Mike Fagan,
Editor
Sept. 20, 2024
The clean energy transition is in danger of stalling out due to scarcity of the world’s most critical “green metal” — copper!
Robert Edwards, copper analyst at CRU, says, “...there’s a narrative around resource scarcity and the green transition with EVs and renewables as well as the build-out of electricity grids. On paper it’s quite a substantial supply gap opening up over the next 10 years.”
The electrification-of-everything is expected to increase annual copper demand to 36.6 million tonnes by 2031 — with supply forecast to be around 30.1 million tonnes — creating a 6.5 million tonne shortfall at the start of the next decade, according to consulting firm McKinsey & Co.
Filling that massive supply gap won’t be easy due to a dearth of new copper discoveries and declining copper grades worldwide along with a lack of new mine construction projects in the global pipeline.
Imminent Approval to Launch Tiny $4 Gold Stock
Click here for full story
According to Glencore CEO Gary Nagle, “Whatever was planned to be built has been built. There is nothing coming behind [the projects now ramping up into production].”
What’s more, once a new copper discovery is made, it can take 10 years and oftentimes as long as 20 to 30 years for the metal to reach the supply chain.
When people think of copper, they immediately jump to electrical wiring and plumbing for home and commercial construction.
Yet, what most people are missing is copper’s rapidly emerging role in the green energy transition — specifically in the areas of EVs, solar panels, wind turbines, grid infrastructure, and, perhaps most importantly, Artificial Intelligence (AI).
As we speak, the world’s biggest tech firms are developing vast networks of hyperscale data centers to run their AI applications… and those data centers, in turn, require tons and tons of copper. And not just any old copper: 99.99% pure copper.
A few poignant examples:
- Meta plans to build an $800M, 715,000 sq ft hyperscale data center in Cheyenne, Wyoming. This will be Meta's 21st data center in the US and 25th globally.
- Microsoft plans to invest $3.2B in Sweden to add 20,000 GPUs to three data centers.
- NVIDIA has unveiled a digital blueprint for building next-generation data centers using NVIDIA Omniverse.
- Elon Musk’s xAI startup is designing what he claims will be “the most powerful AI in the world,” a model called Grok 3 at a massive data center to be based in Memphis, Tennessee.
- CoreWeave plans to open three new data centers in continental Europe before the end of the year.
- What it all adds up to is that the world is going to need a lot more of the red metal in the coming years and decades in order for the green energy transition to become a reality.
Think about this: In 2020, green uses of copper stood at just 4% of global copper consumption.
That figure is now projected to more than quadruple to 17% by 2030… less than 6 years from now!
We’re talking an additional 54% copper requirement over that same timeframe as the electrification-of-everything forges ahead.
Add to that, of the roughly 20 million tonnes of copper produced last year, more than half was from nations categorized as “Unstable” or “Extremely Unstable.”
Those factors are placing increased reliance on future supply from places like Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo — not exactly the most stable places to be mining.
So, the question begs… what about new copper extraction technologies that are emerging right here on North American soil?
The answer to that question, surprisingly, can be found out in the middle of nowhere in the desert sands of the American southwest.
What most people don’t realize is that there are millions and perhaps billions of tons of low-grade copper waste-rock just laying around mine sites in not only the southwestern United States but all around the world.
Turning those mountains of “throwaway” rock into sheets of AI-compliant, 99.99% pure copper — without digging any new holes and without costly refining — could literally turn the global copper supply equation on its head and make contrarian investors a lot of money in the process.
The Copper Bull Is Ready to Charge
A pound of copper is currently worth about $4.
But coming spikes in demand could quickly change all that. According to Goldman Sachs, it could soon be 5x… even 10x that amount. As their head of metals put it: “We’re not ruling out that copper could be as much as $50 a pound.”
That’s because traditional mining won’t be able to scale fast enough to meet rising demand. But a powerful new chemical formula could change all that — with early investors reaping the biggest rewards.
It’s happening right now… mind you, quietly, behind-the-scenes for the moment.
What you are looking at isn’t from some household name, multi-$Billion copper giant. No, this is the work of a soon-to-be-known small-cap copper innovator with advanced operations in the US portion of the Sonoran Desert.
This tiny company, which, by the way, has the backing of industry giant Rio Tinto, is advancing a groundbreaking copper extraction methodology we’ve aptly dubbed “Blue Water.”
Folks, this is what contrarian investing is all about. Not only is this cutting-edge technology transforming mere wasterock into 99.99% pure copper sheets in record time…
…our own John Carl of Digital Dispatch and Gerardo Del Real of Junior Resource Monthly were recently granted rare access to the company’s US headquarters where they witnessed this potentially industry-changing copper extraction methodology in real time.
John and Chris Curl, who together co-run Digital Dispatch, just released a feature-length video presentation on the company and the incredible potential of “Blue Water” that you can view right here.
With copper demand set to soar in the green energy transition… fueled in large part by the advent of AI… it’s an exclusive presentation you simply do not want to miss.
Your contrarian eyes will undoubtedly be impressed!
Yours in profits,
Mike Fagan
Editor, Daily Profit Cycle