May 7, 2025 • 30 mins
Nicolas Niarchos is a journalist whose work focuses on conflicts, migration and, most recently, the energy transition. Specifically, the hidden costs of extracting minerals like cobalt, which remains a critical element in the technology we use to run our lives. Niarchos sits down with Oz to discuss what he’s observed in mineral-rich Congo and Indonesia – and how the battle for geopolitical advantage over these natural resources are overturning the world order.
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Speaker 1 (00:13):
Welcome to tech Stuff. This is the story. Each week
on Wednesdays, we bring you an in depth interview with
someone who has a front row seat to the most
fascinating things happening in and around tech, and today we're
joined by Nicholas Nyakos. Nakos is a journalist who writes
the publications like The New Yorker, The Nation, and The
(00:34):
New York Times, covering everything from the war in Ukraine
to most recently, the clean energy transition. But as new
Orkos tells us, there are many outstanding questions about just
how clean the battery powered world really is.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
You know, in the same way that automobiles in the
nineteen twenties, with these wonderful, shiny, beautiful things, people weren't
really asking where does the crude oil come from? Where
are the resources that we need to go into these
cars come from.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Neokos is working on a book called The Elements of
Power about the natural resources required to power our electric future,
specifically the hidden costs of extracting minerals like cobalt, which
remains a critical element in the technology we use to
run our lives.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Mining is incredibly destructive. You tear up the ground and
you pollute the rivers, and you try and smoke into
the sky and so on, and then these people that
are left with nothing but holes in the ground.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Essentially, time and again, Neocos discovered that the country's riches
in these resources rarely reap the benefits of their abundance,
and the battle for geopolitical advantage is a constant theme
in his reporting.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Oftentimes the people who are profiting are not the local communities.
And I thought it was necessary for the wild to
think a little bit more more deeply about that, and
a little bit more more about how, for example, certain
actors like the Chinese and these big Chinese companies which
we really know very little about, have such a choke
(02:10):
hold on this supply chain.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
And so a few years ago Nioko set off to
do just that, show the world the impact of our
growing reliance on battery metals, which led him to the
southern capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Lubumbashi.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
So Lummbashi Katanga province a sort of ground zero for
this new energy sector. About seventy percent of the world's
cobalt or comes from the southern Democratic Republic of Congo,
and cobolt is important because it's used in the cathode
of lithium ion batteries. Lithium ion batteries are the batteries
that power our devices. Our cell phones are TESLA cars,
(02:50):
and cobalt is essentially one of the ingredients that is
necessary to create this kind of energy density that is
required for especially small devices. Yeah, so many things like
cell phones would be much bulkier and probably have many
fewer capabilities because just to get that kind of energy density,
(03:13):
there's no technology that really allows that at the moment
that's not lithium own batteries. There are some technologies that
are being developed now that you know, in ten years
time will hopefully be wonderful clean batteries, but at the
moment we don't know anything else that will do the
job of a lithium own battery as well as a
lithium ian battery.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
So talk about the Chinese presence as you saw it
in Congo.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
So there are two types of mining in Congo. There's
artismal mining and industrial mining, and artismal mining is one
in which there are most abuses. I'm not saying that
abuses from industrial mining don't exist, but the artismal mining
is where there are a lot of children working, where
there are people working without safety equipment, where there are
pregnant women washing minerals, and where people are really working
(03:59):
in the worst condition. The Chinese have a big presence
in both sectors basically, and some companies even straddle the
artisanal and industrial sectors. There's Huaiyu, which was started by
a guy called Chen Huehua, and he's basically built this
company by actually going out to Congo and buying some
(04:20):
minerals that have been mined in some of the worst conditions,
basically and built this huge company which is now a
supplier to Apple and a supplier to many of the
tech companies around the world.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
And I mean, are there China towns in Congo's the
what's the relationship between Chinese people working in Congo and Congolese.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
So the Congolese scholar Jamatnngoi Chimbambe says that there are
no formal China towns in Congo. And he's right when
you say that. It's mainly these kind of campuses of
people who are working and they seem to be following
the playbook of former colonial powers. It's quite interesting. Just
(05:01):
if you look at like the house construction model for
Chinese workers in Congo. You know, beforehand they were living
in dormitories, they were living kind of in these pretty
squalid conditions. And if you look at Belgian colonialists, I
guess they were living in tents and they were also
living in pretty bad conditions. And then they start to
build their houses. The Chinese have also started to build
their houses, and now they're building what they call garden
(05:23):
style houses, these kind of bungalows, which in many ways
recall the kind of like the architecture of Belgian colonialism,
which also had these like garden bungalows that you see
all over the place in Congo, which is very surreal
because you're going through, you know, the bush and suddenly
you see you come across something that wouldn't look out
of place just outside Brussels.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
So is China in your view of colonial power in DLC.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
I think colonial power means a very different thing to
what it did one hundred years ago, but I do
think that there are similarities.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
But how much of the cobalt supply coming from DC
is controlled by China or Chinese businesses?
Speaker 2 (06:04):
So they are by last count, eighteen large industrial mines
in DRC, and all of them but two are controlled
by Chinese link companies. So it's a huge amount of
a huge amount of congress cobald We'll never really know
one hundred percent full figures because there's a lot of
legal cobalt that comes out of the country, but a
lot of that that is controlled by the Chinese as.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
Well, and it's not just a supply of cobalds. You
chart the evolution of BYD basically from an outsourced battery
manufacture for the Japanese consumer electronics industry to the driving
innovator in battery technology and EVS today in a very
short period.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Yes, BYD and CAATL these are the two kind of
big companies that dominate the Chinese battery making sphere. BYD
is producing thirty percent of Apples iPads and they have
ten thousand researchers working on battery technology for Apple and
one hundred thousand other employees. Now there aren't ten thousand
(07:05):
battery researchers in Western Europe. I mean, it's it's completely
crazy the amount of resources that they're putting into this industry.
