“Cobalt Red” shines a light on how important cobalt from the Democratic Republic of the Congo is for our gadgets and electric cars. It talks about the journey of batteries from their start in the 1970s to powering today’s tech world. But, it also shows the dark side of getting cobalt, where people and nature in the Congo suffer because of the world’s demand. The book makes us think about the cost of our modern conveniences and the need for change.
The world’s reliance on fossil fuels is mirrored today by the critical importance of cobalt, primarily mined in Kolwezi, within the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Copper Belt. This region is pivotal due to its vast reserves of cobalt, essential for the batteries powering our smartphones, laptops, and electric vehicles. The unique geological formation spans from Kolwezi to northern Zambia, containing not only a significant portion of the world’s cobalt but also copper, marking it as a site of immense mineral wealth.
Historically, the Congo has been a treasure trove of resources, sought after with each wave of industrial and technological advancement, yet its people have seen little benefit from this wealth. Instead, they have often been subjected to exploitation and suffering amidst the global demand for these resources. Today, the demand for cobalt is surging, driven by the device-driven economy and the shift towards renewable energy sources, with electric vehicles at the forefront.
Kolwezi, despite its resource richness, is far from a prosperous town. It stands as a testament to the destructive impact of the global cobalt demand, where environmental degradation and human suffering are widespread. The mining industry here is marked by corruption, poor governance, and a lack of accountability from the top of the supply chain down to the local level. Multinational corporations and foreign governments benefit from the resources, while the local populace endures poverty, labor abuses, and environmental harm.
The narrative of cobalt mining in the Congo is a complex web of exploitation, with implications for global technology and energy markets. It underscores the pressing need for ethical sourcing and corporate responsibility in the face of growing demand for critical minerals like cobalt. The path forward requires acknowledging the realities of mining conditions in the Congo and implementing solutions that address the root causes of exploitation and environmental damage.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is a vast and diverse country at the heart of Africa, rich in natural beauty and resources. Its landscape spans from dense tropical rainforests, second only to the Amazon in size, to rugged mountains and sprawling savannas. The country’s major cities vary from Kinshasa, a bustling megacity on the Congo River’s banks, to Mbuji-Mayi with the world’s largest diamond deposit, and Lubumbashi at the southeastern end, an administrative center for mining provinces. The Congo River, the world’s deepest, plays a central role in the country’s geography and history, draining a region as large as India and crossing the equator twice.
Historically, the southeastern corner, Katanga, has been pivotal due to its immense mineral wealth, particularly in cobalt and copper, essential for modern technology and electric vehicles. However, despite this wealth, the DRC faces profound challenges. It ranks low on the Human Development Index, with a significant portion of its population living below the poverty line, suffering from food insecurity, and having limited access to education and healthcare. The exploitation of the DRC’s resources has often not benefited its people, leading to a history of conflict and struggle over control of these valuable minerals. The situation underscores the complex relationship between natural riches and socio-economic development, highlighting the need for sustainable and equitable use of resources to improve the lives of the Congolese people.
FROM TOXIC PIT TO SHINY SHOWROOM
The global cobalt supply chain is the mechanism that transforms the dollar-a-day wages of the Congo’s artisanal miners into multibillion-dollar quarterly profits at the top of the chain. Although the two ends of the chain could not be more disconnected in terms of human and economic valuation, they are nevertheless linked through a complicated set of formal and informal relationships. The nexus of these links resides in a shadow economy at the bottom of the mining industry that flows inevitably into the formal supply chain. This merging of informal with formal, artisanal with industrial, is the most important aspect of the cobalt supply chain to understand. It is, despite claims to the contrary, all but impossible to isolate artisanal cobalt from industrial production.
Opposite is a rough sketch of what the global cobalt supply chain looks like. The links inside the box indicate points in which cobalt from various sources can be mixed.
Artisanal miners occupy the base of the chain. Known locally as creuseurs (“diggers”), they use rudimentary tools to dig in pits, trenches, and tunnels to find an ore called heterogenite, which contains copper, nickel, cobalt, and sometimes uranium. The Congo’s artisanal mining sector is regulated by a government agency called SAEMAPE, which until 2017 was called SAESSCAM.
