In what it describes as “a historic first,” Nexans reports that it has been awarded a turnkey contract valued at €1.43 billion for the section of the EuroAsia Interconnector that connects Greece and Cyprus.
Copper finally made the cut. Or more accurately, one of two cuts. Sadly, it did not get on the one that may matter most.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently released its 2023 Critical Materials Assessment, which evaluated materials for their criticality to global clean energy technology supply chains, and its official list now includes copper. That news was welcomed by The Copper Development Association (CDA), which had lobbied for copper’s addition to the list. It joins aluminum, dysprosium, electrical steel (grain-oriented steel, non-grain-oriented steel, and amorphous steel), fluorine, gallium, iridium, lithium, magnesium, natural graphite, neodymium, nickel, platinum, praseodymium, terbium, silicon and silicon carbide.
However, the DOE recognition is only half the battle as copper is still not named on another list that is even more important: the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) list of critical minerals. That matters because having such a status could give federal priority to copper mining and processing projects. The USGS dismissed calls by some lawmakers and the CDA to add copper to their list.
Supporters of copper’s addition argued that the USGS’s methodology to determine mineral criticality showed that copper now meets the USGS benchmark Supply Risk score of 0.40 for automatic inclusion on the U.S. Critical Minerals List.
David Applegate, who directs the USGS, was not moved. He indicated that vulnerabilities in the nation’s copper supplies have been reduced. “While copper is clearly an essential mineral commodity, its supply chain vulnerabilities are mitigated by domestic capacity, trade with reliable partners, and significant secondary capacity. … As a result, the USGS does not believe that the available information on copper supply and demand justifies an out-of-cycle addition to the list at this time.”
CDA President and CEO Andrew Kireta, Jr., disagrees. “Because USGS data was considerably out of date upon the release of the 2022 Critical Minerals List, and the risks to copper from imports has increased dramatically, we engaged an analyst to update copper’s supply risk score with the most recently available data to 2022,” he said. The Copper Supply Risk score in 2022 was up to 0.423, with a four-year weighted average score to 0.407, so copper should have qualified on both counts, he said.
For now, copper has gone one for two. While USGS will continue to monitor copper supply and consumption, it may take some time as a new updated critical mineral list is not scheduled until 2025.