant in late 2024 to recover process wastewater that would otherwise have been discharged.