With the possible exception of gold, no other metal has caused as much destruction as copper. In the coming years, we’ll need more of it than ever.
||| FROM WIRED.COM |||
Moqadi Mokoena had been feeling uneasy all day. When he’d left his home on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa, for his job as a security guard, he’d had to turn around twice, having forgotten first 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 naked and beaten with pipes by gun-wielding thieves. Now, on this day in May of 2021, Mokoena and a fellow guard were at that substation, peering tensely through their truck’s windshield as a group of armed men approached.
Mokoena pulled out his phone and called his wife, the mother of their 1-year-old daughter. He told her about the gang coming toward him. “I’m feeling scared,” he said. He didn’t have a gun himself. “I think they are the same ones who attacked our colleagues.”
“Call your supervisor!” she told him.
Minutes later, the men opened fire with at least one automatic weapon. Mokoena’s partner jumped out of the vehicle but was cut down by bullets. A third nearby guard dove for cover, shot back at the thieves, 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 cable.
“We face these dangers every day,” the surviving guard later told a local journalist. “You don’t know if you’ll return home when you leave for duty.”
In most places, power companies are a pretty dull business. But in South Africa they are under a literal assault, targeted by heavily armed gangs that have crippled the nation’s energy infrastructure and claimed an ever-growing number of lives. Practically every day, homes across the country are plunged into darkness, train lines shut down, water supplies cut off, and hospitals forced to close, all because thieves are targeting the material that carries electricity: copper.
The battle cry of energy transition advocates is “Electrify everything.” Meaning: Let’s power cars, heating systems, industrial plants, and every other type of machine with electricity rather than fossil fuels. To do that, we need copper—and lots of it. Second to 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 EV contains as much as 175 pounds of copper.) We need it for the giant batteries that will provide power when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. We need it to massively expand and upgrade the countless miles of power cables that undergird the energy grid in practically every country. In the United States, the capacity of the electric grid will have to grow as much as threefold to meet the expected demand.
A recent report from S&P Global predicts that the amount of copper we’ll need over the next 25 years will add up to more than the human race has consumed in its entire history. “The world has never produced anywhere close to this much copper in such a short time frame,” the report notes. The world might 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 “no decarbonization without copper” and called copper “the new oil.”
As the energy transition gathers speed, the value of copper has also soared. In the past four years, the price of a ton of copper has shot 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 into juicy targets for thieves. All around the world, hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of the metal has been stolen—and countless lives have been lost. With the possible exception of gold, no other metal has caused so much death and destruction.
Most of the world’s copper, of course, is produced and sold by legitimate companies. But even the legal copper industry has inflicted tremendous harm. From the western United States to South America to central Africa, copper mining has left colossal pits full of toxic waste and has fouled enormous swaths of land and waterways.
The risk of more disasters is in some ways getting worse, because most of the world’s richest and most easily accessed copper deposits have by now been mined. “All the low-hanging fruit has been picked,” says Scott Dunbar, a Canadian former mining engineer. The quality of the remaining ore in many major mines—that is, the percentage of metal within the rock—is falling fast. That means ever larger tracts of land have to be torn up to extract the same amount of copper, generating ever larger amounts of waste.
The new frontier for copper is central Africa. Investment has been pouring in since the early 2000s, in answer to the howling demand for raw materials from China’s growing economy. Most of the action is in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a vast nation two-thirds the size of Western Europe that is rich with copper as well as diamonds, gold, cobalt, and other minerals. Mining supplies around 80 percent of the country’s foreign earnings. Little of that filters down to its people, however. Most Congolese subsist on less than $3 a day.
Early on the scene in the DRC was Chicago-born billionaire Robert Friedland, one of modern mining’s most idiosyncratic moguls. At Oregon’s Reed College in the early 1970s, Friedland became close friends with a like-minded fellow student named Steve Jobs. Both of them were entranced by Eastern religions and spirituality. “On Sunday evenings Jobs and Friedland would go to the Hare Krishna temple on the western edge of Portland,” writes Walter Isaacson in his biography of Jobs. “They would dance and sing songs at the top of their lungs.” They both traveled to India and were devotees of a famous Hindu guru. They also shared a fondness for hallucinogenic drugs. In fact, when Friedland arrived at Reed, he was on parole following a conviction for possession of 24,000 hits of LSD.
