Along with the price of gold, there is also the price of copper, copper prices are soaring, how can China break the bottleneck of resources?

Scientific research small sugar sugar

2024-04-16 20:44Posted in Chongqing, Fudan University, Ph.D. in Chemistry, creator in the field of popular science

During this time, the topic of gold soaring has continued to occupy the hot list of major news, as if the rise in gold prices is no longer news. What is not known is that in addition to the rise in the price of gold, the price of copper has also risen to the highest point in recent years in the past two days. Compared with gold, copper is closely related to people's livelihood, and the impact of rising copper prices on people is much higher than that of any other metal.

According to relevant data, China is the world's largest copper consumer, consuming 16 million tons of copper every year, accounting for more than half of the world's copper demand. China is a copper-poor country, and our annual dependence on copper imports is as high as 90%, while the import dependence on oil is only 65%. If we only rely on our own copper reserves, we can only use it for 3 years. Although copper is not a rare metal, we are indeed stuck in the neck of copper.

The main use of copper is in the power industry, specifically for various wires. Copper has the second highest electrical conductivity of all metals, and the only metal that conducts electricity better than copper is silver. Compared to expensive silver, copper is the most cost-effective conductive metal material. More than 60% of China's copper is used in the power sector every year, and the rest is mainly used in areas such as transportation and heat dissipation.

In the past two years, China's new energy industry has flourished, leading the world's new energy industry reform, but the largest metal material used in the new energy industry is naturally copper used for conduction. Because China does not have a large amount of copper reserves, and the demand for copper is very large, so the international copper giants continue to raise prices, and the price of copper has risen from more than 30,000 yuan a ton before 2014 to nearly 80,000 yuan a ton now.

Recently, the London Metal Exchange announced that in order to cater to the sanctions imposed on Russia by the United States and the United Kingdom, the exchange banned the trading of any metal produced in Russia after April 13. Russia is one of the world's leading copper producers. Since the Russia-Ukraine war, Europe's copper imports to Russia have fallen by 79%, while China's copper imports have risen by 15%. Due to the restriction of Russian copper trading on the London Metal Exchange, global copper prices have once again ushered in a wave of upward movement.

The high price of copper will lead to an increase in the production cost of power equipment, which will eventually be transmitted to the downstream, which will be reflected in the price of electricity and industrial products. Therefore, the damage to the economy caused by the rise in copper prices is very huge.

Of course not, mainland scientists are also developing new countermeasures against copper. One option is to develop copper recycling technologies, which will be used to significantly supplement our copper sources in the future when a large number of power plants in China will be retired at the end of their useful life.

Another strategy is to use aluminum to save copper. China is a big producer of aluminum, and there is no shortage of aluminum, but the conductivity of aluminum is not as good as copper, and it is also prone to oxidation, so many special parts cannot use aluminum. Scientists are now doing a lot of new things to make it possible to have properties comparable to copper, so that we can use aluminum instead of copper. These new technologies include adding special metals to aluminium to form alloys, compounding aluminium and copper into sandwich structures, or spraying special materials on the surface of aluminum.

The rise in copper prices has undoubtedly put pressure on the mainland economy, but we are not out of options. Although it has brought us pressure, it has also brought us opportunities, prompting us to accelerate the pace of scientific and technological innovation and promote the transformation and upgrading of the mainland's economy.

————

I am Dr. Fudan scientific research Xiaotangtang, follow me to learn more about new life knowledge, popular science knowledge and interpretation of scientific and technological information!

View original image 185K

• 

• 

•