(Kitco News) Washington’s strategic metals push is pulling copper into U.S. warehouses at China’s expense, according to Christopher Ecclestone, principal and mining strategist at Hallgarten + Company.
Fresh from LME Week in London, Ecclestone told Kitco Mining’s Digging Deep on Oct. 22 that one metal dominated the conversations. “Copper, copper, copper,” he said. “This year it was massively, massively copper focused.”
A chart from consultancy Project Blue captured the shift. “It showed that the Trump policies, for better or worse, are sucking copper into the US,” Ecclestone said. According to that chart, the U.S. ran a large inventory surplus last year and is heading for another, while China’s warehouse position has turned negative. “So the party that is suffering most, curiously enough, in the copper space is China, because the US is hoovering up material from all around the world.”
Commodity traders are competing hard to feed that demand. On Oct. 15, Mercuria said it had delivered 12,000 tonnes of Congolese copper into Project Vault, the U.S. government’s critical minerals reserve. “Big trading houses are gouging each other’s eyes out to be part of that picture,” Ecclestone said.
That makes copper a bigger geopolitical chokepoint than rare earths, in his view. “Copper’s the thing that everybody needs,” he said. Rare earths matter mainly to the handful of countries with industries that use them. “I would say 90% of the countries in the world have no end-use industries for rare earths.”
He also backed CME Group’s plan, announced Oct. 19, to launch tungsten futures in early 2027, calling it a fix for a market he sees as opaque and vulnerable to misinformation. “I think it’s a great development. Tungsten has been too murky for too long,” he said, noting that futures volumes could dwarf the physical trade.
Ecclestone saved his sharpest criticism for some miners using Argentina’s RIGI regime, which grants tax and legal stability to projects above US$200 million. The complaints so far, he said, involve companies importing basic goods from China, such as structural steel, sheds and accommodation units, that Argentine suppliers already produce. “We’re not talking high tech here,” he said.
Miners, he argued, are breaking their own pitch. “Miners are the first ones to talk about trickle down,” Ecclestone said. “There’s no trickle down. The flow of trickles are directed towards China and not towards the domestic market.” That matters because the incentives were granted on wider promises. “And these companies are getting big, big, big tax benefits, and they’re getting them on the basis that they’re going to be providing more than just the 200 jobs that are at site.”
“I regard some of these miners as basically just cheap chiselers,” he said.
Ecclestone agreed that RIGI lacked specific local-content rules and said the frustration could slow a larger “Super RIGI” regime still before Argentina’s Congress. “The other 46 million Argentines are going to say, ‘What’s in it for us?’” he said. “It has to be something that benefits everyone.”
Closer to home, he sees a real copper revival in Arizona. On Oct. 21, Hudbay Minerals and joint venture partner Mitsubishi approved construction of Copper World, expected to produce 102,000 tonnes of copper a year over its first decade, with first production targeted for the second half of 2029. Faraday Copper has also closed its purchase of BHP’s San Manuel project. “It’s a revival of US mining,” Ecclestone said, adding that “there seem to be unlimitless amounts of copper that can be discovered in the US.”
The money behind that revival, he noted, is largely foreign. “The entrepreneurs in mining in the US are not in the US. They’re elsewhere,” he said. And the biggest miners still have reservations. Ecclestone said U.S. political swings, and the chance a future administration cools on mining, keep them cautious. “Big international miners are hedging their bets here.”
On digital gold, which the World Gold Council said on Oct. 19 could more than triple by 2031, Ecclestone was unimpressed by the novelty. “ETFs are tokenization,” he said, likening tokens to “old wine in new bottles or new wine in old bottles.” He trusts established ETF issuers over smaller token providers and warned that unverified backing claims are “a recipe for sort of snake oil type scandals.”
He was gloomier on South America’s traditional copper powers. “Chile has rested on its laurels for a very long time,” Ecclestone said. Peru, he added, has well-known deposits that are not advancing, even though its governments have not been hostile to business. “Peru could be really the third leg of a massive dominance of the copper business by Latin America.”
Watch the full video on the Kitco Mining YouTube channel.
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