Some cursory searching suggests that between 40 and 50% of copper is used in building construction. I don’t know the further breakdown, but:
Copper is widely used for flashing. For this application, galvanized steel, aluminum, and stainless steel can substitute. All are less expensive.
Copper is used for pipes. They are much more expensive than plastics. Arguably, depending on the particular application, one or more plastic options are as good or better. (Copper is unharmed by moderate chlorine concentrations and sunlight. It’s mechanically strong. It’s inert to water at appropriate pH. It is quite reactive to water at the wrong pH. Boiler condensate will quickly destroy it.)
Copper is used for heavy-gauge electrical wire. For many of these applications, aluminum is much less expensive and arguable superior (it’s lighter and more flexible).
Copper is used for 12 and 14 gauge branch circuits. Aluminum branch circuits are currently strongly discouraged.
In any event, a lot of copper is consumed for applications that don’t need it. If prices go up, the industry can adapt.
> Copper is used for 12 and 14 gauge branch circuits. Aluminum branch circuits are currently strongly discouraged.
Maybe you're already saying this: there was a period (maybe ~70s) where aluminum was used for household wiring because of the advantages you mention. Unfortunately it oxidizes resulting in higher resistance leading to heat and potentially fire at connections. Where I am, insurers ask you if you have aluminum wiring when you buy a house (and penalize you for it), and it is generally regarded as a failed experiment.
Yep. Aluminum wiring can be safe, but you need to coat all the connections with anti-oxidizing grease. And even at at that, I don't know how long it lasts.
Copper pipe for water is often specified by code in commercial construction. I've heard this is due to lobbying by plumber's unions but not sure about that. Most residential construction will use CPVC or PEX these days.
It also expands/contracts more than copper which can cause screws to come loose and trigger sparks that set fire to the inside of your walls. (Source: A home inspection report from a house I looked at buying a few years ago.)
I'm going to assume that folks in construction, who are under massive cost pressure lately, aren't paying more money out of habit. I'm also going to assume the cursory googling is worth less than 15 minutes of actual experience.
I'm not an economist, but I'm going to go out on a limb here: my expectation is that between now and 2025, a decline in construction demand in China will have a more significant impact on global copper consumption than an increase due to EV demand. I think the copper supplies will be okay.
Who's expecting a decline in construction demand in China? I think I've heard this a few places, granted, but have they really built up enough for their whole population (that would want it)?
Probably completely anecdote evidence, but plastic piping needs to be replaced every 20-ish years, while copper has easily last multiple decades.
20 years is fine assuming all the piping is easy to get to (e.g. around a hot water heater). A lot of piping is not and would require refinishing quite of a bit of piping.
My research seems to indicate most residential plastic tubing still has a lifetime of 20 years, from what I can tell.
PEX-A (expansion PEX) almost all have a limited warranty period of 20-25 years depending on manufacture. It’s minimum reported lifespan is closer to 40-50 years with it estimated to be as high as 100 years depending on water quality, usage, other factors.
> Copper is widely used for flashing. For this application, galvanized steel, aluminum, and stainless steel can substitute. All are less expensive.
If a product is just as good and less expensive, why aren’t builders using it already? Builders (like farmers) are pretty aware of and sensitive to their cost of inputs.
I have a slate roof that’s around 100 years old. It’s had maintenance over the years, but rock lasts essentially forever. I’m coming up on some copper replacement from wear after 100 years and it’s definitely not going to be zinc-plated carbon steel, aluminum, or low-grade stainless. I’d consider 316 stainless and will ask the contractors about it. I feel like the malleability and solderability of copper actually matters here, but I’ll ask.
> Copper is used for pipes. They are much more expensive than plastics.
According to my plumber, who now does all plastic, plastic is indeed cheaper, however, connectors are more expensive, so in the end, it ends up being about the same price. He does plastic mostly because it is easier to work with. I believe it is just manufacturers making bigger margins, it is impressive how expensive all these small parts are.
And yes, it is a sign of the industry adapting. It is just that if may not reflect on the final price the consumer pays.
Copper pipes react badly if they are in contact with steel, such as a nail driven into the wrong place. It doesn't have to puncture the pipe. It's an electrochemical reaction that can destroy the wall of the pipe. (Learned this the hard way. Not a fan of pipes breaking in the ceiling...)
> Copper is used for pipes. They are much more expensive than plastics.
Rats do not chew through copper.