And this is something that's been led from very much
the top of the Chinese Communist Party and BYD is
particularly interesting to me because I think that they have
been very very good about creating cars and focusing on
(07:28):
being an auto manufacturer, and it's not something that we
see here in the US. Well there are very few,
but you're starting to see it in Europe. I mean,
there's amazing video of Musk laughing at at Bads in
twenty eleven and just being like, come on, have you
seen their car? Like, come on, it's never going to
be competitor to Tesla. This company has now taken over
(07:51):
from Tesla in terms of EV sales globally, and Musk
acknowledged this, and Muscle has acknowledged this.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
Yes, but this is now not just harder work and
more work, but more intellectual capital.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
Absolutely, yes, I think that's the big differentiation now. And
it's also not copying anymore. The Chinese are driving forward
battery technology and there's this idea that in the West,
and I actually think it's a slightly complacent way of
looking at things that in the West the education system
is so much better, and you know, in Japan we've
(08:24):
got better scientists, and the Japanese think this as well,
by the way, but the Chinese have so many more
people working on this stuff, and maybe ninety percent of
them are not like incredible research scientists, but then you
have a ten percent of them who really really are
pushing the envelope.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
I believe you spent some time trying to figure out
if there were locals who were benefiting from cobalt mining
in the country, and in looking into it, you ran
in some trouble while hunting down at lead.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
The interview that I had lined up was I had
been speaking to some civil society people who said that
there were connections between the cobalt minds and this sort
of former rebel who has once again kind of gone
on the run in opposition to the current government in Congo.
He's a guy called Jadeon, and so I thought that
(09:13):
it was very interesting if at least some of the
cobalt that was going into our devices was controlled by
this guy, who was, by all accounts a pretty brutal warlord.
I wasn't even meeting by Jadion. I was meeting with
his representatives. So I'm sitting in the restaurant of the
Hotel Bagadougou, and we're sitting there and then suddenly it's
(09:34):
sort of odd. There are these people wearing Chinese football
team shirts who come in and they're offering to sell
these sort of plastic radios, and then all hell breaks loose.
This guy sort of grabs me by the shoulder and says,
come with me. I'm saying I need to speak to
my translator. He's got my passports. He drags me out
(09:56):
into the sunlight, essentially, and there are seven trucks of
soldiers pushing away a crowd of people who are screaming
and yelling, and somehow it's become some sort of mini
protests that's happening outside, and that doesn't seem very normal
in America. But whenever there's a big police action, there's
(10:17):
a big crowd that gathers in that part of the world.
The next thing I know, I'm being put on a
plane and they've confiscated all of my devices. They've taken
my laptop, my phone and all that stuff. But they'd
also tried to take my pens. Luckily, I had one
buried in a bunch of crap that I had at
the bottom of my pocket. So I take this pen.
(10:38):
I go to the bathroom and write two notes. I'd
seen a guy who might might have been I don't
really want to identify him, because you know, he did
a great service to me, and I don't want to
put him in danger. But there was a guy who,
for whatever reason, looked like somebody who might be able
to raise the issue through the appropriate channels. I actually
(11:02):
shake this guy's hand and I pass it to him
in that way. Two days later, I get somebody knocking
on my cell and I've been held in solitary confinement
and they said the Americans know, which is obviously a
sort of great relief. Then the next day after that
is a Sunday, and I'm just sort of kept in
my room all day and I start sort of going
(11:24):
a bit mad. And then the day after that, I
wake up quite early and I am finally bundled onto
a plane to Paris.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
So to this day, what's your best explanation, why do
you think this happened? So?
Speaker 2 (11:39):
I think this happened because basically, powerful people who control
the very fundaments of the supply chain trying to stop people, journalists,
people with questions actually finding out who's profiting of it.
Because there's this thing that happened to me over and
(11:59):
again and reporting this book which is being stymied by
people who are in power in order to protect their
own interests.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
After the break, we discussed how America is responding to
China's dominance over the cobalt supply chain. Stay with us.
So you've testified before Congress here in the US. What
is the US response both to the supply chain issue
(12:37):
of China controlling sixteen out of eighteen of the major
cobalt mines in Congo and then secondly to this extraordinary
rush of battery innovation that's happening in China.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
In December twenty twenty four, President Biden went to Angola
to promote something called the Lubito Corridor, which is a
railroad that is based on old railroad actually built by
British entrepreneur to bring out mineral's mind by the Belgians
from Congo. And basically what the US government is hoping
(13:11):
to do is to rejuvenate this railroad and rejuvenate this
corridor as a form of minerals leaving through Angola to
go to the west rather than to go to the east.
The problem is that the Chinese built that railroad. They
basically they rebuilt that railroad fifteen years ago and as
(13:34):
much as it's wonderful that DC is now able to
export its copper towards the US. The US doesn't have
any processing facilities for copper and cobalt. That might change,
but it's incredibly environmentally taxing to have these facilities, and
so that's one of the questions. Do people want cobalt
(13:55):
processing facilities in the US. That has to be asked
if we're going to have this idea of the Lobito Corridor.
