Toromocho Copper Mine: Chinese Financing for Transition Minerals

Located in the Morococha District in Peru, Toromocho is one of the world’s largest copper mines, and the first overseas greenfield copper mine developed by a Chinese company. The Aluminum Corporation of China Limited (Chinalco), a Chinese state-owned company, completed a $782 million acquisition in 2007, giving it the rights to develop the mine, and launched commercial operations at the site in 2015. Since the early stages of development, which required the resettlement of the Morococha population, Toromocho has faced significant environmental and social challenges.

This mining site profile provides a detailed overview of Chinese state-directed financing, ownership, and operations of the Toromocho mine. It includes granular information on the mine's funding sources (loans, lenders, and co-financing), acquisition history, ownership structure, implementation milestones, ESG challenges, and risk mitigation measures.

The insights in this profile are derived from AidData’s Chinese Financing for Transition Minerals Dataset, Version 1.0 and the sources referenced therein. This dataset captures $56.9 billion of official sector financial commitments that China provided to 19 low- and middle-income countries between 2000 and 2021 for projects involving the extraction or processing of copper, cobalt, lithium, nickel, and rare earth elements. An accompanying report, Power Playbook: Beijing’s Bid to Secure Overseas Transition Minerals, analyzes the dataset and provides evidence about the nature, scale, and scope of the PRC’s overseas financing for the extraction and processing of energy transition minerals.