This story was first published in “Common Ground,” the official magazine of the Department of Mining Engineering at the University of Utah. September 20, 2025. Republished here with permission.
“We predict that we will need more copper in the next twenty-five years than we have mined in the last five thousand years,” says Research Associate Aaron Young. “Mining remains global, and it’s a massive industry, with the opportunity that undergraduates have to live abroad, travel abroad and develop minds abroad.”
Last year, mining engineering students traveled to Oyu Tolgoi mine, located in the Umnugovi province of Mongolia. This excursion was important for undergraduate students not just as an experience-building trip, but in order to see one of the largest copper deposits in the world, since mining is an international effort.
“If you think about labor back in the pre-Industrial Revolution time, a lot of the workforce was involved in labor like mining,” Young states. “Today, only approximately one percent of the population is involved in mining … and so networking is key.”
Both the Kennecott mine here in Utah and the Oyu Tolgoi mine are owned by Rio Tinto. Kennecott is an open pit mine but has started the process of transitioning into underground mining. Oyu Tolgoi is already mining underground, and in Mongolia, many of the mining employees have learned the skills and techniques that can be deployed in Utah. Seniors who traveled to Mongolia have seen in person the methodologies that can be used in the Kennecott Mine.
“The training of the people, the understanding of the engineering, the methodologies are being cross pollinated,” says Young. “It’s helpful to have two operations that are kind of similar.”
Similar operations are rare, according to Young. “Every deposit is going to be shaped differently. It’s going to have different mineralogies. It’s going to have different strengths and weaknesses, right? It’s not like, hey, we opened an ice cream factory here, and in Mongolia, they happen to like the same flavor of ice cream, and that’s the reason we’re on the same page. It’s rare for mines to be so big in scale and have that commonality. That’s part of the reason we have this relationship with Mongolia.”
Legacy of Mining at the U
The Department of Mining Engineering has a long history at the U. The extraction industry has always been an important industry in Utah, and the U has been training mining engineers since nearly 1896 when the territory was granted statehood.
“So historically speaking, and as it applies to the University, every other engineering department has come out of the College of Mines and Earth Sciences,” Young says. “There was no need for electrical engineers until we had electricity. The first need we had for engineers was to pump water out of the mines.”
Today, the focus is shifting away from surface mining due the depletion of surface materials. The shift now is towards underground mining, with mines going deeper and deeper at order to find essential minerals. Research is dedicated to figuring out how to mine at deeper depths, or how to refine materials out of already mined materials such as tailings and rock piles, which is what Young’s research focuses on.
“We have better processing power than we used to,” says Young. “Rock piles are formed from the dumping of a haul truck. If you have a good understanding of that basic process, then you are able to get more value out of it.”
First-hand in real time
The Oyu Tolgoi mine in Mongolia is one of the most modern mines in the world and a leader in technology and methodologies for deep underground mining. Senior undergraduates in mining engineering are able to see first-hand and in real time, familiarizing themselves with the environment of their future careers.
Along with a partnership with the Oyu Tolgoi mine, the U has a partnership with the Mongolian University of Science and Technology (MUST) and has accepted their students into the U’s mining program.
“Not only were they getting degrees in mining here,” Young states, “but they were also doing summer internships, getting practical experience in mining.” Moving forward, the U and MUST will maintain their unique, mutually beneficial relationship,
Part of the reason why Young participated in the field trip to the Oyu Tolgoi mine was that he was classmates with several of the Mongolian students, who now work at Oyu Tolgoi.
“We will not only collaborate on the technicalities of underground mining,” says Young, “but I think we will also collaborate when it comes to that additional use of what has already been mined.”
The value of experiencing those technicalities in the Mongolian mine were not lost on Trey Robison, a participating undergraduate student on the field trip. “Naturally, we would have a huge interest in this opportunity to go visit a mine,” says Robison. While over there, we got to tour this mine for a day and see all of their processes. Additionally, we met with the Minister of Mining in the Mongolian government.”
Potentially, the department would like to make the Mongolian trip a yearly endeavor, again visiting Oyu Tolgoi but other mines as well. The ambition is an extension of other outings: in 2023, U mining students and faculty visited Greenland, an excursion that was the result of a partnership between the U and the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.
Smell the sulfur
“A big part of what we try to do in the mining department is to get our students into the mines,” states Young. “We have a course called Mine Visits that we do every spring. It gives you that exposure and helps you understand. Because everybody’s got all these different concepts of what mining is going be like, you’ve got to get in there and smell the sulfur.”
Mining engineering is not only an industry essential to society, it’s a field rich in research opportunities, traveling experiences, and creativity.
“In mining engineering,” Aaron Young concludes, “we are engineering the Earth. We are engineering the variability of Mother Nature.”