The numbers deserve your full attention

The demand for copper is boundless, with consumption set to rise from 28 million tonnes in 2025 to 42 million tonnes in 2040. A single Hyperscale AI facility or data centre now consumes up to 50,000 tonnes of copper against the 5,000-10,000 tonnes a standard data centre requires. The electrification, defence and AI infrastructure investment cycle is unlike anything the copper market has previously had to absorb.

Against that demand, the supply pipeline is thin in a way that should concern everyone in this industry and every industry depending on it. According to the IEA's Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2026, global primary copper supply could face a 25% deficit by 2035 based on the current project pipeline, and that projection assumes all announced projects are completed on time (which the IEA itself cautions cannot be taken for granted). The 30 largest undeveloped greenfield projects globally will contribute just 14% of total supply by that date. The average time from discovery to production for mines coming online today is 17.9 years. For copper mines it takes 24 years.

This isn’t to say copper is missing. The three deposits that best illustrate the scale of what remains; Escondida in Chile, Oyu Tolgoi in Mongolia and the newly confirmed Vicuña system straddling the Argentine-Chilean border, contain enough copper to meet global demand for decades. The question is whether the technology exists to extract it at the cost and pace the market requires, the problem is getting it out. Each site sits at an intersection of the three hardest problems in modern copper mining; ore grades that break conventional processing economics; geology that requires methods not yet mature at commercial scale; and environmental and social constraints that rule out the approaches that worked in the twentieth century.

Extraction without the mine

Vicuña was discovered in 2021 straddling the Argentine-Chilean border at high altitude in the Andes. It sits on one of the largest undeveloped copper porphyry systems in the world. It is also deep, high-altitude, water-scarce and located in a region where the environmental permitting of a conventional open pit would take decades and face profound opposition.

The question of how to unlock a deposit of that scale without the footprint of a Bingham Canyon is the central question for in-situ recovery or ISR. ISR (injecting a leaching solution into the ore body underground, dissolving copper from the host rock and pumping it to surface) has been used in uranium mining for fifty years. Applying it to primary sulphide deposits which contain the majority of the world's remaining undeveloped copper has traditionally been the difficult part. The dominant material, chalcopyrite, is notoriously resistant to acid leaching, forming a passivation layer that blocks the reagent.

Portfolio venture Ekion's EK-ISR technology takes this a step further. By establishing electric fields deep underground (without removing or disturbing the host rock) EK-ISR mobilises copper, gold and rare earth elements within the ore body and draws them to surface through a grid of low-impact boreholes. The surface infrastructure required is reduced by up to 95% compared to a conventional operation. There is no open pit, tailings dam or processing plant of the scale that conventional extraction demands. Just a grid of boreholes and the electrochemical process working silently beneath the surface.

The market this unlocks isn’t marginal. Ekion estimates that its technology addresses over $400 billion in complex copper reserves currently classified as uneconomic. These are deposits the industry has written off because no viable route to extraction existed. EK-ISR is that route.

Biology can also change the equation. Extremophile microorganisms that thrive in acid mine drainage environments can oxidise chalcopyrite in ways that break down that passivation layer. They self-sustain in subsurface conditions and are inherently selective in ways synthetic reagents cannot match.

FF investment Endolith, is building exactly the biological capability for primary sulphide deposits. A platform tunable to different sulphide mineralogies creates an option on every stranded sulphide deposit the industry has written off as unprocessable.

The evolution goes on

Jackling never found better copper. Instead he changed the economics of what could be processed. The solvent extraction revolution of the 1970s did the same with an entire class of previously marginal ore made viable.

We have backed Endolith, Sunchem and Ekion because we believe they are building a new industry and we are looking for the founders building the rest of it.

If you are working in low-grade separation, in-situ recovery, subsurface intelligence or tailings processing we would like to hear from you.