SAEMAPE has designated fewer than one hundred sites across the Copper Belt in which artisanal mining is authorized to take place, called Zones d’Exploitation Artisanale (ZEAs). The small number of ZEAs is woefully insufficient to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of people who try to earn a living by digging for cobalt. As a result, artisanal miners dig in hundreds of unauthorized mining areas spread across the Copper Belt. Many of these sites are located right next to industrial mining operations since the diggers know there is likely to be valuable ore under the ground. Artisanal mining also takes place directly on many industrial mining sites, even though it is forbidden under Congolese law.
Artisanal cobalt feeds into the formal supply chain via an informal ecosystem of négociants (traders) and comptoirs (depots), also known as maisons d’achat (buying houses). These are the fuzzy linkages that serve to launder minerals from artisanal sources into the formal supply chain. Négociants are independent operators who work in and around artisanal sites to purchase cobalt from artisanal miners. They are almost all young Congolese males, and they either pay a fixed price per sack or offer a split of the sales price to the depots. Once the négociants have loaded their hauls onto motorbikes and pickup trucks, they transport the ore to the depots for sale. In some of the larger artisanal mining areas, there are depots located on-site, in which case artisanal miners can sell directly to them.
Depots and buying houses are usually small shacks that advertise with telltale pink tarps and painted names, such as $1,000,000 Depot or Cuivre-Cobalt, or just with a number (555) or the name of the owner (Boss Xi). There are hundreds of depots scattered around Haut-Katanga and Lualaba Provinces. There is no scrutiny at any depots as to the source or conditions under which the ore being purchased was mined. After the depots purchase ore from négociants or artisanal miners, they sell their supply to industrial mining companies and processing facilities. From this point forward, it is impossible to isolate artisanal from industrial production. Although Congolese law stipulates that mineral depots should be registered and operated only by Congolese nationals, almost all depots in Haut-Katanga and Lualaba Provinces are operated by Chinese buyers. Artisanal production accounts for up to 30 percent of all cobalt mined in the DRC, although the number could be even higher, as there is no accurate way to disaggregate artisanal from industrial production.
The formal segment of the supply chain begins with the massive industrial copper-cobalt mines that span the Copper Belt. Some of the mines, such as Tenke Fungurume and Mutanda, are as big as a European capital. The industrial mining operations in the DRC are typically structured as joint ventures between the state-owned mining company, Gécamines, and a foreign mining company. As of my last ground count in November 2021, there were nineteen major industrial copper-cobalt mining complexes operating in Haut-Katanga and Lualaba Provinces, fifteen of which were owned or financed by Chinese mining companies. Most of the Chinese-owned mining sites I visited were secured either by a military force called the FARDC or the elite Republican Guard. Other industrial sites and many informal mining areas are guarded by any array of armed units, including the Congolese National Police, the mining police, private military contractors, and informal militias. These armed security forces are devoted to two tasks: keep prying eyes out, and keep minerals secure.
Prior to export from the DRC, cobalt-containing ores must undergo a preliminary processing stage during which the cobalt is separated from other metals in the ore. Some of this processing takes place at industrial sites, and some of it takes place at dedicated processors in Kolwezi, Likasi, and Lubumbashi. The preliminary processing typically yields either crude cobalt hydroxide or cobalt concentrate. These semi-refined forms of cobalt are loaded onto trucks and driven to seaports in Dar es Salaam and Durban for export to commercial-grade refiners, most of which are in China. In 2021, China produced 75 percent of the world’s refined cobalt. The largest single refiner was Huayou Cobalt with a market share of 22 percent.5 Huayou owns Congo DongFang Mining, one of the largest copper-cobalt mining companies operating in the DRC. The vertical integration of Chinese companies across the cobalt supply chain has accelerated in recent years, solidifying the country’s dominance over the rechargeable battery industry. Although it would seem advantageous for the DRC to refine cobalt to commercial-grade form and control more of the value chain, a senior official at Gécamines explained, “In Congo, we do not have sufficient electricity capacity to refine cobalt.”
Fully refined cobalt is combined with other metals to make cathodes—the positively charged part of a battery. The largest lithium-ion battery manufacturers in the world are CATL and BYD in China; LG Energy Solution, Samsung SDI, and SK Innovation in South Korea; and Panasonic in Japan. In 2021, these six companies produced 86 percent of the world’s lithium-ion rechargeable batteries, with CATL alone holding a one-third global share.6 Most of the cobalt in these batteries originated in the Congo.