I think, to be honest that the US has responded
to this Chinese dominance of the supply chain with mainly
hand ringing. I mean, it's definitely been on the agenda
(14:15):
of certain people on Capitol Hill. There has been some
really sort of vigorous debate about this, and when I testified,
there were a lot of people knew quite a bit
about this, but mainly it seems to be something that
has taken on a certain inevitability and has complained about
and not really addressed. And the question is can Congress
(14:38):
address it? You know, the US doesn't have state run
enterprises that can do the type of things that the
Chinese state round enterprises can do. They can't provide funding
in the same way that the Bank of China can
to a company like China Malibdin and that wants to
go and take over the biggest cobalt mine in the
southern DRC. So I think it's it's it's also to
(15:01):
do with the limitations of the system that we live
in at the moment. So I don't think it's been
handled particularly well. But it's also hard to imagine a
way of handling this better on the political front.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
There's an old expression, men in glass houses shouldn't for rocks. Obviously,
one of the big stories in tech has been a
US led export controls on chips to China, powering the
most powerful AI systems. Is there a risk of a
Chinese response when it comes to cobalt or even batteries themselves.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
Yes, there's a big risk of Chinese response, And actually
in December twenty twenty four there was a export ban
of rare earth metals from China to the US. And
so this kind of tip for tat tariffs and bands
looks like it will escalate. The only question is that
(15:58):
if China were to say and we're not going to
export lithium ion batteries or finished battery precursor materials to
the US or entities affiliated with the US. There's also
many many ways in which that can be got around
by US companies. How much battery money we talked about
(16:18):
sixteen of eighteen minds. What percentage of global lithium I
battery manufacturing or battery processing. It's something between seventy and
eighty percent is a large, large percentage. In China, I
think it goes up to ninety for some minerals. Career
is also very big on this, and Japan has kind
of completely lost lost the ball. Indonesia does a bit
(16:38):
as well.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
And what about the US are the opportunities to mine
natural resources here?
Speaker 2 (16:44):
One of the projects that has seen more success has
been the renovation of a mine for zinc and lead
in the Silver Valley in Idaho. The Silver Valley is
a part of Idaho that has traditionally seen huge amounts
of mining. It was one of the wealthiest places in
the US back in the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties,
(17:06):
and just as these sort of prospectors came in on
the back of this gold rush and remained a very
wealthy part of the US until the mine started getting
shut down. And when you go to those communities you
see that there is that there are voices for mining
and against mining, and many people feel conflicted about it.
Idaho also has the biggest cobalt belt in the US,
(17:29):
but for most of these critical metals, the US doesn't
have a huge reserve of these cobalt, especially, so we'll
still be relying on China for cobalt.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
We talked a lot about Democratic Republic of Congo, but
talk about some of the other places where you've seen
mining first hand.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
I have seen mining first hand for this book in Indonesia,
and part of the reason that people are mining in
Indonesia is because people are mining for nickel, which is
to create lower cobalt cathods, but also cathodes that have
specific energy density qualities that are more desirable for electric
(18:09):
cars and a better safety profile than lithium cobal oxide,
which is the oldest and kind of og lithium iron
battery technology.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
What did you see when you were in Indonesia, I mean,
what's the same and what's different in terms of how
the mining industry affects people.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
What was similar was that you saw a similar political
feeling of dispossession and you felt that people had been
pushed off their land. You had the same stories of
people being moved away from their farms, and you also
had the same stories about water being polluted. What was
different was that the conditions, while tough, were definitely not
(18:49):
as brutal as some of the things in DRC that
I'd seen, and the government did seem to be more
involved in policing, and whatever corruption there might have been
was not on a kind of you know, you didn't
see a sort of low level and people trying to
steal shipments and so on. It was much more to
(19:11):
do with you know, large contracts being handed out by
certain ministers and stuff like that. And that's actually what's
interesting is that the history of Indonesia is a former
Dutch colony. You have this kind of the similar historical
situation where you move to a like decolonial leader right
(19:33):
after decolonization who talks about sort of nationalizing everything, and
then that person gets overthrown by somebody who is much
more venal and starts selling off the nation's resources. So
obviously no two places are exactly the same, but there's
there were some interesting similarities basically between Indonesia and DRC.
(19:55):
Although the conditions were much much better for the people
who were that although they at the same time they
weren't perfect.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
After the break, we look at some of the other
natural resources being mined to fuel the energy revolution. Stay
with us, Welcome back, Nick. You've covered conflict zones and
(20:28):
wars all over the world. How do natural resources figure
into these conflicts?
