Newsletter · · Ashutosh Agarwal

Copper Faces a Deposit Problem While Fertilizer Suffers From Missing Competition - Materials weekly - Week of July 19, 2026

Materials podcast intelligence for the week of July 19, 2026 (episodes from July 12 to 19). Copper's real constraint is finding new deposits, not mining faster, US-funded rare earths are flowing to Japan and Korea for lack of domestic magnet-making, Asian steelmakers are reshaping American steel, and fertilizer's war spike sits on top of a deeper competition problem.

Materials weekly

Week of July 19, 2026: Copper Faces a Deposit Problem While Fertilizer Suffers From Missing Competition

A lot of this week's best material circled back to one uncomfortable idea: the stuff modern life is built on, copper, magnets, steel, fertilizer, is getting harder and more expensive to make, and you can't fix that in a hurry. Mines take decades. Fertilizer plants take years. Magnet supply chains take longer still. Meanwhile a war near the Strait of Hormuz and a fresh round of tariffs keep poking the anthill. Below is what the podcasters, CEOs, and analysts actually said, with the numbers they used.

TL;DR

  • Copper's problem isn't digging faster, it's finding new deposits at all. Chile, the world's biggest producer, pumped out 14% less copper last year even at record prices. Guests are openly talking about $10, even $20 copper over time. (ITM Trading; Stansberry Investor Hour)

  • The US is spending billions to build a rare-earth industry, and then shipping the output to Japan and Korea because America can't yet turn it into magnets. One CEO flat-out said he'll sell to whoever pays fastest. (The Northern Miner)

  • China's rare-earth squeeze is real, but the West's weak spot is demand, not supply. Flood too much money in and you get a bust. (Money of Mine)

  • Steel's future is being decided in Tokyo and Seoul. Nippon, Hyundai, and Posco are all building modern, cleaner mills on US soil, while AI data centers quietly become a new, steady buyer of American steel. (Climate One; Smart Investing with Brent & Chase Wilsey)

  • Fertilizer is the farmer's biggest gripe, and it has two culprits: a war-driven price spike (urea nearly doubled this spring) and, more lastingly, a near-total lack of competition among suppliers, now drawing government attention. (Marketplace; Grain Markets and Other Stuff; AG Bull)

What's new

Copper: "a deposit problem, not a production problem"

The single best line of the week came from Ian Harris, CEO of copper developer Copper Giant, speaking at the Rick Rule mining symposium in Florida. His point, in plain terms: the world doesn't struggle to run copper mines, it struggles to find and build new ones. "Copper is a deposit problem. It's not a production problem," he said. His proof: Chile, the largest producer on earth, was "down 14 percent in production" last year, at "the highest price ever." Even with every incentive to dig more, "they couldn't hit the throttle." (ITM Trading)

Why can't they just build more mines? Because copper mines take a shockingly long time. Harris said discovery-to-production now averages "20 years." A new project in Poland: "the shaft alone takes seven years." The famous Resolution project in Arizona: "a 10-year time period just to get to first production." When supply is that slow to respond, the only pressure valve is price. Hence his comment that "talking about $20 copper is not insanity" (copper trades in the mid-single digits per pound today), and that copper reaching $6 "is just the beginning." He noted that in the last big copper boom, prices rose "50 percent every single year" for three years running.

You don't have to buy the $20 number to take the setup seriously. On the Stansberry Investor Hour, geopolitical strategist Marco Papic gave the more sober version. Analysts figure the "incentivization price", the price high enough to make companies want to build new mines, "is about $5 a pound." But, he added, "history suggests the incentivization price has to go to $10." Translation: the supply response is going to be late and expensive. Papic's blunt conclusion: owning industrial metals "has been my favorite trade for the last 2 to 3 years. It's still going to be my favorite trade for the next 2 to 3 years."

