US copper security may need many Resolutions
- 25 May 2025
Copper is the metal of the world’s new energy and technology age and is key to American industrial sovereignty. But the country won’t be anywhere near self-sufficient by 2035 and possibly well beyond that time, BHP’s Americas business chief said at the second Energy Future Forum in Washington, DC.
Brandon Craig said some forecasters put US copper demand by 2025 at 3.5 million tonnes of the metal. It currently produced domestically about 1Mt.
“So you’ll have to be able to develop mines that can produce 2.5Mt of copper.”
The forum heard BHP and partner Rio Tinto had applied in 2012 for a permit to mine the large and deep Resolution porphyry copper-molybdenum deposit in Arizona. “So it’s 2025 and we're still going through the legal process trying to secure the permit for that particular development,” Craig said. “Once you cross through the permitting process you can actually get into the job of building the mine, which takes another five years.
“Resolution has the potential to do about half a million tonnes of copper [per annum].
“You’ll need five of those mines developed by 2035 to be self-sufficient in copper in the US. And that mine has been in progress for over 20 years. So that gives you a sense of the scale of the challenge that faces us.”
The forum at the “Carnegie Hall of capitalism”, aka the US Chamber of Commerce headquarters in Washington, leaned heavily into what chamber senior vice president for policy Marty Durbin called “more realistic discussions” about global energy supply and infrastructure at the dawn of AI – or certainly the physical demands of AI – and more urgent security realisations around supply chains in a period of deglobalisation.
“Consider that in October of 2023, just 20 months ago, the International Energy Agency published its World Energy Outlook, a 400-page tome tasked with identifying global energy trends. Completely unmentioned in that report was artificial intelligence data centres and the load growth resulting from them,” Durbin said.
“That’s not to criticise the IEA. It just goes to show you that nobody was talking about data centres as recently as two years ago, except for our friends across the river in Loudoun County, of course.
“But fast forward just a few months from that and by early 2024 everyone was talking about it. Last year the world saw a surprise year-over-year electricity demand growth 60% higher than historical averages, a figure that will be sustained for the foreseeable future as data centre energy demand triples over the next decade.”
Durbin said if the current “moment” could be summarised in a word that word would be “more”.
“It’s increasingly clear that we need more electrons, more molecules, more transmission lines, more pipelines, more critical minerals, more factories and so on. And at the heart of this, of course, is the soaring energy demand, especially from data centres and artificial intelligence applications that are both critical national and economic security imperatives,” he said.
S&P Global vice chair and renowned author Daniel Yergin said the 2022 S&P study, The Future of Copper, was being rewritten to reflect “the thing that wasn’t there two years ago: AI and the demand for energy for it”. He said his 1990 book about the history of the global petroleum industry, The Prize, had “hundreds of characters … but two characters are most important”.
“One is named supply and one is named demand.”
The copper demand story was a global one in which dominant copper user China controlled 55% of current refined metal supply but remained reliant on external mine and concentrate production. As Chinese corporations continued to invest heavily around the world to boost new primary supply – wherever and however it could be done – conditions for a future mad scramble for “the metal of electrification” had been created.
“We’re not only at the turning point of energy we’re at the turning point of how the global economic system works,” Yergin said. “We’re really in the middle of it and don’t know what the shape is going to be at the other end. But we are at the turning point.”
Craig said a BHP internal study on the world copper business highlighted consistent delays in forecast project and new supply delivery. Reasons included the increasing cost and complexity of building copper projects, as well as permitting delays.
“And [then there is] the scarcity of quality copper resources,” he said.
“When you look at that combination and you have a look at the total known projects that are in the pipeline today, there are not enough projects in the pipeline today to actually meet the projected demand.
“It’s always dangerous in our game to predict what the future is going to be but assuming demand forecasts hold to be true, where copper [consumption] goes to 50 million tonnes or thereabouts by 2050, assuming that holds to be true, it’s very difficult to see where the projects are going to come from.
“Copper shortages are going to be a global problem not a local problem. It’s going to be essential that countries think very clearly about how they actually secure access to copper because in a world where there is going to be a shortage of copper the critical thing is going to be to make sure you've got secure supply chains to actually bring that copper to market.”
When it came to “copper security”, mining companies were going to go to where the best deposits in the world were.
“It’s going to be Argentina, it’s going to be Chile, it’s going to be DRC, it's going to be Zambia; the [central African] copper belt and so on,” he said.
“There are a few others but those are the ones that have the quality, the grade and the scale to actually support the world’s demand.”