Getting a plumber out, replacing the pipe section, replastering, etc to deal with the fallout was substantially more expensive than laying copper pipes would have been.
> Copper is used for heavy-gauge electrical wire. For many of these applications, aluminum is much less expensive and arguable superior (it’s lighter and more flexible).
For which applications? I've been told to avoid any houses with aluminum wiring because of how dangerous it is.
It can be used for cabling, though that's going to be industrial connections (like an inch or so in diameter, and connections between 400V equipment). Though those types of connections a practically babysat with inspections every year or two, compared to house wiring which is run once and never think about again.
Also not exclusive, internal parts of gear will probably still be copper.
> Copper is used for heavy-gauge electrical wire. For many of these applications, aluminum is much less expensive and arguable superior (it’s lighter and more flexible).
Superior in what way? Being lighter / more flexible? Did you account for the fact you have to upsize aluminum to carry the same amperage load as copper? When comparing Apples to Apples (Err.. Aluminum to Copper) on say a 200A service entrance cable, the difference in weight / flexibility isn’t much based on personal experience, but there are other negatives to using aluminum over copper for SER cable. One example, voltage drop over 50ft isn’t as much an issue with copper.
For pipes, I would always choose copper over plastic, regardless of the price.
All the plastic pipes that I have ever seen had a too short lifetime, and when it became necessary to replace them prematurely in whatever hard to access place they had been installed, the costs were much higher than the cost of the pipes.
Even if the plastic pipes were claimed to be made of some high-quality long life plastic, instead of being made of cheap PVC or the like, such claims are difficult to verify, unlike for a copper pipe, where you do not need special instruments to verify that the pipe ready to be installed is really made of copper.
>> a lot of copper is consumed for applications that don’t need it. If prices go up, the industry can adapt.
Very likely true. This is usually the case with materials, and as the article mentions it is happening.
However... this doesn't mean that adaptation is without side effects. In a lot of cases, prices will just rise and the finished products will be more expensive and scarce.
It's pretty hard to predict downstream effects, but material availability is increasingly more of an issue.
You mentioned pipes within the context of water. Copper pipe (tubing to be more exact) is used in air conditioning systems, the coils (heat exchangers) and the tubes that connect the condensor and evaporator.
There's also all of the copper used as windings in electrical motors, fans, compressors, transformers, etc.
A "hidden" use of copper is brass which is an alloy made with high percentages of copper.
Plastic pipes have a really bad reputation for joint failures in the construction industry in the UK. I’ve heard of whole commercial buildings having plastic pipes fail all over the place during commissioning resulting in the whole lot getting stripped out and replaced with copper. I always specify copper piping because it’s a lower risk for me.
If all of those alternatives mentioned were superior options, they would be industry standard. They're not because of their big gapping flaws you pointed out in most and hand-waved away as not a big deal.
I agree with most of this except for galvanized steel. It doesn't last long enough for a flashing application, plus the installation (drive a nail through it) destroys the zinc coating.
Aluminum is most commonly used these days - copper is more rare, and mostly used for looks.
> Aluminum branch circuits are currently strongly discouraged.
Sort of. Aluminum made before 1975 is not safe, but aluminum wire made after that date is a new allow that is perfectly safe in branch circuits, but no one wants to use it.
My home is almost all PEX instead of copper piping. I love the stuff. Definitely opportunity to cut down on a lot of it there. But I wonder how many new builds already do?
Copper is a well known bacteria killer in water. Typically Pex is used for most plumbing with copper ends. Older construction will have all copper indoor piping
Copper as a material is fairly unique in that many things we make of copper have alternatives that could be used if the cost was too high.
For example, copper is used for water pipes. But we also have steel and plastic pipes.
Copper is also used for wiring and electrical conductors - but we can redesign circuits to use higher voltages (double the voltage needs only one quarter of the copper). Or, we can switch to aluminium for wiring, which is also a good conductor.
Plenty of users are already economical with copper. For example, have you noticed that if you buy a USB cable that's 1 meter it is less than half the price of a 2 meter cable? Don't you think that's odd, because presumably there is a fixed labour+materials cost for the connectors, and a per-meter cost for the cable itself? No... The USB specification requires a specific wire resistance, which means longer wires must also be thicker (more copper) to meet that spec. Lately, very cost sensitive USB wires have moved to aluminium conductors.
There is talk of electric cars with 800 volt (vs 400 volt) battery systems... The main reason to switch is to reduce the cost of copper wires and motor coils.
