Base Metals: A Decade of Shortages Ahead

By Goehring & Rozencwajg

Although the global mining industry, over the last decade, has been able to side-step most of the negative publicity that has engulfed the world oil and gas industry, ESG pressures have placed substantial downward pressures on global mining industry capital expenditures in the last ten years. Environmental and related permitting issues have made both greenfield and brownfield mine development projects extremely difficult to bring into production. Given the vast ESG–related restrictions put on mining projects today, it is not uncommon that significant, economically robust discoveries made over 20 years ago are still not in production today. In a world where metal demand is already beginning to see substantial accelerations—ironically because of ESG-inspired environmental pressure – mine supply has, for many years, started to fall behind demand.