Oil shaped the twentieth century. It drew borders, set the terms of trade and made a handful of countries powerful for as long as the world depended on what they had. Copper is now playing the same role in this century, and it is moving faster.
Every wind farm, electric vehicle, solar array and data centre runs on copper before it runs on anything else. New mines cannot arrive fast enough to meet demand, and the most practical source of new supply is sitting at operations already running, locked in ore and waste that conventional processing has left behind.
Goldman Sachs made the comparison, and the numbers support it. An electric vehicle contains roughly 70 kg of copper, about twice the amount in a comparable combustion vehicle. A 3 MW wind turbine uses around 4.7 tonnes, and the global grid needs to grow from roughly 75 million kilometres today to 200 million kilometres by 2050.
Artificial intelligence has added demand nobody planned for, with data centres alone potentially consuming 250,000 to 550,000 tonnes of copper a year by 2030. Aluminium is the only serious substitute, and it runs hotter and less efficiently.
Supply is heavily concentrated. Five countries produced roughly 70% of the world’s mined copper in 2023, and China refines around 45% of global supply, which means prices increasingly reflect decisions made in a handful of capitals. In August 2026 copper hit a record high on weak mine supply growth, storm disruption in Chile and the Democratic Republic of Congo’s ban on concentrate exports.
The International Energy Agency projects a 30% copper shortfall against demand by 2035 under current policy settings, widening beyond 40% under a net zero pathway. None of the three constraints behind it responds quickly to capital.
Ore grades have fallen by roughly 40% since 1991, so every tonne of copper means moving and processing more rock. Only 14 new copper deposits were found in the past decade, against 225 in the 23 years before that. Mines that came online between 2020 and 2023 averaged 17.9 years from discovery to production, which means a deposit found today delivers its first copper in the 2040s.
Recycling will help, although the copper going into wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicles now will stay in service for 15 to 25 years before it can be recovered.
If discovery cannot close the gap in time, supply has to come from deposits and materials that already exist. There is a great deal of both.
The first is chalcopyrite, the most abundant copper mineral on earth and one of the most stubborn. In a conventional leach it reacts slowly and gives up only a fraction of its copper, which is why nearly 80% of the world’s copper is extracted from sulphides by smelting instead. Whatever the precise mechanism, conventional leaching leaves most of the copper in the rock.
The second inventory sits above ground. Old leach heaps, flotation waste, tailings and smelter slag have accumulated at copper operations for decades, and volumes keep growing as grades fall. At one large European producer, flotation tailings make up 94% of mined ore, roughly 28 million tonnes a year, stored in a single facility covering 2,100 hectares.
This material has already been mined, crushed and hauled. It sits on permitted sites with power, water, roads and a workforce in place, and recovering it can help offset closure liabilities. Reaching it requires no exploration and no new ground.
Orivium’s platform uses an electric current to convert the leach solution already circulating through a mine into one of the strongest oxidisers in chemistry, generated continuously on site. The process runs at ambient temperature and pressure, regenerates its own reagent in a closed loop, produces hydrogen usable on site, and connects to existing solvent extraction and electrowinning circuits with no changes downstream.
In testing to date, the platform has recovered more than 95% of copper from chalcopyrite ore within 30 days, against control recoveries of 10% to 30% over months to years. Those results come from more than 7,500 hours under leach across 17 feedstock types, with independent validation by the University of Sydney and the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO).
The results are from laboratory and large-column testing, and continuous operation at commercial scale is still to be demonstrated. Orivium is establishing anchor plants in Orange, New South Wales, and Denver, Colorado, to run customer feedstocks at commercial scale and produce the evidence a deployment decision requires.
Exploration and permitting reform remain necessary, and both work on decade-long horizons. Unlocking copper from ground that is already open is a processing challenge, and processing challenges can be solved on a timescale that matters. It also means existing operations, including those nearing the end of their planned lives, hold copper their current flowsheets cannot yet reach.
For once, the environmental argument and the supply argument point the same way. The fastest available tonne of copper is the one that requires no new ground to be opened.
Demand from electric vehicles, renewable energy, grid expansion and data centres is rising faster than new supply can be developed. Ore grades have fallen around 40% since 1991, few major deposits are being discovered, and new mines take close to 18 years to reach production. The IEA projects a 30% shortfall against demand by 2035.
Goldman Sachs made the comparison because the global economy is becoming dependent on copper in the same way it once depended on oil. Supply is concentrated in a few countries, there is no practical substitute, and copper prices increasingly reflect geopolitical decisions as well as market conditions.
Chalcopyrite is a copper iron sulphide mineral and the most abundant source of copper on earth. In conventional leaching it reacts very slowly, an effect usually attributed to a surface layer that forms on the mineral and seals it against further reaction, so most of its copper stays in the rock.
Yes. Tailings, old leach heaps, flotation waste and slag all contain residual copper. Grades are low, but the material has already been mined and crushed and sits on permitted sites with infrastructure in place, which makes it an attractive source of new supply when it can be processed economically.
Not yet. Results to date come from laboratory and large-column testing, independently validated by the University of Sydney and ANSTO. Orivium is establishing anchor plants in Orange, New South Wales, and Denver, Colorado, to demonstrate continuous operation at commercial scale.
A copper iron sulphide mineral and the most abundant copper mineral on earth.
Ore in which copper is chemically bound with sulphur. Sulphide ores account for most of the world’s copper production.
Dissolving copper out of ore with a chemical solution, often by irrigating crushed ore stacked in heaps.
The formation of a surface layer on a mineral that slows or stops further chemical reaction.
A chemical that drives the reaction releasing copper from sulphide minerals into solution.
A process that separates copper minerals from crushed ore by attaching them to air bubbles, producing a copper concentrate.
The finely ground residue left after valuable minerals have been separated from processed ore.
The glassy by-product of smelting, which can retain copper that was never fully separated.
The two-stage process that takes copper from a leach solution and plates it out as high-purity copper cathode.
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