Man has been using copper for 10,000 years. Copper is one of the few metals that can be found in nature as an uncompounded metal (called native copper). Native copper would have been the source for a copper pendant dated 8700 B.C. in what is now northern Iraq. By 5000 B.C., there are signs of copper smelting, the refining of copper from simple copper compounds such as malachite or azurite.
But, it really wasn't until the advent of the Bronze Age (circa 2500 B.C.) that man's appetite for copper really accelerated, and it hasn't slowed…
After iron and aluminium, copper is the third most commonly used metal.
Electrical Applications
The primary use of copper is for electrical applications. Copper is the best non-precious conductor of electricity (only silver is superior) and sets the standard to which other conductors are compared. Compared to copper, aluminium has worse conductivity per unit volume, but better conductivity per unit weight. Gold is sometimes used to plate fine wire applications not because it is a better conductor, but because it is extremely resistant to surface corrosion.
Copper is used in both insulated and non-insulated power cables for all regular voltage applications.
Telecommunication Applications
While optical fibre has displaced copper over long-haul applications, the telecom industry still demands copper, as it is still the preferred carrier for the last segment. Additionally, it is used for domestic carrier lines, wide and local area networks and connectors. HDSL (High-Speed Digital Subscriber Line) and ADSL (Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line) technology allows existing copper to carry high-speed data up to 1 giga-byte per second.
Copper is also starting to be used in the semiconductor industry instead of aluminium because it allows microprocessors to operate at higher speeds and reduces energy demand.
Construction Applications
Building construction accounts for more than 40% of all US copper consumption with residential construction accounting for two-thirds of that figure. The average 2,100 sq.ft. single-family home uses 439 pounds of copper, most of which is for wiring and plumbing.
Copper is still the preferred metal for plumbing applications because it suppresses the growth of the Legionella bacteria, the microbe responsible for Legionnaire's disease.
The Statue of Liberty contains 179,000 pounds of copper that originally came from the copper mines on Karmoy Island near Stavanger, Norway.
Transportation Applications
Used extensively in the automotive industry, today's average automobile contains between 50 to 60 pounds of copper.
A Boeing 747-400 contains nearly 9,000 pounds, representing about 2% of the plane's total weight.
A typical diesel-electric railroad locomotive uses about 11,000 pounds of copper. The latest and most-powerful locomotives manufactured by General Electric Company and General Motors Corporation use more than 16,000 pounds.
A Triton-class nuclear submarine uses about 200,000 pounds of copper.
Copper-nickel alloys are use for hulls of ships to reduce marine bio-fouling of mussels and barnacles.
Global Resources and Production
Known worldwide resource estimates for copper are estimated at 5.8 trillion pounds of which 0.7 trillion pounds (~12%) has been mined. Two-thirds of that is accessible on land and the remainder is available as deep-sea mineral rich nodules formed from undersea volcanic activity currently too expensive to retrieve.
Copper's recycling rate is the highest out of any other engineering metal and supplies approximately one-third of the US annual demand.
Chile is the world's copper giant producing nearly 9.4 million tonnes of concentrate, a figure representing 29% of the 1997 global raw copper production. Chuquicamata, the largest open pit copper mine in the world, is located in Chile and has been producing copper since 1915.
Other significant world producers of copper are: United States, Indonesia, Australia, Peru, Russia, Canada, China, Poland, Kazakhstan and Mexico.
Upcoming Copper Mines
The following graph shows the total copper resources of significant copper mines that are currently under exploration and/or development.
Published originally on Dollardaze.org on Nov 8, 2006.