The electric car industry is scouring the earth for battery
metals,
from lithium in the Chilean salt flats
to nickel in Indonesian rainforests to valuable metals on the
deep sea floor.
China, the US and Europe are engaged in a resource
arms race that stretches around the globe
to try to meet skyrocketing demand.
But extracting those raw materials comes at a cost,
which can include scarred landscapes,
toxic pollution and dangerous working conditions.
There's no question combustion engines are a problem.
They emit hazardous fumes and 1/5 of yearly global greenhouse
gas emissions.
Electric cars are promising to change all that.
Experts say the benefits of EVs outweigh the costs.
But where do battery metals come from?
And what is mining them doing to the planet?
Your average consumer EV has over six times as much
mineral content as a petrol vehicle.
Most of that goes towards the massive battery pack.
Each one is made-up of thousands of cells.
It's here that lithium ions move back and forth between
an anode and a cathode
as the battery charges up and then powers the vehicle.
This is where you'll find many of the minerals at
the centre of today's mining boom.
Change the mix of metals here and you change the
car's performance,
including its range and charging speed.
And each metal has its own story.
What I found was the hidden supply chains behind all
this were dominated by China,
but they also involved a lot of
trade-offs, environmental impacts and a huge need for minerals.
This is Henry Sanderson, his book Vault.
Rush looks at how the race to go green has
upended global supply chains
and transformed landscapes, like in Chile's Atacama Desert.
What struck me when I went there was just the
sheer size of these pools in the middle of the
desert.
Locked away in these vast salt flats is a lightweight
metal used in nearly all EV batteries.
Lithium,
the silvery white mineral, is the world's lightest metal and
can be found in rocks,
clay and salt water. More than half of the global
lithium resources are in the so-called lithium triangle in Bolivia,
Chile and Argentina. Lithium here is stored in underground salt
water called brine.
Billions of gallons of it are pumped to the surface
every year,
where it is left to evaporate.
Lithium from Chile actually has a low carbon footprint because
it's using the energy from the sun.
The more yellow the pond,
the higher the concentration.
It can take more than 1000 gallons of brine to
produce enough lithium for just one electric car battery.
Two companies control the right to operate here,
American Albemarle and Chilean SQM.
In 2021 they exported more than
$890 million worth and satellite imagery shows how their mining
operations have transformed the landscape.
It can take around 18 months for the brine to
move under gravity through the series of ponds.
The lithium rich salts are then loaded into trucks and
then taken to a processing plant near the coast where
they're purified into battery grade.
Lithium
humps suck out enough brine to fill an Olympic swimming
pool every 20 minutes,
and the factories that process the salts draw fresh water
from underground aquifers.
Water usage is of course a sensitive issue here in
the desert.
In some areas of the Atacama,
rainfall has never once been recorded.
Jorge Munoz Coca is a member of the local Atacammenio
indigenous community.
Chilean mining company SQM has run into trouble with environmental
regulators for extracting too much brine and fresh water.
In an e-mail to Business Insider,
SQM said it aims to be water neutral by
2030 as it switches to Desalina tion plants and more
efficient lithium extraction technology
in neighbouring Bolivia. Chinese and Russian companies are investing nearly
$3 billion
in an array of new lithium plants,
but they're gambling on a relatively unproven set of technologies
called DLE or direct lithium extraction.
Instead of waiting for water to evaporate from brine,
this approach draws out the lithium using a range of
chemical or heat based processes.
It can take only a few hours,
but it's unclear how water or energy intensive these processes
will be.
With foreign mining companies moving in,
locals like Abdon Morales are worried about the precious water
supply.
He's disillusioned after years of high hopes for Bolivia's lithium
industry.
A pilot plant was open 60 miles from his home
in 2013,
promising jobs and prosperity. But Bolivia lacked the technical know
how to scale up,
and the jobs never came.
Abdon is not against lithium mining.
He just wants any company coming in to extract the
metal to be open and honest.
As of
2021, there were
21 lithium mining operations globally,
industry experts estimated could take hundreds more to meet demand.
