A startup copper refining and manufacturing company hopes an eight-figure funding infusion will help the United States catch up in that sector while decreasing dependence upon mining.
Red Metals Inc. announced this week it’s secured $10 million in seed money to help build a $70 million facility in Charleston, S.C. The state governor’s office said the facility should come online late this year.
Company leadership said the goal in opening the facility is to streamline the refining and manufacturing processes. The legacy refinement process moves material through various intermediate phases, leadership said, that uses extra energy, time and money.
Red Metals’ process combines processing, advanced sorting and refining into a continuous operation, cutting costs and emissions. The company would be feedstock-flexible but focus initially on domestic copper scrap, of which an estimated 870,000 metric tons was created in the United States in 2024, according to Mark & Spain Solutions.
“America has the feedstocks, the demand and the workforce to produce copper domestically at scale,” said Jackson Switzer, company founder and CEO. “What it has lacked is an economically viable refining process.”
That could be among the reasons why the country has so few refineries in general; the U.S. Geological Survey said only 20 exist nationwide, four of which handle scrap metal.
Accelerated electrification, led by data centers and related infrastructure, has only fed the demand for the material. S&P Global estimates the global copper supply will fall 10 metric tons short of demand by 2040.
In the United States alone, the copper market is expected to exceed $45 billion even with a projected refined copper supply gap of more than 2.5 million metric tons. Production and refinement gaps already exist — about half of the copper used domestically from 2020-2023 was imported, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, primarily from Chile.
Filling those gaps attracted several investors to help pay for the 42,000-square-foot facility, among them Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, who’s also founder and CEO of Redwood Materials.
“Electricity and industry run on copper, and the U.S. has spent decades offshoring the refining and manufacturing capacity needed to produce it,” he said. “What Red Metals is building is exactly the kind of industrial infrastructure America needs more of.”
Other seed investors include Gigascale Capital, Future Ventures and MCJ.
The facility is expected to create at least 45 new jobs initially and received job development credits from the state’s Coordinating Council for Economic Development.
