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Intelligence Squared
Are Lithium and Cobalt the New Oil? The Elements of Power, with Nicolas Niarchos
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- [00:01]
Atusa Araxia Abrahamian
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Nicholas Niarchos
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- [01:30]
Mia Sorrenti
Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. Decarbonization is triggering a new great power race as demand for green technologies and sustainable power sources grows. Washington and Beijing are battling for control of cobalt, lithium, copper and nickel, the critical metals that will determine who lands on top of the global energy transition. In this episode, Nicholas Niarchos joins host Atusa Araxia Ibrahimian to discuss the Elements of Power, a sweeping investigation into the war for the global supply of battery metals. Let's join our host ATUSA now with more.
- [02:08]
Atusa Araxia Abrahamian
Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Atusa Araxia Abrahamian. Our guest today is Nicholas Niarchos. Nicholas began his journalistic career as a fact checker at the New Yorker, for which he is now a contributing writer. He is also the editor of Now Voyager magazine, a magazine of international long form reporting that's coming out later this year. Nick has reported extensively from Africa, from the Middle east, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and today I'm delighted to be speaking to Nick about his New book, the Elements of Power, a really terrific investigation into the war for the global supply of battery metals, essential for the decarbonization of our economies and. And the terrible, bloody human cost of this badly misunderstood industry. Nick, thank you for being here.
- [02:54]
Nicholas Niarchos
Thank you so much for having me. Atuza.
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Atusa Araxia Abrahamian
So let's start from the beginning. What compelled you to write an entire book about batteries and so much more?
- [03:04]
Nicholas Niarchos
Yeah, I mean, I think if you'd told me 10 years ago you'd be publishing a book this day on batteries, I'd say you're crazy. You know, I became interested in. Well, I started my sort of reporting career working on the European refugee crisis of 2015. I started doing foreign stories for the New Yorker based on travels to Greece, and then sort of expanded that into travels to different African countries, including Djibouti in the Western Sahara. And I kept coming back to the questions that some of the people that I spoke to were asking me, saying, you know, we come from these very. You know, we come from these amazing countries, but they've been completely, completely destroyed. And so I started looking at the root causes of problems in some of those countries. The war in Yemen, Iraq, so on and so forth. But I'm very quickly, I was surprised to meet Congolese refugees and migrants along the way on the Greek island of Samos. Actually, I think was the first time that I met these people. And they said to me, they said, well, you know, we're from this country. It's very rich. It's one of the richest countries in the world, but we're some of the poorest people in the world. And so that kind of. That. That dynamic kind of surprised me and, And. And made me want to look further into the. Into the story. And I went into, you know, I started reading up about the drc, and at the time, there was a famous mining fixer character called Dan Gertler, who features a lot in the book. And he'd just been sanctioned, but he was still being paid by a Swiss company, Glencore, and by other companies that were directly in the supply chain of some of the largest tech companies in the world. And they were paying royalties to him because otherwise he would seize their mines back. So I was trying to understand how something like that could happen. And so I went down. I wanted to write the Dan Gutler story for the New Yorker. And I just found so much more. I found, you know, these people who were mining for less than a dollar a day. You found child labor in some of these mines. You saw, you know, women Washing radioactive ore, often pregnant women as well. And, you know, these pits that had been dug in people's backyards and, you know, at night people would complain and say their children fell into these pits. And I just. I don't know. That sort of. The idea that the Green Revolution was based on this, on this base, on this premise that you had to extract these materials from this country, already so poor, already so destroyed by, you know, extractive colonial history, the idea that it was happening all over again just kind of got my goat, I guess.
- [06:14]
Atusa Araxia Abrahamian
Yeah. There's been so much chatter over the years about cleaning up the supply chain and accountability and dozens, if not hundreds of nonprofits and agencies and organizations are deeply invested in this, but there's only really so much they can do. Where do these efforts fall. Fall short?
