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This essay, a composite of those histories, concerns the Copper King mine, a fictional name based on a medium-sized “porphyry” copper deposit. The history of each large copper mine in the Southwest is unique, but their stories are similar. Government regulation is adding more and more cost, thereby decreasing “ore”, the amount of mineralization than can be made available to us. A particular volume of mineralization can be classified as ore or removed from that classification. The term “ore” is purely economic and at any given time, it depends on the price of the commodity, the current technology, the costs of extraction and beneficiation, and the regulatory climate. “Ore” is that part of the mineralization which can be extracted at a profit. To understand how a mineral deposit can have many lives, we must appreciate the difference between mineralization and ore. This story concerns the large copper deposits of southern Arizona and New Mexico mines which produce about 66% of the nation’s domestically mined copper mines which have many lives. For these mines, wholesale reclamation such as filling in an open pit is uneconomic, wasteful, and unsound environmental practice, because it takes less to to reopen an old mine than to construct a new one. However, metal mines, particularly large copper mines, can have many lives and be “mined out” many times. For some kinds of mines, such as a coal mine, it is obvious when the mineral is gone and the mined land can be reclaimed. Some people insist on reclamation of a mine soon after it is mined out. Those that make mines are extraordinary and rare. Most mineral deposits are just curiosities.