The Copper Question - Discussion On The ASX Copper Register

Every tier, producer to explorer, and a register that is shrinking

Part 1 tested the demand headwinds. Part 2 examined the supply side and asked what copper price it would take to fix it. This closing Part brings the two together in the place they were always heading, a register of the copper deposits and operations an ASX investor can actually reach, from the producers down to the explorers, with each row read through the tests the series developed along the way. Compiling it revealed something worth knowing on its own. Corporate buyers have been removing copper companies from the ASX faster than new ones are arriving.

1.00 — HOW TO READ THE REGISTER

A recap of the tests from Parts 1 and 2

This final Part leans on ideas built earlier in the series, so a short recap comes first, before the tables begin.

Part 1 set out two checks that can be run on any company from its own documents. The first is funding: whether the cash in the latest quarterly report covers the planned work, after allowing for normal running costs of roughly A$70,000 to A$100,000 a month.

The second is evidence: how much support the geology gives the company's story. Production history and drill results carry the most weight, untested geophysical targets carry less, and closeness to somebody else's mine carries the least.

Part 2 covered the price side. Estimates of the copper price needed to justify building a new mine start at about US$12,000 a tonne, and one academic study puts the requirement much higher. That gives a simple question to ask of each development project below: do its study numbers still work under current conditions?

Part 2 also covered processing. Concentrate is scarce enough that smelters agreed to process it for no fee in 2026, so projects that can produce finished copper on site, or that sit near an existing smelter, are in a better position than projects that must ship concentrate overseas.

2.00 — THE REGISTER AT A GLANCE

Two maps and a count

The two maps below carry the whole register. FIG. 01 places the Australian side of it, the producing operations, the development-tier deposits and the two smelters, with the deposits that have left the ASX shown in grey. FIG. 02 then adds the ground held offshore by ASX-listed companies, which stretches from Spain to Botswana to Chile to Montana, with one grey marker in Mongolia for the departure there.

Behind the two maps sit thirteen producing operations or complexes that can be bought through the ASX, with Nifty counted among them on the strength of its September quarter first-cathode target. The development tier adds nine Australian deposits and four offshore projects. The explorers follow in Section 6.00, and three deposits have left the register since 2023. Figures in the tables are stated as at their cited dates, and the market-sensitive ones will be refreshed on the day of publication.

3.00 — TIER ONE: THE PRODUCERS

Where the tonnes actually are, including the majors

The producing tier is where the copper is, and most of it sits inside diversified balance sheets. That fact shapes the choice for investors more than any other in this section. Anyone wanting ASX copper exposure at scale is really choosing among companies where copper shares the balance sheet with iron ore, gold, zinc or aluminium, while the pure-play exposure lives further down the table, in the smaller rows where the operating risk is higher. TABLE 01 sets out the tier.

TABLE 01 also shows where the processing happens, and the answer is mostly not here. Of the Australian operations listed, only BHP's South Australian complex converts its own ore to finished metal in Australia. Nearly everything else ships concentrate, most of it to Asian smelters that are now working for zero processing fees, although Carnaby's tolling arrangement into Glencore's Mount Isa smelter, covered in Section 4.00, may become a notable exception. The table makes one more point worth sitting with. Sandfire aside, an ASX investor cannot buy Australian copper production at scale without buying something else as well. There is a defence for that diversification, and it is a good one. It is what has kept these companies able to fund copper growth through the price cycles that broke smaller operators.

4.00 — TIER TWO: THE AUSTRALIAN DEVELOPMENT TIER

Nine deposits between resource and mine

This tier is where Part 1's open questions get settled. Every headline resource below has been verified against current company disclosures. TABLE 02 carries the tier, and profiles follow for the four largest deposits an ASX investor can still reach.

Caravel: the biggest number on the ASX board

Caravel is a porphyry system in the Wheatbelt of Western Australia, about 150 kilometres from Perth, in farming country rather than desert. With Hillside's departure from the ASX, it now holds the largest copper resource still accessible through a listed pure-play. The resource stands at 1.28 billion tonnes at 0.24 per cent copper, which works out to 3.03 million tonnes of contained metal, with molybdenum, gold and silver alongside. The ore reserve was updated in June 2026 to 597 million tonnes at the same grade, the definitive feasibility mining study was completed in July 2026, and the environmental review resubmission is due around the middle of the year.^[R6]

The scale comes with conditions. The grade is the lowest on the register, and prefeasibility work contemplated development capital of A$1.6 to 1.7 billion, a large number for a company of Caravel's size. Press reports of strategic-deal discussions are circulating, and they still need verification.