- [06:32]
Nicholas Niarchos
I mean, I think these efforts fall short in the fact that they do. They lack kind of consistency. I think that that is very, very important. So saying we're going to cut X out of the supply chain and then putting them in two years later or a year and a half later, you know, that really doesn't. That doesn't really cut the mustard. I mean, one of the big reports in 2016 was by Amnesty International and Afriwatch, and it was a report called this is what We Die For. And after that, there was a bit, you know, there was a bit of a hue and cry about, About. About. Especially about child labor. And Apple removed this company, Huayu Cobalt, from their supply chain. And then, you know, a couple of years later, it crept back in. So I think that that's one thing, and I think the exigencies of cost also, just the obscurity of the global supply chain. I mean, you've written about the hidden globe and the way that this kind, these kind of international networks can be used to obscure where capital comes from. But I think that these networks are also used to obscure the very nature of where our products come from. So that, to me, is quite interesting.
- [07:45]
Atusa Araxia Abrahamian
Yeah. So you mentioned cobalt being the mineral that is very in demand in drc. I think that maybe is it the half of the world's cobalt is in the ground in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Is that right?
- [07:57]
Nicholas Niarchos
Something like that. 70% of the current supply. It's even more, you know, 70%.
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Atusa Araxia Abrahamian
And so we're starting literally into the ground. Kids, pregnant women, ordinary people in Congo mining for cobalt. Then what happens? Then where does it go? Because it takes a lot to make, to make a battery, to make an electric vehicle. Like, what's the next step? In this very complicated supply chain.
- [08:19]
Nicholas Niarchos
So it's, so it's partially refined in the drc. It's turned into hydroxide, which is a, which is a sort of slightly more pure form of cobalt, it says bright blue powder. And then it's shipped off to China through this incredibly circuitous land route to the port of Durban or to the port of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. And it is refined in China at these huge battery metal refining plants in cities like Kyu or Shenzhen or various other places. And these, you know, battery refiners are, are directly linked to the people who are sort of putting together the, the, the batteries and the Foxconns and the, you know, the, the, the people who are assembling the batteries of the, these, these giant companies like Cat, Catl, byd, and those are the companies that sort of send them to Tesla and Apple and to all the device creators that we know today.
- [09:34]
Atusa Araxia Abrahamian
So you've had to brush up on your chemistry a little bit. When was the last time you took chemistry in your life?
- [09:39]
Nicholas Niarchos
A very long time, when I was 16.
- [09:43]
Atusa Araxia Abrahamian
And how complicated is all of this?
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Nicholas Niarchos
The chemistry itself is not there, is there. There are some complicated aspects of chemistry, of the chemistry. I, I found it difficult to get my head round, but we had this thing called Covid, and when I was locked in a room for, for, for several weeks, at one point I made it my, my objective to, to, to bone up on, on the chemistry. And luckily I, you know, I was able to speak to a lot of people, very accomplished battery chemists who took me through what was happening inside the batteries. You know, at the sharp end of this, some of the chemistry is very complicated, but essentially what you have is you have these ions, which are these very small subatomic particles that are moving across an electrolyte from a positive to a negative electrode. And when they do that, that releases electricity, essentially.
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Atusa Araxia Abrahamian
And this is different from an older kind of battery because now the batteries can hold much more power. Is that right?
- [10:47]
Nicholas Niarchos
Exactly.
- [10:48]
Atusa Araxia Abrahamian
This is why. Got it. And so this is all about the green transition, electrifying, moving away from fossil fuels. How green is it really?
