Thoughts on Freedom

Note to “peakers”, copper may have just been “unpeaked”. Julian Simon’s bet seems to live on, or at least it has in copper. LOL.

DJ BHP Billiton Announces Massive Copper Find In Chile

SANTIAGO (AFP)–British-Australian mining giant BHP Billiton (BBL) announced Tuesday a new copper find near its Minera Escondida mine in northern Chile, a vein estimated to yield at least one billion tons of the valuable metal. “In order to properly and rapidly evaluate identified exploration targets, decisions were recently made to aggressively expand the exploration and development drilling program” in the area, the company said in a report. The new Pampa Escondida project, as it is called, was discovered during extensive exploration of the area begun in recent years, it said. “Drilling to date suggests that Pampa Escondida contains at least one billion metric tons of porphyry style mineralization,” the report added. The BHP Billiton finding follows last Thursday’s announcement by Chilean state-run mining group Codelco, the biggest copper producer in the world, of a copper find called “Casualidad” with an estimated yield of 300 million tons. Minera Escondida is the world’s biggest copper mine, which produced a record 6.5billion dollars of copper last year.

Chile is the world’s biggest producer of copper, which is used for electrical wiring and plumbing.

Let’s take some bets with oil over the next few years. LOL.

Note to commentors: With only about 3% of the world’s land area partially explored only sensible comments please if you’re thinking of telling us how we’re running out of raw materials

Update: At todays LME price of US$8,300 per ton, that’s a lot of metal (Not bad for weekend’s work with a metal detector on your back).