In a sense, Caravel tests Part 2's question more directly than any other Australian deposit. Its bulk-tonnage economics only clear at a copper price the incentive-price debate is still arguing about. FIG. 03 shows the project ground.

Kalkaroo: the deposit the majors just voted for

Kalkaroo sits in the Curnamona Province of northeastern South Australia, on a pastoral lease a long way from anywhere large. The resource holds 1.1 million tonnes of copper, 3.1 million ounces of gold and 23,200 tonnes of cobalt, and within it sits a reserve of 100 million tonnes at 0.47 per cent copper and 0.44 grams per tonne gold.^[R7]

In February 2026 control of the project effectively moved. Sandfire signed binding agreements to earn 80 per cent through a staged structure worth up to about A$210 million, which commits it to a new prefeasibility study and at least 20,000 metres of drilling inside two years. The transaction says something about value, because a producing mid-cap looked closely at this ground and agreed to pay developer prices for most of it, with BHP's earlier study work on the deposit already sitting on the public record. Havilah shareholders should weigh the other side of it just as carefully. They now hold 20 per cent of a project whose pace is set by someone else. FIG. 04 reproduces the partners' own map of the project and the pastoral lease that hosts it.

Briggs: the tonnage bet next to the infrastructure

Briggs sits in central Queensland, 60 kilometres west of the deep-water port of Gladstone. The deposit carries 2.0 million tonnes of contained copper, along with 73 million pounds of molybdenum and 16.5 million ounces of silver, at a 0.15 per cent cut-off. Most of the tonnage is inferred, 793 million tonnes at 0.20 per cent, with 137 million tonnes at 0.25 per cent already in the indicated category. Alma Metals is sole-funding a 45-hole drilling program of roughly 14,000 metres through 2026 to change that balance ahead of a prefeasibility study, earning its way to 70 per cent, with Canterbury Resources retaining the rest.^[R8]

Two facts shape the deposit's position on the register, and they pull in different directions. The grade sits at the Caravel end of FIG. 09, which means the mining has to be cheap and the scale has to be large. The location, on the other hand, sits closer to power, rail, port and workforce than almost any other deposit in this tier, and FIG. 05 reproduces the partners' own map of that setting.

Part 1's funding test still applies to the operator. Roughly A$8.7 million in cash and investments is enough to fund drilling, and a development decision would call for capital of a different order altogether.

Elizabeth Creek: the grade counterexample

Elizabeth Creek sits on the margin of the Olympic province in South Australia, and it offers a useful counterpoint to the giant low-grade systems that dominate this tier. Not all of the state's copper comes in billion-tonne packages. The flagship deposit here, Emmie Bluff, holds 40.2 million tonnes at 1.27 per cent copper, with cobalt and silver alongside, and about 95 per cent of that sits in the higher-confidence indicated category. It is the largest of four deposits that together hold 65.5 million tonnes.

The work program is well advanced. Prefeasibility drilling finished in early 2026, and an updated resource estimate is due to follow. The company has also been testing a chloride leach flowsheet, with the aim of producing finished copper on site rather than shipping concentrate overseas, which is the processing advantage described in Section 1.00.^[R9]

The flowsheet is also where the main technical risk sits. The leach process is what makes Elizabeth Creek different, and it is the part of the project that still has to prove itself at study level. The prefeasibility study now in progress will put a price on both. FIG. 06 shows the work under way, with one of the three rigs turning at Emmie Bluff in January 2026 during the final holes of the program.

5.00 — TIER THREE: THE OFFSHORE HOLDINGS

ASX-listed copper beyond Australia

The offshore tier holds the register's largest development project and its most instructive departure. TABLE 03 sets out the rows, and the Costa Fuego profile follows.

Costa Fuego: the register's biggest development plan

Hot Chili's Costa Fuego sits on the coastal range of Chile, about 600 kilometres north of Santiago, and it is the largest copper development plan an ASX investor can currently reach. The resource holds 2.91 million tonnes of copper along with 2.64 million ounces of gold. The prefeasibility study of March 2025 set out the shape of a possible mine, a 20-year operation producing about 95,000 tonnes of copper a year, with a post-tax net present value of US$1.2 billion and a maiden reserve of 502 million tonnes at 0.37 per cent copper.^[R10]

The project has some advantages that are not common in Chile. It sits at low elevation, where building and operating are cheaper than high in the Andes. Permitting work has been under way for more than a decade. Water, which is often the limiting factor in this part of the world, is addressed through a granted maritime concession held in a separate water business. And Glencore has taken a 9.9 per cent shareholding along with offtake rights over 60 per cent of the early concentrate, which shows a large trading house has looked closely at the ground and chosen to be involved.

