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base_metal · primary
Refined copper (cathode + secondary). Base metal critical-list addition reflects Tier-1 mineral demand for electrification and grid build-out.
Bottom line
Copper sits on 2 federal critical-minerals lists; mine supply is well diversified (HHI 0.14, 2025), led by 🇨🇱 Chile at 26% of output. The US is 57% net import-reliant (2025). Prices rose 6% over the past year (+1%/yr over 4y). 2 active export controls touch its trade.
At a glance
Price · 2026
12,997$/mt
World Bank Pink Sheet
Price trend
+6% 1Y
+1%/yr · 4Y CAGR
US net import reliance · 2025
57%
Mine production HHI
0.14
Diversified · 2025
From ore to use
lifecycle flow
980.0Mt
Chile leads · 18% share
22.9Mt
Chile top · 2024
1.3Mt
net importer · 2025
450.0Kt
year-end · 2025
17.0Mt
China · 2024
Coverage
Provenance
Methodology
01 · The lens
Strata maps every commodity onto one eight-stage scaffold, ore to end use, so any two are directly comparable. But a real commodity forks - some routes skip stages - so we read this scaffold three ways: what the stages are, how this commodity actually travels them, and how much of each we cover.
One scaffold, every commodity - so any two line up
Strata maps every commodity onto the same eight stages, ore to end use. That is what makes copper, nickel and lithium directly comparable - but a real commodity rarely walks all eight in a straight line. It forks, and some routes skip stages. The primer decodes the scaffold; the journey and routes below show how this one actually travels it.
How copper is made - inputs, outputs & routes
The metal flows left to right. At each stage something is added (from above) and something leaves (below). The three tracks show which stages each route uses - and which it skips.
Hover a stage to read what happens there - click to pin it open. Teal = added at that step, gold = leaves at that step; the coloured tracks are the three routes.
Recycling loops old scrap back into the chain - it re-enters downstream, it is not a new-metal stage. Grades are indicative; sources are linked below.
Copper takes one of two roads out of the mine. Most ore (~80%) is sulfide: it is concentrated, smelted, and electro-refined to 99.99% metal. The rest is oxide ore, which is leached in acid and won straight to cathode - skipping the concentrate and smelter entirely. Both roads end at the same pure copper, then fabricate into wire and tube.
Rock holding less than ~1% copper is dug from a large open pit and crushed to a fine powder - it takes about a hundred tonnes of rock to make a tonne of copper.
The ground sulfide ore is floated in a frothy bath so the copper-mineral grains stick to bubbles and skim off, upgrading copper ~30-fold. (Oxide ore skips this - it is leached whole instead.)
The concentrate is melted with oxygen at ~1,200 C, burning off iron and sulfur to make a molten 'matte', then blown to ~99% crude 'blister' copper and cast into anode plates.
An electric current dissolves the impure anode and re-plates ultra-pure copper onto a starter sheet; gold and silver drop out as a recoverable sludge. Oxide ore reaches the same cathode by acid leach + solvent extraction + electrowinning (SX-EW), with no smelter.
Refined copper is melted and drawn, rolled or extruded into the first tradeable shapes - overwhelmingly wire rod, because most copper ends up as an electrical conductor.
Old cable, pipe and machinery are collected and re-melted - copper recycles endlessly with no loss of quality. About a third of copper used comes from recycled metal. Dashed because it re-enters the loop, it is not new mine metal.
Finished copper goes into buildings, the power grid and telecom, electronics, vehicles and machinery - roughly three-quarters of it used for its electrical conductivity.
grades & routes sourced from: USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025 - Copper · ICSG - The World Copper Factbook 2024 · EPA AP-42 ch.12.3 - Primary Copper Smelting · LME - Copper special contract rules (Grade A, 99.9935%)
The same chain, sized by how much of each stage we map
Band height is facilities strata maps; a stage figure links to its source. Full value chain (companies + control) →
Coverage along the chain - covered, partial, or gap
| commodity | Extraction | Refining | Fabrication (semis) | Use | Recycling |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| copper | covered | covered | covered | covered | covered |
hover a chip for the stage headline · a "gap" chip is the product stating where its own coverage ends - not a blank we hide
02 · The membrane
Two kinds of numbers exist in strata, and they are visually and structurally distinct everywhere they appear.
