Cobalt
In the first three paragraphs of 'Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives' Siddharth Kara describes the scene at a Cobalt Mine where a young child has died due to the horrific conditions of the mine. The entry reads:
THE SOLDIERS ARE WILD and wide-eyed as they point their weapons at the villagers trying to enter the mining area at Kamilombe. Although they are desperate to reach their loved ones just a stone’s throw away, the villagers are denied access. What has happened here must not be seen. There can be no record or evidence, only the haunting memories of those who stood at this place where hope was lost. My guide urges me to stay at the periphery; the situation is too unpredictable. From the fringes, it is difficult to see the details of the accident. The craterous landscape is obscured by a leaden haze that refuses the entry of light. Distant hills appear only as the vague silhouette of a lumbering beast.
I move closer to investigate, treading carefully into the boiling crowd. I catch sight of a body in the dirt. It is a child, lying motionless within a storm of dust and despair. I try to make out the features of his face, but they elude me. Around the lifeless body, the ocher gravel has been stained in dark shades of red, like burnt umber or rusted metal. Until this moment, I thought that the ground in the Congo took its vermillion hue from the copper in the dirt, but now I cannot help but wonder whether the earth here is red because of all the blood that has spilled upon it.
I inch toward the cordon to see the child more clearly. Tensions between the soldiers and villagers escalate to the brink of riot. A soldier shouts angrily and waves his gun at me. I’ve drifted too close and lingered too long. I take one final look toward the child. I can see his face now, locked in a terminal expression of dread. That is the lasting image I take from the Congo—the heart of Africa reduced to the bloodstained corpse of a child, who died solely because he was digging for cobalt.[1]
Summary
From Wikipedia:
Cobalt is a chemical element with the symbol Co and atomic number 27. As with nickel, cobalt is found in the Earth's crust only in a chemically combined form, save for small deposits found in alloys of natural meteoric iron. The free element, produced by reductive smelting, is a hard, lustrous, silver metal.
Today, some cobalt is produced specifically from one of a number of metallic-lustered ores, such as cobaltite (CoAsS). The element is, however, more usually produced as a by-product of copper and nickel mining. The Copperbelt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Zambia yields most of the global cobalt production. World production in 2016 was 116,000 tonnes (114,000 long tons; 128,000 short tons) (according to Natural Resources Canada), and the DRC alone accounted for more than 50%.
Cobalt is primarily used in lithium-ion batteries, and in the manufacture of magnetic, wear-resistant and high-strength alloys. The compounds cobalt silicate and cobalt(II) aluminate (CoAl2O4, cobalt blue) give a distinctive deep blue color to glass, ceramics, inks, paints and varnishes. Cobalt occurs naturally as only one stable isotope, cobalt-59. Cobalt-60 is a commercially important radioisotope, used as a radioactive tracer and for the production of high-energy gamma rays.
Cobalt is the active center of a group of coenzymes called cobalamins. Vitamin B12, the best-known example of the type, is an essential vitamin for all animals. Cobalt in inorganic form is also a micronutrient for bacteria, algae, and fungi.
