Big new copper mines changing ‘paradigm for supply’, says Beaty
- 12 June 2026
Veteran Canadian mining entrepreneur Ross Beaty has stewarded international gold and silver businesses. This week he highlighted why copper is such a different beast, outlining a 25-year blueprint to turn a major discovery into one of the world’s new large-scale primary producers.
All going to plan Beaty-chaired Lumina Metals, which listed in Toronto in April, is into the final decade of that development horizon.
While there are no guarantees in a world the Canadian Mining Hall of Famer believes is presenting companies such as Lumina with different challenges – and opportunities – to those he’s experienced over half a century in the industry, Beaty says the end goal of the Poland-focused company is in sight.
“It’s taken us literally 15 years to get to this point, where we’ve taken it public,” he said of Lumina’s flagship Nowa Sol copper-silver project in southwestern Poland and Lumina’s circa-C$400 million IPO.
“We’re going to take the necessary time to complete the drilling, do feasibility work, environmental work, social work permitting and getting a mining licence. That could take four years or so.
“And then from that point we’re going to do the normal financing and construction, which should probably take another five years or so, because it’s such a huge deposit.
“These big deposits, wherever they are in the world, take a long time to develop these days and that’s one of the reasons why copper prices and silver prices are going to stay higher, longer.
“It’s just the world we live in today ... [It] takes a long time to build big mines.
“It used to take five-to-10 years to go from discovery to production. Now it’s taking 15, 20, 25 years, and that really does change the paradigm for supply development.”
Beaty-founded Pan American Silver and Equinox Gold have become Americas-focused silver and gold mid-tiers, respectively. Latin America, of course, is the world’s dominant copper producing region. Beaty, the geologist, also sees Poland as elephant country for the metal, evidenced by the track record of the country’s copper champion KGHM and its Legnica-Glogow Copper Belt deposits. And Lumina’s finds.
KGHM produces about 600,000 tonnes per annum of refined copper in Poland (from all sources) and puts current “geological resources” at more than 31 million tonnes of copper and 94,000t of silver. Lumina says Nowa Sol’s measured and indicated resource of 604 million tonnes grading 1.24% copper and 38 grams per tonne silver puts it among the world’s most significant undeveloped copper and silver projects.
“Our discovery is top three of the discoveries worldwide,” Lumina CEO Jordan Pandoff said this month. “This is the largest copper discovery in Europe since the 1950s. At the same time it’s in the top two for highest metal content. That’s what makes this deposit so unique.”
With current reform aimed at making Poland’s mining taxation landscape more internationally competitive pending, the country is seen to have potential to more than double domestic copper concentrate production to more than one million tonnes.
Beaty said while the war between Russia and Ukraine on Poland’s doorstep had “weaponised the US dollar” with resulting gold and silver price impacts, it had also sharpened Europe’s focus on secure energy and metal supplies. “They're trying to, just like US and other countries like Canada and Australia are doing – understanding how China is a juggernaut now of metal production, refining and smelting – get on the program of adding internal metal production so [Europe] can control its supply, and this is where Poland fits in really well because Poland has the largest undeveloped copper-silver deposits in Europe,” he said.
“We should be able to build what will be the world's second largest primary silver mine. If silver prices stay where they are today relative to copper prices, it’s sort of a co-product mine, as well as producing about 300,000 tonnes of copper, which would make it the second largest copper producer in Europe.”
Lumina Metals has spent circa-US$125 million in Poland so far and is looking at billions of dollars more to get a deep, large-scale copper-silver mine up and running. Metal prices will need to stay at elevated levels to incentivise such investment and Beaty thinks they can.
“Last year we had a synchronous bull market pretty much across every metal on the periodic table and that was mainly due to [US] president Trump's focus on de-emphasising China's dominance in production of pretty much all metals, [which is] a lot easier said than done because you have to discriminate between deposits in the ground and metal production that actually supplies industrial uses,” he says.
“Europe did the same thing and it all kind of happened last year and people realised, oh boy, if we do this we will need a lot more metals. If they’re not going to come from China we’re going to have to find them and source them here.
“So you just had more of an emphasis on critical metals and that flowed into the prices.
“A lot of these were overblown and they’ve come back to earth but they’re still wobbling around and you've had this new trauma in the Middle East that’s causing sulphuric acid issues, fertiliser issues, and that’s flowing into cost. Diesel costs are going up.
“We’re in a world right now where we do have significant inflationary forces happening versus just a couple of years ago.
“You need higher prices simply to keep mines afloat and to encourage new mines to be built.
“Copper is solid at these [current] prices. It’s a record high price. Those don't typically last but I think this one will.
“If you look at the whole periodic table and look at what is critical and what is not critical there is nothing more critical than copper. It is called Doctor Copper because it is so linked to the economy of the world.
“This particular cycle is also driven by really unique things that we’ve never seen before [including] this AI revolution requiring massive data centres to be built all over the world. The electrification trend is driving massive demand for things like silver and [of course] copper.
“Copper is used in all manner of electrification, from generation of power, transmission of power, and end use in cars, in storage batteries, in heat pumps, in AI data centres. It’s just used everywhere.
“So its demand is going parabolic and it’s very hard to change supply quickly.
“Metal prices are really in a good place. On the whole we live in a very good time to be a miner.”
