A Liberian-flagged bulker, the Nord Norfolk, is steaming toward New Orleans with African copper valued near half a billion dollars. Analytics firm Kpler says that makes it the priciest single cargo of one commodity it has ever tracked. It is part of a broader wave of metal racing into the US ahead of possible import duties.
People familiar with the situation say the Port of New Orleans - a key gateway for metals and a major CME Group Comex copper hub - is already close to capacity. And that is before an additional haul of around 100,000 metric tons from Africa and South America that is slated to arrive across September and October.
Anton Posner, the chief executive officer at logistics-services provider Mercury Resources, said, "We are seeing serious congestion at marine terminals in the New Orleans area, causing delays for loading copper and other metals and steel to trucks and railcars." Instead, his company has been sending the metal by barge up the Mississippi.
Port of New Orleans did not answer an emailed request for comment.
Warehousing companies are seeking approval from Comex to expand space as US storage needs swell. The exchange reports that since the start of 2025 it has approved 20 additional warehouses, increasing available copper capacity by nearly 725,000 short tons - which comes to about 39% of annual US refined copper use. New locations this year include Mobile, Chicago and Atlanta. Separately, a person familiar with the move said shipper BBC Chartering has made Mobile, on Alabama's coastline, a new stop for South American copper.
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The global benchmark on the London Metal Exchange has climbed about 50% since President Donald Trump first put forth copper tariff plans in February of last year. US copper futures rose even faster, handing big arbitrage gains to traders and producers shipping metal to the US in extraordinary volumes.
Lately, that spread has tightened as doubts mount over whether tariffs will ultimately be expanded to refined copper. One gauge puts the gap at $169 a ton now, down from $789 at this year's high, and it has swung widely since Trump returned to office. A slimmer premium blunts the incentive to keep sending metal to the US, and some future loads could be steered toward Asia instead, though rerouting mid-voyage can be tricky and costly.
At Coface, the global trade-credit insurer, North America economist Marcos Carias put it this way: "I wouldn't call the arbitrage dead just yet." And Ryan McKay - a senior commodity strategist at TD Securities - put it this way: "The potential for tariffs alone has essentially had the effect they want from tariffs; that is, bringing lots of supply into the country and increasing domestic premiums to support domestic projects." He added that the White House will probably drag out the decision to keep that dynamic in play.
The mega-cargo and the New Orleans bottleneck sit inside a longer-running copper story: traders are still waiting for a decision on whether import levies will be widened to include refined metal, and that call is overdue. Until then, metal keeps arriving, storage keeps expanding, and price spreads keep reshuffling where shipments go and what they fetch.
For everyday investors, three moving parts are doing most of the work here: the flow of physical supply into US ports, the narrowing price gap with London, and the rapid buildout of warehouse capacity. Those nuts-and-bolts realities can sway prices and, by extension, anything in your portfolio that is tied to copper demand, from industrials to electrification plays.
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