Lithium isn't the only thirsty industry in the Atacama Desert.
Chile is also the world's largest producer of copper,
a highly conductive metal and another key ingredient in EV
batteries.
An electric car can contain over 80kg of the metal,
more than twice the amount used in cars with an
internal combustion engine
in each battery cell. Copper foil placed over the negative
end or the anode
acts as a bridge to the outer circuit,
allowing electricity to flow through the car.
It's also, of course used in the car's wiring and
electric motor.
The existing mines in places like Chile,
they've been going for for decades,
so they are coming close to the end of their
lives.
So we need new copper mines.
Finding and developing a new copper mine can take years
and billions of dollars.
Most copper mines look like this.
Vast open pits where the rock is blasted out of
the earth with explosives,
leaving behind stepped walls that can plunge half a mile
into the earth.
In many cases these pits remain long after the mine
has shut down.
This one in Butte, Mt closed down in the 1980s
and the pumps that would normally keep water out were
shut down.
The liquid you see is in fact a bath of
acids and heavy metals leached from the surrounding rock
in 2016 / 3000. Geese died soon after landing on
the lake.
Now workers have to keep around the clock vigil,
scaring away migratory birds with gunshots,
lasers,
even drones.
If birds land here and start drinking the toxic brew,
it can cause organ failure.
It's Mark Mariano's mission to make sure that doesn't happen.
Yeah, Mark Mariano, waterfowl protection specialist.
We invented that title, but it it fits.
These are propane cannons and they fire all day.
They mimic gunfire, which a lot of the
birds are scared of for obvious reasons.
On special occasions, the birds might get their own private
fireworks display.
This is a kind of a last resort or we
know,
you know, something big would be coming.
We've used them twice.
This acid lake is an extreme outcome,
but there's evidence toxic waste rock has contaminated soil near
copper mines around the world.
As the EV market continues to grow,
so does the demand for copper,
although design improvements mean that less will be needed per
vehicle in the years to come.
Meanwhile, the US still has considerable copper reserves,
as does Chile and the likes of Australia and Peru.
Other battery metals are not so well distributed
like cobalt.
The metal is a popular choice for battery makers because
it withstands high temperatures and doesn't corrode easily.
It goes in the cathode of the most common battery
type,
NMC, and just one African nation is responsible for producing
over
70% of the world's cobalt.
The Democratic Republic of Congo is the Saudi Arabia of
cobalt,
or much more than that.
In fact, they really have a very uniquely dominant position.
Mining here has exploded since 2000,
driven largely by Chinese investment.
Between 15 and 30% of the cobalt ore comes from
artisanal mines,
meaning low tech informal mining operations.
Miners use whatever tools they have available,
often without protective equipment.
Miners here dig shafts into the earth and rock to
reach seams of cobalt.
The tunnels are cut by hand and have been known
to collapse and kill.
Wandan Jolivier has been working in these mines for
22 years.
Wow.
Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow.
Wow
and Wandanj and a team of three others work here.
They cut chunks of ore from the walls
and later haul their load back up to the surface.
Miners take the rocks to a local depot where they
are assessed and weighed.
Wandanj can earn between 2:00 and
$300.00 a week. The price can change on a daily
basis,
depending on the value of cobalt on the global market,
he says. He makes enough money to support his family.
Hundreds of thousands of people work in
DRC's artisanal cobalt mining sector.
Men tend to work as miners and traders,
while women find work processing the ore,
Clarice says this site follows strict rules,
but over the years human rights groups have also raised
the alarm about child labour at unregulated mining sites.
The 2016 Amnesty International report found thousands of children working
as artisanal miners.
The Amnesty report really opened a lot of people's eyes
to what was actually going on in the DRC and
the extent of abuses.
Most companies had little idea about where they got their
cobalt or or what was going on.
Some manufacturers looked to source their cobalt from large industrial
operations.
Instead, these mines are big operations,
fenced off, secured, big, big processing plants,
big open pit mines.
But these mines haven't been without their problems either.
Satellite imagery shows how massive mining pits have consumed large
parts of Kolwayz in the South of the country.