- [10:58]
Nicholas Niarchos
So it could be very, very clean. I mean, I think these technologies could be used. What I'm trying to say is not that the green transition is a lie or the way that electric cars are intrinsically bad, but is that the supply chain for them is incredibly dirty as it stands. And I think that that is just undeniably true. You have to look at how electric cars are produced. You have to look at how much copper, for example, goes into an electric car. And then you have to look at where that copper comes from and what it costs to produce that copper or that cobalt or lithium or whatever it is in the battery. And you realize that electric vehicles are much more environmentally polluting and do rely on supply chains in which there are these deep human rights abuses and corruption issues and various different extractive problems. And I would say that essentially you realize that the green transition is built on very shaky fundaments and you need to come back. I think that the important thing at this stage is to come back and to try and do more environmental mining to shorten some of the supply chains, to try and do refining in countries that are not China, not million miles away from where the mining is happening in Africa. So I think that there are various different things that can be done and that we see that these things can be done because they are done. For example, the Glencore mine that I was speaking about a minute ago, the. That mine is very, very well regulated and well run at this point. And despite the fact that they had these issues around governance and the people that they worked with earlier, earlier on, in the decade or earlier, earlier on last decade, you know, this mine actually does come up to standards. So why can't every mine in DRC come up to those standards, for example?
- [13:23]
Atusa Araxia Abrahamian
Yeah, well, part of the problem, as you point out in the book many times, is that the foundation of these extractive industries is in fact a colonial foundation. Can you talk a little bit about the origins of the mining industry in drc, but also beyond there, you go to Indonesia, you spend time in Western Sahara. What's the common point historically between these places and the kinds of industries that they have brought about?
- [13:48]
Nicholas Niarchos
So all these places were colonized by European powers at various points in their history. Indonesia had a very long standing colonial history with the Dutch. Belgium was the colonizer of the drc. It was actually the Belgian king who colonized it as a personal property for a while. And then the Belgian state took over and the Western Sahara was a Spanish colony. And by and large, although Western Sahara became, became an extractive colony a little bit later on in its colonial history, these places were used for, you know, they were almost targeted for resources that they had. You know, Congo was first targeted for ivory and to some extent gold. And then it became rubber, and then it became copper, and then it became, you know, uranium, cobalt, a whole periodic table of different elements that lie under that, under that, under the rich soil of the drc. But it's really interesting when you start looking at the history of these places. You know, there are these, obviously you can't overlay one thing exactly onto to another, but there are just these insane, you know, these moments where things rhyme and people are saying very much the same thing and, and so on.
- [15:11]
Atusa Araxia Abrahamian
Yeah, that's really, it's quite striking because we think of the world as so diverse and varied, but then history just has a way of coming back. So tell us a little bit about Sulawesi because DRC is pretty well known for anyone who's explored supply chains or colonialism. Sulawesi, not so much it's an island, it's in Indonesia. But what's going on there and how did your reporting take shape around this particular beach that you visit?
- [15:38]
Nicholas Niarchos
Yeah, Sulawesi is an island that has been long mined for nickel. And nickel is a key component in some high performance lithium ion batteries. And you know, there's a company called Vale which, which was doing a lot of mining, you know, during the period of the, the dictator Suharto. And you know, the, the Vale, the people prospecting for Vale, for Vale found various different deposits that they couldn't develop at the time. And one of these very rich deposits is in a place called Bahadopi. And it has been developed by a company called imip, which is a kind of, it's now, it's a sort of company town and it's this sort of boom town on the, on the shore where there are these huge nickel mines and these big processing plants right next door to it. Because the nickel ore there is a form of laterite ore that requires a great deal of energy to process. And the easiest way to do that is to use coal power. Indonesia is also very rich in coal and has been for a long time. And Joseph Conrad, funny enough, this is one of those things with history rhyming. Joseph Conrad, who wrote so brilliantly about Congo and Heart of Darkness, also wrote Victory about coal mining in Indonesia. So there's an instance of history rhyming, but essentially this mine is destroying the local environment. It's this sort of monster kind of eating into the jungle. And because it's in Indonesia and it's because it's a Chinese investment and it's a lot of Chinese workers which look local people are really upset about as well. You have a much lower level of regulation and you see quite firsthand that, you know, the nickel that's going into some of these lithium ion batteries, maybe not the batteries in your phone, but the battery in an E bike or a battery in a high performance Tesla car or so on, that nickel is coming from this quite polluting source.
- [18:02]
Atusa Araxia Abrahamian
And so just going back one more time to history rhyming, are you making the argument that Chinese investments in Africa and Southeast Asia somehow echo the Belgian and Dutch interests of, you know, hundreds of years ago, or is this a different beast entirely?
