Copper prices reached a record $14,779 per tonne this week on the London Metal Exchange, according to Martin Valerio Jiminian, Executive Director of the Dominican Chamber of Mining and Petroleum, writing in an opinion column. He argued that the record itself is the wrong question to focus on.
Commodities are cyclical by nature, rising and falling, and a mining policy built around Monday's price has the same short shelf life as that price, Valerio Jiminian wrote. A mine, by contrast, is planned in decades, since fifteen to twenty years can pass between the first exploration survey and the closure of an operation. A strategy that depends on whether the metal sits at $9,000 or $14,000 a tonne, he said, is flawed from the start.
What makes copper significant is not this week's record but the structural demand trends behind it, which do not depend on a cycle but on the direction of the world economy: electrification, power grids, electric vehicles, data centers and defense, he wrote. The London Metal Exchange, where the price was set, is the world's principal marketplace for trading industrial metals.
Four demand drivers
Valerio Jiminian identified four forces he described as structural rather than cyclical. The first is electrification and renewable energy: every wind farm, solar plant and modernized stretch of power grid requires copper because it remains the most efficient conductor available at industrial scale. He cited Goldman Sachs estimates that electrical and grid infrastructure will account for more than 60% of growth in copper demand through 2030.
The second is electric transport. An electric vehicle consumes roughly four times more copper than a combustion vehicle, not counting the charging infrastructure that has to be built alongside it, he wrote.
The third, which he called the oldest and most underestimated, is construction and traditional infrastructure. Wiring, plumbing, building electrical systems and public works remain, by volume, a huge share of global demand, and they grow with any economic expansion regardless of the energy transition.
The fourth is the newest: artificial intelligence and data centers. Valerio Jiminian cited a Morgan Stanley projection that copper consumption in data centers would climb to 740,000 tonnes in 2026 and approach one million tonnes in 2027. He also cited a BloombergNEF estimate of a cumulative deficit of 6 million tonnes by 2035, driven in large part by that same demand. None of these four drivers disappears if the price corrects, which is why he said they matter more than this week's number.
Congo's export ban and mineral geopolitics
On August 6, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the world's second-largest copper producer and its leading supplier of cobalt, banned exports of copper and cobalt concentrates with immediate effect, seeking to force processing within its own borders and retain more value from its resources. The announcement immediately moved the international copper price, Valerio Jiminian wrote.
It was not the first time Kinshasa has used this tool, having done so previously in 2013, 2019 and 2023, but he said the decision illustrates something bigger than Congo alone: critical minerals have stopped being purely a market matter and become a matter of geopolitics. Countries that hold these resources are increasingly deciding that extracting and exporting raw material is not enough, and are seeking to process it, capture more value and use their position as negotiating leverage.
The Dominican Republic's challenge
Valerio Jiminian argued that the challenge for the Dominican Republic is not to copy Chile, Zambia or Congo, since none of those countries share the Dominican Republic's scale, geology or circumstances, and it would be irresponsible to suggest the country will become a copper giant. Nothing in the data today points to that, he wrote.
The right question, he said, is whether the country sufficiently understands its own geological potential and whether it has the institutional conditions to explore it responsibly. The Dominican Republic already produces copper at Cerro de Maimon, but output has stayed flat for more than a decade, fluctuating between 6,000 and 11,000 metric tonnes a year, without a modern, systematic exploration campaign to confirm how much more copper actually lies underground.
That, he wrote, is the blind spot. The point is not to decide today whether the country should become a significant copper exporter, but to generate the geological information needed so that decision, whenever it comes, is made with data rather than expectation.
Exploration before extraction
Valerio Jiminian closed by writing that a country cannot exploit what has not been discovered, and cannot discover what it does not allow itself to explore. That, he said, is the real dilemma beneath the noise around copper's price. The market will keep being volatile and headlines will keep citing records and corrections, but the underlying question for the Dominican Republic does not change with the quotation, he wrote: if the country wants a serious position on the critical minerals of the future, the first step is not setting a production target or promising a boom, but investing in finding out what it actually has.