In 1974, Friedland moved to an apple farm his uncle owned near Portland. As the journalist Henry Sanderson writes in his book Volt Rush:
The farm became a hippy commune where groups of young people from the Hare Krishna temple worked the apple orchard, meditated, and ate vegetarian food together. Friedland took the name of Sita Ram Dass and looked “like a Caucasian Krishna.” Jobs, who had dropped out of Reed, worked at the orchard, helping to produce cider. Pretty soon, however, Friedland started operating the commune as a business, according to Jobs.
The man who would later give the world the iPhone soon left, disenchanted by Friedland’s “very materialistic” impulses.
By the early 1980s Friedland had teamed up with some Vancouver-based financiers and moved into the world of mining, hustling for small gold outfits. He made headlines in 1992 when a Colorado gold mine he had previously overseen (as its parent company’s CEO) leaked toxic heavy metals into a nearby watershed, earning him the nickname “Toxic Bob.” In the meantime he had also discovered a major gold deposit in Alaska and an even bigger nickel deposit in Canada, which he later sold for more than $3 billion. Friedland has been a major player in the industry ever since. (He also has a sideline in movies, helping to produce Crazy Rich Asians and other films. Another fun Friedland fact: This summer, he bought a scenic California estate from Ellen DeGeneres for a trifling $96 million.)
Friedland has been involved in the DRC since 1996, when he met Laurent Kabila, then the leader of a rebel movement. As Sanderson tells it, “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 in the heart of a phenomenally rich mineral belt stretching across the DRC and south into Zambia. Friedland’s Ivanhoe Mines company found an enormous, high-grade copper deposit near the DRC’s border with Zambia and in 2021 started production at a colossal new mine.
Dubbed the Kamoa-Kakula mine, it is a joint venture with a Chinese company—one of many that are heavily involved throughout the DRC’s mining industry. China refines and consumes far more copper than any other country, and it relies on foreign suppliers for most of it. So when the DRC began opening up to foreign investment, China pounced. Chinese companies have since supplied billions of dollars in infrastructure support to the DRC in exchange for far-ranging mining rights.
Friedland is a peerless pitchman for copper. “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 world’s third-biggest copper mine.
The number-one producer of raw copper, however, is on the other side of the planet 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 enormous wealth to the country—as well as despoliation, dispossession, and violence
Large-scale mining began there more than a century ago, when a US company took control of a site in northern Chile called Chuquicamata, where indigenous people had been digging up copper for centuries. For a time, it was the world’s biggest open-pit mine. Working conditions were grueling and strikes frequent. Among those struck by the harshness of the place was Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who visited Chuquicamata in March 1952 and wrote in his 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 moves was to nationalize the country’s copper mines, including Chuquicamata. The mines’ American owners were furious. Three years later, Allende was overthrown in a US-favored military coup.
Today, Chuquicamata is run by Chile’s state-owned copper company, Codelco. The mine complex sprawls along the lower reaches of a range of hills in the Atacama desert. It’s one of the driest regions on the planet, and it looks the part—miles of sand and rock with barely a speck of vegetation, bounded in the distance by the snow-capped Andes. The pit itself is gargantuan: more than a mile wide, 2 miles long, and most of a mile deep. It’s the center of a shambling complex of buildings and roads teeming with house-sized trucks, hulking machinery, and towering chimneys, all of it swathed in dust and smoke like an industrial suburb of Mordor.
The mine’s impact on the surrounding landscape is even greater. The shock waves extend in every direction. Mountainous heaps of tailings, candy-striped with layers of gray and brown minerals, sprawl away for miles. They could easily be mistaken for hills, matching as they do the size of the naturally occurring ones around them, except for their flat tops and overly tidy shapes. The trucks ferrying waste rock to them look like insects in comparison. A settling pond, its polluted water held in by berms of bulldozed earth and rock, covers an area the size of Manhattan.
And then there’s the damage you can’t see. The mine—and others nearby—draw huge amounts of water from the aquifers and streams of the Atacama. Leonel Salinas, president of the village of Lasana, a modest collection of small houses about 30 miles from Chuquicamata, says mining is sucking away what little water the area has. Cropland is drying up, forcing the mostly indigenous farmers to move away to the 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, feels the same. “There used to be beautiful springs and wetlands here. They’ve disappeared. The other regions get the money, but we here are the ones who pay the price.”
The treasures these mines produce are magnets for some astonishingly brazen criminals. By the light of the full moon, bandits in Toyota Tundra pickups roll up alongside trains that are hauling copper slabs from the mines high in the Atacama down to the coast. With perhaps a whispered prayer to the spirits of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the bandits leap aboard the copper cars, slice through the ropes securing the 180-pound slabs, toss them into the beds of the speeding trucks, and disappear into the night.