- [18:16]
Nicholas Niarchos
I would say, I would say it's different in many, many ways. Of course, the Chinese are not coming to the DRC and chopping off people's hands and, you know, enslaving villages and threatening people with rape. But at the same time, I mean, it's pretty brutal and it's certainly very mercantile and it certainly echoes periods of mercantilist colonialism. One need only think of the British Empire and the East India Company to find analogues that are really not so far away. I would say that the Chinese intention, however, however, is not to colonize, really. I don't think they are looking for, you know, to move their citizens in. They're not looking to influence politics, really, although that might change, especially now, because the, the Trump administration has really pushed to, to influence policy, policies of the government of the drc And China feels like it's losing out. So there's a question about whether they will start, you know, once again because in the 60s they were trying to influence politics in Africa. They will start once again to come in and bring, bring that kind of viewpoint to the table.
- [19:42]
Atusa Araxia Abrahamian
Since you brought up the Trump's arguably neo mercantilist geoeconomics, is there anything you wish that people who are reading about Trump, reading about the tariffs, reading about this conflict of China, understood better about what we are dealing with here?
- [19:59]
Nicholas Niarchos
Well, I think that Trump has unfortunately fallen into the trap of ignoring the situations on the ground and working with leaders, especially in Congo, who don't. And I find it difficult to imagine how a government would do otherwise, especially at that high level. But the problem in DRC is that Felix Tshisekedi, who's the president, does not control vast swaths of his territory, is seen by many people on the ground as illegitimate because of two, two rigged elections, essentially. And yet the, the US Government is dealing with him directly. And I worry that a lot of these critical mineral investments, you know, on the 4th of December, there was this, there was this deal that they did, which was supposed to be a peace deal between Rwanda and the drc. In fact, it was a, a critical metals deal. My, my fear is that Trump is basically embarrassing, emboldening the corrupt, and, you know, two or three years down the line under a Different administration. We are going to see the DRC come back and renegotiate terms which they have done every single time since 1997. And I think actually that would be okay if that benefited people on the ground. But unfortunately a lot of this investment is just further impoverishing people on the ground and lining the pockets of the corrupt. And that, I think is the thing that is missed both by left and by right is that there is this. Once you bring expediency and kind of you think that, okay, look, the only way to deal with it is to deal with these corrupt actors, then you really begin to ignore the basic facts of what's happening on the ground and you do not improve things for people, which I think should be really front and center of any policy making.
- [22:19]
Atusa Araxia Abrahamian
Well, the most sort of touching parts of your book are all to do with the people that you meet along the way. And there are many, many. I think you did more than. How many interviews did you do hundreds of interviews to this book?
- [22:30]
Nicholas Niarchos
Maybe more.
- [22:31]
Atusa Araxia Abrahamian
And you really. Maybe more. You really got to know some of these miners and people living around the mines. Can you maybe introduce us to somebody that you had a particularly close rapport with in your reporting?
- [22:45]
Nicholas Niarchos
Yeah, I mean, I think the main character, Odilongka Drumba Kilanga, is a very good example. I mean, he was, he's around my age. He's a bit older than me, actually. And he has, he has worked his entire life as an artisanal miner, but he's trying to get out of artisanal mining. So I found that incredibly powerful as somebody who kept being sucked back into this thing that he absolutely hated doing.
- [23:18]
Atusa Araxia Abrahamian
And what was bringing him back in because he wants to leave. He's resourceful, he's intelligent. What's going on there?
- [23:25]
Nicholas Niarchos
There's absolutely nothing else for him to do. He tried to set up a restaurant. He couldn't get the money together. He thought if he went back the mines he could get the money together. And he has two children, so he's got to support them, essentially. You have to understand that the Southern DRC only has one industry and that is mining. So if you're not doing something to do with mining, you're in a really difficult position. He was trying to find different jobs that were not going down and hacking out these minerals and so on, but, but he was, he was finding it incredibly difficult.
