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Figure 1: Left: Copper Queen Mine in the early 1900s; Right: George Warren. 

Figure 2: Percent of world production by major ore type from 1800 to 2000. “Other ore type” category includes any ore type not classified by the other four categories (e.g., magmatic, Ni-Cu, lode gold, and native copper). Of especial interest is the long term dominance of production from porphyry copper deposits over the last century. 

Figure 3: Materials flow diagram summarizing cradle to grave copper cycle.

Table 1: The characteristics of physical flow based analytical & simulation based models, uni-market analytical & simulation based models, multi-market analytical & simulation based models.  

Table 2: Categorization of existing literatures based on whether they are physical based, uni-market or multi-market on the horizontal axis, and whether they are analytical based or simulation based on the vertical axis.  

Table 3: The aspects of the structural commodity market that the surveyed literature has addressed or left unaddressed. We identify the aspects least addressed by existing papers that play a role in leading to potentially biased estimations.  

Table 4: This is a summary of how are model output and scarcity assessments likely to be influenced by not properly addressing these key features in the model.   

Aggregate Demand

. . .

North America

Europe

China

. . .

Transportation

Building & Construction

Electrical

Volume Driver

Intensity of Use per Unit

Short Term Elasticity

Long Term

Elasticity

Figure 4: Demand breakdown by region, sector, volume drive vs. intensity of use, and short term vs. long term elasticity.

Table 5: The short term and long term elasticity estimates obtained from the ARDL model for buildings & construction, electrical, and transportation sectors for China (representing emerging economies) and the US (representing developed countries).

Total Deposits

Incentive Deposits

Operating Mines

Retired Mines

Figure 5: Flow chart representing how copper is produced from prospecting to production to deposit depletion. 

Figure 6: A typical copper project cycle beginning from exploration and evaluation to ultimate production.  

Table 6: Assessment results for identified and undiscovered copper worldwide, by region. “90” indicates a 90-percent chance of at least the amount shown, with other percentiles similarly defined. Columns may not add to total because of rounding. Gray shading indicates no quantitative assessment.  

Demand

Adjusted Demand

+

Adjusted Supply

Copper Price

Substitute Price

Supply

Supply Stock

Demand Stock

_

_

+

_

+

_

_

+

Figure 7: (Simplified) system dynamics diagram of the copper market with copper price and substitute mechanisms highlighted.   

Figure 8: Sensitivity of the deposit model to the ultimately recoverable resource, the supply-demand interaction term, and the mine online rate. (Mudd 2014)

Table 7: Scarcity measures for different assumptions of the quantity of total reserve.

Figure 9: Price and consumption projections given different assumptions on the size of total reserve.

Table 8: Scarcity measures for different assumptions of copper mine opening criteria (Internal rate of return).

Figure 10: Price and consumption projections given different assumptions on copper mine opening criteria (internal rate of return).

Table 9: Scarcity measures for different assumptions of the saturation level of housing space for the emerging economy.

Figure 11:  Price and consumption projections given different assumptions on the saturation level of per capita residence space in the emerging economy.

Table 10: Scarcity measures for different assumptions of electric vehicle penetration rate. 

Figure 12: Price and consumption projections given different assumptions on electric vehicle penetration rates.

Table 11: Scarcity measures for different assumptions of the magnitude of long-term elasticities of demand. 

Figure 13: Price and consumption projections given different assumptions on the magnitude of long term elasticity.

Figure 14: Copper consumption forecast based on whether we use discovered reserve (2,100 million tonnes) or total reserve (5,600 million tonnes which includes undiscovered reserve), and whether we assume there is short term and long term elasticity of demand.