Everything has a caveat. This is a fascinating article… thank you for posting. It’s one that should not be overlooked by those who feel an EV future is the solution.
This has gone on long before EVs became an issue. Internal combustion vehicles need copper too, in fact that was why their 6 volt batteries became 12 volt batteries: twice the voltage = half the current, ergo thinner wires. The switch came in the early 1950s … think Korean War. Over the past few decades when buildings are torn down, the first thing removed is the copper plumbing and wiring if accessible. Pennies lost most of their copper in 1982 as the US was losing money minting them.
And power demands aren’t increased just by EVs. The national grid is being upgraded by increasing the diameter of transmission lines to carry heavier loads. Think population increase, huge hi-res screens and inefficient resistance heating for starters.
I believe that you’re ignoring the obvious when you state, “And power demands aren’t increased just by EVs.”
Though true, power demands ARE increased by an increasing population, and in an increase in the number of EVs. The current demand for copper and other rare elements are already having wars fought over them. The more EVs on the road, (or the water), and the larger the machine, (or boat) the more the need for these elements. Multiply the negatives that are related to the transition times millions of new EV vehicles and we may be thinking twice about the tradeoffs between fossil fuel and EV power production.
An honest and open question for OPALCO in regards to the new proposed”free” EV hookups that are to be placed around the island would be… who will be paying the cost for the cost, installation, and use of these?
The average home contains 439 pounds of copper. Copper can be recycled, oil cannot. And how about that Global Warming? It’s not just EVs that demand copper. Also check out the fossil fuel industry campaign against EVs.
Yes, I get it. I get it! Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for the world getting off of carbon emitting fossil fuels, and I’m all for responsible alternatives.
“It’s not just EVs that demand copper,” ignores the effects that millions and millions more EV rare-mineral needed batteries will be needed to re-power our nation and our world… do the math.
“And how about that Global Warming?” O.K. How ’bout it? Read the article, do the math. Consider how much energy (greenhouse gas emitting energy) it takes to extract more copper and the other, (rare and getting rarer), elements that will be needed for the transition of millions (MILLIONS) of EV vehicle s and boats (ferries) and machinery into our limited future.
As fewer wars are being fought for fossil fuels more wars will be fought for the rare elements that will be needed to re-power our transportation and industrial base… they already are in resource rich poor countries around the world. The return on investment is not there. Did I mention I’m all for getting off of our dependence on greenhouse gas emitting fossil fuels, and I’m all for responsible alternatives?
And as my friend Elizabeth would say, “does it really matter?” Ecological overshoot, (including climate change) is upon us, and is irreversible. Our EV future will be guided by the same powers that guided us throughout the fossil fuel era, and the same political mentality of the past will continue to rule the day… for monied interests. As much as you don’t want to believe it, as a species we are doomed… we are well into the 6th mass extinction and the cycle is not reversible.
The science simply isn’t there… we go through the motions based solely on hope and because we are good people who want to do the right thing… but in doing so we’re also not paying attention.
Electric vehicles: On the other hand there’s oil extraction (drilling, fracking and associated environmental degradation such as the Deepwater Hoizon diaster in the Gulf)) , transport (pipelines, rail , truck and ship tankers: Transmountain and Keystone pipeline spills and, of course, the Exon Valdez disaster). We now have hundreds of mammoth oil tankers from the Transmountain pipeline off the shores of Orcas Island and in “the graveyard of the Pacific” waiting for the next disaster. We also get fossil fuel air pollution and the impact of fossil fuels on Global Warming. Let’s put this in perspective.
Re: EVs
EVs and their batteries require copper, lithium, graphite, nickel, manganese, aluminum, and sometimes cobalt along with a lot of plastic and steel, synthetic (oil) “rubber” for tires, and so on. Graphite for batteries is made from synthetic graphite, which is made from coal tar and bitumen. Many of these metals are refined with sulfuric acid, typically made with sulfur, a by-product of oil refineries.
All these materials must be mined out of the ground, using massive steel machines that run on diesel. The refineries are built from concrete, and steel made with coal. The factories, the same. Concrete and steel are two of the most energy intensive materials to produce.
Half of climate change is caused by emissions from land destruction; that is, the reduction of carbon sequestration in soil and trees because of land being destroyed for mining, logging, ranching, industrial agriculture, and other development.
Benchmark Minerals released a report a couple of years ago estimating that we’d need to build 350 *new* mines to supply the materials for battery demand just through 2035, a mere fraction of the batteries required to replace 1.5 billion cars in the world, and not including the battery demand for grid energy storage.
