Southern Copper, the Mexican mining company, has completed 47% of construction on its Tía María copper project in the Arequipa region of Peru and expects to produce its first copper cathode by late 2027, without using any fresh water from the Tambo valley.
To achieve this, the company has decided to build and operate a desalination plant on the coast, located 25 kilometers from the project site.
Oscar Rodríguez, the company's director of plant engineering and new process development, said all the water used by the Tía María project would come from the sea, drawn from the Mejía district and transported to Cachendo. He made the comments at Expomina 2026, a mining industry trade event.
The announcement addresses one of the main questions surrounding the project's development, which has centered on the use of the region's scarce water resources.
Digital Mine With 5G Connectivity
Rodríguez also said Tía María would be a digital mine with full 5G connectivity, using state of the art equipment operated and supervised by 230 trainees from the Arequipa region.
Southern Copper has invested $700 million in the project to date and is set to invest a further $1 billion in equipment that has yet to arrive, according to Rodríguez.
Tía María is the most anticipated mining project in Peru. It is expected to produce 120,000 tonnes of copper per year, backed by a total investment of $1.7 billion. Its startup is scheduled for 2027, three years after the last major project launched by Peru's mining industry, the $2 billion expansion of the Antamina mine in the Áncash region, which began development in 2024.
Antamina Expansion Extends Mine's Life
Luis Santiváñez, chief executive of the Antamina mining consortium, said the expansion project would extend the copper mine's operating life from 2028 to 2036, at a production rate of 400,000 tonnes of copper per year.
He described it as a significant investment that had prevented the mine from closing in 2027 or 2028. He said the consortium was now working to develop further expansions at Antamina.
Santiváñez said it was the consortium's goal to push forward a new expansion, this time extending operations to 2054, because the mineral resource is there and the outcome depends only on cooperation with the authorities.
He said extending Antamina's operating life to 2036 represented a unique opportunity to consolidate the mine's continuous growth and the contribution of responsible mining to Peru's development.
Antamina accounts for 41% of Áncash's GDP and nearly 2% of Peru's national GDP. In 2025, it represented 8.5% of all of Peru's exports.
Regional Cooperation on Strategic Minerals
Luis Enrique Lucero, Argentina's Secretary of Mining, highlighted the importance of a recent agreement signed by Chile, Argentina, Bolivia and Peru to collaborate on the joint development of strategic minerals, including copper.
He described it as a collaboration between four countries that would play a decisive role in the global copper supply over the coming decades.
Lucero said the question was not whether the region had abundant resources, but how quickly, how well and how much value could be delivered from them.
