‘We need speed’: International Copper Association chief
- 6 September 2026
The world needs more copper, fast, was a central message from a major copper forum in Adelaide, South Australia, where International Copper Association CEO Juan Ignacio was in town for the first time. “We need speed,” he said on a flying visit to the city of churches.
Ignacio, who will return to London for Resourcing Tomorrow 2026 in December, told Copper to the World data-centre projects might have planning and commissioning lifecycles of three-to-six years. A new copper mine could take 15-to-18 years to conceive and deliver.
BHP says copper used in the world’s data centres could grow six-fold by 2050 to circa-three million tonnes. The uplift was roughly equivalent to the combined annual output of the world's four largest copper mines today.
“We're creating the future at the speed of innovation and ambition but the material that makes it all possible is just moving at our own reality of permitting, of innovation, of financing, of operation and construction,” said Ignacio
“The future runs on copper and this not just a slogan of our industry ... Electrification, digitalisation, renewable energies, data centres all depend on critical materials and copper sits at the centre of this big transformation.
“We have a very challenging future because in order to get to 42 million tonnes of copper [forecast demand in 2024] from 28Mt we need one huge mine a year to be online.
“It is all about speed.”
The conference heard CRU senior analyst Piers Montgomery recount a somewhat cautionary tale on supply and pricing. He suggested project internal rates of return (IRRs) using plus-US$13,000-a-tonne copper prices were going to accelerate investment.
“We’ve got something like 142 projects [in CRU database] that are theoretically viable and that’s nearly double the number that we need for the supply gap,” he said.
“The problem is that typically we haven’t got a very good track record of [delivering projects] – at least not in the companies that we are used to seeing add copper. There's probably a little bit better performance from Chinese investment over the last decade and they're certainly underrepresented in the pipeline.
“We talk a lot about how we're not developing the projects we need to bridge the supply gap but actually it is happening. It’s just not happening in very visible locations. It’s happening in places where there’s maybe an outside influence of Chinese investment in places like central Asia.”
Montgomery also pointed to strategic alliances being formed in South America, predominantly, to leverage district-scale infrastructure and resource synergies to unlock copper units.
“I think that potentially district-level development is what could define this era of supply,” he said.
“This is a fifth of the supply gap on our numbers,” Montgomery said.
There was also recycling, of course. Ignacio, whose ICA members account for more than 50% of the world’s primary copper supply, said about 40% of current annual copper demand was met with recycled metal. “That is huge,” he said. “That is the beauty of our industry.”
Adelaide’s historical foundations owe more to copper than churches. In fact the 190-year-old city had a “founding pillar” of religious tolerance which spawned the city-of-churches tag. A copper boom in the 1840s and early 1850s briefly made the colony an economic pacesetter in the British Commonwealth.
The conference heard the state generated A$5.6 billion of copper income in the 2026 fiscal year. Massive BHP investment in mining and smelting could double or triple that in the years ahead. Copper overtook iron ore as lead BHP revenue and profit centre in FY26.
BHP Copper South Australia asset president Anna Wiley said: “Copper is already a pillar of the SA economy. Our growth agenda will take this to a new level.”
Resourcing Tomorrow will probe the world’s copper supply conundrum with big industry names joining the ICA’s Ignacio in London.
Former BHP asset president at Olympic Dam in SA, Laura Tyler, will be joined by Gary Agnew, CEO of Canadian mining technology leader Ideon, to look at how today’s advanced technology is poised to unlock significant copper resources to feed the world’s fastest-growing industries.
Tyler, non-executive director at Hudbay Minerals and partner at Oryx Global Minerals, spent nearly two decades at BHP. She is a big believer that modern technology can not only change mine and project economics but also drive vital improvement in the sector’s environmental, social and governance performance.
Codelco, Hudbay, Glencore, Anglo American, Freeport-McMoRan, Zijin Mining, First Quantum Minerals, Ivanhoe Mines, Gunnison Copper and The Copper Mark are just some of the copper sector names on this year’s Resourcing Tomorrow program.