He also connected copper to the AI story in a way that's easy to miss. Everyone treats AI as a software phenomenon; Papic argues the build-out phase is intensely physical. "AI capex is inflationary. Like it costs copper and electricity and labor to build." The digital economy, he said, has "run headlong into... copper and steel." (One caution from Papic worth flagging for portfolio folks: he thinks all this physical inflation could push the Fed toward raising rates again "December and beyond," not cutting, the opposite of what most people expect.)

Where does the demand actually come from? A helpful, numbers-heavy breakdown came from Australia's Equity Mates. Global electricity demand is projected to jump 30–50% by 2035. A big chunk is emerging markets: India alone is expected to go from 1.7 million tons of copper a year today to 5 million tons by 2035, overtaking everyone but China. Electric vehicles add another layer, each EV contains roughly 70 kg of copper, and EVs alone are seen driving 14% of copper's demand growth through 2035. There's even a World Bank–backed plan (Mission 300) to connect 300 million Africans to electricity by 2030. More wires, more copper.

Rare earths: America is building the mine but not the magnet

Here's a genuinely awkward story that broke this week, relayed on The Northern Miner (citing the Financial Times). The US government has poured billions into rare-earth producers, MP Materials, Energy Fuels, Phoenix Tailings, to break China's grip. The catch: America can't yet turn those rare earths into the finished magnets that go into motors, missiles, and wind turbines. So the raw material is being shipped to... Japan and South Korea, where magnet-making is far more developed.

Phoenix Tailings' CEO Nick Myers said it without varnish: "Unless the US defense primes move quickly, I will sell out. Other companies are paying top dollar faster." His customers are "primarily in Korea and Japan." MP Materials, the biggest US producer, is selling its neodymium-praseodymium (the magnet ingredients) mainly through Japan's Sumitomo, though it has stopped selling mined material to China's Shenghe under its US-government deal, and expects to start shipping finished magnets to General Motors later this year (part of supply deals with GM and Apple).

Washington is trying to close the gap. The Department of War announced a $25 million investment (July 13) in RE-Element Technologies to expand rare-earth refining in Marion, Indiana, recycling old magnets into oxides plus yttrium, gadolinium, germanium, and gallium, to "rebuild a domestic mine-to-magnet supply chain."

To see why this matters, look at one number from the same episode: yttrium oxide costs about $7.88 per kilogram inside China versus $1,175 per kilogram in Europe, more than 100 times higher. China controls over 90% of the world's yttrium-oxide capacity. When the input is that much cheaper at home, Chinese manufacturers win downstream too: shares of six Chinese companies that make yttrium- and zirconia-based products have jumped between 74% and 312% this year.

Steel: the future is being written in Tokyo and Seoul, and in data centers

Two very different steel stories landed this week.

First, the industry's ownership is going global. On Climate One, the discussion of the Nippon Steel and U.S. Steel deal made a striking point: three of Asia's biggest steelmakers are now building on US soil. Nippon (which now owns U.S. Steel) committed to $14 billion of investment; Hyundai Steel is building a hydrogen-ready plant in Louisiana; and Posco took a 20% stake in that Hyundai plant plus signed a preliminary partnership with Cleveland-Cliffs. As one guest put it, "the future of this industry could end up being set in Tokyo and Seoul, which I think people haven't totally caught on to yet in the US." The new plants are almost all modern "direct-reduced iron" and electric-arc furnaces (cleaner, more flexible), not the old coal-fired blast furnaces, U.S. Steel's Big River complex has made Mississippi County, Arkansas the #1 steel-producing county in America. (A political wrinkle: President Trump holds a "golden share" that lets him veto company decisions, an unusual lever over a private, now foreign-owned company.)

Second, a new source of steel demand that most people don't picture: AI data centers. On Smart Investing with Brent & Chase Wilsey, the hosts noted industry estimates that new data centers will consume roughly 1 million tons of steel a year, about $1.4 billion of demand, because they're essentially giant steel buildings full of server racks. And they compete with steelmakers for the same scarce electricity: a single electric-furnace mill draws 50–200 megawatts, the same power the data centers are fighting over. Higher steel prices, they warned, then "pass through" to cars, appliances, and buildings.