Speaker 2 (20:35):
So I traveled in two thousand and seventeen to report
on the frozen conflict in the Western Sahara. And this
was before I was focused on battery metals, and I
was going down to interview some political activists in the
town of Laune, which is the capital of the Western Sahara,
(20:58):
which Morocco has occupied since nineteen seventy six and has
taken over that country's phosphate resources. So I was interested
in how much phosphates played into why Morocco was hanging
on to Western Sahara, why they wanted Western Sahara. It's
(21:18):
a much more complicated story to do with the way
that the king sees his authority and these kind of
pre colonial agreements with various different tribes in the Sahara,
but phosphates does play into it. Ten percent of Morocco's
phosphate comes from the Western Sahara. And basically the control
(21:40):
of Western Sahara has allowed Morocco to have a sort
of stranglehold on the world phosphate industry. Phosphates are mainly
used as fertilizers, but now they're used in some of
these lithimyon phosphate batteries, which are a cobalt free battery
which has a much lower energy density than batteries that
have cobolt in them.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
Are not so good for small devices, not so good.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
For small devices, not as powerful, not necessarily good for
high performance electric vehicles, although that's debatable at this point
because there's been a lot of advances in electric vehicle
LFP batteries, and those batteries are seen as a way
of moving away from cobalt, which is also quite expensive,
(22:24):
and they're much cheaper and they're much safer as well,
but they come with this sort of trade off that
phosphates are necessary for agriculture. And Isaac Asimov, the great
science fiction writer, talked about this sort of moment where
population growth meets phosphate shortage and how that's the sort
of stabilizing point of human civilization. So if we're using
(22:46):
phosphates to power our cars and our batteries. We're going
to hit that point much sooner.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
And not only that they mind in a conflict zone.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Their mind in a conflict zone. Exactly so, the Western
Sahara since twenty twenty one has been re embroiled in
a conflict between Morocco and the Polysaria Front, which is
a separatist movement backed by Algeria, Morocco's neighbor. So I
wanted to point out that nothing, nothing comes for free. Basically,
(23:15):
we might think that these LFP batteries as they're called,
are these wonderful, you know, new technology, but actually, in
the end of the day, those batteries also come with
their trade offs.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
I'm curious what's the state of the research into alternatives
to cobald and lithiumine batteries.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
So alternatives cobalt, there's sodium ion batteries, and sodium is
a very very abundant element. The only problem is that
they don't have the same energy density and probably will
never have the same energy density as lithium ion batteries
because sodium ions are larger than lithium ions. Basically, so
(23:54):
the interesting thing about that is that you probably could
have low range electric cars and maybe even medium range
electric cars powered by the current technology. The Chinese have
advanced on that front in leaps and bounds. There are,
by the last count that I read, twenty five companies
in China sort of fully producing sodium man batteries. There
(24:18):
is I think one in France and one sort of
Mark Cuban backed company in the US called Natrion. But
it all feels a bit more like a science experiment
in the West, whereas in China it's actually happening and
it's actually there, and you can buy sodium mayan batteries,
you know, from Ali Baba very easily. Then there's a
little bit further out there sodium sulfur, which is actually
(24:40):
a technology that was first pioneered by Ford in the
nineteen sixties as a potential electric vehicle technology. Sodium sulfur
actually could have a huge amount of energy density. The
problem with the original sodium sulfur batteries was that they
had to have molten cathodes, which was not practical to
have in electric vehicles because you're have to have something
(25:01):
like a molten hot thing in your car battery and
obviously that would be very dangerous. And then there are
you know, various other different types of battery technology that
are being bandied around. People talk about silicon anodes and
various different little tweaks that can be made to make
the batteries more powerful and potentially less resource intensive. I
(25:23):
think that that's probably the road that we're going down
more visibly at the moment. And then the final thing
that I just wanted to mention is hydrogen and fuel
cell technologies. I think that those have been generally accepted
for long distance things like trucking, and there are some
taxi companies in Europe that are using hydrogen and fuel
(25:47):
cell technology. Is the problem is that hydrogen is very,
very energy intensive to convert. Usually you're converting a natural gas,
so it's not necessarily a particularly environmental door of energy
at the moment because you're just putting in so much
energy to convert it into fuel. So for the moment,
(26:08):
battery technology based on cobalts, based on nickel, based on
phosphate seem to be the best options that we have.
Although these things do develop fairly quickly. I mean when
I started this project in twenty eighteen, I mean people
were just starting to talk about lifting my am phosphate
batteries now they're in like fifty percent of electric cars.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
What was the driving question in your mind as you
got on and off these planes all around the world, planes, boats, motorbikes.
I mean, what were you was driving you.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
The motivating question? I mean, look, when I would get
off at a place, I would often think, how is
it possible that the world's new energy revolution can be
based in this place where there's no drain going under
the street, there's no electricity at night, there's no healths.
(27:01):
And we're talking about electric vehicles and flying cars and
things like that. And at the same time, you have
these places which are entirely dejected and undeveloped and sometimes
in a way beautifully undeveloped as well. You know, in
the middle of Indonesia in the Milucu Islands, Like it's
this green landscape of these beautiful islands that have been
(27:21):
sort of untouched. Now they're being ripped to pieces in
order to develop these these minds. So the question is like,
how do you square that kind of destruction and that
kind of deprivation with this ultra shiny, ultra modern world.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
You've seen incredible suffering reporting the supply chain. Yeah, I mean,
mass graves.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Even I have seen I have seen incredible suffering reporting
this story, and yeah, we saw mass graves in Congo.
But what I realized is that it's you know, there
are ways to do cobalt mining cleanly and ways to
pay back to the countries that the minerals are mined from,
but we're not doing that because we can do it
(28:07):
more cheaply by cutting a lot of corners. And cutting
those corners has huge effects down the supply chain. So
you know, if everybody paid a little bit more for
their iPhone, you could probably see much less suffering at
the bottom of the supply chain and people better ammunerated.
Then again, it's very very complicated to understand, like how
(28:31):
that money would get back to people and so on.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
One of the quotes that stay with me from your
book is a Japanese battery executive who said, to you,
the issue is, in the end of the day, there's
no good way to power industrial society. Yeah, do you agree.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
I agree with it to some extent, But I mean,
I think when you speak to scientists and technologists, there's
an incredible amount of hope because they feel like some
of the problems that we're still experiencing in the supply
chain have actually been solved. Like I had this wonderful
conversation with a scientists who wanted to be off the record,
and this scientist was saying to me, well, we've solved
(29:09):
all these problems, We've sold all these problems, and we
don't understand why it's there's still problems. But there's still
problems because to do things in the old ways is
still cheaper, and people are stuck in their ways of
doing things, and the investments have been made, and so
I think that people need to be a bit more flexible,
and I think that legislation as well needs to reflect
(29:32):
the fact that the technology is changing so quickly as well.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
That was Nicholas Niokos, author of the forthcoming book The
Elements of Power for Tech Stuff. I'm Osvoloshin. This episode
was produced by Eliza Dennis, Lizzie Jacobs, and Sina Ozaki.
It was exact to produce by Me, Karen Price and
Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katria norvelleve iHeart Podcasts. We
(30:07):
recorded the conversation at Citybox. Jack Insley mixed this episode
and Kyle Murdoch in our theme song join us on
Friday for the weekend tech Karen and I will run
through the tech headlines, including some you may have missed.