Reported by an authoritative source - USGS, BGS, ICSG, a company filing, a national agency. The row carries its citation; click it and you land on the publication.
Computed as observed activity × a verified material intensity. Always marked imputed, always shows BOTH ingredient sources, and expands to the full calculation on click.
The rule that holds the product together: a reader can always tell which of the two they are looking at - and when the data cannot support a number, we show nothing rather than a wrong number. Every observed row links to its publication; the full catalogue, ranked by authority, lives at /sources.
03 · Supply, observed
Sources publish production per chain stage. The same metal appears at every stage, so summing stages manufactures phantom supply. Strata keeps each stage as its own panel and never sums across them.
04 · Reading the concentration bar
Every screen carries an HHI concentration bar - the product's headline supply-risk number. It is not a black box: it is the sum of squared supply shares, computed separately at each stage, and we show the shares that build it.
The concentration bar on every screen is a single number - the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI): take each supplier's share of the total, square it, and add them up. It runs 0 (many equal suppliers) to 1 (one supplier owns everything). Squaring is the whole point - it makes a dominant producer count far more than several small ones. We show the shares, so you can rebuild the number yourself.
05 · The resource base
Production is a yearly rate; beneath it sit the reserves and mapped deposits that decide whether supply can scale to the transition's build-out.
The eight-stage scaffold starts at the mine; beneath it sits the resource base that decides long-run adequacy - economic reserves in the ground, and the wider inventory of mapped deposits. It is where "can supply scale to meet the build-out?" is actually answered.
million tonnes contained
06 · Secondary supply
Recycling is a second source of metal - large for a mature base metal, negligible for a young battery metal - and it must never be summed into primary mine production.
The life-cycle infographic shows recycling as a stage; here is how much it actually provides, and why it stays on separate books. Recycled metal re-enters the chain downstream, so it must never be added to primary mine production - that would be the phantom-supply error again. How much a metal recycles is a first-order lever on the demand-vs-supply gap, and it varies enormously by metal.
about a third of copper supply is recycled input; most US scrap (68%) is exported
End-of-life recycling rates come from Yale STAFDB; scrap flows and recycled-input share from USGS. The contrast is the point: a mature base metal recovers most of its scrap, while a young battery metal recovers almost none yet - which is exactly the lever a transition scenario tests.
07 · Facilities, not just countries
Country totals answer how much; the censuses answer which plants, owned by whom. Counts and China shares below are live from the plant census (operating facilities; shares are of the censused fleet, never presented as world shares).
plus an 84-mill fabrication census (wire rod, tube, sheet) with ownership resolved
08 · From operator to ultimate owner
A census names the operator; resolution names the ultimate parent behind it - and weighs control by output, not just plant count.
The census names the plant; resolution names who ultimately controls it. Each operator is walked up its ownership chain - SEC EX-21 subsidiary lists and the CorpWatch control graph - to an ultimate parent, its home jurisdiction, and a control bloc. Blocs are relational: the same company is "Domestic" at home and "foreign" abroad, so control is measured against the asset's own country, not in the absolute.
Count the plants, or weigh the output?
A share by plant count and a share by capacity are different numbers, and the gap is the story. Across copper's 37 resolved operations:
here count and weight land close - Chinese-owned operations carry roughly their headcount share of output, and Western owners hold about half the resolved metal. The gap being SMALL is itself the finding.
Output by control bloc
09 · Trade
Metal has to physically reach the user, through specific partners, exposed to specific measures - a supply-risk layer a production map never shows.
Metal is mined in one place and consumed in another, and the movement between is its own risk layer - the part a "who mines it" map never shows. Strata reads it from three public sources: USGS for net-import reliance, CEPII BACI bilateral flows for who ships to whom, and the OECD inventory for the measures that can choke a flow.
US demand met by imports (2025, USGS)
Copper content of blister and anodes - single-partner dependence is a trade-partner HHI of its own
largest global shipper by value (BACI); 15 export measures in force, e.g. Argentina export tax
10 · The screening risk score
Concentration, dependency, control, restrictions and governance roll into a single 0 to 100 screening score - transparent in its parts, and honest when an input is missing.
Everything above - concentration, import dependency, who controls supply, export restrictions, governance - rolls into one 0 to 100 screening score. It is transparent (every component and its weight is shown) and honest when it cannot compute: a missing input reweights the rest rather than counting as zero, and a missing score means "not enough inputs", never "low risk".
