The Fight to Secure the EV Battery Supply Chain

Mining of polymetallic nodules consisting of lithium, cobalt, and other elements may become necessary to meet the growing demand for electric vehicle batteries. Photo: Abramax

Both materials were already high in demand in the manufacture of smartphones, long before EVs became common. The purpose there was to provide sufficient power to keep phones up for at least a day of use without the need for recharging.

The problem is that electric vehicles require far more of either material to function. Thanks to battery innovations in the last few years, smartphone battery cobalt demands, for example, have been reduced to only thousandths of a gram of that material to function properly. But some EV batteries require many pounds cobalt to hold enough charge to keep them going. And to satisfy the demand for batteries just in the U.S. alone will require manufacturing of at least a quarter billion of those batteries just to meet current demand.

A recent published study showed that meeting the growing demand for cobalt, lithium, and nickel would require a minimum of 384 mines that currently do not exist to be established and made operational by 2035. The analysis also showed that even if extensive recycling of materials from exhausted batteries were to become common, 336 of that total of new mines would still be required.

Cobalt and the Democratic Republic of the Congo

To meet the growing need for cobalt, the first of those three metals, most of the world is focusing on the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). That is because currently some 80% of the global reserves of cobalt is located in the Congo, amounting to over 3.6 million tons.

As with any concentration of such a high demand resource in just one location, the equivalent of a 21^st century gold rush has been evident for some time. As the price has soared from roughly $32,000 per metric ton two years ago to over $51,000 just last month with a peak $82,000/ton back in May of this year, it has also been a highly lucrative market for mine owners.

China, the largest importer of cobalt in the world, is the current obvious winner in this game, having seen the strategic value of the cobalt ore and acted upon it earlier than most.

It does so through actions such as it took in 2016, in which China Molybdenum, a company based in the province of Henan, purchased a 56% ownership in Tenke Fungurume Mining, a DRC-based mining company. While the $2.65 billion investment at the time was considered huge, it helped lock down assets for the future and ensured a supply for the growing demand for cobalt by China’s companies.

As of 2022, China controls 15 of the 19 cobalt mines in the DRC. It also runs them as inexpensively as possible, with child labor common in the region, safety regularly sacrificed, no environmental protections and government bribery a hallmark of how Chinese companies continue to gain access to further stores of cobalt for the future.

One area where China does not sacrifice is in ensuring the mines stay secure, especially as the price of cobalt becomes more valuable every day. Through external companies it has hired for security, it has put in place its own on-the-ground paid militia with semiautomatic weapons to keep intruders out. As a measure of what the new mercenaries of the modern age which protect these mines come from, one of the most successful of those companies, the China-based Frontier Services Group, was chaired by none other than Erik Prince, the mastermind for off-the-books military mercenary services in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Middle East that resulted in countless deaths of innocent civilians.

Where the World Goes to Get Lithium

As in the case of cobalt, some electric vehicle batteries require far more lithium than one might imagine. A single EV battery requires between 30 and 60 kilograms (66 to 132 pounds) of the material.

Most global supplies of lithium, the other major component required for electric vehicle batteries, currently are extracted in Australia, Chile, and China, though there are also untapped major additional reserves in Bolivia, which does not yet have the mining infrastructure to bring it out. Of these locations, Australia is the source of roughly 50% of total lithium production at this time.

Once again, China saw the strategic demand early for lithium long before the rest of the world, and secured positions to ensure its own high demand for the product early. In 2021, it was responsible for importing approximately 40% of the global total of 93,000 metric tons of the metal produced annually. Much of that goes to the hundreds of “gigafactories” which currently churn out millions of EV batteries for companies such as BMW, Tesla, and Volkswagen.

To ensure China would get what it needed for its factories back within its borders, it followed a practice similar to what it did with cobalt, by identifying the top producers of the world and locking up those supplies both directly or indirectly. China has extensive ownership investments in lithium mines themselves in the South American “lithium triangle” of Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia, so once again it already has control of the reserves. Chinese-owned factories are also responsible for approximately two-thirds of global lithium processing output.

In Chile, multiple challenges in recent years have held back the country’s ability to continue to grow its important lithium business overall. One issue which has grown more serious of late is the high demand for water when extracting the metal. In the biggest lithium production areas of the country, in the Atacama desert, for example, it take a half million gallons of water to produce a single metric ton of lithium, because of the massive evaporation ponds used in that process. That amounts to 65% of all water used in that area, and with increasing drought conditions locally putting pressure on water use throughout Chile, that is a high price to pay.

