Copper Exploration Budgets Indicate a Coming Rally
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| By Sean Brodrick |
The world is going to need a lot more metal — copper for power grids, silver for solar, uranium for nuclear power — and the miners aren’t spending enough to find it.
A price squeeze is coming. And I’ll tell you how to play it.
Here’s a chart that illustrates the problem …
Global nonferrous (every metal but iron) exploration budgets are expected to reach about $15.5 billion this year, according to S&P Global.
That sounds like a lot of money. But look at the chart again.
Mining companies spent $20.5 billion on exploration all the way back in 2012. So, 14 years later, exploration spending is still roughly 25% below its old peak.
And that's in nominal dollars. Adjust for inflation, and the gap is much wider.
Miners Aren't Looking Hard Enough
Even more troubling is where the money is going.
Take copper. In 2025, 43% of global copper exploration budgets went toward minesite exploration — essentially looking for more metal around deposits miners already know about.
Just 25% went toward grassroots exploration, or the hunt for genuinely new deposits.
You can understand why. Expanding an existing mine is usually cheaper, faster and less risky than finding and permitting a brand-new one.
But you can't keep doing that forever.
S&P Global says not one major copper deposit meeting its threshold was discovered in 2025.
And of the 263 major copper discoveries made since 1990, 165 still haven't entered production.
Just 17 have made it as far as construction or preproduction.
Meanwhile, finding metal is getting harder.
The average depth of copper exploration drilling has increased nearly 50% since 2010, to around 600 meters.
In other words, miners are spending less in real terms — and every exploration dollar must work harder.
The Clock Is Already Ticking
This wouldn't be such a problem if demand were standing still. It's not.
The International Energy Agency expects copper demand to increase by roughly 7 million metric tons by 2040. And based on the current project pipeline, the IEA sees a potential 25% mine-supply shortfall by 2035.
BHP Group (BHP) sees the same problem coming.
The mining giant expects global copper demand to exceed 50 million metric tons annually by 2050.
Yet the industry already needs millions of tons of additional mine capacity that hasn't even been approved.
Here's the kicker: You can't solve this problem by simply throwing money at it when shortages finally arrive.
S&P Global calculates that the average copper deposit now takes 17.5 years to go from discovery to production.
The mining industry should have been spending aggressively on exploration years ago. It didn't.
Demand continues to rise. New discoveries are getting harder to make. And bringing those discoveries into production takes longer than ever.
So the mines we'll desperately need in the 2030s should be getting discovered, drilled and developed right now.
It means the next cyclical rally in metals could be a doozy!
How You Can Play the Coming Move
There are many nonferrous metals to choose from. Recently, I’ve grown much more bullish on copper, for the reasons listed above.
If you want to bet directly on higher copper prices, there's now a remarkably simple way to do it: the Sprott Physical Copper Trust (SCOP).
Sprott says it currently holds about 14,559 metric tons of copper worth roughly $211 million.
You can see on a weekly chart that SCOP is trending higher and hammering away at overhead resistance.
It sure looks to me like it’s coiling up — maybe in advance of its next big move.
SCOP’s expense ratio is a bit high — 1.4%. But if copper blasts off, SCOP will make it worth your while.
The clock is ticking — and that's a recipe for much higher metals prices down the road.
All the best,
Sean
P.S. Individual miners offer much more upside. You see, they are leveraged to metal prices. So, when gold or copper goes up, their margins expand rapidly.
They are also difficult to pick. Fortunately, I’ve already done the work.
Watch my newest presentation on two tiny stocks that are producing much more than just gold and silver these days.
