Copper, Nickel, Lead & Zinc Mining in the United States

An investor's primer on NAICS 21223 (industry level)

A Histometrics industry primer. Core U.S. business statistics come from federal sources (Census Bureau); physical production and reserves come from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and are labeled by source. Numbers carry inline citations to the Sources list. This is a short "rollup" page: NAICS 21223 has exactly one child industry, so it points you to the fuller 212230 primer rather than repeating it.

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1. Overview

NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) code 21223 — "Copper, Nickel, Lead, and Zinc Mining" is a five-digit industry in the U.S. statistical hierarchy. It covers the companies that dig base-metal ore out of the ground and physically concentrate it into a shippable product.

Here is the one structural fact that makes this a short page: 21223 has a single child, the six-digit U.S. national industry 212230, and the two are effectively the same thing. Every firm, worker, and dollar of revenue that the federal statistics assign to 21223 sits inside 212230. There is no second business tucked into this level, and no rollup arithmetic to do — the group equals its one child. So the full analysis (companies, cost economics, demand, regulation, risks, how to invest) lives in the 212230 leaf primer, and this page just gives you the lay of the land and this level's own ground-truth numbers.

The economic thesis is unchanged from the child page and worth stating once: these are price-takers in a commodity business. Producers sell copper, nickel, lead, and zinc into globally quoted markets — the London Metal Exchange (LME) and COMEX in New York — at prices they cannot set. Revenue and margins ride the metal cycle. Copper is the prize (roughly 80% of the group's mine value) and the structural growth story, because it is the wiring of electrification: grids, motors, electric vehicles (EVs), and data centers all run on it [5].

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2. What's inside — and why the group equals its one child

NAICS is a nested hierarchy: broad sectors (two-digit) narrow down to industry groups, industries (five-digit, like 21223), and finally national industries (six-digit, like 212230). Usually a five-digit industry fans out into several six-digit children. This one does not.

Because there is a one-to-one mapping — same name, same definition, same scope — the group and the child report the same figures. Reading the 21223 rollup and the 212230 leaf is reading the same industry at two zoom levels.

What that scope includes and excludes is detailed in the child primer, but the short version: in scope is developing a mine and mining/concentrating ore valued chiefly for its copper, nickel, lead, or zinc, up to the concentrate (or mine-site cathode) stage. Out of scope and sitting in neighboring codes are iron ore (212210), gold and silver ore (212220), other metal ores (212290), the smelting and refining that turns concentrate into finished metal (331410 — that is manufacturing, not mining), and contract mining support activities (213114) [1].

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3. How big it is

Business-frame figures (U.S. Census — our ground truth for 21223)

These are the ground-truth statistics ingested for this level. Because 21223 equals 212230, they match the child page exactly.

Two things follow. Average pay is roughly $97,000 per worker ($1.63 billion ÷ 16,844) — about 1.5× the U.S. private-sector average, the signature of a high-wage, capital-intensive sector [3]. And the industry is highly concentrated: in the 2022 Economic Census the top 4 firms held 78.9% of revenue, the top 8 held 91%, and the top 20 essentially 100% [2]. (The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index — HHI, a standard concentration measure — was suppressed by the Census for confidentiality; we do not have a value and will not invent one [2].) That is the fingerprint of a handful of very large open-pit operations dominating the national numbers.

Physical scale (USGS — real units, a different measure)

The USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries count contained metal and mine value — a different concept from Census business receipts — with the latest estimates for 2025 [5][6][7][8]:

(t = metric tons; Mt = million metric tons.) Copper is overwhelmingly the prize. The U.S. is a structural net importer of all four refined metals, with no primary lead refinery since 2013 and no primary nickel refinery since 1985 [7][8]. The three frames don't tie out to a single number — Census receipts were $16.97 billion (2022, a higher-price year), summed USGS 2025 mine values are ~$14 billion, and IBISWorld estimates 2025 revenue near $13.6 billion — because they cover different years and different concepts. Keep each labeled [2][22].

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4. The investable universe

Because the group is 212230, the investable roster is identical — summarized here, detailed on the child page. There are few pure U.S. base-metal public plays; most producers are diversified global miners or foreign-listed, and the largest single-metal specialists are private. Tickers and buckets below are pointers, not current valuations — caps swing hard with the metal cycle, so check live quotes.