> There is talk of electric cars with 800 volt (vs 400 volt) battery systems... The main reason to switch is to reduce the cost of copper wires and motor coils.
It's not just talk, a number of EVs run at 800V (Porsche Taycan, Audi E-Tron GT, Lucid Air, Hyundai Ioniq 5, Kia EV6). And while there may be a cost benefit for the manufacturer, it also makes a more desirable car for the owner, since they can charge twice as fast. While most 400V EVs top out around 125 kW charging rates, the 800V EVs can hit mid-200s.
> but we can redesign circuits to use higher voltages
Rings circuits[0], popular in the uk due to post-wwii copper shortages, use less wiring than the typical radial circuits. Wikipedia says about 25% less?
Instead of worrying about how we substitute every ICE car for an EV car, we should be trying to get cars off the road.
COVID has taught us that: people value being close to home, people value spending more time in their local communities, a sizable portion of the workforce does not need to commute to work. We should be leveraging these facts when planning towns, to reduce the reliance on cars.
> COVID has taught us that: people value being close to home, people value spending more time in their local communities, a sizable portion of the workforce does not need to commute to work.
I think you could easily look at people's reactions to COVID lockdowns and reach the opposite conclusion.
A lot of people hated being stuck at home, a lot of people couldn't wait to get back to normal, travelling to see concerts and sporting events, or just travelling for fun. A lot of people, despite having jobs that can be done remotely, prefer to commute to offices because they think it has other benefits.
All COVID really showed us is what is possible with regards to remote work and keeping people close to home, not is what is largely desired by people.
I think a large reason for people longing for all those things again, was because many people who were locked down, were locked down in suburbia, which has almost none of those things within walking or even driving distance (under an hour, obviously you can drive further).
But regardless, I think the solution to many issues being talked about here is bette decentralised planning. We need to do away with monolithic cities surrounded by an endlessly increasing suburban sprawl. It requires every household to have at least 1 car, and it means if peool do need to spend time close to home, they suddenly miss out on many things they love or even need.
Many small towns is better than a few huge cities.
The supply chain problems, in part are a result of the Lockdowns.
So sure it "showed us" what people already knew, information workers can work from home. The final tally is still out on if that was better for companies or not, or if companies in the long term will keep work from home for employee
Hell at my company it is about 50/50 on if people want to work from home or not. I think HN being what is it tends to not recognize that here we have a strong bias towards WFH that may not be shared by large parts of the workforce
The major problem for copper is the lack of large projects in the pipeline - current mineral explorers are entering a new phase of what they need to look for and it's a super exciting time to be working in Exploration, honestly.
P.S - Incredibly biased as I work in Mineral Exploration.
Does the mining industry need help with software? I was talking to someone with experience in the the oil & gas sector and he mentioned that there is a lot of things that could be automated because scraping data and data entry is often being done by hand.
If the number of EVs on the road today remained static for the next 20 years, recycling the metals in them might be able to make up the bulk of the demand. But EV sales are growing exponentially.
Why would car manufacturers be limited to copper from cars? For example, there's huge amounts of copper in telecoms infrastructure that's being replaced with fibre at the moment. The originating source of the metal is irrelevant. The only things that matter at purity, contaminants, and cost. If the copper is sufficiently high quality, doesn't contain anything that would stop it being used in a battery or a motor, and it's cheap enough, then it's all good.
Tesla has a patent on replacing lots of individual power and control wires with a single smarter wire carrying both for multiple components.
They were talking about it for the model Y and it was suppossed to reduce 1.5km of wire down to 100m but I dont think it's hit production vehicles yet.
They mostly talked about lighter weight and easier robot install, but should be cheaper and use less copper too if that actually becomes an issue.
For information on this sort of thing the USGS mineral survey is an excellent source.
There's the general overview on copper [0], annual summaries, e.g [1] for 2022, and the more detailed "yearbook" [2] which it looks like is in the process of being updated since the last official release in 2017.
for example, [1] says this about "World Resources":
> A U.S. Geological Survey study of global copper deposits indicated that, as of 2015, identified resources contained 2.1 billion tons of copper, and undiscovered resources contained an estimated 3.5 billion tons.
