Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green

Introduction

‘We have to scale battery production to crazy levels that people can’t even fathom today.’

Elon Musk, Tesla CEO1

In mid-2020 as the world settled into lockdown, we decided to get an electric car. Our son was seven months old and I had begun to think seriously about his future and whether the world would act quickly enough to mitigate the threats of climate change. Shares in Tesla were soaring, and the carmaker was on the cusp of becoming the most valuable in the world, despite the fact it made a fraction of the eleven million cars a year produced by Toyota. Tesla’s Model 3 had been the UK’s bestselling car that April and our friends had started to take the plunge. I knew that our son’s future would depend on decisions we made now, not later. Even as the pandemic had halted global economic activity the news was still grim: a Siberian heatwave had pushed up global temperatures to their second-highest on record. The well-known impacts of climate change stemming from our consumption of fossil fuels had not taken a break. So, I placed our old two-door petrol car for sale and started to look for electrics to rent. Google informed me that one popular search topic was: ‘Will petrol cars be worthless?’

Electric cars were the ethical consumer choice. It was a seductive idea: we could change the world by slightly altering our current lifestyle with a marginal amount of sacrifice. Buying a green investment fund instead of an index tracker; an electric car instead of a petrol one. The BBC informed me that the way we choose ‘to travel to the office, or even to pop to the shops, is also one of the biggest day-to-day climate decisions we face’.2 The car leasing company I used promised a world where cars ‘go hand in hand with the environment’. I imagined myself charging my car in the future and wondered how we would start to perceive petrol cars. Would driving one start to seem like an act of wanton vandalism to the planet, a thoroughly anti-social provocation?

For seven years I had lived in Beijing at the tail-end of China’s thirty-year car boom. I would still wake up with memories of what it had felt like to live there: the dry grating taste at the back of my throat, the hot breath behind my mask (long before Covid) and the tightness in the centre of my chest. I remember watching the red taillights on giant ring roads flowing into a dusk the colour of dirty sink water and feeling unable to escape the city of over twenty million. On some days Beijing felt like a postcard from the end of the planet. China’s car demand seemed like an unstoppable juggernaut – an urge to consume that would eat up whole cities, and then require new cities to be built for the cars.

The growth of China’s car market in my lifetime is alarming. To make a meaningful difference to climate change we will need to scale up the electric car fleet rapidly. The current stock of electric cars globally is around ten million, less than twice the number of cars in Beijing and only one percent of the global total. There are over one billion cars globally on the roads. We will also need to replace buses and trucks with electric versions, as well as ships, ferries and even planes. All this will require batteries on a scale unimaginable a few years ago. Tesla’s South African-born founder Elon Musk had built a vast battery ‘Gigafactory’ in the desert of Nevada to supply his electric cars as well as the batteries to store renewable sources of energy. But he was not alone: across China a new factory was being built every week in 2020.

Through my work as a Financial Times journalist, I had covered the raw materials electric cars needed: the lithium, cobalt, nickel and copper, as well as aluminium and steel. The harder I looked at the supply chain and who was responsible for these metals, the more I understood the shift in economic power that this transition would bring. While Musk and Tesla took all the media attention and limelight, there was a shadow world of billionaires who were also set to get rich. A gold rush had begun.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo I saw private jets landing at the small green and white airport in the mining town of Kolwezi while all around children and families mined for cobalt by hand; in Chile I stood in the searing heat of the Atacama Desert overlooking giant pools the size of Manhattan where lithium was extracted; and in China I visited battery factories and lithium plants running twenty-four hours a day using coal-fired power next to fields where buffalo roamed freely. All this was part of the electric car supply chain. A host of companies were even planning to mine the deep sea for these minerals, opening up one of the last unexplored wildernesses to extraction.

Every day, we rely on metals and minerals to power our iPhones and transmit our electricity. Digital technologies give us a sense that we live in an ethereal economy untethered to the material world. In fact, we are mining more minerals than at any time in our history, a dependence that is only set to increase.* Despite talk of artificial intelligence, the internet of things, and an imminent takeover by robots, our societies have in many ways not moved on from the practices of the past, when the need for oil drove Europeans to carve up the Middle East.