Cobalt was first used during the Bronze Age to color pottery.[1]
Corporations
Fully refined cobalt is combined with other metals to make cathodes—the positively charged part of a battery. The largest lithium-ion battery manufacturers in the world are CATL and BYD in China; LG Energy Solution, Samsung SDI, and SK Innovation in South Korea; and Panasonic in Japan. In 2021, these six companies produced 86 percent of the world’s lithium-ion rechargeable batteries, with CATL alone holding a one-third global share.6 Most of the cobalt in these batteries originated in the Congo.[1]
21st Century Demand
The rapacious appetite for cobalt is a direct result of today’s device-driven economy combined with the global transition from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy. Automakers are rapidly increasing production of electric vehicles in tandem with governmental efforts to reduce carbon emissions emerging from the Paris Agreement on climate change in 2015. These commitments were amplified during the COP26 meetings in 2021. The battery packs in electric vehicles require up to ten kilograms of refined cobalt each, more than one thousand times the amount required for a smartphone battery. As a result, demand for cobalt is expected to grow by almost 500 percent from 2018 to 2050, and there is no known place on earth to find that amount of cobalt other than the DRC.[1]
The East African Rift
The East African Rift is a 6,500-kilometer fracture in the earth’s surface that stretches from Jordan to Mozambique; it is caused by three plates pulling apart from each other—the Nubian plate, the Somalian plate, and the Arabian plate. Beginning around 800 million years ago, tectonic activity in the rift caused ocean water to enter an enclosed basin in the Copper Belt region. Most of the ocean water evaporated, but some of the saline fluids circulated into the sediments within the basin and stripped metals from them, including copper and cobalt. At some point between 650 and 500 million years ago, the salt layers began to move upward due to tectonic action, forming salt diapirs—domed rock formations in which a core of rock moves upward by several kilometers to pierce the earth’s surface. A similar process took place along the Gulf Coast of the United States, which made numerous oil and gas fields accessible to drilling.
As a result of the ocean water deposits and subsequent tectonic action, copper-cobalt ores across the Copper Belt are found both at great depths and near the surface. At depths below the level of a fluctuating water table, the copper and cobalt are combined with sulfur in the mineral carrollite, which is the primary source of industrially mined cobalt in the Congo. Closer to the surface, water combines with sulfur to create sulfuric acid, causing ores to “rust.” This weathering turns a sulfide into an oxide. Oxidized cobalt forms cobalt hydroxide in the mineral heterogenite. According to Hitzman, “The cobalt-hydroxide ore bodies in Katanga are unique. They form blocks that can be tens of meters to several kilometers in length floating like raisins in a cake.” Artisanal miners dig tunnels up to sixty meters deep to find these “raisins” of heterogenite. One of the largest known deposits of cobalt raisins is beneath a neighborhood of Kolwezi called Kasulo, a madhouse of tunnel digging that is unlike any place on earth.[1]
Katanga
There is more Cobalt in the Katanga region of The Congo than the rest of the world combined.[1] These materials are vital to lithium-ion rechargeable batteries.
The region [Katange] is also brimming with other valuable metals, including copper, iron, zinc, tin, nickel, manganese, germanium, tantalum, tungsten, uranium, gold, silver, and lithium. The deposits were always there, resting dormant for eons before foreign economies made the dirt valuable. Industrial innovations sparked demand for one metal after another, and somehow they all happened to be in Katanga. The remainder of the Congo is similarly bursting with natural resources. Foreign powers have penetrated every inch of this nation to extract its rich supplies of ivory, palm oil, diamonds, timber, rubber … and to make slaves of its people. Few nations are blessed with a more diverse abundance of resource riches than the Congo. No country in the world has been more severely exploited.[1]
Lithium Ion Batteries
...Development of lithium-ion batteries dates to the 1970s at Exxon, during the time of the OPEC oil embargo, when alternate energy sources were being explored. Sony produced the first commercial-scale lithium-ion batteries in the early 1990s, at which time they were used primarily for small-scale consumer electronics. The lithium-ion battery market received its first upward demand shock with the smartphone and tablet revolutions. Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, and Android smartphones were launched in 2008. Since that time, billions of smartphones have been sold, and each one of them requires a few grams of refined cobalt in their batteries. A similar eruption of gadgets took place in the tablet market. Apple launched the iPad in 2010, followed soon after by Samsung’s Galaxy Tab. Billions of tablets have since been sold, each of which requires up to thirty grams of cobalt in the battery. Add in laptops, e-scooters, e-bikes, and other rechargeable consumer electronic devices, and the aggregate amount of cobalt needed from all devices, save those with four or more tires, adds up to tens of thousands of tons each year.[1]
"Renewable" Energy
Electric Vehicles
The EV market ... is where cobalt demand has really exploded. The first rechargeable electric vehicle was invented in 1880s, but it was not until the early 1900s that electric vehicles were being produced on a commercial scale. By 1910, around 30 percent of vehicles in the United States were propelled by electric engines. Had the trend continued, we would all be living on a cleaner, cooler planet. Instead, internal combustion engines came to dominate the next century of the automobile industry. There are several developments cited for the shift to gasoline-powered vehicles. First, the U.S. government invested heavily to expand road infrastructure beginning with the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916. Driving across the nation required greater ranges than could be achieved by EV technology at the time. In addition, the discovery of large oil reserves in Texas, California, and Oklahoma made internal combustion–powered cars much cheaper to operate. ...