Fertilizer: a war spike on top of a competition problem

If you farm, fertilizer was the story this week, and it has two layers.

The short-term layer is the war. On Marketplace, the numbers were stark: the price of urea (a common nitrogen fertilizer) "nearly doubled from the year before" this spring. The US makes only about two-thirds of the fertilizer its farmers use; the rest is imported. And on The Green Blueprint, Nitricity CEO Nico Pinkowski put a fine point on why the Middle East conflict matters so much: the Persian Gulf, through the Strait of Hormuz, supplies 38% of the world's urea. He cited an estimate that the strait's closure could push "an additional 45 million more people around the world into food insecurity" over the next year. His own company, which makes fertilizer from renewable power, air, water, and recycled almond shells, has seen inbound interest jump 500% since the disruption.

The bill lands on real people. A Tennessee row-crop farmer, Todd Littleton, told Marketplace: "It cost me an extra $100,000 this spring over what was budgeted for." He can't even pre-buy cheaper fall fertilizer because he doesn't have the cash: "our margins have been so tight that we just haven't been able to do that." On XtremeAg, growers put concrete prices on it: the first fall bid for anhydrous ammonia came in at $1,150/ton, and a standard 180-pound nitrogen program "could be $160 an acre this fall."

The longer-term layer, and the one that got the most heat, is competition, or the lack of it. On Grain Markets and Other Stuff, veteran farmer-trader Matt Bennett said fertilizer is "where it's most glaring... there's just not that much competition whatsoever." The backdrop is grim: the American Farm Bureau Federation projects US row-crop farmers will lose $32 billion across nine major crops in 2027, a sixth straight year of losses, with corn losses deepening from $131 to $167 an acre. And a National Corn Growers Association study, discussed on AG Bull, found US farmers pay far more than Brazilian farmers for the same inputs: corn seed +68%, corn insecticides +80%, herbicides roughly double, and fungicides more than 100% higher. (The seed gap is partly explained by US yields being about twice Brazil's; the crop-chemical gaps are not.) The corn growers want price transparency, more competition, and a "public interest test" in trade cases, and, per the podcast, the Justice Department is "looking in on a number of these areas."

The debate

How much government money should chase this, and where does it backfire? This was the sharpest fault line of the week.

On the metals side, Henry Sanderson (author of Volt Rush) laid out the trap on Money of Mine. China's export controls genuinely worked, partly, he said, because "the element of surprise was remarkably still there" and big Western industries hadn't mapped their own supply chains. But the West's weak spot isn't supply, it's demand: US electric-vehicle sales are soft, wind is soft, and a lot of magnet capacity is being built. Pour in too much capital and "companies competing against each other and no one makes money. And then everyone goes bankrupt and we're back to square one." His preferred fix isn't government price guarantees (which put taxpayers on the hook) but consumer off-take deals with a price floor, the model Japan struck with Lynas. The buyer, not the taxpayer, backstops the price.

The farm world had the mirror-image argument. On Grain Markets and Other Stuff, Joe Vaclavik made a provocative case against endless farm subsidies: "If you continue to subsidize the US producer to grow crops that don't make money, they're going to have the money to pay up for inputs. And the input suppliers will charge you what the market will bear... So do we want to get off this hamster wheel or not?" His point: aid meant to help farmers can quietly leak straight to the fertilizer and seed sellers. (For context, the House GOP just proposed another $12 billion in farm assistance, on top of $11 billion paid last year and $10 billion under Biden before that.)

Same underlying question in both worlds: subsidize the thing, or fix the market structure? Nobody landed a knockout.