The consequences of the transition will not just be economic – they will also be environmental. Extracting and processing these minerals requires large amounts of energy and pollutes local ecosystems. This fact is often hidden in debates about a transition to renewable energy and electric cars. Every product we use has contributed to global emissions, both through extraction of raw materials and manufacturing. Mining is estimated to contribute around ten percent to global carbon emissions. It is an unavoidable industry: to make steel we need coal, and to make batteries we need lithium, the world’s lightest metal with the highest electrochemical potential. The electric vehicle (EV) revolution is green at its core but there are many choices to be made in the way it is executed that will affect both the environment and global power dynamics.

Green energy evangelists tend to assume that a fossil-free future will be without conflicts. Bill McKibben, a well-known activist, wrote that ‘if the world ran on sun, it wouldn’t fight over oil’.3 This idea was repeated by Tony Fadell, the creator of the iPod, who told Wired magazine: ‘If we have energy storage technologies that are very cheap and very efficient, then we’re going to see wars stop, because no one is going to be fighting over oil reserves anymore.’4 Yet the demand for raw materials to build our clean energy infrastructure is as geopolitical as the age of oil. Countries that are able to become a part of these new clean energy supply chains will benefit, while those who cannot will suffer.

The transition to clean energy has already deepened geopolitical tensions between the West and China. Over the past decade, China has obtained a dominant position in both clean energy technologies such as batteries and solar cells and the raw material supply chains that underpin them. While many of these minerals are not rare in the earth’s crust, they are mostly processed in China into usable forms. It’s likely the lithium and cobalt in my car were mined in Australia and the Congo yet processed in China and turned into a battery by a Chinese company.* The electricity was probably generated from solar panels produced by a Chinese company from polysilicon made using coal-fired power in Xinjiang province. And the copper was almost certainly refined in one of China’s hundreds of copper smelters. Without China, we cannot move towards a green, battery-powered future. As we move towards greater energy independence, these supply chains remain our greatest vulnerability.

This book tells the story of these supply chains and the characters behind them. The story involves some of the world’s most secretive natural resource companies; private Chinese companies buying up mines in Chile, Australia and Indonesia; and the largest car companies in the world such as Tesla and Volkswagen. My hope is that the book will equip readers to ask the right questions about our transition away from fossil fuels. The resources we need are buried in the earth’s crust; so what environmental and social cost are we willing to bear to extract them? Without scrutiny, abuses will remain hidden behind a veil of corporate ‘greenwash’ from companies further down the supply chain. We are at the beginning of the electric car revolution, which means we have a unique opportunity as consumers to push companies to do the right thing and manage the downsides involved. We shouldn’t be hostile to green technologies but we shouldn’t be naive either. The oil age has left a long scar on the twentieth century. We should make sure that the industries of our green future do much better.

__________

*Analysts at the American brokerage firm Bernstein calculated that for every one percent you want to grow GDP, you must increase mined volumes by two percent.

*In this book, references to ‘the Congo’ in the period from 1964 onwards always refer to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Congo-Kinshasa) rather than Congo-Brazzaville.

1

The Battery Age

‘The spice must flow. The new spice.’

