Essays on Metals : Sustainability and Markets

Overview & Synopsis

This dissertation examines the economic sustainability of metal markets in the context of the low-carbon transition. It combines a long-term analytical model with empirical applications to copper, assessing whether interactions between rising demand and supply constraints allow for non-explosive price trajectories. Chapter 1 reviews the literature on exhaustible resources — particularly metals — from Hotelling (1931) to the most recent approaches. Our theoretical model (Chapter 2) links a Cumulative Availability Curve (CAC) with a CES demand function, establishing the specific theoretical conditions under which metal markets can be considered sustainable. When applied to copper (Chapter 3), the model shows that supply constraints threaten the feasibility of energy transition pathways even before 2050: economic scarcity precedes physical scarcity, at least in the absence of technological progress. The integration of recycling (Chapter 4) demonstrates that secondary supply mitigates price pressures and limits demand destruction but cannot offset the structural growth of consumption — acting more as abuffer than a substitute. Finally, the empirical analysis (Chapter 5) highlights the limitations of futures contracts as forward-looking tools and proposes two alternative models (ECM and XGBoost) suggesting that copper prices respond more to expectations than to immediate supply-demand balance. The dissertation concludes that the sustainability of metal markets does not hinge on imminent physical depletion, but rather on rising economic tensions — reflected in prices yet strongly mediated by technological innovation and public regulation.