IMARC copper: Mine the gap
- 25 August 2025
“Copper – it’s always copper,” says Wood Mackenzie senior analyst Sagar Kalra when he looks at the one metal with a “perennial shortfall” in the international consultancy’s future supply and demand projections.
Speaking on a recent webinar, Kalra said energy transition to check rising carbon emissions “starts and ends with metals”. None were more important than copper. Increased investment in primary production and refining of key materials was needed to meet global power and transport sector demand under different possible future energy and mobility expansion scenarios.
“The other commodities have plus-or-minus imbalances [depending on base case or accelerated demand scenarios],” Kalra says. Those commodities include lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite and aluminium.
“It’s always copper that appears to be in deficit in either scenario.
“To close the projected 2.5-million-tonne supply gap by 2030 an investment of roughly US$100 billion is needed. However, the current reluctance of investors to take risks and deploy capital, coupled with shareholder demand for dividends, makes it highly unlikely that the gap will be closed by 2030.”
Kalra was addressing an audience on the role of new production enabled by technology breakthroughs and by recycling in meeting surging copper demand over the next 5-to-10 years. Wood Mackenzie is not the only group predicting copper use well above historical levels and as with other forecasts it has tended to underestimate the rising data-centre demand tide, mainly because it’s rising so fast.
World mining major BHP said last year copper demand could grow by up to 70% to more than 50Mt a year by 2050. It highlights a global development pipeline of potential projects that is “less healthy than in previous cycles” and an environment in which “both brownfield and greenfield projects are expected to face cost and stakeholder challenges”. Meanwhile, existing large-scale mines are aging and average grades continue to fall.
“Copper is central to the global push for decarbonisation, with demand accelerating across renewable energies, EVs, power and data infrastructure,” says Bob Fulker, CEO of Australian copper producer, Hillgrove Resources.
“We need an enormous investment over the coming decade to meet this energy transition: $250 billion, according to BHP, over the next 10 years alone.
“Copper has a new floor.”
Hillgrove, looking to expand production from Kanmantoo in “the tier-one mining jurisdiction of” South Australia, is among a surviving handful of Australian Securities Exchange-listed copper companies with existing or near-term production. The list is led by standout mid-tier producer Sandfire Resources, which mines in Botswana and Spain and will deliver a new prefeasibility study on Black Butte in the USA before the end of 2025.
Sandfire and Hillgrove head a stellar line-up of copper producers, developers and explorers in the Mining & Investment Hub at this year’s IMARC in Sydney in October.
Aeris Resources is another Australian copper growth story with a cornerstone operation in IMARC host state, New South Wales. Tritton and the company’s other producing asset, Jaguar in Western Australia, contributed 25,000 tonnes of FY2025 copper production, which Aeris is looking to expand in FY26. It also has the Stockman zinc-copper-gold development project in Victoria. Aeris’ share price is up 14% so far this year.
On the exploration front, the IMARC Mining & Investment Hub list includes big 2025 market risers such as AusQuest (up 280% year-to-date), Blackstone Minerals (plus-130%), London-listed SolGold (plus-120%) and Sunstone Metals (up 80%). The latter two are Ecuador porphyry copper-gold focused; AusQuest continues to advance its flagship Peru porphyry copper asset; and Blackstone is sitting on a potentially major new porphyry copper development in northern Luzon in the Philippines.
Flagship Minerals (up 28% in 2025), which has the Rosario copper project in northern Chile, and Godolphin Resources (plus-60%) are other explorers getting solid ASX market traction this year. The latter has been posting significant copper drill intercepts from Lewis Ponds on the New South Wales Lachlan Fold Belt.
John Forwood, chief investment officer at Lowell Resources Funds, says strong sector M&A activity in 2025 has seen ASX-listed Mac Copper, New World Resources and Xanadu Mines fall into the hands of new international owners, intensifying the spotlight on remaining ASX copper names.
“Aside from the majors in BHP which owns giant copper mines such as Olympic Dam and Escondida [57%] and Rio, and then the $5.8 billion Sandfire Resources, there is little local copper content on the ASX,” Forwood says. Aeris and Hillgrove are a few rungs down in terms of market value.
“The pipeline of junior companies with attractive operating or near-development assets will continue to attract the swollen wallets of the bigger goldfish,” Forwood says.
Despite the bullish outlook for copper demand and prices last month’s closure by Glencore of Australia’s iconic Mount Isa copper mine in north-west Queensland, after more than 60 years of operation, and its moves to suspend copper smelting at Isa and refining at Townsville, mark an historic turning point for the country’s copper sector.
Local business and council groups are urging the federal government to support keeping the downstream assets operational, to process third-party concentrate and retain vital skills and support capability in the region. “Our smelter and refinery are the only assets in the country that can process copper from any mine, anywhere. They’re critical to keeping Australia in the global copper game,” said Townsville Enterprise CEO, Claudia Brumme-Smith.
With Mount Isa’s future uncertain the centre of gravity for the country’s presence in the global copper game has very much shifted, and continues to settle, in South Australia.
John Fennell, CEO of the Australian branch of the International Copper Association, says the state has about 70% of the nation’s known copper resources. BHP is looking to double current output of circa 320,000t over the next decade, which is “fantastic for Australia overall”. Beyond the first tier and batch of lower tier operations, though, Fennell sees massive scope for growth.
“We’ve got the second or third largest resource of copper in the world; probably third after Peru,” he says.
“Chile has 190Mt, Peru 120Mt and we’re about 100Mt. At the moment we produce about 800,000t, hoping to get to 950,000t by 2030.
“We’ve got a lot of years of copper production here and we only consume about 40,000t in our factories and whatever. So we’ve got a wonderful resource here that we should all be focusing on. And I think South Australia is doing a pretty good job of that.”
