Domestic “Red Metal” Critical to America’s Clean Energy Future

The United States and China are battling to secure stakes in copper mines around the world, and the stakes have never been higher. In a clash of titans, America and its free-market economy values are competing against the Asian superpower with its stranglehold on copper resources and processing. 

With copper, the “red metal” critical to America’s clean energy future, it’s time to focus on developing domestic assets and amp up the country’s process engineering. 

“We are in a second Cold War,” said Brian Menell, CEO of TechMet, in a Wall Street Journal article titled, Why the World has Gone Cuckoo for Copper. “It is a competition between Western values and dictatorship.”

U.S. Playing to Win for Copper Assets

The Biden administration’s announcement requiring increased tariffs for Chinese goods, under Section 301, will boost domestic copper production and imports from geopolitically friendly nation which will reduce reliance on China. But America clearly has catch up to do to compete on a level playing field with China.

“The twilight of domestic American process engineering is the major impediment to a secure domestic supply of critical minerals, refined metals, alloys, fine chemicals, and the manufactured items dependent on them,” says Jack Lifton,  Co-Chairman of the Critical Minerals Institute (CMI), which includes copper on its inaugural CMI Critical Minerals List, highlighting copper’s fundamental role in “economic growth and technological advancement.”

“The Critical Minerals Institute’s list reflects the real markets of demand and supply, unlike academic lists produced by bureaucrats,” says Lifton.  “For example, copper is indispensable because without it, we cannot produce, distribute, or use electricity, making it essential for sustaining our modern electro-centric age.”

Moving Domestic Mineral Processing to the “Front Burner”

With the mass production of rare earth minerals and magnets moved from the United States to China in the 1970s, America needed to put the processing of minerals and the development of its own assets on the front burner. 

Lifton, who coined the term “technology metals” in 2007 to describe those metals whose electronic properties enable the miniaturization of electronic technologies, says that today, “China’s process engineering is where America was at the height of the Cold War era.”

“There can be no domestic American self-sufficiency or security of supply of raw materials and their processing without a dedicated program to understand the problem and a dedicated plan to solve it,” says Lifton.

While China is eating America’s technology metals lunch today, the superpower takes few environmental safeguards in their mineral processing. America is primed to take their metals processing mantle back to process and produce minerals in an expeditious and environmentally responsible manner.

Arizona Is the U.S. Leader in Copper Deposits

According to GlobalData’s mines and projects database, there are over 709 copper mines operating globally, with 28 in the U.S. The largest U.S. copper producer is Freeport-McMoRanc, with four formidable domestic copper assets – Bagdad,  Morenci, Safford, and Sieritta mines – all in the state of Arizona, which has the largest cluster of copper deposits in the United States.  

Arizona is the 7th best global jurisdiction for mining according to the Fraser Institute and the state produces 71% of the United States’ total copper output. With the current copper supply deficit, it is likely that short-term solutions to the crisis will come from smaller, more efficient copper operations which are less expensive to build and have less environmental impacts. 

World Copper’s Zonia mine in Arizona fits into the new copper market dynamics perfectly offering a lower cost operation that can be permitted and constructed in half the time required on average to develop new mines.

The alternative to geopolitically-friending copper mines and mineral processing is not any mines but Chinese-run mines and minerals processing with lax environmental regulations.