Volt Rush is a book about the resources behind lithium ion batteries. That's lithium, cobalt, and nickle, along with the energy required to refine them for ore. It's worth reading as it covers much of what's needed to extract those materials from the earth, and what the environmental and human costs are.
For instance, cobalt is largely supplied from Congo using child labor:
In 2014 Unicef estimated that some 40,000 children worked in the cobalt mines in the Congo, a year when mobile phone sales topped 1.9 billion. As late as 2019, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found that children were present or working at about one in four artisanal mining sites. One study based on surveys in the former Katanga province estimated that about twenty-three percent of the children worked in cobalt mining... A decade after Huayou took a gamble on the Congo over ninety percent of the minerals from around Kolwezi were shipped to China.15 No one cared where the cobalt came from, how it was mined, or whether children were involved. As a result, consumers across the world were all indirectly complicit in the practice of child labour. The only thing that mattered was making the phones, and their supply chains, cheap. Designed in California, Made in China. But don’t mention the Congo. It would take the electric car and the work of a global NGO to properly shake the world out of its slumber.(kindle loc 1859-1982)
Even after the car manufacturers got involved, it still seemed like there's little effort to hold the miners accountable for child labor. Similarly, nickle is produced in Indonesia, with immense environmental consequences:
‘Nobody ever imagined that a Chinese investment in Indonesia could have been so disruptive,’ one Western stainless-steel producer told me. ‘They have created the same capacity as the whole of Europe in a country where there is no consumption.’ The company’s stainless-steel production would destroy European industry, he said, even though it produced five times more carbon dioxide from its use of coal-fired power. ‘They are destroying the environment,’ he told me. Tsingshan went from having less than five percent of global stainless-steel production in 2009 to twenty-five percent, becoming so big that even Beijing threatened its Indonesian exports of stainless steel with tariffs in March 2019. Tsingshan had become the cheapest producer of stainless steel in the world...Key to its success was the access to coal-fired power and cheap supplies of nickel. One of the company’s partners in Indonesia told me they paid six cents per kilowatt hour for electricity, compared to ten to twelve cents per kWh in China. Because domestic miners could no longer export their nickel, Tsingshan was in a powerful position to dictate prices to local miners, since it was the biggest buyer in town. The industrial park consumed around 20 million tonnes of nickel a year. Tsingshan paid around $38 a tonne for the local nickel ore, compared to the roughly $65 a tonne that Chinese producers at home paid for material from the Philippines.22 As the scholar Alvin Camba put it, the industrial park had created an oligopsony, where numerous miners competed to sell to a few buyers. As a result, the mining companies had less money to spend on environmental protection....As they watched Chinese companies rush to build projects in Indonesia, Tesla and the world’s largest EV battery producers became worried. The reliance on coal-fired power meant nickel for batteries produced in Indonesia could be up to five times as carbon intensive as that mined in Australia or Canada, in terms of carbon dioxide emissions, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. The sheer amount of energy needed to separate the nickel from the ore also meant that even if renewables were used, the number of solar panels required would mean a large land footprint – which could contribute to deforestation, which mining had already exacerbated. Mining nickel in Indonesia required stripping large areas of the upland forest to access the ore near the surface. ‘These nickel mines have very large footprints,’ Steven Brown, who had previously worked in mining in Indonesia, told me. Erosion and heavy tropical rainfall led to run-off into the sea, impacting downstream communities. In addition, many nickel mines also produced a toxic pollutant, called hexavalent chromium, which could damage human health, he said. (kindle loc 2464-2491)
It's interesting to note that all the companies involved in doing the environmental degradation are Chinese. Many of them are directly backed by state-sponsored loans specifically to encourage the growth of battery manufacturing and electric cars in China.
There is one bright spot, which is that Europe finally woke up and made heavy investments of its own. The European experience clearly shows that you can catch up rapidly if you have the willingness to put money in:
In 2020, Europe’s sales of electric cars surpassed China’s for the first time. It marked a significant shift in the centre of the global EV market. For years China had been the leader. Yet in 2019 European investment in electric transport – at €60 billion – was more than three times higher than China, which invested €17.1 billion, according to Brussels-based non-profit Transport and Environment. Just a year earlier Chinese investment was seven times what Europe was investing in the sector. Europe’s rapid growth sparked concerns in China that Beijing was not doing enough to support the electric vehicle market. In a speech in late 2019 CATL’s chairman Robin Zeng called on China to introduce stricter policies similar to Europe’s mandatory carbon emissions limits. ‘If in the coming few years there is still this trend, if there’s no investment there won’t be production, and it will be very hard for us to continue to stay in the first echelon,’ Zeng said.10 Šefčovič was happy: he claimed that by 2025 the EU would be self-sufficient for battery cells. Of the 272 battery Gigafactories in the pipeline globally, twenty-seven were now in Europe, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. It was an acknowledgement that reaping the jobs and economic growth from batteries and reducing reliance on China would require government support. (kindle loc 3383)
Missing in all this of course are the Americans, though Biden's Inflation Reduction Act did start to put money into battery manufacturing and incentives to source production in the USA. It's probably not too late, but there are already political moves to try to claw that back. Ultimately, what I learned from the book is that you cannot leave green tech to China --- it takes Western Democracies to institute environmentally conscious manufacturing and carbon emissions limits. Otherwise the effort to electrify transportation will very likely be at least partially offset by the increased pollution from a country with a history of ignoring environmental protection.
That makes this book well worth reading. Recommended.
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