Elon Musk, Tesla CEO1

In late September 2020 Elon Musk strode out onto a stage in the bright California sunlight to address a car park full of Teslas at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in Fremont. Dubbed ‘Battery Day’, the event had been hyped up by Musk for months (he had promised it would be ‘insane’). Due to Covid-19 attendees sat alone behind the steering wheels of bright shiny Model 3 and Model Y cars wearing masks. They greeted Musk with a ripple of discordant honks of their horns, as if they were frustrated commuters stuck in traffic. ‘Well this is a new approach. We’ve got the Tesla drive-in movie theatre basically,’ Musk said.2 The attendees had every reason to be happy: Tesla’s shares had soared during the pandemic, making it the most valuable car company in the world, even though it accounted for only one percent of the global car market. At its current valuation each Tesla car they sat in was worth around $1 million. It was a remarkable turnaround from the last few years, when Tesla had come close to bankruptcy as it struggled to increase production of its Model 3 electric vehicle. Tesla, which had started life as a fast-moving Silicon Valley start-up that made cars for the rich, had become a proper automotive manufacturer in one of the most cut-throat and low-margin businesses in the world. It had succeeded in breaking the logjam that had held electric vehicles up for over a century by creating a product that people actually wanted to buy. Along the way it had created a devoted following of fans who hung on Musk’s every word and tweeted about their Tesla cars.

Battery Day marked the next step in Musk’s life mission (which also included human colonisation of Mars). Strutting the stage in a black T-shirt with a microphone clenched in his hand, Musk outlined Tesla’s plan to cut battery costs in half and produce a $25,000 mass market electric car. Honk! Honk! For all the hype and excitement, the electric car was still too expensive to compete with petrol. It was an ambition reminiscent of Henry Ford’s launch of the Model T car over a hundred years earlier, which had ushered in the motoring age by making cars affordable for the working man. Cars at the time had been luxury items but Ford had been determined to get the price below the average yearly wage. Just as Ford had pioneered the moving assembly line to lower costs, Musk needed to scale up battery production. Tesla would need to increase battery production one-hundred-fold by 2030 – enough to make around twenty million cars a year, he said.

That was just for Tesla. By the time of Battery Day, almost every car company in the world – from General Motors to Volkswagen – had pledged to go electric. And more than twenty countries had also announced future bans on the sale of petrol and diesel vehicles.

Then Musk dropped a bombshell. Tesla had acquired the rights to a 10,000-acre plot in Nevada where it planned to extract lithium, a metal that was the key ingredient for every electric vehicle battery, using simple table salt. There was enough lithium in the US to electrify the entire US vehicle fleet, Musk said. ‘We take a chunk of dirt out of the ground, remove the lithium and then put the chunk of dirt back where it was. It will look pretty much the same as before. It will not look like terrible. It will be nice,’ he explained. ‘There’s so much damn lithium on earth it’s crazy.’3

Yet to meet Tesla’s targets would require four times the amount of lithium that the world currently produced. The International Energy Agency predicted that demand for lithium was set to grow thirty-fold by 2030 and more than a hundred times by 2050. The US produced almost no lithium, cobalt and nickel, and little of the copper needed for charging stations and the electrical grid. The same was true for Europe.

Musk’s lithium venture was not likely to produce any metal for years. Instead, his remarks were designed to jolt the notoriously sleepy mining industry into action. In the audience were executives from the two largest lithium companies in the US. It was reminiscent of remarks a hundred years earlier by Ford’s key lieutenant Charles Sorensen: ‘If others would not provide enough steel for our needs, then we would. It was just as simple as that.’4

In the meantime, Musk would have to rely on the green barons – the companies that controlled the emerging clean energy supply chain. A hundred years ago Ford’s Model T had created fortunes for the early oil drillers and refiners, leading to the creation of the global oil industry and some of the world’s largest companies. Now Musk had kickstarted a similar raw material rush. ‘The spice must flow … the new spice,’ Musk said, referring to the 1965 science fiction novel Dune, which detailed the struggle for control of a planet that produced the spice necessary for space navigation and the extension of life. Now that spice was a small group of metals – lithium, cobalt, copper and nickel.

The battery age had begun.

2

Dashed Hopes: The Troubled History of the EV

‘Electricity is the thing. There are no whirring and grinding gears with their numerous levers to confuse. There is not that almost terrifying uncertain throb and whirr of the powerful combustion engine. There is no water-circulating system to get out of order – no dangerous and evil-smelling gasoline and no noise.’

Thomas Edison1

‘Within a year, I hope, we shall begin the manufacture of an electric automobile. I don’t like to talk about things which are a year ahead, but I am willing to tell you something of my plans.

