Copper, the red metal at the heart of electrification and tariffs.
- Terraquota
- Jun 29
- 4 min read
Updated: Jul 2
This article is part of our “One metal a month” series, in which we explore one strategic metal at a time and its role in the energy transition and global supply chains. These materials are increasingly shaping industrial competitiveness and geopolitics, while raising urgent questions about security of supply, recycling, environmental impact and price volatility. This is the June edition of the series.
The United States is about to make a decision about copper, and the whole market is watching. Here is the background. The US does not produce enough copper to supply its own factories, so it relies heavily on imports. In 2025 it started taxing some of those imports, putting a 50% tariff on copper products like wire and pipe. But it left out refined copper, the raw metal itself and the most traded form. The question now is whether that raw metal gets taxed too.
That decision has a deadline. The US Commerce Secretary has until 30 June to recommend to President Donald Trump whether to put tariffs on refined copper or not. A tax would make imported copper more expensive for American manufacturers, so buyers have spent months rushing to bring copper into the country before any tariff hits. That rush has pushed prices up and down all year.
Although, that price volatility and overall increase is not new. Since 2000, the price of copper has known an increase of +631% (nominal, not inflation-adjusted).
Copper is having a moment, yet again.
Copper wires the modern world.
Copper has always mattered, even if quietly. It is the metal humans have used the longest, for around 10,000 years. The Romans mined it on the island of Cyprus and named it after the island. That is where the word copper comes from. It was mostly used for jewellery or decorative items at first, being soft and malleable, then became the masterpiece of the Bronze Age (bronze being made of copper and tin) and was used for weapons and tools. Other uses included coins and miscellaneous like parts of musical instruments.
As time went on, other properties were found in copper: extremely good electricity (only second to silver) and heat conductivity. Those two qualities are why copper wires the modern world, and is the foundational metal to electrification.
Copper is useful almost everywhere. It is essential for traditional industries like manufacturing and construction. It is just as essential for the newer green-energy and digital industries. The same metal runs through household plumbing, solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars and the power systems inside AI data centres. Demand from renewable energy, electric vehicles and AI is rising fast. Copper is now the third most widely-used metal, after iron and aluminium.
The problem is that there may not be enough copper to go around. There is plenty in the ground, with the biggest reserves in Chile, Australia, Peru, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the United States and China. But mining it is another matter. In 2025 Chile mined the most, about 5.3 million tonnes, followed by the DRC with 3.2 million, Peru with 2.7 million, China with 1.8 million and Russia with 1.3 million. China is only the fourth-largest miner, but that number hides where its real power lies.
The problem is that there may not be enough copper to go around.
First, the supply shortage. The world is not producing enough copper to meet what it will need in the coming years, and the gap is expected to open up in the late 2020s (meaning very very soon). The International Energy Agency warns of a supply shortfall of around 30% by 2035 in its main forecast. There are a few reasons. The quality of copper ore is falling, with the average grade down 40% since 1991, so miners have to dig up far more rock to get the same amount of metal. New mines cost more and are harder to build. And fewer new deposits are being found. Of all the copper deposits discovered in the last 35 years, only about 5% were found in the last decade.
Now back to China. Its strength is not in mining but in processing. China handles more than half of the world's refined copper, runs four of the five largest copper smelters on earth, and processes over 12 million tonnes a year. It even imports around 70% of the raw copper it needs, taking ore from mines around the world, refining it, and selling the finished metal back out. This makes China the key processing hub for copper, no matter how much it mines itself. It is a familiar pattern from this series: with manganese and molybdenum too, the bottleneck was not the mine, but the refinery.
This is why the 30 June decision matters so much. The US cannot mine or refine nearly enough copper on its own, which leaves it dependent on a market one country largely controls. A tariff might push the US to build up its own supply, but new mines and smelters take many years.
Whatever the President decides this month, the bigger picture is clear: the world is switching to electricity faster than it can produce the copper that switch depends on.
Authored by Diane Naffah (Terraquota), reviewed by Irina Chèvre (Terraquota)
30th June 2026
