Investing News Network
- Benchmark: Surging Copper Prices Highlight Looming Global Supply Challenges (2026-03-10)
Copper prices surged through 2025 and into 2026, placing the red metal firmly back into the spotlight as concerns about a looming global supply shortfall mount among market watchers.
Analysts say the tightening outlook reflects a powerful mix of rising demand — driven by urbanization, the energy transition and the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence infrastructure — against a backdrop of stagnant mine supply.
Speaking at the Benchmark Summit, held in Toronto on March 2, Carlos Piñeiro Cruz, principal copper analyst at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, outlined the key forces shaping the copper market in the near term, while warning that structural supply challenges could intensify over the coming decade.
Copper supply side increasingly tight
It's no secret that the current copper supply and demand situation is untenable.
In 2025, mining disruptions led to significant declines in output. Cruz noted that production in Q4 2024 exceeded that of any quarter in 2025; in fact, the sector lost around 1 million metric tons (MT) of output in total.
Much of the reduction was due to unforeseen situations, such as the mudslide at Freeport-McMoRan's (NYSE:FCX) Grasberg in Indonesia, seismic events at Ivanhoe Mines' (TSX:IVN,OTCQX:IVPAF) Kamoa-Kakula in the Democratic Republic of Congo and worker strikes at BHP's (ASX:BHP,NYSE:BHP,LSE:BHP) Escondida in Chile.
While the operations will eventually recover, the incidents came at a time when the copper market is increasingly tight and is expected to enter into a supply deficit in the coming years.
Cruz is predicting copper production growth of 1.5 percent in 2025, suggesting that the rate is behind what is expected from refined copper demand. The majority of the increase will come from mines returning to normal operations, with additional amounts from projects or expansions that began ramping up in 2025.
Cruz stated that pre-disruption growth was originally forecast at around 2 million MT in 2026, but has since been downgraded by around 700,000 MT, with the majority of the reduction coming from Escondida.
“We see that supply coming in this year will be highly skewed towards H2 as mines recover, with a 9 percent increase between Q1 and Q4, with most of this growth coming from South America, Africa and Asia, ex-China,” Cruz said.
From there, he expects growth to stabilize in 2027 at a much higher rate than this year, with Africa to experience a faster growth rate than the overall market. In the long run, Cruz predicts a compound annual growth rate of 0.9 percent between 2025 and 2035, with copper output peaking in 2033 at 27 million MT.
Copper demand drivers to watch
One of the main areas Cruz focused on was the acceleration of demand driven by the energy transition, artificial intelligence and technology. A lot of the new demand is coming from electric vehicles (EVs) — while the amount of copper in each EV is seen declining, demand growth will remain strong as sales increase.
“We do think that copper density in EVs is going to go down substantially. From 2010 to 2035, it’s going to go from 85 kilograms per unit to 64 kilograms per unit. In spite of this, we still think that copper demand from battery EVs and hybrid vehicles will grow substantially from around 2.3 million MT in 2025 to 6 million MT in 2035,” Cruz said.
It's not just EVs — other technologies, like artificial intelligence, data centers and communications, are placing additional strains on electrical infrastructure. Increasing demand for new power lines, electrical generators and energy storage is further bolstering downstream demand for copper.
“We anticipate demand from these particular sectors will grow from around 10 million MT in 2025 to 14 million MT in 2035, with most of the demand coming from energy transmission and generation,” Cruz said.
He went on to explain that transmission and generation account for 77 percent of the anticipated growth.
Cruz thinks energy demand has been overshadowed by the growth in data centers, where he suggested that copper demand will increase by only about 400,000 MT between 2025 and 2035.
“Of the growth I told you about from EVs with almost 4 million MT, or the demand from energy infrastructure with a little less than 3 million MT, it’s not that impressive. Although it still adds up to a substantial growth,” he said.
100 new copper mines by 2035?
The key takeaway from Cruz’s presentation was that a copper supply gap is developing. While he pointed out that the annual supply growth rate will come in at around 1 percent, demand is nearly double at 1.9 percent.
“This basically means that with the mines that currently exist, plus the projects that are under construction, we expect to see a difference in what needs to be mined and what will be mined in 2035 of around 7.4 million MT,” he said.
When probable projects are factored in, the supply gap narrows, but a 2.2 million MT shortfall still exists. However, these additional projects are not guaranteed. Cruz suggested that to avoid shortfalls, 100 new mines with output in the 75,000 MT range need to be built by 2035 — but this won’t be an easy task. Of the 10 largest mines in the world, only two were built after 2010; meanwhile, many of the others are decades or over 100 years old.
