Signal board

Sulphur / acid squeeze — corridor exposure

Sulphur is the Copperbelt's least-visible dependency: barely mined in the corridor, rarely in a licence register, yet sitting directly in the cost stack of a large share of hydrometallurgical copper and cobalt output. A Gulf sulphur shock propagates — with a lag — all the way to a tonne of SX-EW cathode produced 8,000 km inland. This card traces that chain and shows exactly which registry facilities are exposed, in which direction, and how that was derived.

Direction of each link is grounded in extractive metallurgy and public trade structure. Magnitude and speed of transmission are the modelled component and are not asserted here as measurements.

Every figure above is a market figure quoted as reported by the named source at the refresh date — an industry estimate, not a Magarini Terraform measurement or forecast. Registry figures elsewhere on this page are real cadastre/registry data.

Metallurgy: smelters produce acid — sulphide-concentrate smelting captures SO₂ as by-product sulphuric acid; SX-EW / hydromet operations consume it — oxide and mixed ore is leached in dilute sulphuric acid. The acid exposure column is the only derived field: it follows the transparent rule role = f(facility_type) — click or hover any exposure tag to see the derivation. It is a screening layer, not a plant assay; material cases escalate to primary-source verification. All 36 facilities are real registry rows and each links to its polygon on the map.