• Public producers & diversified miners: Freeport-McMoRan (NYSE: FCX) is the U.S. copper bellwether (~60% of national copper output) [10][5]; Rio Tinto (RIO, Kennecott/Bingham Canyon, Utah) [16]; Teck Resources (TECK, Red Dog — the world's largest zinc mine) [12]; plus Hudbay Minerals (HBM), South32 (S32), Hecla Mining (HL, by-product lead/zinc), Talon Metals (TSX: TLO, owner of the sole U.S. primary nickel mine since 2026), and Taseko Mines (TGB) [17][18][19][13].
• Major private, foreign & JV owners: ASARCO (Grupo México); Doe Run (largest U.S. primary lead, private via Renco Group); Nyrstar (zinc, owned by trader Trafigura); KGHM International; and the NewRange Copper Nickel JV (Glencore–Teck) [14][15][6][20].
• Mineral-rights & royalty layer: NANA Regional Corporation, the Alaska Native corporation whose Red Dog royalty ran ~$372 million in 2025 [12]; Sweetwater Royalties (~4.5 million mineral acres) [21]; and financial streaming/royalty firms (Franco-Nevada, Wheaton Precious Metals, Royal Gold) that mostly touch these mines through precious-metal by-product streams [32].

The leverage point: producer equities carry high beta to the metal — costs and debt stay put when the price moves, so the equity swings more than the commodity, up and down.

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5. How the money works

Same economics as the child, because it is the child. Base-metal miners are price-takers, so returns come from volume, cost, and by-products against a price they can't control — not from pricing power.

• Commodity price is the dominant lever. Copper drives the group; Freeport realized $4.75/lb copper in 2025 and COMEX hit a record above $5.94/lb mid-2025 [10][28]. A dollar move flows almost straight to cash flow.
• By-product credits (gold, silver, molybdenum) are netted against primary-metal cost, which can make a mine look very cheap — and means a drop in one metal's price can raise another's reported cost [12].
• AISC (all-in sustaining cost) is the headline cost figure, but for base metals it is non-standardized and non-GAAP; the real test is whether an asset still generates free cash flow at a conservative price after sustaining capital, tax, royalties, and closure accruals [10].
• Slow supply and depletion. New mines are multi-billion-dollar, multi-decade projects — U.S. discovery-to-production runs ~29 years, versus a global average near 17 [23][25] — and every ore body is a wasting asset that must be replaced by drilling or acquisition [5][12].
• Royalties and the 1872 law. Under the General Mining Law of 1872, hard-rock minerals on federal public-domain land carry no federal production royalty — so royalties arise mainly on private, state, or tribal land (NANA's ~40% net-proceeds royalty at Red Dog is the standout) [26][12].

Where the children diverge: they don't. With a single child there is no internal divergence to reconcile — the only meaningful splits are between the four metals (copper is a growth story; zinc and lead are mature, recycling-supplied cash generators; nickel is essentially a U.S. import story), and those are treated in the child primer.

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6. Demand drivers

• Copper — the structural growth story. ~42% building construction, 23% electrical/electronic, 18% transportation [5]. The demand case is electrification — grids, EVs, renewables, and AI/data-center power. The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects global copper demand rising ~30% by 2040 and a possible ~25% supply shortfall by 2035 (both scenario-dependent) [24].
• Zinc — galvanized (corrosion-resistant) steel for construction, autos, and infrastructure; tracks the building cycle, mature [6].
• Lead — batteries and recycling. Most U.S. lead goes into lead-acid batteries; mature, GDP-linked, recycling-dominated, with mild long-run substitution risk from lithium-ion [7].
• Nickel — stainless steel first, batteries second; the global market has been in surplus since 2022 on Indonesian supply, and U.S. mine output is negligible regardless [8].

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7. Regulation

Identical to the child level. Highlights: the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and Forest Service administer hard-rock mining on federal land (43 CFR 3809), and the 1872 law grants no federal royalty [26][27]. Safety is overseen by the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) [28]. Projects run a permitting gauntlet — NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) review, Clean Water Act discharge (§402) and dredge-and-fill (§404) permits, air permits, and CERCLA (Superfund) cleanup liability that can outlive the mine [30]. A tailwind: copper, nickel, lead, and zinc are all on the 2025 USGS Critical Minerals List (copper and lead newly added) [31]. And in 2025 a Section 232 tariff placed 50% on the copper content of semi-finished and copper-intensive imports (refined cathode ultimately excluded) [32].

