Happy Tuesday! Pour the double-double: copper came within four tenths of a cent of an all-time record this morning.
Gold touched a two-month high before giving half of it back, and a Grasberg smelter outage is now everyone's supply problem.
On the mining side: a fresh TSX-V IPO points its first geophysics survey at a Blackwater look-alike, and a Timmins junior closes out its summer program with one more visible-gold hit.
On the energy side: a $35 billion West Coast pipeline bet picks up a marine-safety pitch, America's biggest LNG exporter misses on revenue but raises guidance anyway, and a small-cap producer just keeps the dividend cheques coming.
Let's dig in.
🥇 Gold (spot): $4,395/oz 📈
🥈 Silver (spot): $65.35/oz 📈
🔌 Copper: $6.64/lb 📈
☢️ Uranium (U₃O₈ spot): $86.50/lb 📈
🛢️ WTI Crude: $83.50/bbl 📈
🔥 Natural Gas (Henry Hub): $2.79/MMBtu 📈
🍁 TSX-V Composite: ~1,030 📈
💵 U.S. Dollar (DXY): 99.84 📈
The Motherlode: Copper Flirts With a Record, and the Smelter That Broke It
What happened: Copper on the Comex touched $6.7005 a pound, four tenths of a cent short of the August 5 record, after Mitsubishi confirmed a boiler leak has shut down the Gresik smelter in Indonesia that processes ore from the giant Grasberg mine, with no restart date set.
Cash metal on the LME traded $138 above the three-month contract on Monday, the widest premium since October and a textbook scarcity signal.
Aluminum jumped as much as 1.9% too, after Norsk Hydro $NHYDY ( ▲ 1.71% ) cut its Alunorte refinery in Brazil to half capacity on a natural gas supply disruption.
Why it happened: Grasberg, the world's second largest copper mine, is still recovering from last September's fatal mudslide and isn't targeted for full production until the end of 2027.
Freeport's own Manyar smelter doesn't restart until September. Layer in the Iran war choking Middle East aluminum flows, with LME stockpiles now at their lowest since November 1990, and you've got two metals getting squeezed from two different directions at once.
What it means for your position: Copper being this tight while its own miners get sold off is the market pricing in near-term chaos, not long-term confidence: Freeport-McMoRan $FCX ( ▼ 0.51% ) fell 3%, Lundin Mining $LUN.TSX ( ▲ 0.68% ) 3.8%, and First Quantum Minerals $FM.TSX ( ▲ 0.95% ) 1.8% on the day. The 2027 forward curve already trades above $7 a pound, so professional money is betting this scarcity outlasts the smelter repair. Worth watching whether Canadian copper juniors catch a bid on the physical squeeze even while the majors eat the smelter headline risk.
Drill Bit Tech: A Fresh IPO Points Its First Survey at a Blackwater Look-Alike
GoldInxs Mining Corp $INXS.TSXV ( 0.0% ), fresh off its TSX Venture IPO, just put its $1.54 million in proceeds to work with a 3D induced polarization survey at its Fishpot property in central British Columbia.
Fishpot sits in the same mineral belt as Artemis Gold's Blackwater mine and shares its volcanic host rocks, alteration style and gold-silver pathfinder geochemistry, but it's barely been drilled: just 378 metres in two holes, and nothing since 1995.
The company has already run airborne magnetics, radiometrics and VLF-EM across the property, and the 3D IP survey is the higher-resolution follow-up meant to sharpen chargeability and resistivity targets ahead of a planned 2,000-metre maiden drill program.
So what: a district-scale, Blackwater-style system that's virtually untested by modern drilling is exactly the setup that turns a good IPO story into a real discovery story, if the geophysics lines up with the geology.