- [24:04]
Atusa Araxia Abrahamian
And to be clear, when you talk about mining, you really are talking about going down and hacking around for minerals. This is, no, not a high tech thing. There's no robots, it's not automated, it's people getting dirty under the ground.
- [24:16]
Nicholas Niarchos
And he was trying to work for one of the big industrial mining firms. But actually I think this underscore, underscored the, and so the industrial miners are the biggest, you know, like Glencore and some of the big Chinese firms that are, that are mining this. About 80% of the cobalt that comes out of the DRC is mined in these, in these big mines. And those do have robots, those do have, you know, safety procedures and all these things. But, but the mining that, that, that, that I was talking about, the artisanal mining is obviously a much more labor intensive job. You know, people come from all over DRC to try and seek their fortune. They think it's a way to make money for themselves and so on. And I think it's, you know, it's something that unfortunately very few people can make work. I mean they get that people get sucked into it and then they leave basically as poor as they entered.
- [25:12]
Atusa Araxia Abrahamian
Yeah. Tell us a bit about your experience reporting this book. First of all, you wrote a lot of it during COVID How did you manage of all of the travel restrictions and, and what was it like for you personally just understanding this industry that we all depend on literally every day. Right. How did it change your relationship to the world and to the things around you?
- [25:34]
Nicholas Niarchos
I did a lot of the reporting, early reporting in 2019, then during COVID I was able to return once, but essentially. And then, and then I returned again in 22. I guess it depends on when, when
- [25:54]
Atusa Araxia Abrahamian
to DRC in this.
- [25:55]
Nicholas Niarchos
Yeah, depends on when you're, when you're, when, when your covert definition of COVID ending is. But essentially, you know, the DRC was a difficult place to access at that time and you know, the government became more and more restrictive. I mean, I wrote about it in the book, but you know, I was obviously not obviously, but I was detained and often stymied in my, in my investigations. It's very, very difficult to work as a journalist in the drc. The concept of public documents is very, very fuzzy and there's a lot of, there's a lot of questions about like how it's weird because there are no public documents, but then things get sent around on WhatsApp and so on. And then you have to do a lot of fact checking and verifying because there's a lot of fake stuff out there as well. So luckily I'd worked as a fact checker beforehand and so I had to put on my fact checking hat a lot of the time and sift through rumors and, and sort of half truths and things like that. And it's, I think it's also just a fact of working in places where people's relationship to authority is very unstable because these sort of half truths and these, these, these conspiracy theories and things like that really make their way into the public discourse and they become, they become, they become kind of part of the national understanding of things. I mean, you're seeing this now in the US as well. I mean, there's always been a streak of that. But it's funny because sometimes I wake up and I think, God, we're becoming more and more like the drc In a weird way.
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Atusa Araxia Abrahamian
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Nicholas Niarchos
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Mia Sorrenti
Namaste.
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- [31:57]
Atusa Araxia Abrahamian
Tell us about your detention. You're no longer allowed to go to drc. At least until there's a new A new government. What? What happened?
- [32:04]
Nicholas Niarchos
Well, we'll see, we'll see, we'll see. Under a new government, maybe I won't be able to go. We'll see if we'll see if he leaves power as well. That's the other Thing he's trying to change the constitution. So we might be burdened with him,
- [32:16]
Atusa Araxia Abrahamian
might be waiting a while.
- [32:17]
Nicholas Niarchos
Yeah, for a long time. The detention itself was fairly harrowing, but I was quite lucky because lots and lots of Congolese journalists are very poorly treated. Some of them are tortured, some of them are beaten. I was denied food, but not in a particularly organized way. It felt like the reason I didn't have food was because they couldn't figure out how to get a system of getting somebody to go out of the door and buy me something and that kind of thing. So they, I mean, I would say that other Congolese journalists have it much more, much more difficult than me. You know, the Western Sahara as well was a. Was a place where I was again detained, again kicked out. That's becoming more and more a flashpoint with the current negotiations between Morocco and Algeria. And the people of the Western Sahara are consistently forgotten in these sort of great power negotiations. I mean, you have Trump's daughter's father in law, Massad Boulos, jetting off to, to Algeria to try and, to try and do these negotiations. And yet the people in the Sahrawi refugee camps, who are these people who've been dispossessed of their territory since 1975, are kind of sitting there saying, well, where are we going to go? I guess, Are they going to live in refugee camps forever? And there's a big question about that.