The lithium production process in Chile also brings with it major soil, water, and air pollution problems.

In the least developed of the locations with substantial lithium reserves, Bolivia has done its best to exploit that wealth by retaining government control of the assets. Without the money and technological support to make the best of that on its own, however, it has recently been forced to seek external investments from outside the country. It has identified four Chinese companies plus one from Russia and one from America as potential partners for that development. It plans to select one or more of those to work in tandem with the Bolivian state-owned Yacimientos de Litios Bolivianos, to begin taking advantage of its vast stores of lithium. Given the fact that the U.S. orchestrated a coup to defeat democratically elected Evo Morales in 2020 and the many previous CIA-run coups and military dictatorships, Bolivia's current left-leaning government is unlikely to want to cozy up to any American companies.

Going Offshore for Even More Lithium and Cobalt

With China already having in place hundreds of gigafactories for electric vehicle batteries, the United States hoping but unable to have that many and more soon, and extensive future expansion planned in the future, it is becoming apparent more will be needed of both cobalt and lithium than can be produced from existing mine reserves.

One such horrible option to do that is by  scraping the vast reserves of polymetallic nodules off the bottom of the ocean floor while killing everything else within a broad radius. Those nodules include metals such as lithium, cobalt, and even copper, another metal which is also need in vast quantities not just for electric vehicle batteries but also to satisfy demand for renewable energy solutions such as solar and wind, and for the more complex electricity distribution networks of the future.

A recent report produced by the United Nations showed that just one such “nodule field”, the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) in the Pacific Ocean southeast of the Hawaiian Islands, likely contains more cobalt within its 1.7 million square mile expanse than are present in all the land-based reserves for the material.

That zone shows a concentration of 15 kilograms per square meter of the metal. Others with high promise include within the Peru Basin, with concentrations of 10 kilograms per square meter, in the Indian Ocean with reserves amounting to 5 kilograms per square meter, and in the Cook Islands area of the Pacific, also with distributions of 5 kilograms per square meter.

As with all other mining locations, these too come with a big catch. Though the mining companies are attempting to sell the idea for carrying out such mining on vast scale, to the UN’s International Seabed Authority, as inherently safe, experts in marine ecosystems warn mass mining of the ocean floor could bring with it major ecological disaster that could impact the entire planet.

Just in the CCZ region alone, scientists say there are likely several thousand species of marine animals and hundreds of thousands of microbial species living in the floor there. If mining proceeds, no matter how carefully the systems are designed, everything in its path will be killed. Debris stirred up by the mining devices and possible pollutants from their operations will cause further deaths. It is impossible to estimate the ultimate damage to be caused by such nodule mining on a global scale.

As with the cobalt mines principally in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the water-intensive and pollution-laden lithium mines, the prospect of adding ocean mining to the mix — because of the extensive ecosystem destruction which will come with it — should demand at least some hard questions about what we are doing. Is meeting increased demand for electric vehicle batteries at all costs the right thing for the planet in the long run, even if it does mean far less greenhouse gas emissions will be emitted in the future?

Publishers Commentary

The mad rush to replace fossil fuels with electric infrastructure has not been thought out and even in best scenarios is not sustainable. To avoid creating a different type of catastrophe we must rethink our entire civilization, its gargantuan waste of energy and how we are going to survive the climate crisis.

A reality check is in order:

The Earth couldn't support 8 billion people in the parasitic lifestyles that most everyone pursued before the climate crisis. It certainly can't during the climate crisis, which is already starting to cause the collapse of our civilization and will only get far, far worse no matter how much we reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. We have already triggered feedback loops and the Earth itself is now releasing enormous amounts of greenhouse gases.

During the peak of the crazy COVID lockdowns, C02 and methane emissions kept rising, despite a substantial reduction in human emissions. This is glaring proof that we are indeed in a cycle of runaway catastrophic climate change that we can't stop and which will render large parts of the Earth uninhabitable. In those regions most impacted it will be too hot, dry or wet to grow food outdoors. In some regions, floods will destroy infrastructure, as happened to nearly a third of Pakistan with this year's August and September Monsoon rains.

Earth's life support systems are already starting to break down and non-human populations are collapsing. Humans are of course next in line for a substantial population reduction, no matter how many electric cars we buy.

So, what does a climate-proof sustainable civilization look like? Here is one concept developed by a group of scientists and engineers who have dedicated their lives to the subject:

For more information https://www.climatesurvivalsolutions.com