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8. Consolidation

Competition is about securing and permitting tonnage and sitting low on the cost curve, not about price or product. Barriers to entry are extreme. Copper is the prize in mining M&A — BHP's failed ~$49 billion bid for Anglo American (2024) was explicitly a copper play — and buying a permitted deposit often beats discovering and permitting one, driving the recent wave (Talon/Eagle, Hudbay/Arizona Sonoran, foreign JVs at Morenci, Copper World, Resolution, and NewRange) [13][18][20]. A warning that carries over from the child page: deals struck near price peaks destroy value — separate the quality of the deposit from the price paid for it.

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9. Risks

1. Commodity-price cyclicality — the central risk. Revenue and margins are levered to volatile metal prices; equities move more than the metal. Peak-cycle earnings should not be capitalized as permanent, and dividends/buybacks are variable distributions, not bond-like income [10].
2. Cost inflation & execution. Labor, diesel, power, reagents, and steel often rise in the same boom that lifts prices.
3. Permitting, litigation & social license. ~29-year timelines plus project-specific blocks (Pebble, Twin Metals, the vacated Rosemont permit) can strand capital for decades [23][30].
4. Depletion & falling grades — reserve replacement is a constant treadmill [5][12].
5. Downstream dependence. Only two U.S. copper smelters and no primary lead/nickel refining leave domestic concentrate exposed to foreign (largely Chinese) processing [8][16].
6. Environmental & closure liabilities that can pass to acquirers.
7. Diversified & foreign exposure — many "U.S. base-metal" stocks also own foreign mines, so events abroad can dominate the share price.

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10. How to invest & outlook

Because the group equals its one child, the routes and outlook are the same — see the 212230 primer for the detail; the essentials:

• Public routes: producer equities (FCX for clearest large-cap U.S. copper; Teck, Rio Tinto, Hudbay, South32, Talon, Hecla for varied blends) give leveraged exposure with a boom-bust capital-return pattern (Freeport pays a small base dividend plus a variable dividend) [10][12][16]. Royalty & streaming companies (Franco-Nevada, Wheaton, Royal Gold) offer lower-risk, no-operating-cost exposure at premium multiples [32]. ETFs include the Global X Copper Miners ETF (COPX), Sprott's COPP/COPJ, the SPDR S&P Metals & Mining ETF (XME), and the futures-based United States Copper Index Fund (CPER) [31].
• Private routes: direct/private-equity ownership of operators (Doe Run, Nyrstar show it is possible but concentrated and illiquid); mineral & royalty interests — the classic angle, own the ground and collect a royalty (NANA's ~$372 million/year at Red Dog is the marquee example); and higher-risk development-project equity, streams, and offtakes (Resolution, Copper World, Hermosa, Tamarack) [15][6][12][21].
• Outlook: structurally constructive on copper, cyclical near-term. Durable electrification demand meets throttled supply (~29-year lead times, falling grades, permitting friction), with supportive U.S. policy (critical-minerals status, Section 232 tariffs, the 2026 Oak Flat transfer advancing Resolution Copper) — but near-term prices stay hostage to Chinese demand, the dollar, and tariff mechanics. Zinc and lead are mature cash generators; nickel is, for the U.S., an import story weighed down by surplus [24][23][31][32].

The through-line: NAICS 21223 is a single-child industry that is, for every practical purpose, identical to national industry 212230 — a small-headcount (~17,000 workers), roughly $14–17 billion U.S. industry sitting atop a globally important copper demand story. For the full company-by-company detail, cost economics, and vehicle selection, read the 212230 primer.

