RE: Futures5 May 2018 16:40
*Significant deposits are now being found at greater depths or in more remote areas
*Net of administrative costs, a mining company had an average total cost to replace reserves and produce copper of more than $3.30/lb in 2015
*The 22 major copper producers, based on 2015 production levels, need to replace an average of at least 500,000 mt of copper reserves each year.
Tomorrow's Copper Demand:
According to the Minerals Education Coalition, every American born will need 978 pounds of copper over a lifetime.
We can see in the above Wood MacKenzie, Macquarie Research graph (graph missing) from an August 2015 report, a projected refined shortage in 2019. The surplus forecast between now and then is diminutive in relation to the sheer size of the copper market and copper production often falls short of forecasts due to accidents, strikes, ore degradation or power shortages. Disruptions in the copper market averaged 900,000 tonnes of copper supply per year between 2004 and 2015.
We already have one billion people out of today's current population slated to become significant consumers by 2025.
Another 2.8 billion people will be added to the world between now and 2050. Most will not be Americans but they are going to want a lot of things that we in the western developed world take for granted—electricity, plumbing, appliances, AC etc.
Out of a total of 10 billion people in 2050, 8.2 billion of them are expected to be in developing countries.
How much copper could they expect to use over their lifetime?
Will they each use 978 lb's of copper in their life time? Is there 8 plus trillion pounds of new copper left to be mined in the world?
Probably not . . .
According to a September 2015 report from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) global land-based copper resources (contained in identified, mined, and undiscovered resources—undiscovered resource numbers are based on geological modeling, the copper should, might, be there) exceed 3 billion tons (6 trillion pounds). These identified, mined, and undiscovered resources do not include deep-sea nodules and submarine massive sulfides.
Conclusion:
If we mined every last discovered, and undiscovered, pound of land based copper the expected 8.2 billion people in the developing world would only get three quarters of the way towards copper use parity per capita with the U.S.
Of course the rest of us, the other 1.8 billion people expected to be on this planet by 2050, aren't going to be easing up, we're still going to be using copper at prestigious rates while our eastern cousins play catch up.
Copper use parity isn't going to happen, it can't.
It's my opinion the developing world will not get a third of the way to our development levels here in the west before we all run out of USGS stated copper resources to mine.
Consider that this game of 'Copper Catch-Up' is not going to happen in 100 years, it's happening now.
The world's exploding populati