Please rate, review, and reach out to us at tech
Stuff Podcast at gmail dot com. We love hearing from you.
Welcome to tech Stuff. This is the story. Each week
on Wednesdays, we bring you an in depth interview with
someone who has a front row seat to the most
fascinating things happening in and around tech, and today we're
joined by Nicholas Nyakos. Nakos is a journalist who writes
the publications like The New Yorker, The Nation, and The
(00:34):
New York Times, covering everything from the war in Ukraine
to most recently, the clean energy transition. But as new
Orkos tells us, there are many outstanding questions about just
how clean the battery powered world really is.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
You know, in the same way that automobiles in the
nineteen twenties, with these wonderful, shiny, beautiful things, people weren't
really asking where does the crude oil come from? Where
are the resources that we need to go into these
cars come from.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Neokos is working on a book called The Elements of
Power about the natural resources required to power our electric future,
specifically the hidden costs of extracting minerals like cobalt, which
remains a critical element in the technology we use to
run our lives.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Mining is incredibly destructive. You tear up the ground and
you pollute the rivers, and you try and smoke into
the sky and so on, and then these people that
are left with nothing but holes in the ground.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Essentially, time and again, Neocos discovered that the country's riches
in these resources rarely reap the benefits of their abundance,
and the battle for geopolitical advantage is a constant theme
in his reporting.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Oftentimes the people who are profiting are not the local communities.
And I thought it was necessary for the wild to
think a little bit more more deeply about that, and
a little bit more more about how, for example, certain
actors like the Chinese and these big Chinese companies which
we really know very little about, have such a choke
(02:10):
hold on this supply chain.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
And so a few years ago Nioko set off to
do just that, show the world the impact of our
growing reliance on battery metals, which led him to the
southern capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Lubumbashi.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
So Lummbashi Katanga province a sort of ground zero for
this new energy sector. About seventy percent of the world's
cobalt or comes from the southern Democratic Republic of Congo,
and cobolt is important because it's used in the cathode
of lithium ion batteries. Lithium ion batteries are the batteries
that power our devices. Our cell phones are TESLA cars,
(02:50):
and cobalt is essentially one of the ingredients that is
necessary to create this kind of energy density that is
required for especially small devices. Yeah, so many things like
cell phones would be much bulkier and probably have many
fewer capabilities because just to get that kind of energy density,
(03:13):
there's no technology that really allows that at the moment
that's not lithium own batteries. There are some technologies that
are being developed now that you know, in ten years
time will hopefully be wonderful clean batteries, but at the
moment we don't know anything else that will do the
job of a lithium own battery as well as a
lithium ian battery.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
So talk about the Chinese presence as you saw it
in Congo.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
So there are two types of mining in Congo. There's
artismal mining and industrial mining, and artismal mining is one
in which there are most abuses. I'm not saying that
abuses from industrial mining don't exist, but the artismal mining
is where there are a lot of children working, where
there are people working without safety equipment, where there are
pregnant women washing minerals, and where people are really working
(03:59):
in the worst condition. The Chinese have a big presence
in both sectors basically, and some companies even straddle the
artisanal and industrial sectors. There's Huaiyu, which was started by
a guy called Chen Huehua, and he's basically built this
company by actually going out to Congo and buying some
(04:20):
minerals that have been mined in some of the worst conditions,
basically and built this huge company which is now a
supplier to Apple and a supplier to many of the
tech companies around the world.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
And I mean, are there China towns in Congo's the
what's the relationship between Chinese people working in Congo and Congolese.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
So the Congolese scholar Jamatnngoi Chimbambe says that there are
no formal China towns in Congo. And he's right when
you say that. It's mainly these kind of campuses of
people who are working and they seem to be following
the playbook of former colonial powers. It's quite interesting. Just
(05:01):
if you look at like the house construction model for
Chinese workers in Congo. You know, beforehand they were living
in dormitories, they were living kind of in these pretty
squalid conditions. And if you look at Belgian colonialists, I
guess they were living in tents and they were also
living in pretty bad conditions. And then they start to
build their houses. The Chinese have also started to build
their houses, and now they're building what they call garden
(05:23):
style houses, these kind of bungalows, which in many ways
recall the kind of like the architecture of Belgian colonialism,
which also had these like garden bungalows that you see
all over the place in Congo, which is very surreal
because you're going through, you know, the bush and suddenly
you see you come across something that wouldn't look out
of place just outside Brussels.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
So is China in your view of colonial power in DLC.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
I think colonial power means a very different thing to
what it did one hundred years ago, but I do
think that there are similarities.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
But how much of the cobalt supply coming from DC
is controlled by China or Chinese businesses?
Speaker 2 (06:04):
So they are by last count, eighteen large industrial mines
in DRC, and all of them but two are controlled
by Chinese link companies. So it's a huge amount of
a huge amount of congress cobald We'll never really know
one hundred percent full figures because there's a lot of
legal cobalt that comes out of the country, but a
lot of that that is controlled by the Chinese as.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
Well, and it's not just a supply of cobalds. You
chart the evolution of BYD basically from an outsourced battery
manufacture for the Japanese consumer electronics industry to the driving
innovator in battery technology and EVS today in a very
short period.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Yes, BYD and CAATL these are the two kind of
big companies that dominate the Chinese battery making sphere. BYD
is producing thirty percent of Apples iPads and they have
ten thousand researchers working on battery technology for Apple and
one hundred thousand other employees. Now there aren't ten thousand
(07:05):
battery researchers in Western Europe. I mean, it's it's completely
crazy the amount of resources that they're putting into this industry.