The risks are the ones that come with any project of this size, and Part 2 explained why they carry more weight now than usual. The capital needed to build Costa Fuego will run into the billions, while the company's market value is a small fraction of that, so a large financing task lies ahead. The definitive feasibility study is still to come. And the mine would earn its living selling concentrate in a market where smelters currently charge nothing to process it. The Glencore relationship softens that exposure but does not remove it.

The main near-term development is the La Verde discovery, which is being drilled into a revised study due by the end of 2026. FIG. 07 shows the project's setting on the coastal range.

6.00 — TIER FOUR: THE EXPLORERS

The hopeful tier, kept brief by design

The explorer tier holds the most companies and the least defined copper, and this series treats it accordingly. These companies are at the stage where the story is a hypothesis awaiting an expensive test. Exploration is exactly that, and every deposit in the tiers above once sat here. The tools for reading this tier were built in Part 1, Section 10.00, and they remain the whole of Samso's guidance on it. Run the funding test on the latest quarterly report, keeping in mind that running costs continue through every month of waiting. Run the evidence test on the latest exploration announcement, keeping in mind that being near Olympic Dam is not evidence of an Olympic Dam. TABLE 04 lists the starter set.

The spreadsheet accompanying this document carries this table on its own sheet, with an example row and space to extend it company by company during the pre-publication sweep. The rows above are a starting set.

7.00 — THE SHRINKING REGISTER

What compiling the register revealed

A register compiled in 2023 would have carried OZ Minerals, Rex Minerals, Xanadu Mines and MAC Copper among its most substantial rows. All four are gone now, and an 80 per cent economic interest in a fifth deposit, Kalkaroo, followed them in February 2026. FIG. 08 sets out the exits.

The buyers in FIG. 08 have a lot in common. Each is a strategic, long-term holder of assets: a diversified major, an Indonesian conglomerate, a Singapore-based consortium, a South African gold house moving into copper, and a mid-cap producer securing its next decade of ore. The sellers, in every case, were ASX shareholders accepting a premium, 57 per cent for Xanadu and 98 per cent over the ninety-day average for Rex. Each transaction made sense on its own. Taken together, though, they mean the pool of copper an Australian retail investor can own is shrinking at the development end faster than discovery is refilling it. In its own way, the corporate activity repeats what Part 2's discovery-drought chart showed.

FIG. 09 plots what remains, and what has left, on the axes that decide development economics.

Set against Part 2's incentive-price estimates, FIG. 09 shows two kinds of project. Down and to the right sit the tonnage bets, Caravel, Costa Fuego, Briggs and, until its departure, Kharmagtai. In these deposits the copper is measured in millions of tonnes, but the grade demands bulk-mining economics, and on the register's own study numbers they need copper prices in the range the incentive-price debate is still contesting. Up and to the left sit the grade bets, Emmie Bluff, Mutooroo, Greater Duchess, and CSA before it left. These are smaller inventories that can carry higher costs for every tonne of rock mined. It is worth pausing on where the buyers have been shopping. Hillside and Kalkaroo sit in the middle of the chart, and CSA sat at the grade end. The corporate money has been buying deposits whose economics work at conservative copper prices, and that choice says something about how those buyers view the incentive-price debate.

8.00 — SAMSO TAKE

Closing the series

The Copper Question opened with a newspaper column about data centres and aluminium wiring. Three Parts later, the trail has run a long way from there. It has taken in copper demand forecasts that disagree by multiples, a substitution threat that turned out to be a century old and price-capped rather than fatal, mine supply that keeps missing its own guidance while smelters work for nothing, an incentive-price debate spanning a factor of two, and finally a register of ASX-accessible copper that corporate buyers have been steadily reducing from the top.

This closes The Copper Question. The register in this document and its companion spreadsheet are built to be maintained rather than filed away. The tables carry their verification flags, the spreadsheet carries its sweep sheet, and the September quarter of 2026, when Nifty either pours cathode or does not, will give the series its first public test. Samso will be watching it on the record, as always.

REFERENCES & SOURCES

Notes on sourcing

All maps, charts and tables in this document are original Samso illustrations of sourced data. The project photographs and reproduced company maps (FIG. 03 to FIG. 07) are drawn from the companies' public presentations, fact sheets and ASX announcements and are credited to their source documents in their captions. Resource figures in TABLE 02 and TABLE 03 marked as verified were checked against company disclosures in July 2026; rows marked "verify" carry a pre-publication check. Market-sensitive figures (production guidance, cash balances, deal values and currency conversions) are stated as at the cited dates and refreshed on publication day. The explorer table is deliberately a starter set pending the pre-publication sweep.

