America needs more copper.
Every part of the chain has to expand to deliver it: more ore permitted and mined, more capacity to smelt and refine it, and allied supply while domestic capacity is built. The country still mines copper. What it largely stopped doing is finishing it.
That view is set out here at three distances: how the capacity was built and lost, what the gap looks like now, and where copper sits in the rebuilding of American industry.
Copper: An American History
How the country built the capacity to make its own copper, and how it lost it.
From Indigenous metalworkers and Paul Revere’s rolling mill to Butte, Anaconda and national electrification. For most of the twentieth century the United States refined nearly all the copper it consumed. This is the story of the century in which that was true, and of its drawdown.
Read →The American Copper Imperative
The gap as it stands, and what closing it actually takes.
The United States consumes about 2,200 kt of refined copper a year, mines about 1,000 kt, and refines 850 kt. Sixteen primary smelters operated here in 1976; two operate today. Closing that gap takes every part of the chain, and S&P Global’s own scenarios say where the constraint binds.
Read →Copper: The Reindustrialization Metal
Where copper sits in the rebuilding of American industry.
Data centers, the grid, defense manufacturing and reshored factories all run on copper, and America imports more than half of the refined copper it uses. Founders, investors and policymakers are converging on critical minerals, and copper is the material the build-out runs on.
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