Perspectives of Copper Availability

While copper was used over 10,000 years ago in some of the earliest human civilizations, it still plays an influential role in the development of sustainable energy sources as well as the transition to a green future.

In light of its remarkable conductivity of electricity and heat, it has widespread use in various sections of the industry to such an extent that it is considered to be the third most consumed metal after only iron and aluminum, in spite of the fact that it is not that much abundant in comparison to the two aforementioned metals.

In other words, aside from the current uses of copper in technology, construction, and transportation, an additional amount of copper is needed to fulfill the goals set for climate change and net zero emissions.

This will require renewable energy sources such as the likes of wind or solar energy, whereas the production turbines and panels needed for them consume over ten times the copper required for producing machines that use fossil fuels instead.

Likewise, developing such low-carbon systems that sustain the required electricity of the world in 2050 takes more copper, equal to two and ten years of the global produced copper at the moment.

Due to copper’s growing significance in the world of economics and a lack of substitutes in its place, some concerns have been raised about the gap between copper demand and supply.

But aside from this energy transition, the demand for copper in 2050 is predicted to be approximately three times higher than the copper demand in 2000. By considering this energy transition, the demand would be 3.3 times higher.

Yet such a soaring demand is heavily dependent on the world’s economy and finance, especially GDP and people’s population.

With such a rising demand for copper, it is of little wonder to feel a gloomy foreboding of the copper supply’s depletion.

Just like what had happened in the 1800s-1900s about the excessive use of fertilizers in agricultural products that brought out the concept of insufficiency of natural sources of nitrogen, or even when after World War II, due to extreme uses of natural resources of minerals and energy in the war, the adequacy of such materials turned out to be alarming.

Now in order to deal with the copper supply deficit, the world needs to adopt approaches that have been common throughout history in the cope with resources shortage, including finding new sources of copper, using the current sources more efficiently, and finding a substitute for its place.

While there is not any cost-effective replacement for copper, it is the onus of politicians to implement the other two, managing the excessive consumption of red metal and increasing its end-of-life recycling most economically with the help of technological development.

Hence, when it comes to perspectives of copper availability, what is crystal clear is the fact that the cost of copper is set to skyrocket, and while we are pondering whether we would run out of copper or not, its depletion might happen sooner than our projection, urging us to implement some serious measures to develop its sustainability.

What is the future demand for copper?

If you are wondering what copper is used for the most, we should notify you that the copper demand is set to rise until 2070 in a monotonic trend, with its different applications in electronics, industry, transportation, and other uses, respectively allocating 26%, 19%, 3%, and 42% of shares at the market, as the demand for each section, increases with various rates.

According to figure 1 below, it is estimated that the overall copper demand will grow approximately five times in 2070 to 48.8 Mt/year in comparison to the demand in 1991. The section that is associated with the greatest demand would rise from 5.2 Mt/year to 20.4 Mt/year during this period pursued by the sections of industry and transportation and, finally the other applications.

Figure 1. Copper demand by sections

The projection of copper supply and consumption

With such a soaring demand by 2070, it seems that the primary copper reserves are not adequate to sustain the future availability of copper.

Therefore as illustrated in figure 2, which shows the trend of the primary and secondary supply of copper, as well as its consumption rate from 1991 to 2070, the secondary source of cooper in the form of recycling, is binding to satisfy the predicted demand.

It is calculated that the overall copper supply will rise from 8.89 Mt in 1991 to 39.9 Mt in 2070, while the primary supply of copper would still be the major part of copper production as this source would allocate 26.8 Mt of copper production in 2070, compared to 7.89 Mt in 1991.

Figure 2

Moreover, Latin America would remain to be the largest producer of copper, with its products being doubled from 7.5 Mt in 2020 to 16.4 Mt in 2070, while Chile plays the most influential role.

Even extraction of metals in the Asia-Pacific countries is predicted to increase at a 1.4% rate of growth, reaching 11.1 Mt in 2070, which is three times 3.7 Mt in 2020. Yet, it is self-evident from the peak of the graph that the rate of primary production would decline by 2% to reach a stable amount by 2060.

Besides, with the current End-Of-Life Recycling Rate of 60%, the secondary source of copper would rise to 13.1 Mt in 2070 from 1 Mt in 1991, allocating 33% of the overall copper supply in 2070.

This is estimated on account of the consumption rate of 0.43%, increasing from 7.9 Mt in 1991 to 39.6 Mt in 2070.

Is copper getting harder to find?

In order to answer the critical question of how much copper is left in the world, at first glance, one might get assured of the fact there is an abundant amount of copper in the crust of the earth.

In other words, about 3 km of the crust that is closer to the earth’s surface possesses around 60,000 billion metric tons of copper, while their typical concentration is 50 ppm.

But the real nub of the matter is that it is not feasible to extract a huge part of this amount while it is also a herculean task to even prognosticate the eventual extractability of the red metal’s resources as different variables like the need for energy as well as environmental, social, and climate considerations may influence the cost of copper extraction.

While the natural deficiency of higher ore grades is a feature common to all the minerals around the world, it is due to such variables that the concern of copper shortage would raise in the form of its extraction cost.

For instance, consider that with the copper ore grades being halved, the required energy would be doubled to produce the copper commodity.

With the further advancement of technological equipment for copper’s mining and production process, it would be possible to dig into deeper parts of the mines to extract the lower grades of copper.

What is the availability of copper?

Finally, in so far as to gain further insight into perspectives of copper availability in the world, a cumulative availability curve (CAC) would help us a lot, as perspectives of fixed stock and opportunity-cost perspectives are conspired to consider actual stocks and flow along with other fluctuations as the likes of various demand trends, geographical considerations and the expenses of copper extraction.

As per the copper resources, CAC discovered copper deposits would most probably meet the demand for copper until around 2075.

After that, it is the further efforts that would be made for the discovery and development of already unidentified deposits, the enhancement of copper production efficiency, and the advancement of the copper recycling process to boost its secondary supply that would determine the cost of copper commodity as well as the extent of the demand’s satisfaction.

Moreover, it is apparent from the available identified deposits that for the sake of responding to the demand by 2050, about 30% of reserves and resources are needed, and by 2075, 88% of them.

Besides, in the long run, it is the rate of resources to reserves conversion that has the utmost significance for facing the copper demand in comparison to the rate of depletion itself.

In the best-case scenario for the rise of copper demand, the already identified copper deposits would be adequate only before 2075.

With the boost of demand, those deposits that are less expensive would start to be depleted.

Then, as shown in figure 3, by approaching the inelastic part of CAC, economic undersupply would occur as the rise of copper price would result in a less than proportional gain in the amount of copper supply.

Figure 3. Price elasticity of the modified cumulative availability curve (CAC) for copper reserves and resources, 2018–2100. The vertical axis shows the price elasticity of the quantity supplied on the basis of the modified CAC. Each line exemplifies various consumption trends.

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