Note that this article is careful not to outright say "there isn't enough copper", even if it heavily implies it. It says there aren't enough mines for future demand. And in the sense that more mines should be built in anticipation of that demand, it's correct. But the idea that a copper shortage will meaningfully delay electrification is ridiculous; even if there is a shortfall, all that will mean is that EVs will become slightly more expensive while other uses of copper move to substitutes and more mines are built. The economic incentives are too strong for anything else to happen.
> ... even if there is a shortfall, all that will mean is that EVs will become slightly more expensive
Seeing as expense is currently a major barrier to adoption of EVs by the general public, I'd say that becoming even slightly more expensive provides a significant barrier to electrification in the near-term.
> For some standard EV models, Ford will use lithium-iron-sulphate batteries
Googled this, and google gave me a page full of results for lithium iron phosphate batteries. Not a single mention of sulphate (or sulfate). There are people actually getting paid a salary to do this.
It is actually similarly difficult to Google other new battery chemistries like lithium-iron-manganese-phosphate batteries (Google would confuse it with lithium ion manganese oxide batteries).
This is a Google Search bug. If you search for something less popular, that exists close to a popular phrase, it will give you the popular results. Kind of like "horse riding a man" fails in both Dall-E and Google Image search:
They pretend they are using transformer neural nets in search, yet fail at such a clear semantic task that should have been easy for transformers to solve.
i might have missed it in the article but it seems the issue is that there arent enough mines coming online to meet the new demand NOT that we dont have enough copper. it is about the same abundance as zinc and nickel. this is where the free market should help, if the price goes up enough it should incentivize companies to open more mines and possibly innovate new mining methods.
While there is enough copper in the world, geologically speaking, to supply the increased demand, there isn’t enough time.
It takes 10 to 15 years to get a new copper mine through permitting and construction. Twenty years is not unusual for very large projects.
It's mining dot com trumpeting the S&P Mineral Intelligence position on the recent independant Copper position report .. anticipatinting a potential crunch in 15 years if not averted now by investment in developing projects.
The average time figure quoted is best read as "typically, in the absence of the demand we see ramping up now..." and reflects a typically sedate pace for mineral projects which have 50+ year lifespans with trannational owners who overlap exploration, development, and production.
The industry voice here is for Cu projects to accelerate.
( FWiW 14+ years back I wrote a chunk of the backend of what was sold on to become S&P Min.Intell.
The article is on mining.com, there is a section about mining :)
> In B.C., there are currently two mine expansion proposals that are close to having final investments decisions made, Goehring said – Highland Valley Copper and Red Chris — and two proposed new mines: the KSM gold-copper mine and the Galore Creek copper mine.
Readit News
Copper is widely used for flashing. For this application, galvanized steel, aluminum, and stainless steel can substitute. All are less expensive.
Copper is used for pipes. They are much more expensive than plastics. Arguably, depending on the particular application, one or more plastic options are as good or better. (Copper is unharmed by moderate chlorine concentrations and sunlight. It’s mechanically strong. It’s inert to water at appropriate pH. It is quite reactive to water at the wrong pH. Boiler condensate will quickly destroy it.)
Copper is used for heavy-gauge electrical wire. For many of these applications, aluminum is much less expensive and arguable superior (it’s lighter and more flexible).
Copper is used for 12 and 14 gauge branch circuits. Aluminum branch circuits are currently strongly discouraged.
In any event, a lot of copper is consumed for applications that don’t need it. If prices go up, the industry can adapt.
Maybe you're already saying this: there was a period (maybe ~70s) where aluminum was used for household wiring because of the advantages you mention. Unfortunately it oxidizes resulting in higher resistance leading to heat and potentially fire at connections. Where I am, insurers ask you if you have aluminum wiring when you buy a house (and penalize you for it), and it is generally regarded as a failed experiment.
Copper pipe for water is often specified by code in commercial construction. I've heard this is due to lobbying by plumber's unions but not sure about that. Most residential construction will use CPVC or PEX these days.
But for big feeder wires, it’s a different story. Compare:
2 AWG XHHW-2 Al: 0.358 inches OD, 0.081 lbs per ft, $0.90/ft
4 AWG XHHW-2 Cu: 0.33 inches OD, 0.129 lbs per ft, $1.78/ft
I know which one I would pick under most circumstances. And insurance companies are just fine with the aluminum option.
20 years is fine assuming all the piping is easy to get to (e.g. around a hot water heater). A lot of piping is not and would require refinishing quite of a bit of piping.
My research seems to indicate most residential plastic tubing still has a lifetime of 20 years, from what I can tell.