And this is something that's been led from very much
the top of the Chinese Communist Party and BYD is
particularly interesting to me because I think that they have
been very very good about creating cars and focusing on
(07:28):
being an auto manufacturer, and it's not something that we
see here in the US. Well there are very few,
but you're starting to see it in Europe. I mean,
there's amazing video of Musk laughing at at Bads in
twenty eleven and just being like, come on, have you
seen their car? Like, come on, it's never going to
be competitor to Tesla. This company has now taken over
(07:51):
from Tesla in terms of EV sales globally, and Musk
acknowledged this, and Muscle has acknowledged this.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
Yes, but this is now not just harder work and
more work, but more intellectual capital.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
Absolutely, yes, I think that's the big differentiation now. And
it's also not copying anymore. The Chinese are driving forward
battery technology and there's this idea that in the West,
and I actually think it's a slightly complacent way of
looking at things that in the West the education system
is so much better, and you know, in Japan we've
(08:24):
got better scientists, and the Japanese think this as well,
by the way, but the Chinese have so many more
people working on this stuff, and maybe ninety percent of
them are not like incredible research scientists, but then you
have a ten percent of them who really really are
pushing the envelope.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
I believe you spent some time trying to figure out
if there were locals who were benefiting from cobalt mining
in the country, and in looking into it, you ran
in some trouble while hunting down at lead.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
The interview that I had lined up was I had
been speaking to some civil society people who said that
there were connections between the cobalt minds and this sort
of former rebel who has once again kind of gone
on the run in opposition to the current government in Congo.
He's a guy called Jadeon, and so I thought that
(09:13):
it was very interesting if at least some of the
cobalt that was going into our devices was controlled by
this guy, who was, by all accounts a pretty brutal warlord.
I wasn't even meeting by Jadion. I was meeting with
his representatives. So I'm sitting in the restaurant of the
Hotel Bagadougou, and we're sitting there and then suddenly it's
(09:34):
sort of odd. There are these people wearing Chinese football
team shirts who come in and they're offering to sell
these sort of plastic radios, and then all hell breaks loose.
This guy sort of grabs me by the shoulder and says,
come with me. I'm saying I need to speak to
my translator. He's got my passports. He drags me out
(09:56):
into the sunlight, essentially, and there are seven trucks of
soldiers pushing away a crowd of people who are screaming
and yelling, and somehow it's become some sort of mini
protests that's happening outside, and that doesn't seem very normal
in America. But whenever there's a big police action, there's
(10:17):
a big crowd that gathers in that part of the world.
The next thing I know, I'm being put on a
plane and they've confiscated all of my devices. They've taken
my laptop, my phone and all that stuff. But they'd
also tried to take my pens. Luckily, I had one
buried in a bunch of crap that I had at
the bottom of my pocket. So I take this pen.
(10:38):
I go to the bathroom and write two notes. I'd
seen a guy who might might have been I don't
really want to identify him, because you know, he did
a great service to me, and I don't want to
put him in danger. But there was a guy who,
for whatever reason, looked like somebody who might be able
to raise the issue through the appropriate channels. I actually
(11:02):
shake this guy's hand and I pass it to him
in that way. Two days later, I get somebody knocking
on my cell and I've been held in solitary confinement
and they said the Americans know, which is obviously a
sort of great relief. Then the next day after that
is a Sunday, and I'm just sort of kept in
my room all day and I start sort of going
(11:24):
a bit mad. And then the day after that, I
wake up quite early and I am finally bundled onto
a plane to Paris.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
So to this day, what's your best explanation, why do
you think this happened? So?
Speaker 2 (11:39):
I think this happened because basically, powerful people who control
the very fundaments of the supply chain trying to stop people, journalists,
people with questions actually finding out who's profiting of it.
Because there's this thing that happened to me over and
(11:59):
again and reporting this book which is being stymied by
people who are in power in order to protect their
own interests.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
After the break, we discussed how America is responding to
China's dominance over the cobalt supply chain. Stay with us.
So you've testified before Congress here in the US. What
is the US response both to the supply chain issue
(12:37):
of China controlling sixteen out of eighteen of the major
cobalt mines in Congo and then secondly to this extraordinary
rush of battery innovation that's happening in China.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
In December twenty twenty four, President Biden went to Angola
to promote something called the Lubito Corridor, which is a
railroad that is based on old railroad actually built by
British entrepreneur to bring out mineral's mind by the Belgians
from Congo. And basically what the US government is hoping
(13:11):
to do is to rejuvenate this railroad and rejuvenate this
corridor as a form of minerals leaving through Angola to
go to the west rather than to go to the east.
The problem is that the Chinese built that railroad. They
basically they rebuilt that railroad fifteen years ago and as
(13:34):
much as it's wonderful that DC is now able to
export its copper towards the US. The US doesn't have
any processing facilities for copper and cobalt. That might change,
but it's incredibly environmentally taxing to have these facilities, and
so that's one of the questions. Do people want cobalt
(13:55):
processing facilities in the US. That has to be asked
if we're going to have this idea of the Lobito Corridor.
