Copper and Trump’s Tariff Tantrums

July 8, 2025: President Donald Trump declared: “I am announcing a 50% TARIFF on Copper, effective August 1, 2025.”  

 July 8, 2025: Copper futures prices hit an all-time high. 

July 9: The copper mining and refining company Freeport-McMoRan predicts the tariff would add more than $1 billion to its revenue—a 15% jump over 2023–2024.

On July 30, Trump amended the copper tariff to exempt refined copper. But the tariffs will impose a 50% duty on semi-finished products such as pipes, rods and wires, and other copper products—such as the circuity for your cell phone. 

While Trump’s semi-TACO revision to the copper tariff knocked the copper futures price down (and presumably led to a reassessment by Freeport-McMoRan profit projection), it will do little to modify the inflation impact of the tariffs. Makers of fridges, washing machines, or users of electrical wiring in construction, don’t buy raw refined copper. They buy the products covered by the revised tariff. Because of the flood of copper into the U.S. when the tariff was first bandied, the price increase will probably take a little while to occur. 

Copper is an often-overlooked metal, but it has been essential to human existence. Copper, alloyed with tin, created the Bronze Age, a millennium of human time on Earth. As the second-best conductor of electricity (after silver), copper, refined to purity levels of more than 99.9%, made possible the electrification of homes and businesses in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  (If we had to use silver, today many fewer of us would have cell phones; they would be too expensive.)  

And, now, copper is the critical material for decarbonization. 

First, copper is crucial to reconfiguring transportation, a sector that accounts for 20% of all greenhouse gas emissions, largely the result of fossil fuel vehicles. Electric vehicles (EVs) generate three times less greenhouse gas emissions than vehicles that run on fossil fuels, but EVs require much more copper—two to three times as much as fossil fuel vehicles. 

More broadly, copper is at the center of a shift to renewables for energy generation. Copper is a major input to solar and wind farm power facilities. And the demand for electricity will escalate with the proliferation of the new data centers for artificial intelligence.

So, we will need more copper. In his original 50% tariff proposal, Trump seemed to think we could just ramp up copper output, perhaps in a matter of a few months.

Is that possible? The short answer is “no.” 

Making copper is capital-intensive and environmentally problematic. Both the large capital requirements and the environmental impact come from one simple fact: today we have to mine about 100 tons of copper bearing ore to get just one ton of copper. Mining copper moves more earth than any other human activity. Profitable copper mines, those with 1% or more average copper ore content, have 100 times more copper than the Earth’s crust’s average of 0.006%.

Freeport-McMoRan knows a lot about copper mining. It is the largest copper producer in both the United States and globally, owning three of the 10 largest copper mines in the world. One of these, in Morenci, Ariz., is in the United States; the other two are in Peru and Indonesia. The company refines and sells all of its domestic copper output to U.S. customers.  

Freeport-McMoRan is the dominant copper producer in both Indonesia and Peru, but virtually none of the copper produced there comes to the United States. Almost 75% of Peruvian ore and concentrate exports go to China, as does a quarter of Indonesian ore and concentrate exports.  Copper concentrate is the product of the first stage of copper ore processing and is usually 25–35% copper.  

And China, a country that produces less than 10% of all mined copper, manufactures over 40% of all refined copper. China’s refineries and smelters have been refurbished and expanded during the past two decades and rely heavily on Peruvian and Indonesian supplies of copper ore.  

But today, a new scramble for copper is underway—in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). China’s Zijin Mining company has a 40% stake in Congo’s huge Kamoa-Kakula mine (Canada’s Ivanhoe Mining company also has a 40% stake). There are two possible transport routes for copper produced in Congo: east via the Tazara Railway to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, or west via an upgraded railway to the Port of Lobito in Angola. China is planning to upgrade the Tazara Railway, which they built in 1973. A U.S./E.U. partnership is proposing an upgraded rail link to Angola’s Port of Lobito.  Most of the DRC copper is refined in the country – thus this product would fall under Trump’s proposed refined copper tariff exemption.

We may be headed for a new “scramble for Africa,” 140 years after aspiring European colonial powers divided the African continent into rival spheres of influence. It’s copper today, but Congo’s cobalt may be the bigger prize.  As of this writing, no tariffs have been announced on cobalt.