It seems a hard question to get an answer for, as most research I have found is clearly sponsored by the PVC industry.
[0] https://www.ipexna.com/media/3074/pvc-pipe-longevity-report....
If a product is just as good and less expensive, why aren’t builders using it already? Builders (like farmers) are pretty aware of and sensitive to their cost of inputs.
I have a slate roof that’s around 100 years old. It’s had maintenance over the years, but rock lasts essentially forever. I’m coming up on some copper replacement from wear after 100 years and it’s definitely not going to be zinc-plated carbon steel, aluminum, or low-grade stainless. I’d consider 316 stainless and will ask the contractors about it. I feel like the malleability and solderability of copper actually matters here, but I’ll ask.
According to my plumber, who now does all plastic, plastic is indeed cheaper, however, connectors are more expensive, so in the end, it ends up being about the same price. He does plastic mostly because it is easier to work with. I believe it is just manufacturers making bigger margins, it is impressive how expensive all these small parts are.
And yes, it is a sign of the industry adapting. It is just that if may not reflect on the final price the consumer pays.
https://www.kuow.org/stories/copper-versus-salmon-why-an-ala...
I've seen plastic pipes chewed through by rats too.
Rats do not chew through copper.
Getting a plumber out, replacing the pipe section, replastering, etc to deal with the fallout was substantially more expensive than laying copper pipes would have been.
For which applications? I've been told to avoid any houses with aluminum wiring because of how dangerous it is.
Also not exclusive, internal parts of gear will probably still be copper.
Superior in what way? Being lighter / more flexible? Did you account for the fact you have to upsize aluminum to carry the same amperage load as copper? When comparing Apples to Apples (Err.. Aluminum to Copper) on say a 200A service entrance cable, the difference in weight / flexibility isn’t much based on personal experience, but there are other negatives to using aluminum over copper for SER cable. One example, voltage drop over 50ft isn’t as much an issue with copper.
All the plastic pipes that I have ever seen had a too short lifetime, and when it became necessary to replace them prematurely in whatever hard to access place they had been installed, the costs were much higher than the cost of the pipes.
Even if the plastic pipes were claimed to be made of some high-quality long life plastic, instead of being made of cheap PVC or the like, such claims are difficult to verify, unlike for a copper pipe, where you do not need special instruments to verify that the pipe ready to be installed is really made of copper.
Very likely true. This is usually the case with materials, and as the article mentions it is happening.
However... this doesn't mean that adaptation is without side effects. In a lot of cases, prices will just rise and the finished products will be more expensive and scarce.
It's pretty hard to predict downstream effects, but material availability is increasingly more of an issue.
There's also all of the copper used as windings in electrical motors, fans, compressors, transformers, etc.
A "hidden" use of copper is brass which is an alloy made with high percentages of copper.
If copper becomes more expensive, people will re-evaluate the trade-offs.
Aluminum is most commonly used these days - copper is more rare, and mostly used for looks.
> Aluminum branch circuits are currently strongly discouraged.
Sort of. Aluminum made before 1975 is not safe, but aluminum wire made after that date is a new allow that is perfectly safe in branch circuits, but no one wants to use it.
For example, copper is used for water pipes. But we also have steel and plastic pipes.
Copper is also used for wiring and electrical conductors - but we can redesign circuits to use higher voltages (double the voltage needs only one quarter of the copper). Or, we can switch to aluminium for wiring, which is also a good conductor.
Plenty of users are already economical with copper. For example, have you noticed that if you buy a USB cable that's 1 meter it is less than half the price of a 2 meter cable? Don't you think that's odd, because presumably there is a fixed labour+materials cost for the connectors, and a per-meter cost for the cable itself? No... The USB specification requires a specific wire resistance, which means longer wires must also be thicker (more copper) to meet that spec. Lately, very cost sensitive USB wires have moved to aluminium conductors.
There is talk of electric cars with 800 volt (vs 400 volt) battery systems... The main reason to switch is to reduce the cost of copper wires and motor coils.
It's not just talk, a number of EVs run at 800V (Porsche Taycan, Audi E-Tron GT, Lucid Air, Hyundai Ioniq 5, Kia EV6). And while there may be a cost benefit for the manufacturer, it also makes a more desirable car for the owner, since they can charge twice as fast. While most 400V EVs top out around 125 kW charging rates, the 800V EVs can hit mid-200s.
