BHP chief development officer Johan van Jaarsveld told the Melbourne Mining Club this week the global shift to electric vehicles would require an additional 26m tonnes of copper by the end of this decade as the number of EVs moves from 16 million in 2023 to a predicted 400 million by 2030.
Mr van Jaarsveld’s assessment of an apparent hole in the world’s energy transition dreams follows from a speech from CEO Mike Henry at the IEA Critical Minerals and Clean Energy Summit in Paris, where he warned the world needed about $386bn of “growth capital” investment into copper in the next seven years to limit temperatures rises to 1.5 degrees celsius.
But though Mr van Jaarsveld said the challenge of securing enough copper would be “daunting”, he said BHP had successfully applied AI analysis to geological data going back 130 years to find new deposits.“Running AI analysis through that, it is bringing us an agnostic view to the interpretation of the data.
Exploration involves drilling companies intersecting target zones at multiple points to map out potential mineral wealth within a particular area.