Last week, the president of Argentina, Javier Milei, was again in the United States, where he met with representatives of mining companies and foreign investors in New York and spoke at a business event in Miami. One of the focuses of this trip was the Argentine president’s new obsession: copper.
“Argentina does not export a single gram of copper, while Chile, which shares the mountain range [dos Andes] with us, it exports US$20 billion a year”, said Milei in Miami, when talking about the investments he is seeking to transform Argentina into a powerhouse in metal production.
To achieve this goal, his government zeroed retentions (export taxes) on 231 mining products, including copper; tries to attract projects to the area within the Large Investment Incentive Regime (Rigi); and modified laws that regulate the activities of the Mining Secretariat, which, according to the Milei administration, previously “imposed bureaucratic burdens that lacked rationality or adequate proportionality to the objectives that the modified rules sought to achieve”.
Argentina has not produced significant amounts of copper since 2018, when the La Alumbrera mine, in the province of Catamarca, was closed, but it has great potential for producing the metal.
According to information from the Infobae portal, attracted by the facilities offered by Milei, there are already new copper projects underway in the provinces of San Juan, Catamarca, Salta and Jujuy.
The Secretary of Mining estimated that foreign direct investment in the mining industry will increase from US$ 1.4 billion registered in 2024 to US$ 7.5 billion in 2026, with a focus on copper and lithium, and exports from the sector could increase fivefold in the next ten years, exceeding US$ 25 billion annually.
The idea is that copper stops being the ugly duckling of Argentine mining and becomes the crown jewel: last year, gold, silver and lithium accounted for 95% of Argentine exports in the sector.
According to a report published this Tuesday (11) by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), the new projects are expected to generate production of more than 1 million tons of copper per year by 2035, which would transform Argentina into one of the world’s five largest producers of the metal.
One of the projects is the Vicuña mining company, a partnership between the Australian BHP and the Swedish-Canadian Lundin Mining, which announced this year the discovery of the largest copper, gold and silver deposit in the world in the last 30 years, located in the province of San Juan.
However, the WSJ listed a series of bottlenecks to be resolved for Argentina to reach this potential: lack of sufficient roads, electricity and railways to transport copper from the Andes; insufficient skilled labor; financing large projects remains expensive, as Argentina’s country risk remains high, despite Milei’s economic reforms; and a law prohibits mining in the region of around 16 thousand Argentine glaciers.
In an interview with the WSJ, Carlos Saravia Frías, a lawyer in Buenos Aires specializing in mining, projected that the recent victory of Milei’s party, A Liberdade Avança (LLA, in its Spanish acronym), in the mid-term legislative elections should facilitate the government’s task of changing the law.
“This definitely needs to be resolved. It is an essential condition for all copper projects,” he warned.
