alt Hacker NewsSomething I could use some clarification on:
> Even though the industry would be willing to pay top dollar for each pound of metal delivered, there is simply not much more to be found. Copper bearing formations are not popping up at random, and there is no point in drilling various spots on Earth prospecting for deposits, either. The major formations have already been discovered, and thus the ever increasing investment spent on locating more copper simply does not produce a return.
How do we "know" there isn't any major formations we haven't found yet? I find it hard to believe we've prospected every possible area.. or are deposits more predictable than it seems?
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The mining majors, BHP, Rio Tinto, et al have petabytes of surface geochemistry, samples, near surface magnetic maps that penetrate into the crust, 3D seismic maps, drill cores, technical reports on every mine ever, surrounding geology, and good models on where economic feasible (at particular price points) amounts of desirable metals can be found.
For example, there are only so many places significant masses of porphyry copper deposit will be found (although these aren't the only types of copper deposit).
For people interested in subscribing, there are databases such as the S&P portal that scratch some of that industry knowledge.
https://www.spglobal.com/en/research-insights/market-insight...
although they seem to have backed off from a public page about the GIS portal to the mining databases they purchased.
So; pretty much most areas have been scratched - Antartica is still open, the Artic has possibilities .. but should we.
There are known untapped masses of copper, eg: in the US there's a mass that will take 64 years to mine .. that's on Apache land so, you know, it'll be US history all over again poking that one.
* US Supreme Court spurns Native American challenge to Rio Tinto's Arizona copper project - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/us-supreme-court-spur...
We don’t know. The entire article is garbage.
We ran out of cheap pure copper a long time ago. Now we're producing copper out of ores that contain a very small proportion of copper. If the price goes up we'll produce copper from ores that contain an even smaller fraction of copper.
Copper is 60 ppm of the crust. As long as the price keeps going up, we'll never run out.