Another Amnesty report, this time focusing on large Chinese and
European run mining operations in the DRC,
details how residents have been forced from their homes to
make room for the pits.
In some cases, residents were physically assaulted and even had
their houses set on fire.
Locals say hundreds of homes have disappeared.
Meanwhile, artisanal mining hasn't gone away,
and many don't want it to.
Human rights groups say that improving working conditions at these
mines is a better approach than trying to outlaw them
all together.
And it's difficult for battery or car manufacturers to know
which type of mine the cobalt comes from,
since the ores mixed together at refining plants.
Almost all of the Dr.
CS cobalt ends up in China,
where it has helped put around
14,000,000 EVs on its roads,
way more than Europe and the US.
In fact, the DRC has a long history of foreign
countries benefiting from its riches.
Over 100 years ago, Belgian colonizers scoured the vast country
for its mineral wealth.
Supposed
to be
later, other Western powers relied on the country for minerals
used in military aircraft
Without strategic materials. And by strategic materials,
I mean ones like cobalt.
We really couldn't make a jet engine.
Today, the metallic element is used in things like paints,
alloys, and batteries. Conventional combustion engine vehicles don't use any.
The mining boom, driven largely by EVs,
has transformed the Dr. CS economy as well.
But the majority of Congolese people are not feeling the
benefit of the country's mineral riches.
Economists call it the resource curse.
We've seen countries who have been blessed with natural resources
that often it's elites that benefit.
You get these booms where they're actually more destructive than
than beneficial.
That's partly because minerals like cobalt gain value as they
move through the supply chain,
from ore to refined metals to batteries.
It's difficult for many resource rich countries to
have the infrastructure, the energy,
the chemicals, etcetera that that's needed to produce processed products.
But whether processed at home or abroad,
the amount of cobalt used in the most common EV
battery,
NMC, is going down from 1/3 of the cathode to
just 10%.
The trade off means using more nickel
and 6 1/2 thousand miles away.
One country is poised to benefit massively from that change.
Indonesia is the world's largest nickel producer,
and it's just going to extend that lead this decade.
Unlike the DRC, Indonesia receives far more investment from foreign
mining firms and car makers,
including from China, the US and Korea,
for things like refineries and battery plants,
helping it hold on to more of the supply chain.
The country's leaders banned nearly all nickel exports after decades
of shipping it off to foreign stainless steel plants with
little economic gain to chauffeur it.
Now they're saying, well, we've got all the processed nickel
here,
why don't you come build your battery factory in Indonesia?
And then they're saying, why don't you build your electric
vehicle factory?
Nickel mining in Indonesia is concentrated on the resource rich
island of Sulawesi,
where mineral extraction is increasingly coming into conflict with nearby
agriculture.
These are clove farms and some locals say mining companies
have forcibly cleared their lands.
All right. Any ponchon case would have similar.
Give me Tar
Nimata Pensarian, Akita Sudha DC-2,
Sudha Kita MP in Pecan and
Akita
90A.
Meanwhile, pollution from the mines has washed into the sea,
visible here on the left,
and it's having a direct impact on fishing.
In the
beginning, the sea is guaranteed
a visa.
So far, the vast majority of nickel coming out of
Indonesia has gone to make stainless steel,
not batteries.
That's because most of the country's ore has low nickel
content.
But Indonesia wants a larger piece of the EV pie
and plans to scale up a process called high pressure
acid leaching.
This technique can transform low grade ore into the kind
of nickel useful to the EV battery industry,
but it uses hot sulphuric acid and can leave behind
hazardous waste that can cause environmental destruction if not properly
stored.
The eastern side of the Indonesian archipelago is inside what's
known as the Coral Triangle,
an area with more diverse marine life than anywhere else
on the planet.
And the nation as a whole is home to more
than 1/10 of the world's mammal species
and nearly 1/5 of all bird species.
Environmental concerns have given some investors pause.
In 2022, Indonesian officials said Tesla would soon invest $5
billion
in local nickel processing. But an open letter from environmental
groups to CEO Elon Musk called for an end to
all nickel investments in the country.
