Copper Cu
What it is for
Copper is the metal electrification runs on. It carries current better than anything affordable, so it appears wherever electricity is generated, moved or consumed: grid cable, motor windings, transformers, and roughly three to four times as much in an electric vehicle as in a combustion one. Demand for copper is close to a direct reading of how fast the world is building electrical capacity, which is why it is watched as a macroeconomic indicator as much as an industrial input.
What it costs
Where it sits in the chain
The chain has a bottleneck that the mining figures hide. Ore is mined and concentrated near the deposit, because concentrate is far cheaper to ship than rock, but smelting and refining are concentrated somewhere else entirely: China refines around half the world's copper, well above its share of mine output. So a country can hold the ore and still depend on somebody else to turn it into metal, and the country that refines it captures a stage of value the production table does not show.
Who has it
| Country | Production | Reserves | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chile | 5,300 | 190,000 | 2024 |
| Congo, Dem. Rep. | 3,300 | 80,000 | 2024 |
| Peru | 2,600 | 100,000 | 2024 |
| China | 1,800 | 41,000 | 2024 |
| Indonesia | 1,100 | 21,000 | 2024 |
| United States | 1,100 | 47,000 | 2024 |
| Russian Federation | 930 | 80,000 | 2024 |
| Australia | 800 | 100,000 | 2024 |
| Kazakhstan | 740 | — | 2024 |
| Mexico | 700 | 53,000 | 2024 |
Production and reserves in thousand tonnes of contained copper; price in US dollars per tonne.
How concentrated it is
Mine production is less concentrated than most critical minerals — Chile, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Peru lead, and no single country approaches a majority. The concentration that matters for copper is downstream, and the refinery series in this database shows it: China's refined output is far above its share of mine output, so the country that digs the ore and the country that turns it into metal are frequently not the same. That gap is where a stage of value sits.
What this cannot show
USGS reports mine production and refinery production as separate series and adding them would double-count the same metal; the table on this page shows mine output. Reserves are a commercial judgement, not a physical count: they are what is economically extractable at prevailing prices, so a reserve figure rises when the price does without a gram of new copper appearing.
Other resources
Lithium · Cobalt · Nickel · Potash · Phosphate · Iron ore · Aluminium · Zinc · Tin