I think we are talking past each other. When people talk of a copper shortage they are talking about copper that has been mined, processed and is ready for sale to those who wish to purchase it. They are not talking about copper ore that resides hundreds of metres under the Earth. The former is useful, the latter is not although may be in the future once millions of dollars has been spent digging it out of the ground and processing it into a form that can be used for industrial production.
Copper below the Earth is plentiful, copper mined and processed is not necessarily so. Copper mines take many years and mountains of capital to plan, build and then operate.
From your post I'm gathering that you think that there is going to be a issue with mining the copper, which will cause a shortage and a price boom.
What I have been saying is that there is many recorded locations and reserves of copper, technology has caught up to allow miners to extract the copper at low cost, and we will have no issues in geting to those copper reserves at profitable costs for the forseeable future.
It Is Highly Improbable!
Since 1960, there has always been, on average, 38 years of reserves, and significantly greater amounts of known resources (USGS data). In addition, recycling, innovation and mining exploration continue to contribute to the long-term availability of copper.
Despite increased demand for copper produced from ore in recent years, increases in reserves have grown, and there is more identified copper available to the world than at any other time in history.
In the period 2010-2020, 207 million tonnes of copper have been mined. In that same period however, reserves have grown by
240 million tonnes to 870,000 million tonnnes copper . This reflects additional exploration, technological advances and the evolving economics of mining.
Technology has a key role to play in addressing many of the challenges faced by new copper production. Known and as yet unknown innovations will ensure new mine production continues to provide vital copper supplies.
In addition copper recycling plays an important role in copper availability since today’s primary copper is tomorrow’s recycled material. Unlike other commodities such as energy or food, copper is not “consumed”. Copper is one of the few raw materials which can be recycled repeatedly without any loss of performance, and key stakeholders such as policy-makers, scrap collectors, copper producers and recyclers must all focus on ensuring that yesterday’s metal is recycled and re-used.