Rings circuits[0], popular in the uk due to post-wwii copper shortages, use less wiring than the typical radial circuits. Wikipedia says about 25% less?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_circuit
Deleted Comment
COVID has taught us that: people value being close to home, people value spending more time in their local communities, a sizable portion of the workforce does not need to commute to work. We should be leveraging these facts when planning towns, to reduce the reliance on cars.
I think you could easily look at people's reactions to COVID lockdowns and reach the opposite conclusion.
A lot of people hated being stuck at home, a lot of people couldn't wait to get back to normal, travelling to see concerts and sporting events, or just travelling for fun. A lot of people, despite having jobs that can be done remotely, prefer to commute to offices because they think it has other benefits.
All COVID really showed us is what is possible with regards to remote work and keeping people close to home, not is what is largely desired by people.
But regardless, I think the solution to many issues being talked about here is bette decentralised planning. We need to do away with monolithic cities surrounded by an endlessly increasing suburban sprawl. It requires every household to have at least 1 car, and it means if peool do need to spend time close to home, they suddenly miss out on many things they love or even need.
Many small towns is better than a few huge cities.
The supply chain problems, in part are a result of the Lockdowns.
So sure it "showed us" what people already knew, information workers can work from home. The final tally is still out on if that was better for companies or not, or if companies in the long term will keep work from home for employee
Hell at my company it is about 50/50 on if people want to work from home or not. I think HN being what is it tends to not recognize that here we have a strong bias towards WFH that may not be shared by large parts of the workforce
P.S - Incredibly biased as I work in Mineral Exploration.
Why would car manufacturers be limited to copper from cars? For example, there's huge amounts of copper in telecoms infrastructure that's being replaced with fibre at the moment. The originating source of the metal is irrelevant. The only things that matter at purity, contaminants, and cost. If the copper is sufficiently high quality, doesn't contain anything that would stop it being used in a battery or a motor, and it's cheap enough, then it's all good.
They were talking about it for the model Y and it was suppossed to reduce 1.5km of wire down to 100m but I dont think it's hit production vehicles yet.
They mostly talked about lighter weight and easier robot install, but should be cheaper and use less copper too if that actually becomes an issue.
There's the general overview on copper [0], annual summaries, e.g [1] for 2022, and the more detailed "yearbook" [2] which it looks like is in the process of being updated since the last official release in 2017.
for example, [1] says this about "World Resources":
> A U.S. Geological Survey study of global copper deposits indicated that, as of 2015, identified resources contained 2.1 billion tons of copper, and undiscovered resources contained an estimated 3.5 billion tons.
Note that this article is careful not to outright say "there isn't enough copper", even if it heavily implies it. It says there aren't enough mines for future demand. And in the sense that more mines should be built in anticipation of that demand, it's correct. But the idea that a copper shortage will meaningfully delay electrification is ridiculous; even if there is a shortfall, all that will mean is that EVs will become slightly more expensive while other uses of copper move to substitutes and more mines are built. The economic incentives are too strong for anything else to happen.
[0]: https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-c... [1]: https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022-copper.pdf [2]: https://pubs.usgs.gov/myb/vol1/2017/myb1-2017-copper.pdf
Seeing as expense is currently a major barrier to adoption of EVs by the general public, I'd say that becoming even slightly more expensive provides a significant barrier to electrification in the near-term.
Googled this, and google gave me a page full of results for lithium iron phosphate batteries. Not a single mention of sulphate (or sulfate). There are people actually getting paid a salary to do this.
Double quotes still help though.
1. https://www.google.com/search?q=horse+riding+a+man
2. https://labs.openai.com/s/5iMgC0d3AxrZ2Z39A7nnSuKY
They pretend they are using transformer neural nets in search, yet fail at such a clear semantic task that should have been easy for transformers to solve.
https://www.bing.com/search?q=lithium+iron+sulfate+batteries
Deleted Comment
The average time figure quoted is best read as "typically, in the absence of the demand we see ramping up now..." and reflects a typically sedate pace for mineral projects which have 50+ year lifespans with trannational owners who overlap exploration, development, and production.
The industry voice here is for Cu projects to accelerate.
( FWiW 14+ years back I wrote a chunk of the backend of what was sold on to become S&P Min.Intell.
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met...
)
> In B.C., there are currently two mine expansion proposals that are close to having final investments decisions made, Goehring said – Highland Valley Copper and Red Chris — and two proposed new mines: the KSM gold-copper mine and the Galore Creek copper mine.
etc.