11 · Demand, estimated honestly
Take something you can count - tonnes of stainless melted, GWh of cells built, m2 of floorspace added - and multiply by how much metal each unit needs. Every coefficient is independently verified against its publication before use.
The coverage meter - how much of world copper demand our lanes explain
the remainder is stated, not hidden - stock-dominated end uses (grid, buildings) are tracked as stocks, which are never summed with annual flows
12 · Supply meets demand
Sections 03 and 05 built the two halves - what the world makes, and what the transition needs. Here they meet: each implied-demand lane as a share of the world supply it draws on.
Supply was observed; demand was estimated. Here the two halves finally meet: divide an implied-demand lane by the world supply it draws on, and you get the one number a transition analyst actually wants - is this end use a rounding error, or a claim on a large slice of the world's metal?
This is modeled demand over reported world supply - an estimate divided by an observation - so it inherits the estimate's caveat and always reads with a "≈". The denominator matters: an annual-flow lane (stainless melted this year) is measured against annual production, while a stock lane (copper standing in the grid) is measured against reserves. Comparing a stock to a flow is the phantom-supply error in reverse, so we never do it - which is why the demand meter earlier keeps stocks and flows on separate books.
13-14 · The GCAM link
GCAM projects the energy transition but models no critical minerals. Strata turns GCAM's build-out into mineral demand - and exports the whole layer in GCAM's own input format, with both sources attached to every row.
The GCAM coupling is commodity-agnostic, so it lives on the methodology page: how strata couples to GCAM, and how GCAM answers live inside the product →
15 · The rules
194 cataloged sources; each figure is traceable to its publication - see /sources.
Wood Mackenzie, Benchmark, S&P are cite-only and flagged as procurement targets.
Yale-STAF material flows and 2008-vintage footprints render with a historical flag.
Plant-census statistics say so explicitly; world shares come from IEA / USGS series.
cda copper home
ica emobility 2017
midstream_components_seed
oecd_export_restrictions_2026
ownership_control_seed
sec_edgar_ex96_pdf
usgs_deposit_gt
usgs_mine_waste
usgs_mrds_2016
usgs_porcu
usgs_world_phosphate
usmin_critical_deposits
28 sources · titles open the source card · url opens the publisher
How do we know a row's stage? We don't infer it - the source reports it.
USGS and BGS publish production as separate statistical series per stage. Strata preserves each row's verbatim wording and only GROUPS that vocabulary into stage panels:
A row whose label fits no family lands in "Other forms" rather than being force-classified, and every row keeps its provenance - so any grouping is auditable back to the source line. That is the difference between a data-integrity rule and a model assumption. A free bonus: nickel's Class-1 vs Class-2 split (refined metal vs NPI / ferronickel) simply falls out of the panels, because the sources were reporting it all along.
the top five shares alone already sum to 0.13; the dominant producer's square carries most of the index - which is exactly what a concentration measure should do
The bands
The ladder runs green to amber and stops there - an index is a description, not an alarm, so there is no red. A missing bar means not enough suppliers disclosed to compute it, never "low".
HHI of which stage?
Because a metal's mine geography is not its refinery geography, we compute HHI separately at each stage and never blend them. The mine map and the refinery map are different maps - and the gap between them is the single most useful supply-risk signal on the page.
copper is the lesson: mining is spread across the Americas and Africa (diversified), but refining routes through China - the risk lives downstream, and only a per-stage HHI shows it. "% attributed" on the live rows sizes how much of the total the named suppliers cover; a "Rest of world" residual is kept in production sums but excluded from the index, so it can neither dilute nor inflate the concentration number.
A deposit count is not a supply map
Of 47,988 mapped deposits, 79% sit in United States - not because it holds the metal, but because the USGS MRDS inventory is exhaustive at home and sparser abroad. So we label the count as "how well mapped" and read the true supply leader (Chile) from reserves and production instead. It is the same rule as "a census share is not a world share", one layer deeper.
The weights are fixed and published, not fit to an outcome. As a sanity check, the score is cross-referenced against the USGS supply-risk benchmark (OFR 2025-1047), where this commodity ranks 29 of 84 (Elevated). The bands run green to amber; there is no red.
