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Minerals

Mineral
Metric
Type
Measure
Minerals

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What you should know about this indicator

How is this data described by its producer?

Notes found in original USGS historical data:

  • Note on global production: World mine production is based on available country data published in the MR and the MYB and generally reflects the copper content of concentrates, precipitates, and electrowon copper. For some countries, including the United States, recoverable copper content is used. For other countries, such as Chile, data includes copper content of non-duplicative mine and metal products produced from domestic ores and concentrates. This data set was originally derived from the MR and the MYB, but data for 1940–85 may contain revisions to specific countries that reflect new understandings of production, especially for the former Soviet Union as reported by Strishkov (1984, p. 8).

Notes found in original USGS data:

  • Production in 2020. Mine production in Russia is estimated in both years and refinery production in Canada is estimated in both years.
  • Production in 2021.
  • Production in 2022.
  • Production in 2023.
  • Estimated.
  • Estimated 2023.
  • Production in 2021 is also estimated.
  • Also estimated in 2022.

Notes found in original BGS data:

  • Blister copper plus recoverable copper in ores and matte exported.
  • In 1990 the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) was reunited with the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). Therefore, from 1991 these 2 countries are shown simply as "Germany".
  • Cu content of cement copper.
  • Excluding copper contained in iron pyrites.
  • In a mixed copper-zinc concentrate.
  • In 1980 Rhodesia was renamed Zimbabwe.
  • Excluding data from August to December for the Republic of Croatia.
Copper production
Based on mined, rather than , production. Measured in tonnes.
Source
USGS – Mineral Commodity Summaries (2026); USGS – Historical Statistics for Mineral and Material Commodities (2024); BGS – World Mineral Statistics (2026) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
November 9, 2026
Next expected update
November 2027
Date range
1900–2025
Unit
tonnes

Related research and writing

Featured image

Who would have won the Simon-Ehrlich bet over different decades, and what do long-term prices tell us about resource scarcity?

Hannah Ritchie

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

United States Geological Survey – Mineral Commodity Summaries

This database contains the United States salient statistics and world production statistics for over 90 nonfuel mineral commodities.

Retrieved on
November 9, 2026
Retrieved from
https://doi.org/10.5066/P1WKQ63T
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
National Minerals Information Center, 2026, U.S. Geological Survey Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 Data Release: U.S. Geological Survey data release. https://doi.org/10.5066/P1WKQ63T

This database contains the United States salient statistics and world production statistics for over 90 nonfuel mineral commodities.

Retrieved on
November 9, 2026
Retrieved from
https://doi.org/10.5066/P1WKQ63T
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
National Minerals Information Center, 2026, U.S. Geological Survey Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 Data Release: U.S. Geological Survey data release. https://doi.org/10.5066/P1WKQ63T

United States Geological Survey – Historical Statistics for Mineral and Material Commodities

Information on mineral commodities, including production and unit value (the real and nominal price in U.S. dollars of a metric ton of apparent consumption). For many of the commodities, data are reported as far back as 1900. The data was compiled primarily from publications of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the U.S. Bureau of Mines (USBM). The principal references are the annual Minerals Yearbook (MYB) publication and its predecessor, Mineral Resources of the United States (MR). Other USGS and USBM publications used as references included: Statistical Compendium (SC), Metal Prices in the United States Through 1991 (MP91), Metal Prices in the United States Through 1998 (MP98), Metal Prices in the United States Through 2010, MCS and its predecessor Commodity Data Summaries (CDS), Minerals Facts and Problems (MFP), and various USBM Information Circulars. In some cases, USGS mineral commodity specialists added previously unpublished or recently revised data to the historical statistics series.

Retrieved on
July 15, 2024
Retrieved from
https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-center/historical-statistics-mineral-and-material-commodities
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Kelly, T.D., and Matos, G.R., comps., 2014, Historical statistics for mineral and material commodities in the United States (2016 version): U.S. Geological Survey Data Series 140.