‘The fact is that Mr. Edison and I have been working for some years on an electric automobile which would be cheap and practicable. Cars have been built for experimental purposes, and we are satisfied now that the way is clear to success. The problem so far has been to build a storage battery of light weight which would operate for long distances without recharging. Mr. Edison has been experimenting with such a battery for some time.’

Henry Ford2

I drove down to collect our electric car on a clear, cold December day, just after the UK’s second lockdown. The roads were busy with the first taste of freedom – a brief opening leading up to Christmas. Car ownership provided a safe way to go out in the pandemic, removing the need to mix with other households. It struck me that the car had returned to its original promise – the ability to go wherever you wanted, when you wanted. It was a concept that had captured American culture and came to define the Western world. I had grown up with it. The electric car now promised all the benefit and none of the guilt that had latterly come to define car ownership. The shift in the UK’s energy mix, and therefore the energy that would power my car, was remarkable. The share of coal in the UK electricity mix had fallen from forty percent in 2013 to two percent. On many days it was zero. We now burned less coal than in 1882, when the first coal-fired power station was built. My car would be charged by energy from the wind and the sun. It was an enticing idea – the thought of driving on a renewable resource.

Before I had got rid of my petrol car, I had taken it into a garage in a narrow street in east London run by Jak, an energetic and entrepreneurial owner. He opened up the bonnet to examine the engine. My cylinders were misfiring, he told me. I gazed at the engine as if it were an exotic animal that was about to go extinct. We were surrounded by the noise and familiar reek of engines. Jak had spent his career fixing engines and it was clear he loved them. ‘Engines are really very simple when you understand them,’ he said. I asked him about electric cars, and he sighed. ‘Electrics are OK but they will have their own drawbacks,’ he said. ‘There are teething problems.’

I was about to find out. On my journey to collect my Tesla, I was accompanied by my father, whose life had been defined by oil. He was born in Kirkuk, in Iraq, where my grandfather worked for the Iraqi Petroleum Company, a consortium of four of the world’s largest oil companies, for many years – staying there after the 1958 revolution by Iraqi officers that overturned the country’s Western-backed monarch. It was an era when Western oil companies dominated the global oil markets and divvied up the Middle East amongst themselves. Such efforts had enabled the rapid growth of car culture in Europe and America. Like my father I had grown up in the era of the car – the growth in distance travelled and car ownership shot up in the second half of the twentieth century. It had been, as researchers from MIT noted in 2001, a ‘golden age’ for mobility.3

We arrived at Thorpe Park, a place I had visited frequently as a child to ride the log flume – but now the theme park was temporarily closed, and Tesla had set up stall instead. Row upon row of bright shiny Teslas that had arrived from California sat in the winter sun. We queued up outside an office to get our keys, which turned out to be two black key cards. The man behind the counter told me the car’s software would cut out temporarily when we left the car park but we were not to worry as we could still drive. His face made clear that any further questions were unnecessary. He pointed to the car park and told me to head off. No one showed us to the car or told us how it worked. ‘Thank you for accelerating the transition to sustainable energy,’ a notice said. My father and I walked out into the cold, found our car and entered with some trepidation. I had to scan a QR code and grapple with the large touch screen, which immediately checked for a software update. I grabbed a young man who was walking by to get his help. I asked where the back windscreen wiper was and he laughed. ‘Teslas don’t have those,’ he said.

Then off I went, silently, as if something was missing. It just started! I was gliding along the road. I was so used to the combustion engine’s presence, its noise and throbbing, that at first I thought I had lost something profound. There was no engine to warm up the car or melt the frost. Instead, a woman’s voice guided me through every turn at the roundabout as I scrolled through the large screen searching for a radio station. For a moment I felt as if I was in an upsized golf cart. But as I turned onto the motorway, I soon forgot those thoughts as the car accelerated frighteningly quickly. I realised the American inventor Edison had been right: electricity is the thing. In 1909 Edison had told a friend over lunch: ‘this scheme of combustion in order to get power makes me sick to think of – it is so wasteful.’4