I think, to be honest that the US has responded
to this Chinese dominance of the supply chain with mainly
hand ringing. I mean, it's definitely been on the agenda
(14:15):
of certain people on Capitol Hill. There has been some
really sort of vigorous debate about this, and when I testified,
there were a lot of people knew quite a bit
about this, but mainly it seems to be something that
has taken on a certain inevitability and has complained about
and not really addressed. And the question is can Congress
(14:38):
address it? You know, the US doesn't have state run
enterprises that can do the type of things that the
Chinese state round enterprises can do. They can't provide funding
in the same way that the Bank of China can
to a company like China Malibdin and that wants to
go and take over the biggest cobalt mine in the
southern DRC. So I think it's it's it's also to
(15:01):
do with the limitations of the system that we live
in at the moment. So I don't think it's been
handled particularly well. But it's also hard to imagine a
way of handling this better on the political front.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
There's an old expression, men in glass houses shouldn't for rocks. Obviously,
one of the big stories in tech has been a
US led export controls on chips to China, powering the
most powerful AI systems. Is there a risk of a
Chinese response when it comes to cobalt or even batteries themselves.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
Yes, there's a big risk of Chinese response, And actually
in December twenty twenty four there was a export ban
of rare earth metals from China to the US. And
so this kind of tip for tat tariffs and bands
looks like it will escalate. The only question is that
(15:58):
if China were to say and we're not going to
export lithium ion batteries or finished battery precursor materials to
the US or entities affiliated with the US. There's also
many many ways in which that can be got around
by US companies. How much battery money we talked about
(16:18):
sixteen of eighteen minds. What percentage of global lithium I
battery manufacturing or battery processing. It's something between seventy and
eighty percent is a large, large percentage. In China, I
think it goes up to ninety for some minerals. Career
is also very big on this, and Japan has kind
of completely lost lost the ball. Indonesia does a bit
(16:38):
as well.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
And what about the US are the opportunities to mine
natural resources here?
Speaker 2 (16:44):
One of the projects that has seen more success has
been the renovation of a mine for zinc and lead
in the Silver Valley in Idaho. The Silver Valley is
a part of Idaho that has traditionally seen huge amounts
of mining. It was one of the wealthiest places in
the US back in the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties,
(17:06):
and just as these sort of prospectors came in on
the back of this gold rush and remained a very
wealthy part of the US until the mine started getting
shut down. And when you go to those communities you
see that there is that there are voices for mining
and against mining, and many people feel conflicted about it.
Idaho also has the biggest cobalt belt in the US,
(17:29):
but for most of these critical metals, the US doesn't
have a huge reserve of these cobalt, especially, so we'll
still be relying on China for cobalt.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
We talked a lot about Democratic Republic of Congo, but
talk about some of the other places where you've seen
mining first hand.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
I have seen mining first hand for this book in Indonesia,
and part of the reason that people are mining in
Indonesia is because people are mining for nickel, which is
to create lower cobalt cathods, but also cathodes that have
specific energy density qualities that are more desirable for electric
(18:09):
cars and a better safety profile than lithium cobal oxide,
which is the oldest and kind of og lithium iron
battery technology.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
What did you see when you were in Indonesia, I mean,
what's the same and what's different in terms of how
the mining industry affects people.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
What was similar was that you saw a similar political
feeling of dispossession and you felt that people had been
pushed off their land. You had the same stories of
people being moved away from their farms, and you also
had the same stories about water being polluted. What was
different was that the conditions, while tough, were definitely not
(18:49):
as brutal as some of the things in DRC that
I'd seen, and the government did seem to be more
involved in policing, and whatever corruption there might have been
was not on a kind of you know, you didn't
see a sort of low level and people trying to
steal shipments and so on. It was much more to
(19:11):
do with you know, large contracts being handed out by
certain ministers and stuff like that. And that's actually what's
interesting is that the history of Indonesia is a former
Dutch colony. You have this kind of the similar historical
situation where you move to a like decolonial leader right
(19:33):
after decolonization who talks about sort of nationalizing everything, and
then that person gets overthrown by somebody who is much
more venal and starts selling off the nation's resources. So
obviously no two places are exactly the same, but there's
there were some interesting similarities basically between Indonesia and DRC.
(19:55):
Although the conditions were much much better for the people
who were that although they at the same time they
weren't perfect.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
After the break, we look at some of the other
natural resources being mined to fuel the energy revolution. Stay
with us, Welcome back, Nick. You've covered conflict zones and
(20:28):
wars all over the world. How do natural resources figure
into these conflicts?
Speaker 2 (20:35):
So I traveled in two thousand and seventeen to report
on the frozen conflict in the Western Sahara. And this
was before I was focused on battery metals, and I
was going down to interview some political activists in the
town of Laune, which is the capital of the Western Sahara,
(20:58):
which Morocco has occupied since nineteen seventy six and has
taken over that country's phosphate resources. So I was interested
in how much phosphates played into why Morocco was hanging
on to Western Sahara, why they wanted Western Sahara. It's
(21:18):
a much more complicated story to do with the way
that the king sees his authority and these kind of
pre colonial agreements with various different tribes in the Sahara,
but phosphates does play into it. Ten percent of Morocco's
phosphate comes from the Western Sahara. And basically the control
(21:40):
of Western Sahara has allowed Morocco to have a sort
of stranglehold on the world phosphate industry. Phosphates are mainly
used as fertilizers, but now they're used in some of
these lithimyon phosphate batteries, which are a cobalt free battery
which has a much lower energy density than batteries that
have cobolt in them.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
Are not so good for small devices, not so good.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
For small devices, not as powerful, not necessarily good for
high performance electric vehicles, although that's debatable at this point
because there's been a lot of advances in electric vehicle
LFP batteries, and those batteries are seen as a way
of moving away from cobalt, which is also quite expensive,
(22:24):
and they're much cheaper and they're much safer as well,
but they come with this sort of trade off that
phosphates are necessary for agriculture. And Isaac Asimov, the great
science fiction writer, talked about this sort of moment where
