Kathleen Quirk

President and Chief Executive Officer, Freeport-McMoRan

Freeport-McMoRan Inc.

In the second half of 2025, while rivals talked about copper shortages in the abstract, Kathleen Quirk was already treating the metal as a solvable engineering problem. Freeport-McMoRan's innovative leach programme — applying new additives and heat to old stockpiles once written off as waste — was quietly scaling toward a 300-million-pound annual run rate. At the same time, the Grasberg Block Cave in Indonesia was being carefully rebuilt after a serious incident, and the company was preparing a multi-billion-dollar decision on expanding its Bagdad mine in Arizona.

Quirk, who had spent more than three decades inside Freeport before becoming CEO in mid-2024, did not frame these moves as heroic. She framed them as necessary. Copper demand from electrification, data centres and the energy transition was not a future scenario; it was already reshaping the company's economics. The controversy lay in the method: rather than chasing headline acquisitions or new greenfield discoveries, she doubled down on extracting more from assets Freeport already controlled. In an industry that still prizes spectacle, the most ambitious copper growth plan in the Americas was being executed by an accountant-turned-operator who preferred process over proclamation.

Kathleen Quirk matters this month because Freeport-McMoRan is the largest publicly traded pure-play copper producer, and copper has become the defining strategic mineral of the energy-transition and AI era. Under her leadership the company is simultaneously restoring its flagship Indonesian asset, commercialising a potentially transformative leach technology across the Americas, and advancing brownfield expansions that could add hundreds of millions of pounds of low-cost copper.

For NES readers focused on energy, business and strategic minerals, Quirk represents the operational reality behind the copper narrative. She is the long-serving insider who now holds the levers of the world's most important listed copper company at the moment demand is accelerating and supply remains constrained.