One reason new mines are scarce is long permitting processes, but Cruz also acknowledged that newly found large-scale deposits are at greater depths and lower grades. This has led to a scarcity of greenfield projects, with most growth coming from expansions at existing mines, a trend Cruz expects to continue over the coming years.
“Looking ahead, we expect this trend to continue to the point that we anticipate that by 2031, new production from greenfield projects will be half of what it was in 2011,” he said.
Additionally, Cruz said the copper market is becoming increasingly bifurcated, with China set to be a dominant force in both production and refinement of the red metal moving forward.
“The supply gap, or the future copper shortage, is something that the industry has been warning about for years now. The truth is, it seems not a lot of people are paying attention to it, but China has,” he said.
Cruz explained that China’s involvement in the Democratic Republic of Congo was the result of extensive planning and considerable investment. In fact, Chinese companies have collectively surpassed western producers and are securing their own supply chain.
Investor takeaway
Overall, Cruz believes the copper sector is well positioned for investment.
While he has some concerns that smelting capacity is nearing saturation, he expects the situation to return to balance by 2031 and thinks that competition for concentrate will keep producer costs lower until then.
The combination of low treatment charges, high copper prices and even higher by-product gold, silver and molybdenum prices has helped increase margins and profitability for operators.
“We think that the market is in a very good position right now for miners at least. You could argue that for smelters it's good as well despite the treatment and refinement charges, and we think that if these factors last a little bit longer, we expect some of these projects to bring the copper that humanity needs,” Cruz said.
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Securities Disclosure: I, Dean Belder, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article.
- Canada's Junior Miners Still in Challenging Financial Climate as Metals Prices Climb (2026-03-10)
Canada is a premier destination for mineral exploration and mining, but the nation’s exploration-stage companies are still struggling to attract investment dollars.
The country's appeal is showcased in the Fraser Institute's most recent Annual Survey of Mining Companies, which tracks the investment attractiveness of global mining jurisdictions. It places the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Saskatchewan among the world’s top mining jurisdictions, behind only Nevada.
The Canadian mining industry “serves as a proxy for the global (mining) industry” as it is home to “the largest concentration of public mineral companies in the world,” with Toronto at “the center of the mining finance universe,” said Douglas Silver, partner and senior advisor at Benwerrin Investment Partners, during his presentation at this year's Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) convention, held last week.
Jeff Killeen, director of policy and programs for PDAC, shared similar sentiments in his own presentation, telling conference attendees, “Almost 30 percent of every dollar raised somewhere in the world for the (mining) sector comes through the Canadian marketplace: the TSX, the Venture and the CSE.”
Canada’s unique tax incentives crucial for mining investment
Canada owes its leading position in the global mining industry to its large landmass and abundance of natural resources. However, both Silver and Killeen pointed out that the nation’s flow-through share tax incentive — unique to Canada — is also “incredibly critical” to the success of the natioin's mining sector.
Flow-through shares are a highly specialized financing tool that allow resource companies to transfer eligible exploration and development expenses to investors, who then deduct them from their own taxable income.
Under the Mineral Exploration Tax Credit (METC), funds generated from this type of capital raise must be put into a project within 18 months. There's also the Critical Mineral Exploration Tax Credit (CMETC), which applies to critical minerals used for batteries and magnets, including rare earths, nickel, uranium, lithium and graphite, among others.
Generational shift shrinking pool of mining investors
Although Canada dominates the global mining finance sector and is teeming with multiple types of mineral deposits, it's becoming increasingly difficult for the nation’s exploration-stage companies to attract investment dollars.
The tight financial landscape for today’s explorers stems in part from both a complex regulatory system that limits the areas open to mining activity, and a lack of proper infrastructure in the more remote regions of the country. Both of these shortcomings strike at the heart of perceived jurisdictional risk for both retail and institutional investors.
During his presentation, Killeen highlighted a few of the key financing trends affecting access to capital in the mineral industry, noting that last year saw a dramatic uptick in investment in the mining sector.
Where is capital originating from? Most of it was equity raised through private placements, which poses a problem as it represents a very narrow investor base that consists of friends and family of the management team and strategic investors that probably already own shares in the company.
“That just tells us that we're not broadening the investor base. We're not pulling in more investors. There's no more new retail folks coming in investing in shares in Canada. This tells us that we're in a very risky balance in terms of who actually can fund the sector through the next generation,” he warned the PDAC audience.
“There is a lesser population of retail investors as time goes on. You know that the Boomer generation is going away in terms of an investment pool, and the next generation isn't necessarily replicating that.”
Silver also views the generational shift in the investment landscape as a problem for raising money in the mining industry. “There's no question from what I've read and heard that the younger generations don't pick individual stocks. They tend to lean towards ETFs or crypto or other stuff,” he said. “Crypto is definitely competing with mining.”
