The goblin metal: cobalt and the "curse" of electrification
It’s a story that practically writes itself: the metal that powers our glimmering screens and sleek electric cars has a dark side lurking in the depths of the Congo, where cobalt is mined under truly horrific conditions. The underbelly of electrification is the same bleak hinterland of Conrad and Kurtz, the very country ravaged by King Leopold of Belgium, where today the Congolese people still pay the price for our insatiable thirst for resources.
Opponents of the energy transition routinely deploy this hadean narrative, equating lithium-ion batteries with the worst forms of oppression, environmental degradation, exploitation, and dehumanization.
While it is absolutely essential that we end the mining-related atrocities in the Congo, I do feel that my peers within the oil and gas space are going too far in making the leap that electrification should be categorically rejected due to the conditions, however horrific, in a single country. Nuclear power should not be rejected because of the disaster of Chernobyl, just as solar should not be condemned because the Chinese produce polysilicon with the forced labor of the Uyghurs.
This is, assuredly, an area where the oil and gas industry should not be throwing any stones. Western operators have largely cleaned up their business, but not without learning hard lessons in Valdez, the Gulf of Mexico, Ecuador, and Baku.
Acknowledging my own glass house, I will in this piece take a step back and take a look at the global context of cobalt. What makes cobalt so important? How rare is it, really? And does cobalt truly “curse” the energy transition?
The goblin metal
The name cobalt comes from the German word for goblin, kobold. Cobalt in Europe was only found in compounds with arsenic and, when smelted, it would give off poisonous vapors. Cobalt was only “discovered” in 1735, making it the only metal with a known discoverer: Georg Brand. Cobalt had been used for centuries as a dye and coloring agent, including famously in Chinese porcelain, but Brand showed that cobalt was its own unique metal, and that it, not the already-known bismuth, provided the coloration.1
Cobalt has a multitude of modern applications, ranging from catalysts and wear-resistant alloys to inks and magnetic alloys. But it is the use of cobalt in the cathodes of lithium-ion batteries that stands above the rest in terms of strategic importance. As lithium ions travel from the cobalt-oxide cathode to the graphite anode, electricity moves through the circuit and the cobalt switches its oxidation state from +3 to +4.
Many other materials, including manganese, nickel, and iron can be used in the cathode, but cobalt offers the best combination of energy density, power output, and long-duration battery life. Sacrifice any of these, and you don’t have a battery that will meet all the demands of an electric car.
The abundance (or lack thereof) of cobalt
Only 0.0029% of the earth’s crust is cobalt, orders of magnitude less than its next-door neighbor on the periodic table, iron:
If you look at the chart above, you’ll notice that the abundance (y-axis) drops dramatically after iron. Iron has an incredibly stable nucleus, with the highest binding energy of any element2. Cobalt has 27 protons to iron’s 26; odd-numbered elements are less common in the universe due to the Oddo-Harkins rule. Cobalt is less common in the earth’s crust than familiar favorites copper, zinc, manganese and lithium. Due to earth processes that fraction certain elements into the crust and others into the mantle and core, less cobalt lies in the crust than compared to some less abundant elements like zirconium and strontium.
Today, 72% of cobalt production today comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, though only 46% of reserves lie there.
provides this excellent visualization that shows just how concentrated current cobalt production is:
The cobalt of the Congo comes from the Central African Copper Belt, a mineral deposit stretching across the Katanga Basin of southeastern Congo into the neighboring Zambia:
Early miners, writing to King Leopold of Belgium, described the deposit in awestruck terms3:
It will be utterly impossible to exhaust your bodies of oxidized ores during this century … The quantity of copper you can thus produce is entirely a question of demand—the mines can supply any amount. You can make more copper and make it much cheaper than any mines now working. I believe your mines will be the source of the world’s future supply of copper.
For decades, the main value from the belt came from the copper, but that has shifted in recent years as the global demand (and price) for cobalt has exploded.
Unlike the giant porphyry copper deposits along the western coast of the Americas, the Central African Copper Belt features sediment-hosted copper deposits. In order to form, these deposits require organic-rich rocks, which provide the reducing conditions (or mobile reducing fluids) that cause the precipitation of the copper, cobalt, and other metals.4 The earth has a sense of irony: the same class of organic-rich source rocks that produce oil and gas play a pivotal role in the formation of cobalt ore, the key to electrification.5
This is an interesting story, but to return to the question at hand: just how unique is it for a metal’s production to be concentrated in a single country?
Generally, the more a metal is produced globally6, the more dispersed its production is across different countries. Globally, we mine tens of millions of tons of salt, iron, and petroleum every year, and the top-producing countries of each of those commodities only produce 20-40% of the world supply. By contrast, we produce only hundreds of tons of germanium and gallium, for which over 90% of production is concentrated in their top-producing countries.
Cobalt production is more concentrated than you would predict based on its volume, though other minerals have a similar profile: 82% of tungsten production and 66% of vanadium production come from a single country: China.
As the cobalt market matures and price signals drive global exploration and production, we should expect the global supply to naturally diversify away from the Congo. But where might that come from?
Are there alternatives for more cobalt?
The astute reader will have noticed that cobalt reserves are more geographically diverse than cobalt production: Zambia, Australia, Cuba, and Indonesia all have large volumes that are not being produced at scale today. And this does not take into account the potential for cobalt deposits in other areas, such as Greenland, which is currently being explored by KoBold metals, with backing from Gates, Bezos, and Branson.