It cites water and air pollution,
land grabbing and systemic large scale environmental damage.
The deal didn't go through.
And Tesla switched its standard range vehicles to a nickel
free variety.
The Indonesian government says it will improve environmental monitoring at
mining sites,
but operations aren't likely to scale down any time soon.
Indonesia is the nickel producer to watch this decade,
and we won't have in many cases electric vehicles without
Indonesia.
7 1/2 thousand miles away on the West Coast of
Africa,
Gabon is busy mining another key ingredient in EV battery
cathodes,
Manganese.
A company called Comalog, owned by French mining interests,
has operated here since 1951,
leading to massive population growth and development.
The company says it's invested millions of dollars in social
projects that improve access to education and water,
but some locals say they've been left behind.
Meanwhile, the
government is counting on mining for manganese,
iron and gold as it tries to transition away from
an oil based economy.
Right now, the majority of Gabon's manganese is used for
making steel,
not EV batteries, but EV Demand for the metal could
grow eightfold by 20-30.
There is one place where manganese,
nickel and cobalt can all be found together and it's
not on land
but within potato sized rocks lying more than two miles
below the Ocean's surface.
They're called polymetallic nodules and there could be billions of
tons of them in the ocean.
A Canadian start up called the Metals Company wants to
be the first to cash in
on a test run. In
2022. It scooped up what the founder says is the
world's biggest haul yet.
This is history. I've never stood in this.
No one has. No one.
Gerard Baron is on a decade long quest to mine
the deep.
His last venture ran out of money.
I wanted to do something that was near impossible.
You know, I was pretty sure that if I didn't
do this then it may not move forward and that
would be a travesty.
The technology is available to collect these rocks at a
commercial scale.
Here's how it works. The ship lowers a collector vehicle
into the water.
The prototype weighs 90 tons and is about the size
of a minibus
on the way to the
seabed. Coffee operators Dr. the collector remotely from inside the
control room.
Nodules.
Nodules. Each vehicle has four nozzles and sensors that adjust
their positions.
They hover just above the seabed and the nodules that
are laying there are sucked into the nozzle.
They work kind like a vacuum cleaner.
The machine also collects the top few centimetres of mud.
Internal pumps separate that from the rocks and shoot some
of the sediment back out.
Next, air bubbles push rocks,
mud and seawater up a tube that can extend up
to 2 1/2 miles.
After about 12 minutes, the slurry reaches the surface.
Here, a Whirlpool uses gravity to separate the nodules from
water and sediment.
Nodules are found in flat,
soft parts of the deep ocean floor around the world.
One of the most promising nodule fields is in the
Clarion Clipperton Zone,
a stretch of Pacific Ocean floor about as wide as
the continental United States.
A promotional video for the Metals Company calls this mining
area
a vast underwater desert. But even deserts have life in
them,
and this stretch of sea floor does too.
Recent expeditions have found a never before seen octopus,
a swarm of eels eating bait,
plus sea cucumbers, fish and species not found anywhere else.
No matter how careful the miners are,
some environmental impact is impossible to avoid.
We can't really predict the scale of species extinctions that
would come from that much mining,
but there is a reason to think it could be
significant.
We don't actually know enough yet to understand all these
impacts,
and therefore the costs.
Deep sea mining in international waters is regulated by the
International Seabed Authority.
By the end of 2023 it had granted exploration contracts
to
31 companies and governments.
It takes a different type of contract to mine the
sea floor at commercial scale,
and no one has one of those Yet.
If all goes according to plan,
the metals company aims to build processing centres at ports
that will melt and refine the rocks.
The nodules wouldn't leave behind tons of waste rock like
other ores do.
We generate 0 waste and 0 tailings.
We don't have the risk of any child labour.
We can commercially pick up these rocks and help stop
some of the terrible deforestation of our most biodiverse habitats
on land.
However, it's not clear yet whether ventures like this can
scale,
and experts say there's no evidence land based mining would
go away or even decline.
If sea floor mining takes off,
you'll just end up with a situation that you are
going to have increased ecological harm on land and then
at sea as well.
