By Naveen Thukral and Melanie Burton
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - U.S. president-elect Donald Trump's new administration should focus on speeding up the permitting process to ensure there is enough copper for the energy transition, said a Rio Tinto (NYSE:RIO) executive on Thursday, referring to its stalled Arizona mine.
Rio Tinto, alongside partner BHP Group (NYSE:BHP), is developing the Resolution copper mine which could supply more than one quarter of the country's domestic copper needs for the highly conductive metal.
But around the world, it takes years to develop a mine partly due to the time it takes to get permits, Chief Commercial Officer Bold Baatar said, speaking at the Financial Times commodity summit in Singapore.
Development progress on the mine is currently tied up in U.S. courts. It has faced opposition from Native Americans because it would cause a massive crater that would swallow a religious site where Arizona's San Carlos Apache worship.
The new Trump administration will be able to either approve the mine or keep its development essentially frozen. Baatar added that Rio Tinto was committed to working with Native American groups as it considers how best to develop the mine.
As Rio Tinto looks at how it will grow, Baatar sees Argentina as a main focus, where its Rincon lithium project sits, as well as some assets of Arcadium Lithium, which it agreed to purchase for $6.7 billion last month.
As such, the miner will be busy integrating those existing businesses before it has time to focus on any "mega mergers" of the scale of BHP's $49 billion tilt at Anglo American (JO:AGLJ) earlier this year, he said.
"I think we have to prove to the market that we can create value from lithium first," he said.
For Rio's mainstay iron ore, China's steel demand is shifting to higher grade ore which is less carbon intensive to turn into steel, as overall housing sector demand falls but is offset by steel demand from the energy transition.
"The demand for high grade ore continues to be strong. The new industries such as electric vehicles and energy transition are picking up the drop in the residential sector," he said.