* Large pool US Capital looking for home in mining -EMR Capital
* European institutional investors, burnt now shy - Denham
* Difficult to find assets with right risk profile - Oz Minerals
MELBOURNE, Nov 9 (Reuters) - Private equity (PE) investors that were burned by the commodity downturn are unlikely to come back to the metals and mining sector during the next decade, though U.S.-based capital may have more appetite to invest, executives said on Tuesday.
Additionally, the pipeline for new low-risk deals is low, they said at the International Mining and Resources (IMARC) conference in Melbourne.
"There is still by and large a huge crisis of confidence in commodity investment," said Bert Koth, Managing Director of global private equity house Denham Capital.
"The large European pensions funds, they will say we had a billion dollar portfolio, it lost 40 percent of its value, so for the next ten years the funds are not going to invest in metals and mining - end of discussion."
Koth estimated that there was $6 billion to $7 billion in private equity available for investment in the sector, but that it was difficult to find low-cost, low-risk projects that could be brought into production in the next two to three years.
"I do not think the metals and mining pool (of PE) is going to meaningfully expand like oil and gas....The reason is that capital deployment over the last decade has primarily disappointed," he said.
"We have screened more than 300 management teams in the last four years, we have invested in six. Those management teams have screened in excess of 1200 projects and capital was ultimately invested into 13."
But EMR Capital, which is currently raising capital for a fund to be launched in the next several weeks, said there was quite some appetite from U.S.-based capital, particularly for projects tied to the Chinese economy.
"The sentiment around commodities is definitely going very strongly.. I think that people increasingly accept that in China, the percentage growth rate is not as important is as the absolute growth in GDP," said Jason Chang, chief executive of Australia-based EMR Capital.
"There is a very significant universe of capital in the U.S. looking for a home in metals and mining and that includes endowments and pension funds that do not have the expertise - they are relying on (PE) to manage that," he said.
Chief executive Andrew Cole of Australian copper miner Oz Minerals also said the pipeline for new projects was slim, despite its $1 billion of potential investment capital.
"We have not found an asset that we could create value from yet and we have done a lot of due diligence," he said.