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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 hold on this supply chain.
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.
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, 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, 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.
So talk about the Chinese presence as you saw it in Congo.
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
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 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.
And I mean, are there China towns in Congo's the what's the relationship between Chinese people working in Congo and Congolese.
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 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 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.
So is China in your view of colonial power in DLC.
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.
But how much of the cobalt supply coming from DC is controlled by China or Chinese businesses?
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.
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.
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 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 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 from Tesla in terms of EV sales globally, and Musk acknowledged this, and Muscle has acknowledged this.
Yes, but this is now not just harder work and more work, but more intellectual capital.
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 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.
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.
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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 a bit mad. And then the day after that, I wake up quite early and I am finally bundled onto a plane to Paris.
So to this day, what's your best explanation, why do you think this happened? So?
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 again and reporting this book which is being stymied by people who are in power in order to protect their own interests.
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 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.
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 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 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
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
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 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 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.
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.
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 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 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 as well.
And what about the US are the opportunities to mine natural resources here?
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, 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, 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.
We talked a lot about Democratic Republic of Congo, but talk about some of the other places where you've seen mining first hand.
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 cars and a better safety profile than lithium cobal oxide, which is the oldest and kind of og lithium iron battery technology.
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.
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 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 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 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. Although the conditions were much much better for the people who were that although they at the same time they weren't perfect.
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 wars all over the world. How do natural resources figure into these conflicts?
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, 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 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 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.
Are not so good for small devices, not so good.
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, 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 phosphates to power our cars and our batteries. We're going to hit that point much sooner.
And not only that they mind in a conflict zone.
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, 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.
I'm curious what's the state of the research into alternatives to cobald and lithiumine batteries.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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.
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.
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. 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 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.
You've seen incredible suffering reporting the supply chain. Yeah, I mean, mass graves.
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 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 that money would get back to people and so on.
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.
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 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 the fact that the technology is changing so quickly as well.
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
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.