One mineral that can't be found in nodules but makes
up the largest part of any EV battery is graphite.
It's used in the anode,
or negative end of each battery cell.
Most EVs use synthetic graphite derived from coal,
but there's still demand for natural graphite,
which is cheaper, and China is the world's largest producer
of both.
The country produces 70% of the world's mined graphite,
but in 2023 announced it was restricting exports.
The move spooked foreign EV makers,
who are wary of their over reliance on Chinese supply.
As the world races to find a more diverse supply,
countries like Sri Lanka are hoping to cash in.
The country is home to what's called vein graphite,
the purest natural form of the element.
But at the moment, Sri Lankan graphite is mainly used
for steel making and as an industrial lubricant,
and working in the mines is difficult and dangerous.
Neel Suresh Abhisikara has worked in Kahatagaha,
Sri Lanka's biggest graphite mine,
for 11 years. It descends 2000 feet,
the deepest in the country.
To
mine
the graphite, Neil and his colleagues use drills
and explosives.
Working so far underground can make it hard to breathe.
The work exposes miners to toxic air particles,
putting them at risk of lung diseases like pneumoconiosis.
But if the lift brakes,
or the power is cut,
the only way out is this ladder.
About 60 workers earn a living from the mine here
in Kerhatagaha.
But it's not much. In January 2020,
mine workers went on a hunger strike for increased wages.
For the first time since 2012,
the government gave workers an increase of just
₹50 a day. That's three US cents,
promising to meet other demands in the future.
But those needs have still not been met.
With more modern machinery, Sri Lanka could be well placed
to tap into the huge demand for graphite from the
EV industry.
Miners here just hope they won't be left behind.
Whether on land or at sea,
every form of mining comes with trade-offs.
After extraction and refining, battery metals head to gigafactories like
this one.
At the moment they roll off the assembly line,
EVs have a carbon footprint about 30%
larger than internal combustion engine cars on average.
However, that begins to change as soon as you start
the engine.
Because driving an EV has no direct emissions,
they still have a lower climate impact over their lifetime,
even if they're charged with electricity that comes from fossil
fuels.
Reducing greenhouse gases is the number one tool humans have
to fight the climate crisis,
which is displacing people and threatening many species.
As EVs enter the mainstream,
consumer power, Sanderson says, will likely force car manufacturers and
mining companies to clean up their acts.
Consumers, I think, are in a powerful position because electric
vehicles are still relatively new to many people.
It's supposed to be a better product.
People care more about where all the materials come from,
so that's helping to drive change.
Meanwhile, one of the best ways to clean up the
EV supply chain is by minimising the need for mining
in the 1st place,
which means reusing and recycling as much as possible.
A handful of start-ups use end of life EV batteries
for large scale energy storage fields of lithium ion batteries,
which will be an essential part of scaling up wind
and solar power
and recycling rates for battery metals are trending upwards.
the US, Europe and Asia have seen massive public and
private investment in recycling infrastructure.
Getting the minerals out of the complex battery cells is
its own puzzle.
Crushing or shredding the batteries is risky because they can
catch fire under pressure.
A company called Life Cycle says it's process addresses that
issue.
The team built a machine that slices batteries into confetti
like shreds,
while keeping them submerged in liquid.
Without oxygen, there's no fires.
That liquid also helps separate the plastic,
which many recyclers just burn away.
What is left is metallic foil.
So behind me we're bagging that metallic foil,
and we sell this for the copper content as well
as the precious metals
and black mass. Black mass contains the nickel,
the cobalt, manganese, graphite, lithium,
etcetera.
As recycling operations like this scale up,
recovered metals could eventually account for about half of the
amount of cobalt and nickel the world uses.
But that might not happen until the year
2050. By then, investments in public transportation and greater awareness
of the climate crisis will possibly have even brought about
a less car centric world.
But while the car continues to be king,
Sanderson says the electrification of transit is essential.
We shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the
good.
And it pales in comparison to
the destruction wreaked on the planet by our addiction to
fossil fuels,
and that we need to make this shift.