Why the Copper Industry is Facing Supply Shortages

We see this kind of pop its head up amongst a lot of critical materials. We see it with uranium, we see it with silver. Copper is no different. There are about four distinct things, but you can make an argument that there are more than that. First, miners are grappling with declining ore grades.

What this means is that they've mined out all the easy-to-get-to material, and they have to move more dirt in order to get more copper out of the ground. This is an issue that we're seeing. Secondly, I think what you're seeing is very much related to that, in that a lot of the copper miners are focusing on expanding production at existing mines because that's where the copper is, and they know how to get there.

They're not investing as much in exploration as they should, and this is leading to the third issue, which is a downstream impact of that. We're not really having these major copper discoveries like we're accustomed to seeing. Over the last decade, we've had 239 copper discoveries.

Of those, only about 14 would be considered major discoveries. While we're mining out these other mines that have been producing for decades upon decades, we're not finding these large discoveries to take over. Finally, one area where hopefully some of the direction we've seen come out of the White House and also out of the Canadian government is they're looking to streamline the permitting process. I think that could go a long way in shortening the lead time to get from discovery to production, which could be 15 years or more in many cases.