The names in play

A quick tour of the specific companies and projects that came up, not recommendations, just what got airtime and why:

  • MP Materials, Energy Fuels, Phoenix Tailings, the US rare-earth producers now selling into Asia because domestic magnet-making lags. MP is furthest along on the finished-magnet path (GM and Apple deals). (The Northern Miner)

  • RE-Element Technologies, private; just landed a $25M Department of War investment for rare-earth refining in Indiana. (The Northern Miner)

  • Nippon Steel / U.S. Steel, Hyundai Steel, Posco, Cleveland-Cliffs, Nucor, the reshaping of who owns and builds American steel. (Climate One)

  • Copper Giant, Colombia copper developer; passed 1 billion tonnes of resource, first economic study due year-end, stock up 250% this year, hoping a new Colombian president turns the country mining-friendly. Backed by Frank Giustra. (ITM Trading)

  • Intrepid Metals, early-stage, high-grade copper-gold in Arizona (local grades up to 20% copper); Teck Resources owns 9.9%; a 10,000-meter drill program starts September 1. (Mining Stock Daily)

  • Buffalo Potash (TSXV: BUFF / OTCQB: BLPTF), trying to build a low-cost Saskatchewan potash mine using horizontal oil-and-gas drilling tech instead of a "billions"-dollar conventional shaft. CEO sees a potash supply gap opening over 2–3 years. (Stocks To Watch)

  • Nitricity, private; makes low-carbon nitrogen fertilizer from renewable power and almond waste; riding a wave of interest post-Hormuz. (The Green Blueprint)

  • BYD, Polestar/Volvo (Geely), on the EV/battery-metal side: BYD now outsells Ford and Honda without touching the US market; Polestar is being forced out of the US under the new Connected Vehicle rule while Volvo squeaks through. (The Straight Shift)

Read-throughs

The Strait of Hormuz is the thread tying half of this newsletter together. It's why urea nearly doubled, why fertilizer aid is back on Congress's desk, why Brazilian farm margins are turning negative (Brazil imports most of its nitrogen and phosphate, Commodities Focus), and part of why Marco Papic thinks inflation stays sticky. If you follow one macro variable across metals and ag this quarter, it's the shipping situation in the Gulf.

AI's power hunger is quietly a metals-and-materials story. The same electricity crunch shows up three ways: copper demand (all those wires and transformers), steel demand (data centers are giant steel sheds), and a warning that it may not all get built, on The Wall Street Skinny, a 50-year power-industry veteran estimated that maybe half of announced data centers won't reach the finish line because grid-connection studies can quietly kill them. If he's right, the copper-and-steel demand from AI is real but lumpier and slower than the headlines suggest.

Cheaper Chinese inputs are a competitiveness weapon, not just a talking point. The 100x yttrium price gap and China's ability to make things for less keep showing up, in rare earths, in EVs (BYD), in batteries. It's the same worry the fertilizer debate raises from the other direction: when your input costs are structurally higher than a rival's, subsidies just paper over the gap.

Farmers are voting with their wallets, and it hits the fertilizer majors. Multiple ag shows described growers cutting back phosphate (MAP/DAP) and potash, though not nitrogen, for the 2026 crop, and reaching for biologicals to stretch what's in the soil (AG Bull / Cross Creek). Even where 2027 fertilizer is ~$200/ton cheaper, cash-strapped farmers can't pre-buy it. That's softer near-term volume for the phosphate and potash producers, even as the long-term supply-gap story stays intact.

What changed this week

  • New: Trump's 25% tariff on Brazil (effective July 22), with soybeans, meal, oil, and ethanol not exempt, and Brazil weighing retaliation by suspending patent protection on US ag seeds. (Grain Markets and Other Stuff)

  • New: The FT report that US-funded rare earths are flowing to Japan and Korea, and the $25M Department of War refining investment. (The Northern Miner)

  • New: House GOP's proposed $12 billion in farm aid tied explicitly to war-driven input costs. (Grain Markets and Other Stuff)

  • Building: The DOJ / antitrust attention on fertilizer and crop-chemical pricing, the NCGA cost-gap study has now "got the debate going full time." (AG Bull)

  • Still thin: Battery metals as a pure-play theme. Plenty of EV and battery-chemistry chatter (LFP, sodium-ion, solid-state), but almost no direct talk of lithium, cobalt, or nickel prices this week. Aluminum was essentially absent too, no Alcoa/South32 episodes surfaced. We'll flag it honestly rather than stretch.