In 2010, there were only 17,000 electric vehicles on the road in the entire world. By 2021, that number had skyrocketed to 16 million. Meeting the ambitions of the Paris Agreement would require at least 100 million total electric vehicles in use by 2030. An even more ambitious EV30@30 Campaign was launched in 2017 with the goal of accelerating the deployment of electric vehicles, targeting a 30 percent market share for electric vehicles sales by 2030. The EV30@30 target would require a global stock of 230 million EVs by 2030, a fourteen fold increase over 2021 numbers. EV sales could end up being even greater, as twenty-four nations pledged at COP26 to eliminate the sale of gas-powered vehicles entirely by 2040. Millions of tons of cobalt will be needed, which will continue to push hundreds of thousands of Congolese women, men, and children into hazardous pits and tunnels to help meet demand.[1]
Tesla
In May 2023 -- a few months after Joe Rogan interviewed Siddharth Kara -- Tesla announced that it will conduct a third-party audit of its battery supply chain.[2] Elon Musk used his platform, Twitter, to claim he "will review the audit personally." He added: "If you drive a Tesla, you should be able to believe in it to your core."[3]
Cell Phones
LCO batteries provide high energy density, which allows them to store more power per weight of battery. This quality makes them ideal for use in consumer electronic devices such as mobile phones, tablets, and laptops. The tradeoff is that LCO batteries have shorter life spans and deliver a lower amount of power, qualities that make them unsuitable for use in electric vehicles.[1]
Cobalt Mines
The global cobalt supply chain is the mechanism that transforms the dollar-a-day wages of the Congo’s artisanal miners into multibillion-dollar quarterly profits at the top of the chain. Although the two ends of the chain could not be more disconnected in terms of human and economic valuation, they are nevertheless linked through a complicated set of formal and informal relationships. The nexus of these links resides in a shadow economy at the bottom of the mining industry that flows inevitably into the formal supply chain. This merging of informal with formal, artisanal with industrial, is the most important aspect of the cobalt supply chain to understand. It is, despite claims to the contrary, all but impossible to isolate artisanal cobalt from industrial production.
Opposite is a rough sketch of what the global cobalt supply chain looks like. The links inside the box indicate points in which cobalt from various sources can be mixed.
Artisanal miners occupy the base of the chain. Known locally as creuseurs (“diggers”), they use rudimentary tools to dig in pits, trenches, and tunnels to find an ore called heterogenite, which contains copper, nickel, cobalt, and sometimes uranium. The Congo’s artisanal mining sector is regulated by a government agency called SAEMAPE, which until 2017 was called SAESSCAM.4 SAEMAPE has designated fewer than one hundred sites across the Copper Belt in which artisanal mining is authorized to take place, called Zones d’Exploitation Artisanale (ZEAs). The small number of ZEAs is woefully insufficient to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of people who try to earn a living by digging for cobalt. As a result, artisanal miners dig in hundreds of unauthorized mining areas spread across the Copper Belt. Many of these sites are located right next to industrial mining operations since the diggers know there is likely to be valuable ore under the ground. Artisanal mining also takes place directly on many industrial mining sites, even though it is forbidden under Congolese law.[1]
"Artisanal" Miners
Throughout much of history, mining operations relied on the exploitation of slaves and poor laborers to excavate ore from dirt. The downtrodden were forced to dig in hazardous conditions with little regard to their safety and for little to no compensation. Today, these laborers are assigned the quaint term artisanal miners, and they toil in a shadowy substrate of the global mining industry called artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM). Do not be fooled by the word artisanal into thinking that ASM involves pleasant mining activities conducted by skilled artisans. Artisanal miners use rudimentary tools and work in hazardous conditions to extract dozens of minerals and precious stones in more than eighty countries across the global south. Because ASM is almost entirely informal, artisanal miners rarely have formal agreements for wages and working conditions. There are usually no avenues to seek assistance for injuries or redress for abuse. Artisanal miners are almost always paid paltry wages on a piece-rate basis and must assume all risks of injury, illness, or death.