The World Bank stated in 2017 that “Technologies assumed to populate the clean energy shift … are in fact significantly MORE material intensive in their composition than current traditional fossil-fuel-based energy supply systems.”
Graphite demand will grow 25-30 times for EV batteries, nickel by 89 times, copper 28 times, silicon by 460 times. All for 2035 demand; again, a mere fraction of the 1.5 billion cars on Earth.
Essentially those who advocate for EVs and electrifying everything are suggesting that we move from a fossil fuels-intensive energy system to a materials-intensive energy system, requiring more materials than most of us can possibly imagine, including copper.
Metals are becoming far more scarce. There’s still plenty of them, but copper grade, for example, has reduced from 1.6% in 1920 to 0.5% in 2019. That means we must mine 200 tons of ore to obtain 1 ton of copper.
We live on a finite planet and, to quote Simon Michaux who studies materials use, “to phase out fossil fuels 4,575,523,674 tons of copper will be needed to produce one generation of technology units (wind, solar, batteries, etc.) requiring 189.1 years at 2019 rates of production.” To mine that much copper, at 0.5% grade, will require moving 915,104,734,800 tons of ore from the ground. 915 billion tons of ore. Can you imagine the extraordinary amount of damage that would do to the Earth? And the toxic tailings that would create? Now add all the other materials required to make an EV and its battery and I think the Earth would look like one massive hellscape.
There are 44 million miles of roads around the world, with 25 million more miles in the works, many of them through some of the only intact ecosystems left on Earth. Roads are “among the wrongest things imaginable” as Ben Goldfarb wrote in his book Crossings.
Imagine we are driving an EV instead of a gas car on these roads. The microplastics from the tires and brakes on those EVs continues to poison the entire planet. The roads we are driving on continue to fragment habitat, killing wildlife both by creating uncrossable barriers and by direct strikes from cars. We continue to live our high-consumption lifestyles, driving these EVs, traveling where we want when we want. We charge our EVs at charging stations around the world… oh wait. Most of those charging stations are still powered by coal and gas-fired power plants in 2035. Hmmm. Why? Because there’s only so many (river-killing) dams in the world, and in 2035 wind and solar have grown from 15% of the world’s electricity to — let’s say — 30% (being generous) of the world’s electricity supply.
Of course electricity is only 20% of the world’s energy supply, and fossil fuel use is growing far faster than wind and solar, geothermal, nuclear, and dams, so all those EVs make very little difference at all in emissions.
So, (in 2035) we realize we built 350 new mines, destroying habitats around the world, kicking people off their land, making mountains of toxic mining waste, destroying rivers, lakes, soil, and air with pollution, accelerating the sixth mass extinction, and worsening the health of every living being on the planet for … nothing. For a few fancy cars that only rich people can afford anyway.
Note that I’m NOT saying we should use gas cars, nor am I saying we should stick with fossil fuels.
What I am saying is that EVs will do nothing to solve our problems. The only way to solve our problems is to dramatically and rapidly reduce our consumption, of everything. Until we are willing to contemplate LESS as a solution, we will get nowhere.
Elisabeth , thank you. You have described the predicament eloquently and I think indisputably. Ultimately, humans will decrease our overall resource consumption one way or the other—probably by necessity rather than by design. Even if we discover zero point energy, for example, we will run out of planet.
EVs are just one step, tentative and with drawbacks that are new and therefore self-magnifying, but the numbers show that the social and environmental costs of an economy running on electrical energy is far less than that for a fossil-fueled economy and far less than the environmental and social costs of a fossil fueled economy. Having accepted the costs (largely to others to date) of a fossil-fueled economy for so long that in the developed countries they involve only background noise and perhaps some residual feelings of guilt.
That said, I agree with you Elizabeth, that overall over-consumption is a driver of the problem. But as we all know, while we can easily identify those whom we feel are over-consuming, we know that given our good personal reasons, our own level of consumption [] is unlikely to change voluntarily []. More to the point, directing the world to consume less penalizes those countries on whose energy shoulders we righteously stand. Everyone is entitled to their chance for self-fulfillment as they see it.
I agree, Bill, that our own level of consumption is unlikely to change voluntarily, and as a country with 4.4% of the global population using 18% of the global primary energy consumption, we should feel utterly ashamed about that.
So, it is likely that the sixth mass extinction, catastrophic global pollution, habitat loss, and climate change will make that change for us, whether we like it or not.
