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's about, I'd say, probably four distinct things. You can make an argument that there's more than that, but first would be that miners are grappling with declining ore grades.

So 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, what you're seeing, 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.

They're not investing as much in exploration as they should. This is leading to the third issue, which is a downstream impact of that, is 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. So 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 with that. I'd say 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.