Copper Concentrate Market in Deficit for 3 Years, Freeport Says

June 7 (Bloomberg) -- The copper concentrate market will have a shortfall for three years after miners delayed projects because of lower prices, said Javier Targhetta,Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc's senior vice president of marketing and sales.

The deficit will be between 500,000 metric tons and 1 million tons this year, Targhetta said in an interview at the Copper 2010 conference in Hamburg yesterday.

"The concentrate market will remain tight over the next three years, or even longer," said Targhetta, who is also president of Freeport unit Atlantic Copper. Concentrate is the raw material from which copper is produced.

Mining companies delayed or scrapped new projects after copper prices plunged a record 54 percent in London in 2008, crimping future supply. Global mine production fell 0.1 percent last year, Barclays Capital said in a report. The refined market is expected to show a deficit of 155,000 tons this year after a surplus of 567,000 tons in 2009, according to the May 21 report.

The shortfall in mined output will keep the fees that mining companies pay smelters to turn ore into metal "under pressure for a long time," Targhetta said at the event, organized by the GDMB Society for Mining, Metallurgy, Resource and Environmental Technology with Hamburg-based Aurubis AG. The German company is the world's largest publicly traded copper refiner.

Smelters have received increased supplies of scrap copper, and have benefited from higher prices for sulfuric acid, the largest by-product from the smelting process, Targhetta said.

'Scrap is Helping'

"Scrap is helping smelters in China and also outside China," Targhetta said. This year Atlantic Copper's plant in Huelva, Spain, will produce 20,000 tons of copper from scrap, up from 7,000 tons last year, he said.

Atlantic Copper, based in Madrid, produces about 1 million tons of sulfuric acid per year. This year the company expects to produce 278,000 tons of copper anodes, usually refined into a finished form of metal known as cathode, Targhetta said. That's 8,000 tons more than last year, he said. Production of cathodes will reach 262,000 tons this year, up from 257,000 tons, he said.

"Production will be lower next year" as the plant is scheduled to be closed for about 20 days for maintenance work, he added.