Gold grabbing all the dollars
Canada’s minerals industry did experience a strong rebound in terms of equity investment in 2025, but it was heavily targeted at producers and developers with large-scale, near-production projects. Gold dominated, but investment also increased in projects associated with critical minerals like lithium, nickel, copper and graphite.
“How much is going to the bottom end, to those sub-$100 million market cap companies, the lion's share of the junior explorers that are out there? Well, in the Canadian marketplace, only about 10 percent of every dollar raised is getting down to those size of companies,” explained Killeen, highlighting the discrepancy.
In his view, the lack of investment over the past decade is bringing about a decline in grassroots exploration.
Gold is grabbing many mineral investment dollars, not only because its price is surging to unprecedented highs, but also because there’s a faster return on investment compared to other metals. Killeen said that’s due to the fact that gold mining doesn’t require large amounts of infrastructure such as railways and ports.
“In some cases, you don't need roads. The capital to develop a gold mine might be one-sixth of, one-10th of or one-20th of a copper mine or a zinc mine,” he commented. “So the rate of return for the average investor who's looking at an exploration stock saying, ‘Could I get money back into this? Could I get value back into this?’ Today that timeframe is much shorter, and the capital to bring it to market is much lower.”
Looking at copper, which is much more capital intensive, Killeen said production is down nearly 30 percent from seven or eight years ago. Reserves are also down, even though rising copper prices have resulted in more resources being upgraded to reserves. Silver agreed with that take — his research shows that the Canadian mining industry is overflowing with gold companies. Of the 1,555 mining companies in Canada in 2024, 42 percent of them were gold-focused firms compared to only 17 percent for copper, the second highest amount.
“So why do we have so many gold companies? I think the answer is pretty obvious to me, which is if you want to build a porphyry copper mine, you've got to go raise $5 (billion) or $10 billion,” said Silver. “That's very difficult in the mining industry, because we just don't have that much gross capital available to us relative to what some of the other industries have ... but you can build a gold mine for a couple hundred million (dollars)."
Despite the massive focus on gold, Killeen and Silver both noted that Canada is actually seeing increasing exploration activity for rare earths, lithium, cobalt, graphite and uranium.
Improving the investment case for Canada's juniors
Killeen said PDAC and its members are pushing for the Canadian government to make the METC and CMETC permanent to bring more investment into mineral exploration in greenfield regions and making new discoveries.
Last year, flow-through shares generated C$1.6 billion in investment into the sector, according to Silver’s research, or about 76 percent of funding received by mineral exploration companies in Canada.
“When you look at the role of Canadian flow through, it's so incredibly critical to Canadian mining,” he said. Silver too is advocating for the mining industry and investors to “fight for flow through way more than you do."
To address infrastructure challenges for bringing critical metals projects into production sooner for a quicker return on investment, Killeen suggested more pension funds investing in Canada and easing government regulations.
“We need them cooperating together with the federal government to develop major infrastructure that doesn't exist beyond 100 kilometers from the border,” he said.
Killeen noted that “the world is changing” and governments, including Canada’s, are becoming more focused on securing domestic sources of critical minerals. For example, at PDAC, Tim Hodgson, Canada’s minister of energy and natural resources, announced a C$3.6 billion suite of investments targeting the critical minerals sector.
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Securities Disclosure: I, Melissa Pistilli, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article.
- David Erfle: Gold, Silver Under Pressure, Key Price Levels to Watch (2026-03-10)
David Erfle, editor and founder of Junior Miner Junky, explains why gold and silver prices took a hit not long after war in the Middle East was announced.
While the near term could be volatile, he said the long-term outlook for precious metals is strong.
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Securities Disclosure: I, Charlotte McLeod, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article.
- John Feneck: Gold, Silver to Retest Highs, "Don't Get Off the Horse" (2026-03-10)
John Feneck, portfolio manager and consultant at Feneck Consulting, explains why he expects gold and silver prices to retest January's highs, noting that he sees investors beginning to rotate away from the tech sector and toward commodities.
"My suggestion is don't get off the horse, right?" he told the Investing News Network.
"This sector is on fire, this sector will continue to rally."
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Securities Disclosure: I, Charlotte McLeod, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article.
- Tavi Costa: Gold, Silver Stocks to Rerate, "Explosive" Energy, Copper Opportunities (2026-03-10)
Tavi Costa, CEO of Azuria Capital, explains where he's looking to deploy capital right now, mentioning mining, energy and emerging markets.
"When I apply macro analysis into markets, there's a few things that look exceptionally cheap today that could be extremely asymmetric," he commented.
"Again, I could be wrong in three of them, but if I get one right it's going to go up."
Don't forget to follow us @INN_Resource for real-time updates!
Securities Disclosure: I, Charlotte McLeod, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article.