population growth meets phosphate shortage and how that's the sort
of stabilizing point of human civilization. So if we're using
(22:46):
phosphates to power our cars and our batteries. We're going
to hit that point much sooner.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
And not only that they mind in a conflict zone.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Their mind in a conflict zone. Exactly so, the Western
Sahara since twenty twenty one has been re embroiled in
a conflict between Morocco and the Polysaria Front, which is
a separatist movement backed by Algeria, Morocco's neighbor. So I
wanted to point out that nothing, nothing comes for free. Basically,
(23:15):
we might think that these LFP batteries as they're called,
are these wonderful, you know, new technology, but actually, in
the end of the day, those batteries also come with
their trade offs.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
I'm curious what's the state of the research into alternatives
to cobald and lithiumine batteries.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
So alternatives cobalt, there's sodium ion batteries, and sodium is
a very very abundant element. The only problem is that
they don't have the same energy density and probably will
never have the same energy density as lithium ion batteries
because sodium ions are larger than lithium ions. Basically, so
(23:54):
the interesting thing about that is that you probably could
have low range electric cars and maybe even medium range
electric cars powered by the current technology. The Chinese have
advanced on that front in leaps and bounds. There are,
by the last count that I read, twenty five companies
in China sort of fully producing sodium man batteries. There
(24:18):
is I think one in France and one sort of
Mark Cuban backed company in the US called Natrion. But
it all feels a bit more like a science experiment
in the West, whereas in China it's actually happening and
it's actually there, and you can buy sodium mayan batteries,
you know, from Ali Baba very easily. Then there's a
little bit further out there sodium sulfur, which is actually
(24:40):
a technology that was first pioneered by Ford in the
nineteen sixties as a potential electric vehicle technology. Sodium sulfur
actually could have a huge amount of energy density. The
problem with the original sodium sulfur batteries was that they
had to have molten cathodes, which was not practical to
have in electric vehicles because you're have to have something
(25:01):
like a molten hot thing in your car battery and
obviously that would be very dangerous. And then there are
you know, various other different types of battery technology that
are being bandied around. People talk about silicon anodes and
various different little tweaks that can be made to make
the batteries more powerful and potentially less resource intensive. I
(25:23):
think that that's probably the road that we're going down
more visibly at the moment. And then the final thing
that I just wanted to mention is hydrogen and fuel
cell technologies. I think that those have been generally accepted
for long distance things like trucking, and there are some
taxi companies in Europe that are using hydrogen and fuel
(25:47):
cell technology. Is the problem is that hydrogen is very,
very energy intensive to convert. Usually you're converting a natural gas,
so it's not necessarily a particularly environmental door of energy
at the moment because you're just putting in so much
energy to convert it into fuel. So for the moment,
(26:08):
battery technology based on cobalts, based on nickel, based on
phosphate seem to be the best options that we have.
Although these things do develop fairly quickly. I mean when
I started this project in twenty eighteen, I mean people
were just starting to talk about lifting my am phosphate
batteries now they're in like fifty percent of electric cars.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
What was the driving question in your mind as you
got on and off these planes all around the world, planes, boats, motorbikes.
I mean, what were you was driving you.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
The motivating question? I mean, look, when I would get
off at a place, I would often think, how is
it possible that the world's new energy revolution can be
based in this place where there's no drain going under
the street, there's no electricity at night, there's no healths.
(27:01):
And we're talking about electric vehicles and flying cars and
things like that. And at the same time, you have
these places which are entirely dejected and undeveloped and sometimes
in a way beautifully undeveloped as well. You know, in
the middle of Indonesia in the Milucu Islands, Like it's
this green landscape of these beautiful islands that have been
(27:21):
sort of untouched. Now they're being ripped to pieces in
order to develop these these minds. So the question is like,
how do you square that kind of destruction and that
kind of deprivation with this ultra shiny, ultra modern world.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
You've seen incredible suffering reporting the supply chain. Yeah, I mean,
mass graves.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Even I have seen I have seen incredible suffering reporting
this story, and yeah, we saw mass graves in Congo.
But what I realized is that it's you know, there
are ways to do cobalt mining cleanly and ways to
pay back to the countries that the minerals are mined from,
but we're not doing that because we can do it
(28:07):
more cheaply by cutting a lot of corners. And cutting
those corners has huge effects down the supply chain. So
you know, if everybody paid a little bit more for
their iPhone, you could probably see much less suffering at
the bottom of the supply chain and people better ammunerated.
Then again, it's very very complicated to understand, like how
(28:31):
that money would get back to people and so on.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
One of the quotes that stay with me from your
book is a Japanese battery executive who said, to you,
the issue is, in the end of the day, there's
no good way to power industrial society. Yeah, do you agree.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
I agree with it to some extent, But I mean,
I think when you speak to scientists and technologists, there's
an incredible amount of hope because they feel like some
of the problems that we're still experiencing in the supply
chain have actually been solved. Like I had this wonderful
conversation with a scientists who wanted to be off the record,
and this scientist was saying to me, well, we've solved
(29:09):
all these problems, We've sold all these problems, and we
don't understand why it's there's still problems. But there's still
problems because to do things in the old ways is
still cheaper, and people are stuck in their ways of
doing things, and the investments have been made, and so
I think that people need to be a bit more flexible,
and I think that legislation as well needs to reflect
(29:32):
the fact that the technology is changing so quickly as well.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
That was Nicholas Niokos, author of the forthcoming book The
Elements of Power for Tech Stuff. I'm Osvoloshin. This episode
was produced by Eliza Dennis, Lizzie Jacobs, and Sina Ozaki.
It was exact to produce by Me, Karen Price and
Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katria norvelleve iHeart Podcasts. We
(30:07):
recorded the conversation at Citybox. Jack Insley mixed this episode
and Kyle Murdoch in our theme song join us on
Friday for the weekend tech Karen and I will run
through the tech headlines, including some you may have missed.
Please rate, review, and reach out to us at tech
Stuff Podcast at gmail dot com. We love hearing from you.
TechStuff News
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