Thank you for your comments, Elisabeth. I agree we are in pretty deep with overconsumption and destruction of the planet but we must start somewhere
to change course. EVs will contribute to increased use of copper and electricity but I think you overstate the impact of EVs. Resurgence of manufacturing in the U.S., the growing development of newer technologies like factories for semi-conductors, batteries, solar panels, data centers serving growing online activity, increased use of air conditioning and heat pumps contribute far more to required generation and distribution systems based on copper.
The existing development pattern of the U.S. is based on over a hundred years of automobile mobility and that pattern will take many decades to change if ever.
EVs won’t change that dynamic but at least they might help get us away from fossil fuels.
Greg, I agree, there are thousands of uses of copper not just EVs; I responded on that point specifically because someone mentioned it, and because I’ve spent the last 4.5 years of my life studying mining for batteries as I fought a massive lithium mine currently destroying sage-grouse habitat in Northern Nevada. The lithium from that mine will go to GM EVs.
If you’re interested in sources:
* Benchmark Minerals report: https://source.benchmarkminerals.com/article/more-than-300-new-mines-required-to-meet-battery-demand-by-2035 (I have the full report if you want me to send it)
* Simon Michaux’s research on materials intensity: https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/michauxpptpptx/256818096#1 (see slides 21 and 22 in particular)
We don’t have decades to change. And developing an entirely new supply chain for a different kind of car will, on top of all the other metals and minerals required for a materials-intensive energy system, on top of an already materials-intensive economy will simply make the ongoing catastrophic decimation of habitats and wildlife and pollution far far worse. That will dramatically reduce the time that this ongoing catastrophe leads to total chaos.
(Not directed specifically at you Greg) – I find it fascinating that the simplest solution–reduction–is so challenging for people. So challenging that people are spending immense effort, brain power, money, etc. to try to get “solutions” to avoid it, “solutions” that will only make ecological overshoot far worse. The idea of reducing is so anathema to our way of life, our thought processes, we can barely contemplate it. We have been, in a relatively short period of time on the scale of human existence on Earth, been so thoroughly indoctrinated into this insane ecocidal infinitely growing way of life, we simply cannot imagine any other way.
If nothing else, it is a fascinating look at the limitations of human thinking. In his presentation I set up for the county which only 4 people from the county actually attended because these ideas are SO challenging, Bill Rees said, “We are not cognitively equipped.” Certainly my discussions on this channel have confirmed this.
As I look outside at a blood red sun in a smoke filled sky this morning, I’m reminded of a CBC segment I heard the other day in which divulged the fact that the number one worldwide green house gas emitter in 2023 was the Canadian wildfires.
Thank you Elisabeth, this is the most important conversation that I’ve ever heard. Dr. Rees is at the top of his field when it comes to environmental economics, ecological overshoot, and climate change. Little do we know the profound awakening that our planet is fixing to show us.
“Overshoot occurs when the demands on an ecosystem exceed its regenerative capacity. Suffice to say that human beings are in extreme overshoot, and pushing further every single year. According to the Ecological Footprint Analysis, and I’m quoting from one of Bill’s papers here, “we would need the bio-capacity equivalent of three additional Earth-like planets to supply the demands of just the present population sustainably.” And the population continues to grow on this one precious planet. The neoliberal demand for “infinite growth” is literally unsustainable.”
William E. Rees: Ecological Overshoot is Driving Humanity Toward Collapse– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPmMeF0B4v4
Excellent commentary on this thread! As with my own thinking though, it is long on abstractions and theory and short on practicality. Given that people are generally unwilling to embrace L.E.S.S. (Less Energy, Stuff & Stimulation) when their neighbors are not, it seems that we are left in the awkward position of knowing the global corporate/capitalist/industrial civilization is willing to destroy the biosphere to make Elon a trillionaire before his next birthday and that, individually, there doesn’t seem to be much we can do about it.
My personal response to that conundrum seems to be to stay home and not buy things that I don’t actually need. Honestly defining “need” however, can be extremely challenging to a lot of preconceptions and social conditioning! And then, needs change as one ages, so it’s a moving target.
The future clearly holds L.E.S.S. for us. Getting comfortable with that, before we are forced to, is the best practical suggestion I have come up with. It’s not going to save the world, whatever that even means, but it may mean that, by our example, we may serve as seed crystals and when the super-saturated, overheated, social solution around us begins to cool, perhaps we can precipitate a new way of Being in the world? My hope is it will be a kinder, slower, quieter, more respectful way of Being that will prioritize feeding our souls rather than our egos.
Derrick Jensen’s book “Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization” (2006) presents some interesting thoughts.
https://derrickjensen.org/endgame/premises/