COBALT AND THE COPPER BELT
For much of human history, cobalt was little more than a color. As far back as the Persian Empire and the Ming dynasty, cobalt was used to create blue pigments in art and pottery. In the modern era, the element has accrued a range of industrial functions. Cobalt is used in the manufacture of superalloys for turbines and jet engines; as a catalyst for cleaner fuels; in carbides used to make cutting tools; in materials used for dental and bone surgeries; in chemotherapies; and in the cathodes of rechargeable batteries. Given its wide range of uses, the European Union has designated cobalt to be one of twenty “critical” metals and minerals, and the United States has designated cobalt to be a “strategic mineral.” Initiatives to secure reliable supplies of refined cobalt that bypass China’s current monopoly have become matters of considerable geopolitical importance to the U.S. and the EU.
By virtue of geographic fluke, the Central African Copper Belt holds roughly half of the world’s cobalt reserves at an estimated 3.5 million tons.7 Although geographic fluke may be responsible for the massive reserves of cobalt in the Copper Belt, the artisanal mining crisis in the DRC would not be possible unless there were substantial deposits of cobalt at depths shallow enough to be accessible by a shovel. According to Central African geology expert Murray Hitzman, the reason the copper-cobalt deposits in the Copper Belt are so shallow is because they are uniquely found in “sediment hosted stratiform deposits.” This type of deposit indicates that the cobalt-containing ores occur in discrete layers of sedimentary rocks that were initially laid down in water. Such deposits are the only ones with the potential to be pushed upward to the surface by tectonic activity, thereby making them accessible to artisanal miners. The Central African Copper Belt happens to be located on the western shoulder of one of the most spectacular examples in the world of this tectonic activity—the East African Rift.
The East African Rift is a 6,500-kilometer fracture in the earth’s surface that stretches from Jordan to Mozambique; it is caused by three plates pulling apart from each other—the Nubian plate, the Somalian plate, and the Arabian plate. Beginning around 800 million years ago, tectonic activity in the rift caused ocean water to enter an enclosed basin in the Copper Belt region. Most of the ocean water evaporated, but some of the saline fluids circulated into the sediments within the basin and stripped metals from them, including copper and cobalt. At some point between 650 and 500 million years ago, the salt layers began to move upward due to tectonic action, forming salt diapirs—domed rock formations in which a core of rock moves upward by several kilometers to pierce the earth’s surface. A similar process took place along the Gulf Coast of the United States, which made numerous oil and gas fields accessible to drilling.
As a result of the ocean water deposits and subsequent tectonic action, copper-cobalt ores across the Copper Belt are found both at great depths and near the surface. At depths below the level of a fluctuating water table, the copper and cobalt are combined with sulfur in the mineral carrollite, which is the primary source of industrially mined cobalt in the Congo. Closer to the surface, water combines with sulfur to create sulfuric acid, causing ores to “rust.” This weathering turns a sulfide into an oxide. Oxidized cobalt forms cobalt hydroxide in the mineral heterogenite. According to Hitzman, “The cobalt-hydroxide ore bodies in Katanga are unique. They form blocks that can be tens of meters to several kilometers in length floating like raisins in a cake.” Artisanal miners dig tunnels up to sixty meters deep to find these “raisins” of heterogenite. One of the largest known deposits of cobalt raisins is beneath a neighborhood of Kolwezi called Kasulo, a madhouse of tunnel digging that is unlike any place on earth.
The narrative uncovers the critical role of cobalt, sourced primarily from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), in powering the global surge in lithium-ion rechargeable batteries. This demand traces back to the development of these batteries in the 1970s, gaining momentum with the advent of consumer electronics like smartphones and tablets, and later, electric vehicles (EVs), which have significantly driven up cobalt demand. The EV revolution, particularly post-2010 and fueled by the Paris Agreement’s climate goals, envisions a massive shift towards battery-powered transportation, necessitating millions of tons of cobalt. This requirement has plunged numerous Congolese into dangerous mining conditions to meet the global cobalt demand.
Cobalt is crucial for lithium-ion batteries because of its ability to maintain thermal stability and high energy density, ensuring safety and efficiency in devices and EVs. Despite efforts to reduce cobalt dependency due to its limited supply and ethical mining concerns, alternatives still face challenges in matching cobalt’s performance. The cobalt mining in the DRC, therefore, represents a paradox of technological progress shadowed by human and environmental suffering, echoing historical cycles of exploitation in the region. This scenario highlights the ongoing struggle between advancing renewable energy technologies and the ethical sourcing of materials.