'There's No Deposits Anywhere' - Why $7 Copper is Only the Beginning: Ian Harris
Commodity Culture Aug 25, 2026
Summary
Copper supply cannot respond to today's record prices because new mines take roughly twenty years from discovery to first pour.
Most large near-surface copper deposits are already found, so any future supply will come from deeper, slower projects.
Aging US power grids, AI data centers, and EVs create a triple copper demand effect spanning generation, transmission, and end use.
Copper Giant's Mocoa project gained a strategic ally when Trafigura signed an off-take deal before the PEA was even published.
Colombia's new pro-mining president plus $47 million in treasury let Copper Giant accelerate Mocoa toward a year-end PEA.
Ian Harris's takeaways
- Top takeaway Harris argues copper will not just breach $7 per pound but go materially higher, citing inventories that fell from the 'COVID toilet paper' hoarding levels three months earlier into shortage, with negative treatment charges now pulling concentrate from miners
- Harris is a long-term copper bull who sees the deficit as a structural 20-year 'train wreck': he says roughly $250 billion of investment is needed just to build new supply and that capital is not available, and that no major near-surface discoveries have been made, with deeper projects like Resolution and a Polish deposit requiring 9-10 years from construction to first pound
- Harris dismisses bearish scenarios — an AI bubble popping or a global recession — as ultimately bullish for copper, arguing governments will double down on digitalization to escape debt loads, while a price collapse would only worsen the long-term incentive problem for new supply
- Harris sees Colombia as one of the few underexplored jurisdictions with the endowment and political alignment to host a tier-one copper project, and argues Copper Giant's near-surface Makoa deposit with infrastructure already in place is uniquely positioned to deliver near-term new supply
Jesse Day's takeaways
- Top takeaway Jesse Day anchors the macro side of the discussion, citing Chile's 2026 output forecast cut of about 2.6% to roughly 5.27 million tons and the aging US power grid — illustrated by a multi-week Northwest Indiana outage — as evidence of supply and infrastructure strain
- Day provides market-performance context for the bull thesis — copper up about 16% YTD, the COPX ETF up around 30%, and Copper Giant up 135% YTD — and presses Harris on whether Copper Giant's valuation has become stretched after the run