WorldWide Drilling Rescource

www.starironworks.com 257 Caroline Street Punxsutawney, PA 15767 800-927-0560 • 814-427-2555 Fax: 814-427-5164 SERVING THE WATER WELL INDUSTRY Serving the Drilling Industry 22 OCTOBER 2019 WorldWide Drilling Resource ® Copper: Bright Future - Glorious Past Adapted from Copper Development Association, Inc. First used by man over 10,000 years ago, copper was, for nearly five millenia, the only known metal, thus having all the metal applications. Initially decorative and then utilitarian, copper was, around 300 B.C., alloyed first with arsenic and then with tin. When the BronzeAge suddenly ended at about 1200 B.C., the interruption of international trade routes forced economy in the use of copper. From then to now, efficiency in copper use and reuse has continued. Large-scale mining of copper began in the late 1800s, primarily in the American West. Open-pit mining techniques were developed, and the U.S. quickly became the world’s largest copper producer. In 1877, Thomas Doolittle, a Connecticut brass mill man, devel- oped hard-drawn copper wire strong enough to be strung overhead. When the telephone system was commercialized, both it and the electric power grid began to con- sume large quantities of copper wire. Similar developments occurred in the rest of the industrialized world. From the early 1890s to the mid-1970s, annual world consumption grew by about a factor of 30. The U.S. copper industry consists of two main segments, producers and fabricators. Producers’ products are sold mostly to fabricators, while fabricators’ products are sold to the construction industry, manufacturing industry, and the govern- ment. U.S. copper and copper alloy industry structure has undergone dramatic changes over the last 10 to 20 years. Whereas the U.S. was the largest producer and consumer of newly-mined copper, now Chile has taken the lead. The U.S. share of world mine production is now about 18%, while Chile’s share is 23%. Today, as copper maintains its markets, this must be balanced against its future availability. Of the world’s reserves, about one-quarter of the deposits are economically recoverable now or in the near future. Each year about three billion pounds are withdrawn from the earth as U.S. mine production.Three key factors will influ- ence copper supply in the future: U.S. self-sufficiency, energy efficiency, and recycling efficiency. But more copper is recovered and put back into use from recycled material than is derived from mined ore, so copper will most likely continue its 10,000- year history of usefulness well into the future. MIN WWDR photos Bingham Canyon Open-Pit Copper Mine