Copper’s biggest shortage is belief
Cobre Panama, First Quantum’s Panamanian operation, produced 330,863 tonnes of copper in 2023, around 1.5 per cent of world supply. Within Panama it accounted for close to 5 per cent of GDP, 7 per cent of external revenues and some 40,800 jobs, and it put 1.8 billion dollars into the domestic economy that year through wages, taxes and social security.
In November 2023, after weeks of street protests, the Supreme Court ruled its operating contract unconstitutional. The mine has not reopened. Panamanian growth fell from 7.4 per cent to 2.9 per cent the following year and all three agencies downgraded the country's credit rating.
Most of the industry read it as a contractual failure compounded by political weakness, and both readings hold. The more uncomfortable interpretation is that a country looked at what the mine paid, understood what losing it would cost, and closed it anyway. Economic contribution, the argument on which the sector has rested for a century, was set out in full view and lost.
The metal nobody argues about
Copper occupies an unusual position in the minerals data. Our World in Data's country-by-country breakdown shows how concentrated most energy transition minerals are, with the Democratic Republic of Congo holding roughly three quarters of cobalt mining, China more than two thirds of rare earths production, and Indonesia over half the world's mined nickel. Each of those minerals carries a political identity that arrives before any company does. Copper carries almost nothing.
Absence of that kind looks harmless and behaves otherwise, because the sector is about to place enormous demands on a category the public has never considered. The International Energy Agency projects a 30 per cent copper supply deficit by 2035 against announced projects, with copper demand rising by 30 per cent to 2040 and around 500 billion dollars of new mining investment needed across critical minerals. Supply cannot simply respond, because ore grades are falling, project costs rising and new discoveries slowing.
Meeting that demand means building more new copper mines, in more places, than the industry has ever attempted, in a commodity with no public constituency to call on when a project becomes contentious.
Winning in court is not the same as being believed
Oak Flat was protected from mining by an Eisenhower order in 1955 until a 2014 land exchange, inserted into a defence bill, opened it to Resolution Copper. The Supreme Court declined to hear the Apache Stronghold appeal in May 2025, the Ninth Circuit refused an injunction in March 2026, and the Forest Service completed the transfer days later. Resolution Copper won every round available to it, on a deposit that could yield up to 40 billion pounds of copper.
What the company did not win was the account of what happened. The public record of Oak Flat describes a sacred site and a long defeat rather than a land exchange conducted lawfully over twelve years. Written largely by the people who lost, it is this version of events that anyone approaching the question for the first time will encounter.
How people reach that version has changed. When a subject has been argued over for decades, an assistant draws on a large and contested body of material, and its answer tends towards an average. When very little has been written, whatever exists carries disproportionate weight. Copper is thin, so an assistant asked about it reaches for Panama, the roadblocks at Las Bambas in Peru, and Oak Flat, the moments anyone wrote about at length.
Cobalt shows what a settled category looks like. A decade of reporting on artisanal mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo produced an answer so fixed that disclosure barely moves it, and every company in the battery chain inherits it regardless of its own conduct. Copper has not reached that point, though it is closer than the sector thinks.
What to do while the category is still open
Populating the space is the obvious first move, and the most neglected. Simple accounts of what a modern copper operation involves, what it pays, whom it employs, what it disturbs and what it restores, published where people and machines can both read them, would cost little against capital requirements on that scale.
Leading with economic contribution alone needs rethinking, because Panama tested that argument to destruction. Forty thousand jobs and five per cent of GDP were not enough, and the objection was never about the size of the contribution. Questions about who decided, on what terms and with what recourse filled the streets, and they are answerable long before a contract reaches a constitutional court.
Establishing what assistants say about copper, and about the company, in each jurisdiction it operates is the third, and quick to do. The answers vary by country, are testable, and are already shaping opinion among people who will never read a technical report.
Copper is in the rare position of being needed by almost everyone and defended by almost nobody. Whether the sector fills that space, or waits and finds somebody else has filled it first, will decide how much of the coming decade is spent building mines and how much in court.
