A second copper mine is opening in Utah with prices for the metal at their highest in a decade.

Based in Lakewood, Colo., Constellation Copper Corp. says its Lisbon Valley Copper Mine, 40 miles southeast of Moab, will yield 27,000 tons of copper a year.

"We are scheduled to start making copper by the end of the month," company President Greg Hahn said Friday.

Constellation will employ 146 at the open-pit mine on a $9 million annual payroll.

The $55 million Lisbon Valley mine was scheduled to start producing last fall, but a shortage of construction workers and materials delayed the opening. Utah's strong construction industry has made hiring tradesmen difficult, builders say, while Hurricane Katrina sent the prices of basic materials soaring.

At one point Constellation couldn't find enough pipe fitters to work on a copper processing plant, but the work is done and the company is running water through the plumbing works to test for leaks, Hahn said.

The timing is right for a new copper mine. Global demand has sent prices soaring to more than $2.25 a pound, up from a low of 62 cents a pound three years ago, according to market indices and industry officials.

"Any time copper is over $1, it's a good price" for mining, said Louie Cononelos, a spokesman for Kennecott Utah Copper Corp., a subsidiary of London-based Rio Tinto that reported earning more than $1 billion last year.

Kennecott operates Utah's only other copper mine, 20 miles southwest of Salt Lake City in the Oquirrh mountain range. At 300,000 tons a year, Kennecott's mine generates more than 10 times the copper Lisbon Valley will produce.

State geologist Ken Krahulec said Utah has had hundreds of copper mines "all over the place," but fluctuating prices and marginal prospects left only Kennecott, which is carrying on a century of digging at Bingham Mine. Kennecott has been able to survive lean years for copper prices by mining on an industrial scale. It is clawing into an unusually large, tooth-shaped ore deposit formed by volcanic activity about 35 million years ago.

Kennecott expanded its pit last year to extend the life of the operation to at least 2018, Cononelos said.

Constellation will work small, abandoned pits from an old operation called Blackbird as well as new pits, with total ore reserves measured at almost 37 million tons — enough to keep the Lisbon Valley mine busy for about seven years.

"Copper mining in the Lisbon Valley goes back to 1903 with the Big Indian Mine," Krahulec said. In the early 1970s, "beautiful azurite mineral specimens were discovered near the old Big Indian Mine, which led to the commercial collection of crystal clusters into the late 1990s."