Intriguingly, extremely cobalt-rich deposits lie at the bottom of the seafloor in certain parts of the world. Ferromanganese crusts form on rocky surfaces exposed to seawater, most commonly on seamounts. Ocean currents sweep sediment off the rock surfaces while also providing a large flux of water contact to the seamount. With the right oxygen conditions, this can produce oxides with up to 2% cobalt content.
There are significant environmental concerns around the mining of deep-sea deposits, chiefly around the disturbance to the seafloor and release of mining detritus back into the ocean. But I personally just find it hard to believe that the extraction of these minerals in the remote Pacific could be more harmful than mining in central Africa, the coast of Greenland, or the remarkably biodiverse Indonesia—not to mention the vastly lower humanitarian cost.
Of course, the easiest way to decrease cobalt usage from the Congo is to diversify away from cobalt usage entirely. Lithium-iron phosphate (LFP) batteries have gained an astonishing 40% of electric vehicle market share in just a few years, thanks to the strong cost advantage of iron over cobalt or nickel, not to mention the much more well-developed, ethical supply chains. And Ford has just announced the first domestic factory to produce these LFP batteries, with expected delivery in 2026. While the LFP batteries lack the range of those containing cobalt, they are a great option for vehicles where long ranges are not as important (such as in Asia).
Two things can be true
I want to make sure to emphasize to the reader just how horrific mining can be in the Congo. I urge you to read Cobalt Red by Siddharth Kara, or at least listen to his appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast. Kara travels into the heart of cobalt production country, and shows that the pronouncements of clean supply chains are (to be generous) rather misleading, with artisanal mining and supposedly-ethical industrial operations thoroughly intertwined. The book is filled with one heartrending anecdote after another, with sexual assault, child labor, disease, and deadly accidents steadily piling up.
But two things can be true. The suffering in the Congo can be a moral crisis requiring immediate action, and cobalt can be an incredible material with potential to power the energy transition. To focus on only the moral crisis—as do some of my peers in oil and gas—belies the concrete steps that we can take to improve conditions in cobalt production.
We must put more international effort behind supply train transparency in the Congo, both at the level of governments and business. Efforts to diversify battery chemistry away from cobalt anodes should receive strong financial support. Smaller electric vehicles, which require smaller batteries, should be given more favorable treatment than larger ones. Hybrids and plug-in hybrids, similarly, have much lower mineral demands than fully electric vehicles7. We should manage expectations about how fast the energy transition can occur given the material constraints, and recognize the importance of adaptation and mitigation efforts.
Finally, we will have to produce cobalt, lithium, and copper HERE in the west. The Inflation Reduction Act provides huge incentives for the production and refining of battery materials to take place within the US or friendly countries, but that still requires us to issue the permits, approve the requests, and build the infrastructure. Approvals for mining permits on federal lands are down since Biden took office, even compared to the Obama Administration:
Every mine involves some amount of disturbance to the earth, but we be can confident and proud of our environmental protections and responsible operations in the US and amongst our allies. We must avoid continuing on the easy path: bowing to political pressure to deny critical projects here while covering our eyes and buying materials mined under horrible conditions.
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There is something poetic (and perhaps related?) that blue was generally the last color named by humans: https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-blue-and-how-do-we-see-color-2015-2
I recommend reading John McPhee’s book “The Curve of Binding Energy” for more on this interesting subject. Fusion and fission are both ways of moving up on the same curve of binding energy, just from different directions. https://www.amazon.com/Curve-Binding-Energy-Alarming-Theodore/dp/0374515980
Quote from John R. Farrell, reported from Cobalt Red by Siddharth Kara.
The USGS has an excellent report on these type of deposits: https://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2010/5090/j/sir2010-5090j_text.pdf
Interestingly, the organic content of organic-rich source rocks has been decreasing through time. In other words, the source rocks of 800 million years ago (around when the Central African Copper Belt formed) are generally richer than the source rocks of the Cretaceous, which are generally richer than the source rocks being produced today. This is probably due to the gradual evolution of bottom-feeding organisms that consume the organic matter falling to the seafloor, which can become a source rock. This is pure speculation, but I have to wonder that this process has played a role in the rarity of these type of superrich copper/cobalt deposits. Perhaps one of my readers can disabuse me of this harebrained notion. Maybe one day this will become another post…
I also looked at production concentration vs. value of the global mining trade. Those numbers were surprisingly hard to come by, but the same trends hold whether you are looking at global value of the trade or absolute volume of production numbers. E.g., gold and silver pop back to where you would expect.
I really want to find some better numbers on this, it seems like hybrids have simply… fallen out of fashion in the large studies on electrification done by international agencies. But these guys have the average EV battery being 5.5x the size of the average plug-in hybrid battery: https://evstatistics.com/2022/04/bev-batteries-average-83-kwh-versus-15-kwh-for-phevs/#:~:text=For%20PHEVs%2C%20the%20mean%20battery,miles%20of%20range%20for%20BEVs.
Great read Ted!! Interesting to see if any US administration can finally give up on the Cold War postering against Cuba and open up some meaningful economic relations finally, especially with that percentage of global cobalt supply in our backyard.