![]() ![]() The reliance on a single raw material is nothing new, of course: The auto industry owes its very existence to pumping crude oil out of the earth. “In the next 10 years, it will be everything.” “If you want to be king of the world in the next 10 years, you have to have cobalt,” says Jean-Luc Kahamba Kukenge, deputy general manager of the Congolese mine Commus Global, which is owned by the China’s Zijin Mining Group, when I meet him in Kolwezi. On the ground in Congo, the pressure to produce cobalt has reached a fever pitch. Demand for cobalt for lithium-ion batteries alone could triple by 2025, and then double again, reaching about 357,000 tons a year by 2030-nearly seven times the current level, according to the London-based cobalt-trading company Darton Commodities. That means the spike in cobalt may have only just begun. Miners pulling up a bag of cobalt inside the Kasulo mine near Kolwezi in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And Volkswagen aims to have one-quarter of its production devoted to electric vehicles by 2025. General Motors, for example, says it is planning for an all-electric future. As many governments around the world-if not the one in Washington, D.C.-begin rolling out their climate-change targets to curb carbon emissions, so automakers are hugely ramping up production of electric vehicles. ![]() The global transition to renewables-the biggest energy shift in a century-could depend in good measure on how readily cobalt will be available over the next several years, and how expensive it will be to produce and refine. Without it, our digital lives-at least for the moment-would be unable to function as they do.Īnd yet, as valuable as cobalt is today, its crucial role is only now coming into focus. Cobalt provides a stability and high energy density that allows batteries to operate safely and for longer periods. That soaring appetite for cobalt is a product of today’s device-driven tech economy: The metal is a key component in the lithium-ion batteries that power countless millions of smartphones, computers, and tablets. It’s more difficult still for diggers living in poverty, like Lukasa, to understand a surge in demand for the mineral that has sent the price of cobalt on commodities markets rocketing up some 400%, from about $10 a pound in 2016 to a peak of about $44 in April. But that business is hard to fathom for those living near Kolwezi, the hardscrabble center of the cobalt industry in Congo. Lukasa has, he says, recently begun to grasp that his cobalt mining earnings are a pittance compared with the sums that traders make selling it on the world market. With a hint of pride he says, “On good days I can earn 15,000 francs.” That adds up to about $9.įrom his vantage point in one of the poorest countries in the world, Lukasa has little awareness that a multibillion-dollar scramble is underway for the grayish metal he digs out of the ground some 300 days a year. ![]() Lukasa is wearing a T-shirt with “Prada” written on the front and sitting under a shade tree in his village on a recent Sunday, his one day off, as he explains his routine. “I sell it to Chinese people,” he says, referring to the buyers from Chinese commodity trading companies who dominate the market in the area. He hoists the load, which can weigh up to 22 pounds, on his back and lugs it for an hour by foot to a trading depot. ( Fortune is withholding the name of the village in order to protect Lukasa and other children.) Once at the mine, Lukasa spends eight hours hacking away in a hole to accumulate chunks of a mineral that is crucial to keeping our modern lives moving: cobalt.īy about 3 p.m., Lukasa has filled a sack with his day’s haul. Then he makes the two-hour walk from his tiny village in the southern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to a government-owned mining site. The slender 15-year-old, with an oval face and piercing stare, slips out of his family’s mud-brick home before dawn six days a week. MOST OF HIS NEIGHBORS are still sound asleep at 5 a.m., when Lukasa rises to begin his 12-hour workday. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |