Tyrell Sutherland, CEO and President of Viridian Metals wrote a first-person feature on the future of copper and what lies ahead for Viridian Metals for Canadian Mining Magazine’s Fall Edition.
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My fascination with rocks started early, but it was a beautiful piece of native copper, gifted to me at age six and pulled from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, that truly stoked the flames. I still have it today. That gleaming fragment sparked a lasting curiosity about how something so raw could be found jutting straight out of the ground.
Years later, deep underground at the LaRonde mine in Québec, I stood before entire faces of chalcopyrite (a copper sulfide), exposed in bright, metallic sheets along the drift. It wasn’t the scale or richness that stood out, it was the cutting edge research and innovation happening onsite. LaRonde showed how mining can be carried out at depth, in a first-world jurisdiction, with both technical excellence and a commitment to doing things better.
Those moments – one formative, one professional – continue to shape how I approach exploration, especially as we advance work in the Seal Basin, a rare and underexplored setting geologically linked to that same rift-driven copper story that first captured my imagination as a child.
Two decades later, copper is no longer just a building block of old infrastructure: it is the bloodstream of the global energy transition. In a recent Bloomberg interview, BHP said demand for copper will require a $250 billion investment over the next decade and copper is set to rise by 70% to 100% by 2050. It also highlighted how new copper deposits, along with other critical minerals, are becoming harder to find.1
We are already seeing the shift toward a more sustainable and electrified future with bigger artificial intelligence (AI) data centres emerging, secure power grids, rigid renewable energy systems, and the rise of electric vehicles. Copper lives at the centre of this global transition and has become one of the world’s most critical and contested resources. That realization is what led me to launch Viridian Metals: to help Canada meet this moment, with integrity, purpose, and an eye on what comes next.
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Read the full Canadian Mining Magazine article: https://flip.matrixgroupinc.net/cmmq/2025/fall/#page=24