Although ASM is fraught with hazardous conditions, the sector has been growing rapidly. There are roughly forty-five million people around the world directly involved in ASM, which represents an astonishing 90 percent of the world’s total mining workforce. Despite the many advancements in machinery and techniques, the formal mining industry relies heavily on the hard labor of artisanal miners to boost production at minimal expense. The contributions from ASM are substantial, including 26 percent of the global supply of tantalum, 25 percent of tin and gold, 20 percent of diamonds, 80 percent of sapphires, and up to 30 percent of cobalt.[1]
Covid-19
...As the pandemic wreaked havoc across the globe, its impact on the destitute people mining for cobalt remains largely unassessed. When industrial mines went into lockdown for extended periods during 2020 and 2021, demand for cobalt did not graciously hibernate. It only grew as people across the world relied more than ever on their rechargeable devices to continue working or attending school from home. The increased demand for cobalt pressured hundreds of thousands of Congolese peasants who could not survive without the dollar or two they earned each day to clamber into the ditches and tunnels, unprotected, to keep the cobalt flowing. COVID-19 spread rapidly in the artisanal mines of the Congo, where mask wearing and social distancing were impossible. The sick and dead infected by the disease were never counted, adding an unknown number to the industry’s bleak tally.[1]
Health Hazards
...So all these people are being exposed to toxic cobalt dust and particulates and ore every day. Birth defects are on the rise, cancers, thyroid disease, neurological ailments, respiratory ailments, skin rashes and dermatitis. But no one at the top of the chain is talking about good health practices and protective gear. You can live in that part of the Congo and have nothing to do with cobalt mining, but you’re still being poisoned every day.
And the ore sometimes has traces of radioactive uranium in it, which has very bleak consequences to the human body. When the industrial mines process the ore, they use sulfuric acid. They’re supposed to contain the effluence, the gas clouds, as they would in their own home countries, these foreign mining companies, but no one cares about the people of the Congo or the environment of the Congo. It all just wafts over the mining provinces. Every body of water, the air, the dirt, it’s all contaminated.[4]
International Regulatory Coalitions
Many large international corporations requiring Cobalt to produce their products claim to strictly monitor the conditions of Cobalt mines, often times, through two leading coalitions: the Responsible Minerals Initiative and the Global Battery Alliance. In Cobalt Red Siddartha Kara challenges the efficacy of these organizations:
In all my time in the Congo, I never saw or heard of any activities linked to either of these coalitions, let alone anything that resembled corporate commitments to international human rights standards, third-party audits, or zero-tolerance policies on forced and child labor. On the contrary, across twenty-one years of research into slavery and child labor, I have never seen more extreme predation for profit than I witnessed at the bottom of global cobalt supply chains. The titanic companies that sell products containing Congolese cobalt are worth trillions, yet the people who dig their cobalt out of the ground eke out a base existence characterized by extreme poverty and immense suffering. They exist at the edge of human life in an environment that is treated like a toxic dumping ground by foreign mining companies. Millions of trees have been clear-cut, dozens of villages razed, rivers and air polluted, and arable land destroyed. Our daily lives are powered by a human and environmental catastrophe in the Congo.[1]
Horrific Conditions
Sources
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 Kara, S. (2023). Cobalt red: how the blood of the Congo powers our lives (First edition.). St. Martin's Press.
- ↑ https://www.tesla-mag.com/tesla-to-conduct-third-party-audit-of-its-battery-material-suppliers/
- ↑ https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1659340198340067328
- ↑ https://e360.yale.edu/features/siddharth-kara-cobalt-mining-labor-congo