The Looming Copper Shortage in 2026

All right. Now, S&P Global recently warned that copper supply could fall 10 million metric tons short of demand by 2040. What are the biggest obstacles in bringing new copper production online? And how realistic are these long-term shortage projections?

I think the growing consensus is that over the long term, we do expect to see shortfalls. There's some variations around it. I've seen 7 million, 10 million. That tends to change based on who's doing the projections, but I think the prevailing fact is that we're expected to see a prolonged supply deficit. A lot of that is being attributed to declining grades that we see at copper mines.

Major discoveries just aren't happening to the same extent that we've seen in past years. Supply disruptions are a key thing that's really been pushing down supply this year as we've had many major disruptions in the market. And then the long lead times to get new mines up and running could take 15 years or 30 years in some cases. All of those make it difficult to increase supply, which is leading to these larger projections.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance just put out their annual report on transition metals last month. One of the pieces that they've noted is in order just to close the supply gap, you need to invest about $122 billion by 2035. So, taking a step back and looking at this from an investment standpoint, there's a significant opportunity in our view in the copper miner space because they're the ones that are in the front lines of increasing this primary production, and that's where we expect to see a lot of the investment happen over the next decade to two decades.