Because of the software included in a Tesla, many writers had started to mourn the passing of the car age. To the writer Matthew Crawford, cars, especially autonomous self-driving ones, would now be nothing more than computers on wheels. Silicon Valley executives ‘seek to make everything idiot-proof, and pursue this by treating us like idiots’.5 In the New Yorker the writer Bruce McCall, a former advertising executive for the car industry, sounded a similar elegy, writing that he had been lucky to have experienced the ‘romance of driving at its fervent peak’.6 ‘Mine was close to the last generation of car nuts,’ he wrote. ‘Since my time working on car ads, automobiles have morphed into emotionally neutered large appliances, competing more on entertainment than performance, dulling risk with technological interventions that replace the need for judgment. This is good for safety and inarguably progressive – but it’s heading into a tomorrow where we’ll all be guests in our automated, self-driving blobs.’

But to me these writers missed a critical point: the importance of an electric car was not in the electronics, or the software, as fancy as these were. The exciting development was the battery – the thousands of cells lying at the bottom of the car, wrapped in an aluminium case. It was improvements in the battery that had made the electric car possible. It meant that I, and not a tech billionaire, could go electric and drive two hundred miles without worrying. It marked a hard-won victory over the internal combustion engine.

*

In the summer of 1896 Thomas Edison, the man responsible for the first workable lightbulb and the phonograph, was dubbed the ‘Wizard of Menlo Park’. Inventions seemed to flow uninhibited from his brain on an almost daily basis. On a single day when he was just over forty, Edison had noted down a hundred and twelve ideas for possible devices, including a mechanical cotton picker and an electrical piano as well as ‘Ink for the Blind’.

Henry Ford, in contrast, was an unknown engineer from Michigan who worked at the Edison Illuminating Company in Detroit, part of Edison’s electricity empire, helping to maintain the steam engines that generated electricity. In his spare time, Ford worked on his first petrol car, the Quadricycle, in a workshop outside his home. The prototype, however, had not received a positive reception in Ford’s hometown after he rolled it out one rainy morning in June 1896. The vehicle had a two-cylinder, four-horsepower engine under its bench seat and a tiller for steering. But as he drove his four-wheeled motorised car around the streets of Detroit people thought it was a nuisance, ‘for it made a racket and scared horses. Also it blocked traffic.’7

Ford idolised Edison and, at a conference held at the Oriental Hotel in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn, that summer, Ford managed to take some pictures of the grand man sleeping on the hotel’s veranda. The meeting had brought together electrical technicians and executives from all the Edison electrical companies across the US. On 12 August, the third day of the conference, Ford got a lucky break when he managed to attend the conference banquet with some of the leading players in America’s electricity industry. Edison was the honoured guest. The delegates discussed electric cars and storage batteries but then, during a lull in the conversation, Ford’s boss from Detroit announced that ‘this young fellow here has made a gas car.’8 The mood in the room must have turned – it was a conference about electricity after all. Someone at the table asked Ford for more details, whereupon he began to explain his petrol-powered Quadricycle, which he had spent three years building. Edison, who had bad hearing, strained to listen, so Ford moved closer to him. Edison continued to prod Ford with questions, so Ford sketched out the details for him on the back of a menu card. After he had finished, Edison brought his fist down on the table with a loud bang and told him to keep up the good work. Edison’s encouragement meant the world to the young Ford; the next day Edison invited him to take the same train back to the city with him. Ford returned to Detroit full of enthusiasm to get going on making a second model of his car.

Despite his encouraging words to Ford, however, Edison himself still believed in the superior potential of electric vehicles. He had previously built a three-wheeled electric car in 1895.9 But he had found batteries wanting. Edison had called the existing rechargeable lead-acid battery a ‘catch-penny, a sensation, a mechanism for swindling by stocking companies’.10 By 1900, Edison could not resist the lure of inventing a better battery himself. So it was that in May of that year, at the beginning of an optimistic new century, Edison stood on a street on the West side of Manhattan,