Moqadi Mokoena had been feeling uneasy all day. When he left his home outside Johannesburg, South Africa, to go to work as a security guard, he had to make two detours — first because he forgot his watch, and then his cigarettes. He had reason to be nervous. His supervisor had assigned him to join a squad protecting an electrical substation where, just two days earlier, four other guards had been stripped and beaten with pipes by armed robbers. Now, on this day in May 2021, Mokoena and a fellow guard were at that substation, staring tensely through the windshield of their truck as a group of gunmen approached.
Mokoena pulled out his phone and called his wife, the mother of his one-year-old daughter. He told her the gang was heading his way. “I’m scared,” he said. He didn’t have a gun. “I think they are the same ones who attacked our colleagues.”
“Call your supervisor!” he told her.
Minutes later, the men opened fire with at least one automatic weapon. Mokoena’s partner jumped out of the vehicle but was hit by bullets. A third guard nearby dove for cover, shot the robbers and then ran for help. When he returned with the supervisor, they found Mokoena and his partner dead. Police later said the criminals made off with about $1,600 worth of copper wire.
“We face these dangers every day,” the surviving guard later told a local reporter. “You don’t know if you will return home when you go out on duty.”
In most places, power companies are a pretty boring business, but in South Africa they are literally under attack by heavily armed gangs who have crippled the country’s energy infrastructure and claimed an ever-increasing number of lives. Virtually every day, homes across the country are left in the dark, railway lines are shut down, water supplies are cut off and hospitals are forced to close – all because thieves are targeting the material that carries electricity: copper.
The rallying cry of energy transition advocates is “Electrify everything.” That means powering cars, heating systems, industrial plants, and all manner of machines with electricity instead of fossil fuels. To do that, we need copper—and lots of it. After silver, a rarer and far more expensive metal, copper is the best natural electrical conductor on Earth. We need it for solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles (a typical electric vehicle contains up to 79 kilos of copper). We need it for the giant batteries that will provide power when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. We need it to massively expand and modernize the countless miles of power lines that support the electrical grid in virtually every country. In the United States, the capacity of the electrical grid will have to grow up to three times to meet projected demand.
A recent report from S&P Global predicts that the amount of copper we will need in the next 25 years will be greater than the human race has ever consumed. “The world has never produced anywhere near this amount of copper in such a short time,” the report notes. The world may not be up to the challenge. Analysts predict supplies will fall short by millions of tons in the coming years. No wonder Goldman Sachs has declared that “there is no decarbonization without copper” and called copper “the new oil.”
As the energy transition accelerates, the value of copper has also soared. Over the past four years, the price of a ton of copper has skyrocketed from about $6,400 to more than $9,000. That, in turn, has made electrical wiring, equipment and even raw metal fresh from the mines attractive targets for thieves. Around the world, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of precious metals have been stolen and countless lives have been lost. With the possible exception of gold, no other metal has caused as much death and destruction.