INTERVIEW: Viscaria to ramp up Sweden’s mined copper output by a third

Copper mining is returning to Sweden's northernmost town, Kiruna, with the reopening of the Viscaria copper mine scheduled by 2028.

The Viscaria mine operated from 1983 to 1997, initially by the state-owned Swedish iron ore mining company LKAB and later by Outokumpu.

Although Viscaria is a brownfield site, it is Europe's fastest-growing copper deposit, with ongoing exploration uncovering additional resources beneath the site, according to Jörgen Olsson, the chief executive officer of the Viscaria company.

"The previous miners barely scratched the surface. Basically, they mined 2% [of the reserve], we have 98% left. When Outokumpu closed the mine in 1997, the company estimated its total mineral resource to be 3 million mt of contained copper. Today, we have confirmed 108 million mt," Olsson told Platts, part of S&P Global Energy, in an interview.

Viscaria has drilled 220,000 meters since Olsson and his partners took control, yet it is only 2% of the asset's total exploration permit area.

The copper project has wide recognition in Sweden: it has raised $370 million, 90% of which came from Swedish investors, and will raise another $500 million this year. Viscaria estimates its full cost at SEK9 billion ($900 million), and as for the payability period, it expects to be debt-free by 2033, that is, five years from the start of production.

The company has already built one-third of the site. In June, it will connect its future rail yard to the adjacent Malmbanan railway and will have one switch to the north to Narvik, an ice-free harbor with no depth restrictions, and the other switch will take its product to shipping facilities on the Gulf of Bothnia.

The site will comprise an underground mine and a processing plant, which will convert 3 million metric tons/year of ore into 120,000 mt of 25% Cu concentrate, containing approximately 26,000-30,000 mt of copper.

"With that, we can provide 3% of Europe's primary copper production, which will not move the needle initially, but we have the potential to grow because we're finding so much more new copper every quarter," said Olsson.

He envisages the first concentrate leaving Viscaria at the end of 2027 or beginning of 2028.

Negligible CO2

Viscaria has no plans to expand its operations into smelting, given the global excess of smelting capacity. However, raw material supply shortages mean that Europe's imports, at 45% of its copper needs, could rise to 52% unless it starts developing new domestic copper resources, according to Olsson.

Viscaria's concentrate will have negligible CO2 emissions: the electricity for its production will come from hydropower, which also powers the railway that Viscaria will use to deliver its material to ports.

"We will be within 5% of the world's mines with the lowest CO2 footprint," said Olsson.

Also, the product will be sold within Europe, so moved over short distances. Half of the output will go to a German smelter operated by copper recycler Aurubis under an offtake agreement the companies signed in December 2025.

Viscaria's operations will generate a byproduct, too -- about 400,000-600,000 mt/year of iron ore concentrate. Several trading houses are already chasing Viscaria for it, but Olsson assumes that LKAB, which owns the world's largest underground iron ore mine and is Viscaria's next-door neighbor in Kiruna, could also be among the buyers, given that Viscaria's ore, with an iron content of 70%, is of the same quality as LKAB's.

"Then we have gold and silver, and since the prices of gold and silver have increased so much, we now expect contributions to come from that too," said Olsson. He added that the company has already negotiated with copper concentrate offtakers and has agreed on levels of occurrences, above which it gets paid for the precious metals.

Price resilient

Olsson remains unfazed by the copper price having touched and exceeded the $13,000/mt mark, its highest ever, 10 times since the beginning of 2026, and is reassured that copper demand will remain unharmed.

"Nothing happened when the copper hit $9,500/mt, then $11,000/mt, and nothing happens at $13,000 either, because it doesn't destroy any product prices: the share of end-use product costs attributable to copper is so small that it makes the metal completely price-resilient," said Olsson.

"This is the thing with copper: there's not much of it in anything, but there is a tiny amount in everything. You have 10 grams [of copper] in the phone -- that costs $0.10-$0.20. You have 100 grams in your computer worth $1-$2. These costs will not change the price of the phone or the computer. If you build a house in a country like Sweden, fitted with modern facilities, it will contain 100 kilos of copper -- that's $1,300 today. This will not change the price of a house," he said.

Olsson believes copper prices will remain strong because mining costs have increased and will continue to rise as mining shifts to copper-poor deposits.

All easy copper has been mined out, and the new copper resources are low-grade and located in trickier places. The average copper grade across 707 existing mines is 0.55% -- down from 1.5%-1.7% in the 1960s. The average grade of all new copper discoveries has dropped to 0.35%. As a result, 93% fewer copper resources were found in 2019-2023 than in the five-year period 15 years earlier, according to Olsson.

Growing middle class

At the same time, the world needs more copper as the middle class expands, a factor Olsson sees as the prime driver of global demand.

There is 100% correlation observed over a 100-year period between middle-class growth and the demand for copper, with only 4%-6% of the latter owed directly to electrification, according to Olsson.

"Growth of the middle class is about how much more infrastructure -- bridges, roads, railways and subways -- we build. It is about people upgrading from a shed to a house. You have nil kilos of copper in a shed but 100 kilos in a house," he elaborated, and added that the middle class also acquires possessions, and most of what they buy is made by machines, and there's not a single machine that doesn't contain copper.

"Stockholm is growing massively with a lot of construction going on," he noted, talking from within Sweden's capital. "And we're not even close to the growth speed of India, Indonesia and what China has seen. Should we then rebuild Ukraine, Gaza, Syria, it will require massive amounts of copper."