Recent developments in primary copper supply in the United States

Demand for copper is expected to increase in the United States as energy infrastructure expands to accommodate data centers, new electricity generation, and electric vehicles. While scaling-up recycling of copper is important for meeting domestic demand, a number of active and emerging copper producers have announced new activities for expanding primary copper production. Generalized market and facility-level models representing mine energy and materials flows have been developed, but the potential future portfolio of mining supply is diverse and requires further characterization to support planning for supply chains and technology deployment. Herein, we present a dataset of mine projects, providing estimates of copper productivity by technology pathway. We review diesel, electricity, water, and tailing waste generation factors reported in literature and used in life-cycle assessment databases, highlighting incontinences and gaps where values may not represent primary production of copper in the United States, now and in the future. Using data reported between 2021 and 2026, we find 0.9 and 1.6 million tonnes/year of cathode-grade copper production from active and proposed mine projects, respectively. By gathering data from technical reports, we were able to reproduce domestic production reported most recently by the US Geological Survey. We find 21% of new Cu production is explicitly from leaching processes that avoid sending concentrate to offshore smelters. Our findings suggest limits to domestic smelter capacity could be a bottleneck for new projects generating conventional sulphide ore copper concentrate. Partnerships between mines and providers of key resources such as water, fuel, and electricity could have far reaching effects as copper mining expands beyond the Southwest where it holds an established industrial presence.