Why copper rush right now
Copper for September delivery touched $6.7045 a pound on the Comex, an all-time high in the United States. The metal is up roughly 17% in New York this year and more than 50% over 12 months. In London, it reached $14,369.50 a tonne Thursday, the highest since January, after the Democratic Republic of Congo banned exports of copper and cobalt concentrate, effective immediately.
Two other supply stories broke in the same stretch. Codelco paused expansion work in the Andes Norte section of El Teniente, the world’s largest underground copper mine, saying six months of study had identified seismic risk different from anything it had previously monitored.
And the chemistry is tightening. Disruption in the Gulf has knocked out around half of seaborne sulphur shipments and China has halted its own sulphuric acid exports until December, together removing close to a quarter of global acid supply. A study published this week by GEM Mining Consulting estimates more than 15% of the world’s copper production, about 3.6 million tonnes a year, depends on acid-leach processing.
There is also a shift in who buys mining assets at all. Zijin Gold walked away from a $3.9 billion takeover of Canada’s Allied Gold this week after Chinese regulators declined to sign off, taking a 9% stake instead. Bloomberg reported the decision reflects Beijing pulling back from large mining acquisitions after two decades as the sector’s most acquisitive buyer.
Against that backdrop, a junior taking a strategic position and a trader locking up concentrate looks less like an outlier and more like the model.
Colombia’s obstacle has never been geology. It has been getting anything approved. Harris advanced Mirador, the first large-scale mine in Ecuador, to construction at Corriente Resources, which sold for $690 million. Director Mark Gibson is a former chief operating officer of Ivanhoe Electric and Cordoba Minerals. Thyana Alvarez, vice-president and country manager, is credited by the company with securing Colombia’s first new mining permit in 20 years, and was named by Semana among the country’s most influential women in 2024 and 2025.
The groundwork shows. The company says updated cadastral records confirm no overlap between the regional forest reserve and the known Mocoa resource, and that it secured a unified concession in June covering long-term development. Mocoa sits roughly 426 kilometres from the Pacific port of Tumaco and 531 kilometres from Buenaventura, and the company reports an 85% local workforce and an operating water plan based on rainwater harvesting rather than drawing on nearby sources.