Information on mineral commodities, including production and unit value (the real and nominal price in U.S. dollars of a metric ton of apparent consumption). For many of the commodities, data are reported as far back as 1900. The data was compiled primarily from publications of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the U.S. Bureau of Mines (USBM). The principal references are the annual Minerals Yearbook (MYB) publication and its predecessor, Mineral Resources of the United States (MR). Other USGS and USBM publications used as references included: Statistical Compendium (SC), Metal Prices in the United States Through 1991 (MP91), Metal Prices in the United States Through 1998 (MP98), Metal Prices in the United States Through 2010, MCS and its predecessor Commodity Data Summaries (CDS), Minerals Facts and Problems (MFP), and various USBM Information Circulars. In some cases, USGS mineral commodity specialists added previously unpublished or recently revised data to the historical statistics series.

Retrieved on
July 15, 2024
Retrieved from
https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-center/historical-statistics-mineral-and-material-commodities
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Kelly, T.D., and Matos, G.R., comps., 2014, Historical statistics for mineral and material commodities in the United States (2016 version): U.S. Geological Survey Data Series 140.

British Geological Survey – World Mineral Statistics

The World Mineral Statistics dataset is a compilation of production and trade statistics on a wide range of mineral commodities since 1913. However, data prior to 1960 is only available as scanned PDF books, whose content, currently, cannot successfully be extracted programmatically.

Retrieved on
November 9, 2026
Retrieved from
https://www.bgs.ac.uk/mineralsuk/statistics/world-mineral-statistics/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
World Mineral Statistics, contributed by permission of the British Geological Survey (BGS). The copyright of all materials derived from the BGS's work is vested in the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and/or the authority that commissioned the work.

The World Mineral Statistics dataset is a compilation of production and trade statistics on a wide range of mineral commodities since 1913. However, data prior to 1960 is only available as scanned PDF books, whose content, currently, cannot successfully be extracted programmatically.

Retrieved on
November 9, 2026
Retrieved from
https://www.bgs.ac.uk/mineralsuk/statistics/world-mineral-statistics/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
World Mineral Statistics, contributed by permission of the British Geological Survey (BGS). The copyright of all materials derived from the BGS's work is vested in the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and/or the authority that commissioned the work.

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator
  • The majority of the data is sourced from USGS, supplemented by BGS data where available. Where both overlap, USGS data is prioritized.
  • As BGS does not provide global data, we calculated the world total by summing the data from individual countries, using this as a cross-check against USGS global figures.
  • Due to the inherent uncertainties in the data for certain minerals and countries, we allowed a maximum deviation of 10% between the global totals reported by USGS and the calculated ones for BGS. If the deviation exceeded this threshold, we excluded the BGS data.
  • The calculated global total from BGS data was used only on exceptional occasions, after ensuring that the resulting aggregate was sufficiently complete.
  • Both BGS and USGS datasets include numerous notes and footnotes. We have retained most of these, making only minor edits or deletions where necessary to maintain clarity.

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Copper production”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie and Pablo Rosado (2024) - “Metals and Minerals”. Data adapted from United States Geological Survey, British Geological Survey. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20261114-154231/grapher/minerals.html [online resource] (archived on November 14, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

USGS – Mineral Commodity Summaries (2026); USGS – Historical Statistics for Mineral and Material Commodities (2024); BGS – World Mineral Statistics (2026) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

USGS – Mineral Commodity Summaries (2026); USGS – Historical Statistics for Mineral and Material Commodities (2024); BGS – World Mineral Statistics (2026) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Copper production” [dataset]. United States Geological Survey, “Mineral Commodity Summaries”; United States Geological Survey, “Historical Statistics for Mineral and Material Commodities”; British Geological Survey, “World Mineral Statistics” [original data]. Retrieved November 14, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20261114-154231/grapher/minerals.html (archived on November 14, 2026).

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Data API

Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.

Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/minerals.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/minerals.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/minerals.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/minerals.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/minerals.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/minerals.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/minerals.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/minerals.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear