Copper: The New Oil Behind a Global Crisis of Death and Destruction

Moqadi Mokoena had felt on edge from the moment he woke up that May day in 2021. When he left his home on Johannesburg, South Africa’s outskirts to report for his shift as a security guard, he’d already turned back twice—once to grab a forgotten watch, then again for his cigarettes. His anxiety was not unfounded. Just two days prior, four fellow guards at a local electrical substation had been stripped naked and beaten with metal pipes by armed thieves, and Mokoena had just been ordered to join the security detail guarding that same site. Now, as he and a colleague sat in their truck watching a group of armed men approach, staring tensely through the windshield, the danger felt all too real.

Mokoena pulled out his phone and dialed his wife, mother to their one-year-old daughter. He told her the gang was advancing on his position. “I’m scared,” he said, adding that he had no weapon of his own. “I think this is the same group that attacked our colleagues.”

“Call your supervisor right now,” she urged him.

Minutes later, the men opened fire, at least one of them carrying an automatic weapon. Mokoena’s partner leaped out of the truck but was gunned down mid-run. A third guard stationed nearby dove for cover, fired back at the thieves, then fled to get backup. When he returned with Mokoena’s supervisor, they found both Mokoena and his partner dead. Police later confirmed the criminals had stolen roughly $1,600 worth of copper cable before escaping.

“We face these dangers every single day,” the surviving guard told a local reporter afterward. “You never know if you’ll make it home when you leave for work.”

For most of the world, power utilities are a quiet, unremarkable industry. But in South Africa, they are under open attack: heavily armed criminal gangs targeting copper infrastructure have crippled the national energy network and left a rising toll of dead and injured. Practically every day, communities across the country are thrown into blackouts, train services halted, water supplies cut off, and hospitals forced to turn away patients—all because thieves are after the conductive metal that powers every grid: copper.

Proponents of the global energy transition have rallied around the slogan “Electrify everything.” The idea is to shift cars, heating systems, factories, and nearly every other type of machinery from fossil fuels to electricity. To pull that off, we need massive amounts of copper. After silver, which is far rarer and more expensive, copper is the most effective natural electrical conductor on Earth. It is a core component of solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles (a single typical EV can hold up to 175 pounds of copper). It is needed for the grid-scale batteries that store power for when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. It is also required to expand and upgrade thousands of miles of power lines that form the backbone of electricity grids across nearly every country. In the U.S. alone, analysts estimate the grid will need to triple its capacity to meet projected future demand for electricity.

A recent report from S&P Global projects that total global copper demand over the next 25 years will exceed the entire amount of copper humanity has mined and consumed over all of recorded history. “The world has never produced anywhere close to this volume of copper in such a compressed time frame,” the report notes. Many analysts warn the world may not be able to meet this demand, predicting supply shortfalls of millions of tons in the coming years. That is why Goldman Sachs has famously declared “no decarbonization without copper,” and labeled the metal “the new oil.”

As the energy transition accelerates, copper prices have skyrocketed. Over the past four years, the price per ton of copper has jumped from roughly $6,400 to more than $9,000. That surge has turned everything from installed electrical wiring to mining equipment to raw copper ore into high-value targets for thieves. Across the globe, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of copper is stolen annually, along with a staggering human cost in lost lives. With the possible exception of gold, no other metal has been linked to as much death and destruction as copper today.

The Hidden Cost of Legal Copper Mining

Most copper produced globally comes from legitimate, licensed mining companies. But even the legal copper industry has left a trail of massive environmental and social harm. From the western U.S. to South America to Central Africa, copper mining has left giant open pits filled with toxic waste, and contaminated vast stretches of land and waterways.

The risk of future harm is growing, because nearly all of the world’s richest, most easily accessible copper deposits have already been mined. “All the low-hanging fruit has been picked,” says Scott Dunbar, a former Canadian mining engineer. The ore grade (the percentage of usable copper contained in rock) at most existing major mines is dropping rapidly. That means miners have to tear up far larger areas of land to extract the same amount of copper, producing far more toxic waste in the process.

Central Africa has become the new frontier for copper mining. Investment has poured into the region since the early 2000s, driven by soaring demand for raw materials from China’s fast-growing economy. Most of this activity is concentrated in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a large nation roughly two-thirds the size of Western Europe that holds massive reserves of copper, along with diamonds, gold, cobalt, and other critical minerals. Mining accounts for roughly 80% of the DRC’s foreign export earnings, but very little of that wealth reaches the general population. Most Congolese people survive on less than $3 per day.

One of the earliest and most prominent players in the DRC’s modern copper boom is Chicago-born billionaire Robert Friedland, one of the mining industry’s most distinctive figures. In the early 1970s, while a student at Oregon’s Reed College, Friedland became close friends with classmate Steve Jobs. The pair shared a fascination with Eastern religion and spirituality. “On Sunday evenings Jobs and Friedland would go to the Hare Krishna temple on the western edge of Portland,” Walter Isaacson writes in his biography of Jobs. “They would dance and sing songs at the top of their lungs.” Both traveled to India and became followers of a prominent Hindu guru, and both experimented with hallucinogenic drugs. In fact, when Friedland arrived at Reed, he was on parole after being convicted of possession of 24,000 doses of LSD.

In 1974, Friedland moved to an apple farm owned by his uncle outside Portland. As journalist Henry Sanderson writes in his book Volt Rush, Jobs, who would later go on to build Apple, soon left the farm, turned off by what he saw as Friedland’s “very materialistic” tendencies.

By the early 1980s, Friedland had partnered with Vancouver-based financiers to enter the mining industry, cutting his teeth on small gold mining operations. He made national headlines in 1992 when a Colorado gold mine he previously led as CEO of its parent company leaked toxic heavy metals into a nearby watershed, earning him the nickname “Toxic Bob.” In the years that followed, he discovered a major gold deposit in Alaska and an even larger nickel deposit in Canada, which he later sold for more than $3 billion. Friedland has remained a major industry leader ever since. (He also dabbles in film production, helping back hits like Crazy Rich Asians, and made headlines when he purchased a scenic California estate from Ellen DeGeneres for $96 million.)

Friedland first became involved in the DRC in 1996, when he met Laurent Kabila, then leader of a rebel movement fighting the government. As Sanderson recounts, “Friedland went on TV to defend Kabila’s advance to power, and in return got 14,000 square kilometers of land outside the copper mining town of Kolwezi.” The area sits at the heart of an extraordinarily mineral-rich belt that stretches across the DRC and south into Zambia. Friedland’s company Ivanhoe Mines discovered a massive, high-grade copper deposit near the DRC’s border with Zambia, and began production at the giant new Kamoa-Kakula mine in 2021.

The mine is a joint venture with a Chinese firm, one of hundreds of Chinese companies active across the DRC’s mining sector. China refines and consumes more copper than any other nation, and relies on foreign suppliers for most of its supply. When the DRC opened its borders to foreign investment, Chinese companies moved quickly to secure stakes. Chinese firms have since invested billions of dollars in DRC infrastructure in exchange for broad mining rights across the country.

Friedland is one of copper’s most vocal advocates. “We simply cannot continue to exist as a species without a lot more copper, especially if we want to reduce hydrocarbon consumption or if we want to electrify the world’s transportation fleet,” he told an industry conference in Santiago, Chile, in 2022. “There is no alternative.” Kamoa-Kakula, which is still being expanded, is already the third-largest copper mine in the world.

Copper’s Long Trail of Harm in Chile

The world’s top producer of raw copper, however, is located halfway across the world from the DRC. Chile has held that title for decades, and currently supplies nearly a quarter of the world’s raw copper. Copper has brought massive wealth to the country, but also widespread environmental destruction, displacement of indigenous communities, and violence.

Large-scale commercial copper mining began in Chile more than a century ago, when a U.S. company took control of the Chuquicamata site in northern Chile, where indigenous communities had mined copper for centuries. For decades, it was the largest open-pit copper mine on Earth. Working conditions were brutal, and strikes were common. Ernesto “Che” Guevara visited Chuquicamata in March 1952 during his cross-continental motorcycle trip, and wrote in The Motorcycle Diaries about “the graveyards of the mines, containing only a small share of the immense number of people devoured by cave-ins, silica and the hellish climate of the mountain.”

When Chileans elected socialist Salvador Allende as president in 1970, one of his first policy actions was to nationalize the country’s copper mines, including Chuquicamata. The American owners of the mines were furious, and three years later, Allende was overthrown in a U.S.-backed military coup.

Today, Chuquicamata is operated by Codelco, Chile’s state-owned national copper company. The mine complex sprawls across the lower slopes of a mountain range in the Atacama Desert, one of the driest regions on Earth. The landscape is miles of barren sand and rock with barely a speck of vegetation, framed by the snow-capped Andes in the distance. The open pit itself is enormous: more than a mile wide, two miles long, and nearly a mile deep. It is the center of a sprawling network of buildings, roads, and massive machinery, with house-sized haul trucks, hulking excavators, and towering smokestacks all shrouded in dust, looking like an industrial outpost of Mordor.

The mine’s impact on the surrounding landscape extends far beyond the pit itself. Miles of mountainous tailings heaps, layered with gray and brown mineral waste, stretch out from the mine site. They are so large they could easily be mistaken for natural hills, if not for their flat tops and unnaturally uniform shapes. The haul trucks that carry waste rock to the heaps look like tiny insects in comparison. A massive settling pond for contaminated mine water, held back by earthen berms, covers an area roughly the size of Manhattan.

Much of the damage is invisible to the naked eye. The mine and neighboring operations pull enormous volumes of water from the Atacama’s aquifers and streams. Leonel Salinas, president of the small village of Lasana, located roughly 30 miles from Chuquicamata, says mining has drained the region of what little water it has. Farmland is drying up, forcing mostly indigenous local farmers to relocate to cities. “We’re losing our cultural landscape,” he says. “We’re not against modernity and development. But the burdens need to be equitably shared.” Dina Pannier, president of the nearby farming town of Chiu Chiu, echoes that sentiment. “There used to be beautiful springs and wetlands here. They’ve disappeared. Other regions get the money, but we here are the ones who pay the price.”

The copper produced by these mines is also a magnet for brazen criminal gangs. By the light of a full moon, bandits drive Toyota Tundra pickups alongside trains hauling copper slabs from the high Atacama mines down to coastal ports. Channeling the spirit of old west outlaws like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the bandits leap onto the rail cars, cut the ropes securing the 180-pound copper slabs, toss them into the beds of their speeding trucks, and vanish into the desert night.

The problem is so severe that Chile’s national police have created a special task force dedicated to combating copper theft. Even so, trains were still being robbed regularly when journalist Vince Beiser visited Chile in 2022. The thefts are not limited to trains: in January 2023, a gang of thieves hit Chile’s main seaport, overpowered a small group of workers, and stole a dozen shipping containers full of Codelco copper worth more than $4 million.

The Global Copper Theft Epidemic

No one knows exactly how much copper is stolen globally each year. Thieves almost always sell stolen metal to unregulated scrap yards and recyclers that do not ask questions about origin. These operations remove plastic insulation and other non-metallic materials, then shred or melt down the copper. The process is accessible to almost anyone: copper can be melted with blowtorches or small furnaces available for purchase on Amazon, and countless online tutorials walk beginners through the process. Once melted into generic ingots or scrap, stolen copper can be mixed with legally mined copper, making its origin essentially impossible to trace.

Even so, it is estimated that annual global copper theft totals hundreds of millions, possibly billions, of dollars. In one particularly brazen 2023 heist, thieves stole nearly $200 million worth of copper and other metals from Aurubis, Europe’s largest copper producer. In the U.S., the largest heists are often insider jobs. In 2013, police broke up a ring that stole up to $80 million worth of copper ingots from an Arizona mine. Prosecutors proved that complicit mine workers would open the security gates for confederates, who loaded trucks with raw copper and drove out unchallenged. The metal was sold to California recyclers, who altered its appearance to look like scrap, then shipped it to China. Uncovering the plot took years: at one point, a mine company representative found a severed goat’s head nailed to his front door as a threat.

Most American copper thieves, however, are small-time opportunists drawn to an easy profit. Huge amounts of copper are left exposed and unguarded across the country. It takes little skill or courage to rip wiring out of an abandoned building, break into an air conditioning unit behind an apartment building, or steal a manhole cover from a quiet suburban street. Thousands of copper thefts are reported each year, with targets ranging from fire hydrants to a 3,000-ton historic bell to a bust of Orville Wright, and even at least one urn holding human ashes.

The cost of repairing damage from copper theft almost always far exceeds the value of the stolen metal. Stolen cables have shut down drinking water supplies in Hawaii, street lighting across Missouri, airport runway lights in Washington state, and entire subway lines in New York City. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that copper theft causes $1 billion in damage annually to critical infrastructure facilities and businesses.

The human toll is even starker: while no exact count exists, a review of 10 years of local U.S. news turns up dozens of reports of thieves electrocuted to death while cutting live copper wire, plus at least one security guard murdered while trying to stop a theft.

In South Africa, widespread poverty, under-policing, and soaring copper prices have turned copper theft into a large-scale criminal industry. Working mines are prime targets, even mines that do not produce copper: their vast underground networks of shafts and tunnels require miles of copper cable to power lights and digging equipment, much of it unguarded and out of sight. On any given day, hundreds of desperate people risk their lives to steal this copper.

These illegal miners are known as zama zamas, a Zulu term that roughly translates to “take a chance.” They climb down abandoned and active mine shafts on ropes or handmade ladders, then make their way through old tunnels to reach copper cables. Many set up permanent underground camps, with hundreds of zama zamas living underground at any given time, some staying for weeks or months at a time.

The scale of the problem is staggering: one major mining company, Implats, reported roughly 800 separate cable theft incidents in 2021 alone. Stolen cables have forced companies to shut down entire mines for weeks at a time. It is also an extraordinarily dangerous way to make a living. Dozens of illegal miners die every year from gas explosions, floodwaters from heavy rain, and other tunnel accidents. In 2021, a mining company sealed off a ventilation shaft that a group of zama zamas were using to supply their crew underground. Desperate, the illegal miners blew open the shaft with explosives. Police and private security then engaged in a pitched battle with the escaping zama zamas, leaving at least eight people dead.

Above ground, gangs have hijacked dozens of trucks carrying copper to South African ports, stealing millions of dollars worth of metal in a single heist. The national electric grid is plundered so often and so thoroughly that the entire country feels the impact. In 2021, national railway operator Transnet reported that more than 1,000 kilometers of overhead power cables had been stolen. A recent report from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime notes that “while two security guards may have proved a deterrent in the past,” gangs “now come in groups of 20 or 30 and are often heavily armed, with ‘spotters’ shooting at patrol vehicles.” Cell phone towers, water pipelines, and power stations are all targeted regularly. Thieves disguise themselves as utility workers sent to remove old underground cables, bribe actual power company employees, or simply arrive armed and use four-wheel-drive trucks to rip cables out of the ground.

Ordinary South Africans pay the highest price. Children have died falling into open manholes after copper covers were stolen. Beyond disrupted train services, widespread power outages, cut water and phone service, a Johannesburg hospital was forced to close completely after thieves stole all of its copper pipes, cables, and electrical equipment. Police believe gang rivalries over copper theft territory sparked two mass shootings in the Johannesburg area in 2022 that left 21 people dead. Dozens of security guards like Moqadi M