Copper We already have one billion people out of today’s current population slated to become significant consumers by 2025.
Another 2.8 billion people will be added to the world between now and 2050. Most will not be Americans but they are going to want a lot of things that we in the Western developed world take for granted – electricity, plumbing, appliances, AC etc.
But what if all these new one billion consumers were to start consuming, over the next 10 years, just like an American? What’s going to happen to the world’s mineral resources if one billion more ‘Americans’ are added to the consuming class? Here’s what each of them would need to consume, per year, to live the American lifestyle…
One billion new consumers by 2025. Can everyone who wants to, live an American lifestyle? Can everyone everywhere else have everything we in North America have?
If we mined every last discovered, and undiscovered, pound of land-based copper, the expected 8.2 billion people in the developing world would only get three quarters of the way towards copper use parity per capita with the US.
Of course the rest of us, the other 1.8 billion people expected to be on this planet by 2050, aren’t going to be easing up, we’re still going to be using copper at prestigious rates while our developing world cousins play catch up.
Now add an extra 1.1 million tonnes of copper demanded by 14 million EVs by 2025 – just five years away – in the low-EV scenario of 14 million units. And another 42 million tonnes of copper to be deployed for the 20 million charging points predicted by Wood Mackenzie? The numbers are starting to get stupid.
https://www.sharecafe.com.au/2020/02/07/ev-predictions-show-strained-metal-supply/