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Vale Base Metals doubled the intensity of copper drilling in the Carajás District, Pará, in 2025 and plans to double it again in 2026 — reaching over 120,000 meters of rock drilled throughout the year, a distance enough to cross Rio de Janeiro from end to end four times — while the company’s copper resources reached a record high of 44.9 million contained tons.
What is 120,000 meters of drilling and why Carajás is the right place
120,000 meters of drilling is not a drill going down 120 km in one direction — it is the sum of hundreds of exploratory holes drilled throughout the year at different angles and depths, each seeking to confirm where the copper deposits indicated by geological models are located. It’s ant work: drilling, collecting rock core samples, laboratory analysis, adjusting the model, new hole.
Carajás is the right address for this. The Carajás Mineral District, in southeastern Pará, is the largest iron ore reserve on the planet and one of the largest metallogenic systems in the world — with associated deposits of copper, gold, manganese, and nickel that are still being mapped. Carajás’ Northern Range has been operating for decades, but the N4 and N5 systems and adjacent areas still hold deposits that Vale is now aggressively exploring.
The 7% growth in copper resources in a single year — from 41.9Mt to 44.9Mt contained — represents billions of dollars in future value, considering the current copper price above US$10,000 per ton.
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Why copper has become a global strategic race
Copper is not glamorous. It doesn’t have the name of lithium — which has become synonymous with electric batteries — nor the prestige of gold. But copper is the nerve of the energy transition: it’s in every meter of electrical cable, in every electric car motor, in every wind turbine, and in every solar panel. An electric car uses three times more copper than a combustion car. An offshore wind turbine uses tons of the metal.
Global demand for copper is expected to grow exponentially until 2040 according to the International Energy Agency. The problem is that existing mines take between 10 and 20 years to become operational from the discovery of the deposit — which means that the copper the world will need in 2035 needs to be discovered and developed now. This is exactly what Vale is doing in Carajás with the 120,000 meters of drilling in 2026.
Brazil’s position in the race for critical minerals
Brazil has the second-largest iron ore reserve in the world, the largest niobium reserve, significant reserves of lithium, graphite, and rare earths — and now consolidates its position in copper. This portfolio places the country in an enviable position in the race for critical minerals that the USA, EU, and China are urgently engaging in.
The European Union approved the Critical Raw Materials Act in 2024 precisely to ensure access to strategic minerals — and Brazil is on the list of priority partners. The USA, in turn, negotiated a critical minerals agreement with Brazil that includes partial tariff exemptions for Brazilian refined copper exports. Never in history has the Carajás subsoil been so geopolitically valuable as it is now.
Vale operates Carajás as an integrated ecosystem: mine, beneficiation, railway (EFC), and port. The same infrastructure that transports iron ore is already adapted to transport copper — which accelerates the development time of new deposits discovered by the 120,000 meters of rock drilled in 2026.
What the 120 kilometers of drilling mean for the future
The logic of exploratory drilling is simple: you can only mine what you found first. Each meter of rock core collected in Carajás in 2026 is data that will feed the geological model and eventually transform potential into proven reserves — the step that precedes any investment decision in a new mine.
If the results of 2026 confirm the models, Vale may announce new copper mines in Carajás over the next decade, placing Brazil among the world’s largest producers of a metal that will be as strategic in the 2030s as oil was in the 1970s.
The race has already begun. Chile and Peru dominate current copper production. The Democratic Republic of the Congo leads cobalt. Australia has the largest lithium reserves. Brazil can enter the next phase of the energy transition as the largest copper supplier in the Americas — or lose the development window to competitors drilling faster.
It is worth remembering that the copper race has a geopolitical dimension that goes beyond drilling numbers. The USA classified copper as a critical mineral in 2022, and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) directs billions of dollars in subsidies to the domestic and allied critical minerals supply chain. Brazil, with its strategic position as a non-NATO partner of the USA and with significant reserves in Carajás, has a strong argument to negotiate preferential access to American critical minerals markets. The new copper mine in Carajás that may emerge from the 120,000 meters of drilling in 2026 could be worth much more than the market price of the metal — it could be worth Brazil’s strategic position as a reliable supplier in a supply chain that the USA desperately wants to diversify away from China. The drill that is drilling Carajás today is drawing the geopolitical map of the next decade.
With 44.9 million tons of copper in the Carajás subsoil, will Brazil become a critical minerals powerhouse or export raw ore and leave the added value to others?
