Why the Copper Industry is Facing Supply Shortages

we see this kind of pop its head up um amongst a lot of critical materials.

We see it with uranium, we see it with silver.

Um copper is no different.

There's about I'd say probably four distinct things.

You can make an argument that there's more than that.

Um but first would be uh that miners are grappling with declining uh ore grades.

So what this basically 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.

Uh so this is an issue that we're seeing.

Um, secondly, I I think what you're seeing, it's very much related to that, is that a lot of the copper miners are focusing on expanding production at existing mines because that's where the copper's at and they know how to get there.

Um, that they're not investing as much in exploration uh as they should.

Um, and this is leading kind of to the third issue, which is kind of a downstream impact of that, is that we're not really having these major copper discoveries like we're accustomed to seeing.

Uh over the last decade we've had 239 copper discoveries.

Of those only about 14 would be considered major discoveries.

So while we're mining out these other mines that have been producing for decades upon decade, um we're not finding these large discoveries to take over with that.

I just say finally one one area where hopefully some of the direction we've seen come out of the White House and also uh out of the Canadian government is they're looking to streamline the permitting process.

I think that could go a long way of shortening the lead time to get from uh discovery to production which could be you know 15 years or more uh in many cases.