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 NAICS Manual and definition, codes 21223 / 212230 "Copper, Nickel, Lead, and Zinc Mining." https://www.census.gov/naics/?input=212230&year=2022
2. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census (EC2200BASIC), NAICS 212230 — 36 firms; $16.967 billion receipts; concentration ratios CR4 78.9%, CR8 91%, CR20/CR50 100%; HHI suppressed. https://data.census.gov/table/ECNBASIC2022.EC2200BASIC
3. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns 2023, NAICS 212230 — 61 establishments; 16,844 employees; $1.633 billion annual payroll; $482 million first-quarter payroll. https://data.census.gov/table/CBP2023.CB2300CBP
4. U.S. Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 — Copper (2025 estimate). https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2026/mcs2026-copper.pdf
5. U.S. Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 — Zinc (2025 estimate). https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2026/mcs2026-zinc.pdf
6. U.S. Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 — Lead (2025 estimate). https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2026/mcs2026-lead.pdf
7. U.S. Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 — Nickel (2025 estimate). https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2026/mcs2026-nickel.pdf
8. Freeport-McMoRan Inc., 2025 Form 10-K and Q4/YE 2025 conference-call materials (realized copper $4.75/lb; U.S. net cash cost ~$3.05/lb; ~1.33 bn lb attributable U.S. copper). SEC EDGAR. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/831259/000083125926000012/fcx-20251231.htm
9. Teck Resources Limited, 2025 Annual Report (Red Dog 2025 zinc ~462,700 t; zinc net cash cost ~$0.33/lb; NANA net-proceeds royalty ~40%; US$372 million royalty expense 2025). https://www.teck.com/media/2025-Annual-Report.pdf
10. Talon Metals Corp., "Talon Completes Acquisition of Eagle Mine and Humboldt Mill" (Jan 2026). https://talonmetals.com/
11. ASARCO LLC / Grupo México — corporate profile and operations. https://www.asarco.com/
12. The Doe Run Company / Renco Group — largest U.S. primary-lead producer (privately held). https://doerun.com/
13. Rio Tinto, Kennecott operations overview (Bingham Canyon, Utah). https://www.riotinto.com/en/operations/us/kennecott
14. Hecla Mining Company — Greens Creek (Alaska) and Lucky Friday (Idaho); lead/zinc by-products. https://www.hecla.com/
15. Hudbay Minerals — Copper World (Arizona) development; Arizona Sonoran acquisition (2026). https://hudbay.com/
16. South32 Limited — Hermosa/Taylor zinc-lead-silver project, Arizona. https://www.south32.net/
17. NewRange Copper Nickel (50/50 Glencore–Teck JV) — NorthMet, Minnesota. https://www.newrangecoppernickel.com/about/
18. Sweetwater Royalties (Orion Resource Partners / Ontario Teachers') — ~4.5 million mineral acres. https://www.sweetwaterroyalties.com/
19. IBISWorld, Copper, Nickel, Lead and Zinc Mining in the US (NAICS 212230) — revenue ~$13.6 billion (2025). https://www.ibisworld.com/classifications/naics/212230/
20. S&P Global Market Intelligence / National Mining Association, Mine Development Times (June 2024) — U.S. ~29 years discovery-to-production. https://www.mining.com/us-has-second-longest-mine-development-timeline-in-the-world-sp-global-says/
21. International Energy Agency, Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2026 — copper demand growth and potential ~25% supply shortfall by 2035 (scenario-dependent). https://www.iea.org/reports/global-critical-minerals-outlook-2026/executive-summary
22. International Energy Agency, Reliable Supply of Minerals — historical ~17 years global discovery-to-production. https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions/reliable-supply-of-minerals
23. General Mining Act of 1872 and Congressional Research Service, The General Mining Law of 1872: Issues and Legislation (2024) — no federal royalty on public-domain hard-rock minerals. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48166
24. Bureau of Land Management, Mining and Minerals (43 CFR Subpart 3809). https://www.blm.gov/programs/energy-and-minerals/mining-and-minerals/about
25. U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), Data and Reports. https://www.msha.gov/data-reports
26. U.S. Geological Survey, 2025 List of Critical Minerals — copper and lead added; nickel and zinc already listed. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/mineral-resources-program/science/about-2025-list-critical-minerals
27. The White House, Presidential Proclamation / Section 232 — 50% tariff on semi-finished copper and copper-intensive derivatives, effective Aug 1, 2025 (refined cathode excluded). https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/adjusting-imports-of-copper-into-the-united-states/
28. Copper price dynamics 2025 (COMEX record >$5.94/lb, June 2025). Sprott, "The Emerging Copper Premium"; CNBC (Jul 9, 2025). https://sprott.com/insights/the-emerging-copper-premium-policy-risk-meets-physical-scarcity/
29. Resolution Copper (Rio Tinto/BHP JV, Arizona) — Oak Flat land transfer (March 2026). https://cronkitenews.azpbs.org/2026/03/16/resolution-copper-oak-flat-land-transfer/
30. Pebble Mine EPA Clean Water Act §404(c) veto and Twin Metals 20-year mineral withdrawal. Harvard EELP tracker. https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/tracker/bristol-bay-pebble-deposit/
31. ETF fund pages: Global X Copper Miners (COPX); Sprott Copper Miners (COPP) / Junior Copper Miners (COPJ); SPDR S&P Metals & Mining (XME); United States Copper Index Fund (CPER). https://www.globalxetfs.com/funds/copx
32. Royalty/streaming sector — Wheaton Precious Metals; Royal Gold's 2025 acquisition of Sandstorm Gold / Horizon Copper. https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2026/04/20/the-top-10-gold-royalty-and-streaming-companies/