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BHP president of minerals for the Americas Ragnar Udd has expressed his optimism for growing copper demand in the future at the CRU World Copper Conference in Chile.

With an extensive career in mine, rail and port operations, as well as with iron ore, manganese, coal and copper, Udd said he had never been as positive about the future of a job as he was about leading some of BHP’s future facing commodities, copper and potash.

Udd put such positivity down to three factors: a richness of opportunity, population growth and a demand for decarbonisation.

“A great example is electric vehicles. Policy signposts for rapid electric vehicle (EV) adoption were distinctly favourable over the last (12) months and we have revised our internal EV penetration forecasts upwards,” Udd said.

“These vehicles use four times as much copper as petrol-based cars, and they will also need more infrastructure to connect charging stations to the grid.”

Udd said BHP expected the world’s Paris-aligned emissions reduction targets to more than double the demand for copper and quadruple for nickel over the next 30 years.

“The commodities we produce are the building blocks of the modern world. And they always have been,” Udd said.

“Everything from railroads to bridges, aeroplanes to batteries, and mobile phones to medical instruments require the resources that we produce. The simple truth is that we cannot build a better world without a reliable supply of these natural resources.”