The report states that while there should be enough copper ore available to be mined, there is concern that the industry may not be able to mine the resource fast enough to support baseline global development and vehicle electrification.
The report finds that the strongest evidence for this concern is the lack of sufficient copper resources in the discovery pipeline.
New copper mines that started operation between 2019 and 2022 took, on average, 23 years from the time of resource discovery to be fully permitted, built and put into operation.
Within this long discovery-to-operation pipeline, the report says that there should be at least ten years of prospects with a combined production potential of more than 8Mt per year in the pipeline for the industry to have any confidence that it can meet the 1.7 major deposits per year discovery rate required for production to meet EV manufacture demand.
However, these prospects are not currently in the pipeline. A study of scheduled mine closures and new mines predicts that copper production will rise above baseline demand until 2025 but then strongly decline, such that mine production rates in 2030 will be nearly the same as they were in 2018.
This projection is based on the fact that mining companies are struggling to discover new large high-grade copper deposits. Only 16 of the 224 copper deposits discovered since 1990 were discovered in the past decade, despite mining exploration budgets having increased by three or four times since 2005.
Ultimately the report warns that without targeted action from both industry and government, world-wide copper production could reach its all-time peak in just 60 years.
Copper production versus EV demand - Mining Magazine Australia
Oh wow! Not a word on disruption of mining production due to extreme weather or the decline in standard of living around the world. As if all economies and world trade will continue to grow at the same current rate.
“None are so blind, as …”