1. [R1] Samso Insights, The Copper Question Parts 1 and 2 (July 2026), for the demand evidence, supply evidence, tests framework, incentive-price material and the Nifty case study, with their underlying references.

2. [R2] Stockhead, "ASX Copper Tier List" (July 2025), and Hot Chili media pages, "ASX Copper Tier List: Part 2": producer output compilation; Alara, Cobre and Norfolk mentions.

3. [R3] The Assay, "Five Largest ASX-Listed Copper Miners in 2026" (February 2026): Sandfire December quarter output; Develop Woodlawn ramp and Trafigura US$65m arrangement.

4. [R4] The Bull (May 2026): Capstone Copper 2026 guidance 200,000 to 230,000 t and costs; South32 Sierra Gorda.

5. [R5] Investing News Network (February 2026): Sandfire MATSA and Motheo operations; Black Butte PFS and permit history.

6. [R6] Caravel Minerals: project page and ASX releases; Mining.com.au (July 2026) on the DFS mining study and the June 2026 reserve of 597 Mt at 0.24%; Stockhead (January 2026) on the resource of 1.28 Bt at 0.24% for 3.03 Mt, DFS progress and reported strategic discussions (verify).

7. [R7] Havilah Resources project pages; Mining Technology and Yahoo Finance (February 2026): Kalkaroo resource and reserve; Sandfire two-stage 80% earn-in and consideration; Mutooroo resource.

8. [R8] Canterbury Resources ASX announcement, "Major Drilling Program Commences at Briggs" (29 April 2026): MRE of 2.0 Mt Cu, 73 Mlb Mo and 16.5 Moz Ag at a 0.15% Cu cut-off (137 Mt at 0.25% indicated; 793 Mt at 0.20% inferred); 45-hole ~14,000 m program; earn-in terms; and Alma Metals releases and coverage (April to May 2026) for funding.

9. [R9] Coda Minerals ASX announcement, "Elizabeth Creek Copper-Silver Drilling Recommences in 2026" (12 January 2026): programme status, project-wide inventory of 65.5 Mt for 725,800 t contained copper, Emmie Bluff resource detail, and the August 2025 scoping study update (pre-tax NPV7 ~A$1.3 billion, IRR 39%); with Discovery Alert (January 2026) and SMM (May 2026).

10. [R10] Hot Chili: PFS announcement (27 March 2025) including the maiden reserve of 502 Mt at 0.37% Cu; Livewire Markets (May 2026): resource of 2.91 Mt Cu and 2.64 Moz Au, PFS economics, Glencore holding and offtake, La Verde and the revised PFS timeline; Crux Investor (April 2025) on production scale and costs.

11. [R11] Xanadu Mines announcements and coverage: Bastion takeover unconditional (June 2025), Zijin acceptance, compulsory acquisition and TSX delisting (July 2025); Allens deal summary (~A$160m implied value); Kharmagtai 2024 PFS parameters and resource basis (Junior Mining Network, January 2025; earlier scoping MRE).

12. [R12] Rex Minerals and Hillside: MACH Metals scheme completion (30 October 2024, A$393m); Mining.com and Australian Mining (July 2024); Rex project page (resource 337 Mt at 0.56% for 1.9 Mt Cu, Stage 1 reserve, A$854m capex); Ausenco EPCM award; Wood Mackenzie project note (May 2026).

13. [R13] Harmony Gold announcement (24 October 2025): completion of the MAC Copper acquisition at US$1.01bn; CSA integration and life-of-mine plan timing (August 2026).

14. [R14] Carnaby Resources coverage (October 2025): Greater Duchess consolidation, ~27 Mt at ~1.5% CuEq across twelve deposits including Trekelano; Glencore tolling and offtake agreement.

15. [R15] KGL Resources: Northern Territory Government investment flyer on Jervois approvals, build schedule and financing dependence (verify currency of document at publication).

16. [R16] BHP disclosures via Part 1 sources: South Australian FY25 guidance and growth studies; Escondida interest.

17. [R17] Kamoa-Kakula context update: Ivanhoe Mines guidance announcement (3 December 2025), 2026 guidance 380,000 to 420,000 t (noted for the Part 2 record).

18. [R18] Deal-value conversions: approximate AUD equivalents at reported-date exchange rates; verify conversions at publication.

19. [R19] Reproduced image sources: Caravel Minerals investor presentation (February 2021); Sandfire and Havilah Resources, Kalkaroo Copper-Gold Project fact sheet (February 2026); Canterbury Resources ASX announcement (29 April 2026); Coda Minerals ASX announcement (12 January 2026); Hot Chili corporate presentation, Rule Symposium (ASX release, 7 July 2026).

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