The Copper Shortage Killing the Green Dream
Wind, solar, EVs require 5-10x more copper than fossil fuels. Discovery rates crashed post-2015. Recycling provides 35%, demand doubling.
They knew.
For at least a decade, the people running the world’s copper mines understood the math. Building one offshore wind turbine requires ten thousand kilograms of copper. Replacing a coal plant demands five times more metal. The green energy transition would require doubling global copper consumption by 2035.
And they stopped looking for it anyway.
Between 2014 and 2023, the mining industry discovered exactly fourteen major copper deposits. In previous decades, they found nearly two hundred.
The geology didn’t get harder. After the 2015 commodity crash, executives decided discovering copper was bad for quarterly earnings. They slashed exploration budgets. Paid dividends. Bought back shares.
Let the pipeline run dry.
Now the bill is coming due.
In December 2025, London Metal Exchange copper stockpiles fell below one hundred thousand tonnes. That translates to less than two days of global demand. The entire world’s backup supply of the metal that makes electric cars move and wind turbines spin. Gone in forty-eight hours if something goes wrong.
Something went wrong.
The Grasberg mine in Indonesia, second-largest on earth, was buried under eight hundred thousand tonnes of mud. Half a million tonnes of annual production vanished. Recovery won’t happen until 2027.
The market is hemorrhaging.
Copper prices exploded past eleven thousand six hundred dollars per tonne. Some analysts predict fifteen thousand. These aren’t speculative bubbles. This is what happens when the physical world runs out of options.
The United States takes twenty-nine years to permit and build a copper mine. Canada takes twenty-seven. A child born when a deposit is discovered will be nearly thirty before any copper comes out.
These timelines protect incumbents. They strangle competition. They ensure scarcity becomes permanent.
Meanwhile, the ore keeps getting worse. In 1900, copper ore averaged 1.5% metal content. By 2020: 0.6%, as one recent analysis documents. Mining companies now dig up, crush, and process more than twice as much rock to get the same copper. More rock means more energy, more cost, more carbon.
The green transition is being built on increasingly dirty extraction.
The industry knew grades were falling. They knew new deposits were rare. Their response was to keep mining aging giants until they literally collapsed.
Chile’s El Teniente mine suffered rock bursts in 2024. The mountain is exhausted. Production dropped to twenty-five year lows.
In Panama, the Cobre Panamá mine was shut down overnight in 2023. Fully operational. Responsible for two percent of global supply. Government tore up the contract. Three hundred fifty thousand tonnes per year erased.
Foreign investors learned their lesson: even signed contracts mean nothing when politics shift.
And demand keeps accelerating.
Every electric vehicle needs eighty-three kilograms of copper versus twenty-three for a gas car. Governments have mandated that half of all vehicles sold by 2030 must be electric.
Automotive copper demand is about to quadruple right as mines run dry.
Then there’s the wildcard nobody modeled: artificial intelligence.
A single hyperscale data center requires twenty-seven tonnes of copper per megawatt. Microsoft’s Chicago facility used over two thousand tonnes for eighty megawatts. Massive busbars to feed racks consuming forty kilowatts each. Liquid cooling systems. Heat exchangers to prevent silicon from melting.
Goldman Sachs projects data center power demand will increase 165% by 2030. That’s a double hit: copper for the data centers themselves, and copper for the power plants and transmission lines to feed them.
AI wasn’t in anyone’s energy models. It showed up anyway.
UBS forecasts a deficit of 407,000 tonnes in 2026. S&P Global projects ten million tonnes missing by 2035. That’s not a shortage. That’s the difference between a world that transitions to clean energy and one that doesn’t.
Copper takes thirty to fifty years to come back from building wiring. The copper being recycled today was consumed in the 1980s. Recycling provides 35% of supply.
Demand is doubling.
Some argue substitution. Use aluminum instead. But aluminum has only sixty percent of copper’s conductivity. It takes up more space, corrodes faster. In offshore wind turbines battling salt spray, aluminum is a non-starter. In electric vehicle motors where efficiency is everything, aluminum means higher losses and shorter range.
The industry’s last hope is new extraction technology. Companies claim they can leach copper from low-grade ores previously considered waste. It’s promising. It’s unproven at scale.
And it won’t be ready in time.
Meanwhile, politicians keep making climate commitments pretending the copper will materialize. Paris Agreement. Net Zero by 2050. All of it assumes the metal exists.
The International Energy Agency shows committed mine supply falling thirty percent short of what’s needed.
When the shortage becomes undeniable, when automakers can’t get copper for motors, when utilities can’t wire wind farms, when the transition stalls, who suffers?
Not the executives who spent a decade buying back stock. Not the politicians who wrote climate laws without checking if materials existed.
Everyone else.
The communities that won’t get clean energy. The workers whose jobs depend on factories that can’t secure supply. The planet that needed the transition to happen on schedule.
They chose dividends over discovery. Stock buybacks over exploration. Short-term profits over long-term planning.
Now the world gets to live with less than two days of copper in reserve.
And hope nothing else goes wrong.
My Open Tabs:
The Future of Copper - Will the looming supply gap short-circuit the energy transition?
Copper shortage is forcing faster aluminium adoption, Norsk Hydro says
Stunning stupidity. Wasn’t aware of copper.