Global Commodity Forum at Berkeley

Everything starts
in the ground.

The largest commodity club at UC Berkeley. We bring the people who mine, trade and move the world's raw materials to campus, and teach anyone who's curious how it all works.

Speak at Berkeley Join the club

Every phone, every power line, every EV parked on Telegraph started as rock in a desert somewhere. Most of us will never see that part. We think we should understand it anyway.

Aerial view of a terraced open-pit mine with a turquoise pool at the bottom

So we invite the people who do this for a living to come and tell us how it really works: geologists, traders, mine operators, analysts. Then we spend the rest of the semester digging in ourselves. We read the reports, teach each other the basics and argue about where prices are going. No finance background needed.

From rock to wire.

Five industries sit between a hillside in the Atacama and the wiring in your wall. Each one has its own economics, its own risks and its own people. That's what our speakers talk about.

  1. Close-up of iridescent bornite copper ore

    Find it. Geologists drill kilometers of core looking for ore like this bornite. A decade can pass before anyone commits to building a mine.

  2. Haul trucks working on the benches of an open-pit mine

    Dig it. A big open pit moves hundreds of thousands of tonnes of rock a day. Typical ore is less than one percent copper.

  3. A long conveyor carrying ore across an open-pit mine

    Concentrate it. The ore is crushed, ground and floated in froth until it's roughly a quarter copper. Then it ships, often across an ocean.

  4. Two foundry workers pouring molten metal into molds

    Smelt it. Melted down to about 99 percent copper. China runs roughly half of the world's smelting capacity.

  5. Refine and trade it. Electrorefining produces 99.99 percent pure cathode. It trades in London, New York and Shanghai, then becomes the wire in your wall.

What's in your pocket.

Your phone holds more of the periodic table than you'd think. Almost every piece of it comes from a handful of countries.

A specimen of native copper
29Cu

Copper

Wiring and circuit boards. Chile mines more than anyone, followed by the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Peru.

27Co

Cobalt

The battery cathode. About three quarters of it comes from the DRC.

3Li

Lithium

The battery itself. Hard rock in Western Australia and salt flats in Chile and Argentina.

50Sn

Tin

The solder holding every chip in place. Mostly China, Indonesia and Myanmar.

60Nd

Neodymium

The magnets in your speaker. China mines most rare earths and refines even more.

Come talk shop with us.

We know you get plenty of requests, and student ones are easy to turn down. Here's why this one is worth an hour.

Nothing for you to organize.

Send us a date and a topic. We take care of the room, the promotion and the rest. Campus or video call, whatever fits your calendar.

It can change where someone ends up.

Most of us have never met anyone who runs a mine or a trading desk. One honest conversation is often what makes this industry feel like a real option.

Not sure what to talk about? Any of these works.

  • How you got into the industry, and what you'd do differently
  • A project, deal or trade you can talk about openly
  • Where your market is heading, and what most people get wrong
  • What you wish someone had told you at twenty-one
Talk to us about speaking

You don't need to know what backwardation means.

Most of us didn't when we joined.

We're engineers, economists, Haas students, geology majors, and a few political science people who wanted to know why everyone keeps talking about critical minerals. Come to a speaker night, sit in on a teach-in, or just ask us something.

Join the club

Get in touch.

Whether you'd like to speak, partner with us or join, send us a note. Someone from the team will reply by email.

What's this about?