- [33:56]
Atusa Araxia Abrahamian
Yeah. And the mineral that's in the Western Sahara, fossil phosphate.
- [34:00]
Nicholas Niarchos
It's phosphate. Exactly, yeah.
- [34:01]
Atusa Araxia Abrahamian
Phosphate, yeah. And what does phosphate do in this whole ecosystem? So it's a.
- [34:05]
Nicholas Niarchos
So there are these batteries called LFP batteries, which are these. No. Cobalt batteries, which. It's funny because when you write about this stuff, you get like a million people on Twitter being like, well, like, LFP batteries exist. So, like, your thesis is completely wrong. Is like A. LFP batteries are not used in MacBooks or cell phones or whatever it is. So there's a huge segment that they're not used in because they're a bit bigger and they're also half of electric cars. Don't. Don't use LFP batteries. Be that as it may, LFP has a lot of applications, very good technology, and it's, you know, it's very safe and so on. But phosphates are used in it. And phosphates are a scarce resource they use in agriculture, and they are a very. They're not. Because about 10% of Morocco's phosphate supply comes from this place, which is. Which is often talked of as Africa's last colony. The, the supply chain itself is not particularly problem free. I mean, there's been a huge amount of trade disputes over phosphates coming from the Western Sahara. European courts have, have ruled that they're not allowed to be used and so on. So I would say that the point of that part of the book is basically that you, that there's no free lunch. I mean, there's no technology that sort of drops from the sky and you're like, we have this magic power source and we can power our devices and never have to think about mining ever again or where these things come from. Even the cleanest technologies have implications.
- [35:50]
Atusa Araxia Abrahamian
Yes. So reading your book really drove home this idea that what goes up must come down in some way, that there are beneficiaries and victims in all aspects of globalization, but specifically in this green transition that we may or may not be living through. My question for you is, is it still worth it, knowing what, you know, given where we are, is it still worth it to pursue this green transition?
- [36:16]
Nicholas Niarchos
Yes, I think it's totally worth it to pursue the green transition. And I think this is a question of cleaning up supply chains. It's not a question of returning to burning coal and things like that. I think that's, and I think I've seen the, as we all have, we've seen how the planet heating and climate change has affected communities around us. And you know, these. I think the point that was driven home to me actually most powerfully when I was in the Sahel doing some reporting in the latter part of last decade and just seeing how these farmer herder conflicts had intensified and seeing this land that had been dried up on the edge of the Sahara. I mean, you really, I mean, it's almost like daily encroachment of the desert. And that to me was very, was very powerful. And I think we do need to do things about a warming world. But let's do it intelligently. Let's do it with an idea of the whole supply chain. Let's do it with an idea of the people right at the end of the supply chain and not just how do we make our cities more smoke free and you know, chuck tons of smoke into the air above an Indonesian island or whatever it is.
- [37:53]
Atusa Araxia Abrahamian
Well, thank you Nick for this wonderful book and for your time.
- [37:57]
Nicholas Niarchos
Thank you very much.
- [37:58]
Atusa Araxia Abrahamian
I hope everybody reads it because it's really very eye opening and a little depressing, but really fun to read. So that was Nicholas Niarchos, author of the Elements of Power and amateur chemist. His book is available now online and in stores. I'm Atusa Araxia Abrahamian and you've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.
- [38:21]
Mia Sorrenti
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by me, Mia Sorrenti and it was edited by Mark Roberts for ad free episodes and full length recordings. You can become a member at intelligencesquared.com forward/membership and to join us at future events, just have a look at our full event program over on intelligencesquared.com attend. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.