Copper is one of the most important metals in the world, and with the green energy transition forging ahead, it’s more vital than ever.
A recent report by the International Energy Forum (IEF) outlines and addresses how demand for copper will continue to rise with the push to electrify homes and vehicles.
The IEF’s Copper Mining and Vehicle Electrification report addresses concerns in the industry that copper supply will struggle to keep up with rising demand. The report does this by projecting supply and demand from 2018 out to 2050 using historical copper mine output.
What is the IEF?
The IEF is the world’s largest international organisation of energy ministers, with 72 members from both producing and consuming nations, including Australia, the US, Canada, Japan, China and South Korea.
The IEF was originally founded in 1991 as a forum to facilitate collaboration between producing and consuming countries from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Now, the IEF has more member countries than both OPEC and IEA combined, hailing from all over the world. The forum hosts biennial ministerial meetings that form the world’s largest gatherings of energy minsters.
Through its global platform, the IEF examines all energy issues, including gas and oil, clean and renewable energy, sustainability, the energy transition, new technologies and even energy poverty.
Copper: the key to the future
Copper is a vital element that enables many aspects of our modern-day lives. As copper is one of the most versatile metals on Earth, humans have been finding uses for its unique properties for thousands of years. These uses included everything from utensils and jewellery, to the copper pipes used in early plumbing and the creation of alloys like brass and bronze.
In the modern day, copper’s most useful quality is its conductivity. While this property was first utilised to carry heat for cooking and heating, nowadays copper most frequently carries the electricity that powers our everyday lives. Every time you use an appliance, switch on a light or turn on your computer, copper plays a key role in making that possible.
Copper is set to play a critical part in the electrification of the world’s vehicles and infrastructure. As the world continues to shift to clean energy, copper demand is expected to skyrocket as it forms a vital component of new and emerging energy technologies.
Supply and demand
A big part of the clean energy transition involves switching 100 per cent of vehicle manufacturing from internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles to EVs.
Many studies have been undertaken to analyse the increased copper supply that such an endeavour will require, and the results have raised concerns that supply will be unable to meet demand.
The IEF’s report has estimated that to meet ‘business-as-usual‘ trends in copper demand, 115 per cent more copper will need to be mined in the next 30 years than has ever been mined historically up to 2018. The report predicts that in response to this demand, copper mine output will increase by approximately 82 per cent, as many new mines open.
Electrifying the global vehicle fleet would require 55 per cent more new mines than would otherwise be needed for ‘business-as-usual‘ demand.
Despite this, the report says that concerns about how much copper is available to be mined are unfounded, with an estimated 6,598Mt of copper available to be mined worldwide. The baseline projected copper ore production over the next 30 years adds up to approximately 1,689Mt of ore, or 26 per cent of the total available resource.
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.
The report posits that this is due to the chain of unlikely occurrences that must follow the initial discovery of a viable resource. Discovery of a copper resource must be followed by drilling and preliminary economic and engineering assessment to confirm a potential mineral resource. Further drilling, economic evaluation, engineering and metallurgical assessment is then required to ensure that an ore reserve can become a viable mining operation.
The report found that the success rate of discovering an initial occurrence of at least 0.1Mt was around one in 2,500 during the period of 2001 to 2010, and is now around one in 5,000. On top of this, the rate of success for a copper occurrence becoming a mineable economic deposit is between one in 100 and one in 800.
Rows of EVs on production line. Image: IM Imagery/shutterstock.com
Meeting spiking demand
The report states that there is remarkably little difference between the amount of copper needed to manufacture hybrid-electric rather than ICE vehicles. Hybrid vehicles require 29kg of copper compared to 24kg for an ICE vehicle.
The report therefore recommends that the transition target be changed from the 100 per cent manufacture of battery electric vehicles – which require 60kg of copper – to 100 per cent manufacture of hybrid-electric vehicles by 2035.
The report acknowledges that although this is not a perfect or long-term solution, it is a more resource-realistic one.
For the longer term, the report states that it is important that copper exploration and mine development receive greater encouragement and investment, starting immediately.
To that end, the report recommends that:
- Technologies needed for exploration of deeper copper deposits and leaching be encouraged as a matter of urgency
- More land be made available for exploration to create new mines
- Work be done to change attitudes toward exploration, land access and drilling
- Capital allocation for deeper-than-conventional mines or mines in remote locations that lack infrastructure be encouraged
- Studies of ocean mining be accelerated, with a goal of achieving a scientific understanding of potential impacts by a defined future date
- Copper recycling be further enabled and encouraged
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.
With copper playing such an important role in modern technology and infrastructure, and the anticipated soar in demand that the energy transition will bring, it is vitally important to boost production while simultaneously managing demand to a more attainable level.
Featured image: jonnysek/shutterstock.com
