Why the copper industry is vital to India's critical minerals mission

This article is authored by Mayur Karmarkar, managing director, International Copper Association India.

India's National Critical Mineral Mission has opened a new phase in the country's effort to secure the materials needed for clean energy and advanced manufacturing. Between late 2023 and July, the Centre offered 88 critical mineral blocks and auctioned 56. July's tranche covered graphite, tungsten and potash, and state-owned firms are hunting for lithium overseas.

Copper (Unsplash)

Some minerals on India's own list of 30 barely figure in this effort. Take selenium and tellurium. No auction will ever offer them, because the world has almost no mines for either. Both come out of copper smelters and refineries, drawn from the same ore that gives us the metal. Depending on the ore, so can platinum group metals, nickel and cobalt. India has auctioned a handful of nickel and platinum-group blocks, but they are years from production, and it still imports all its nickel and cobalt.

The mission's success will depend partly on recovering more from the minerals India already processes. Copper ore and scrap carry a halo of minor elements that end up in solar panels, electronics, batteries and clean hydrogen. Copper smelting and refining offer an opportunity that deserves greater policy attention: Supplying several critical minerals alongside the copper needed for power networks, factories and electric vehicles.

The world refines about 28 million tonnes of copper a year, close to half of it in China. Copper mines account for more than a quarter of the world's mined silver and a good deal of its gold, and refining is the main source of tellurium, used in thin-film solar panels, and of selenium. Every tonne of refined copper comes with some silver, up to a gram of gold, roughly 30-100 grams of selenium and 2-8 grams of tellurium. Platinum and palladium, used in catalytic converters and hydrogen electrolysers, turn up in fractions of a gram. Nickel and cobalt can run to a few kilos a tonne, depending on its source.

Most of these metals settle in the sludge at the bottom of refining tanks, while nickel and cobalt drift into the slag. Getting them out needs dedicated circuits rather than new mines. Scrap helps too. Old circuit boards, contacts and spent catalysts are often richer in platinum group metals than ore, so more recycling means more to recover.

By-products are becoming increasingly important to copper smelters’ revenues to offset the losses from negative treatment and refining. The IEA’s reports highlight how by-product metals and sulphuric acid help sustain operations, particularly at facilities with access to suitable concentrates and the ability to maximise recovery. This reinforces the case for developing these capabilities alongside smelting capacity to capture greater value from each tonne processed.

India is not starting from scratch. Primary refined copper output rose by about a quarter to roughly 0.7 million tonnes in FY26. Yet it leans on imports. In FY25 it imported about 240,000 tonnes of cathode, nearly three-quarters of it, roughly 176,000 tonnes, from Japan, duty-free under the two countries' Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement. Whatever selenium, tellurium or gold that copper carried was recovered in Japan.

The gap will widen as the demand grew 9.3% to 1.878 million tonnes in FY25, and industry estimates put it at 3 to 3.3 million tonnes by 2030. The ministry of mines' copper vision document asks for 5 million tonnes a year of new smelting and refining capacity by then. Announced expansions could take domestic output towards 2 million tonnes, short on both counts. Imports will stay, but India needs new capacity, both to meet copper demand and to produce critical minerals it cannot mine. At 2 million tonnes, Indian refineries would handle ore carrying an estimated 60-200 tonnes of selenium and 4-16 tonnes of tellurium a year.

There is a jobs case as well. A 0.5 million tonne smelter-refinery commissioned in 2024 was projected to create 2,000 direct and 5,000 indirect jobs and to anchor MSMEs in engineering, maintenance, logistics and testing. An imported tonne of cathode brings none of that, and none of the minerals. Policymakers should be clear about the case for more domestic processing and manufacturing before deciding how much copper to import as finished metal.

None of this happens on its own. Refineries invest in recovery when the incentives make sense and the residues are rich enough to justify the plant, and even good ones capture only 70-90% of the selenium and tellurium in their feed. The National Critical Mineral Mission, with a ₹34,300 crore outlay, already covers processing and recovery from tailings. It should treat smelters and refineries as a source of critical minerals and fund the recovery of selenium, tellurium, nickel and cobalt against verified output.

Copper will wire India's grid and its electric vehicles for decades. The refineries that produce it could also supply several of the minerals the mission is chasing. Every decision on copper should be judged by how many of those minerals India produces at home by 2047.

(The views expressed are personal)

This article is authored by Mayur Karmarkar, managing director, International Copper Association India.