Aminatou Haidar on Gran Canaria in 2017

  As for LFP, it was on the rise everywhere. Jose W. Fernandez, the Biden administration’s undersecretary of state for economic growth, energy, and the environment, told me that “LFP battery chemistries are expected to comprise a forty-two percent share of cell demand by 2030…. Phosphate refining is expected to be a bottleneck in the future, as only three percent of total phosphate product supply is currently suitable for lithium-ion battery applications, given the refinement qualifications.”

  And, of course, most of that phosphate was refined in one place: China.

  Chapter 45

  Next Energy

  LFP batteries were a cheaper, safer alternative to their LCO and NMC cousins, but they were less powerful. This was a tricky problem that, in the early 2020s, was being solved by China. Historically, advancements in battery technology had been made in Europe, in the U.S., and in Japan, but suddenly it was Chinese scientists who were leaps and bounds ahead of their colleagues elsewhere. The massive research departments at firms like CATL and BYD were the size of entire battery-research communities in Western nations. CATL’s R&D department was said to have eighteen thousand people in its employ, a number that equaled or even surpassed the total number of battery scientists in Germany, a country endeavoring to lead the European electric-car market; BYD, which was also a car company, employed a staggering 110,000 researchers in 2024. “We are not leading in materials innovation,” Philipp Wunderlich, a battery technology specialist with the consulting firm Accenture, lamented at a 2023 industry gathering in Stuttgart.

  By 2024, the most prominent leap in LFP battery technology had been made by Wang Chuanfu’s giant car-and-battery company, BYD, which had created a new form of battery. When BYD announced its innovation, which it called Blade, on its website in 2023, it explained that it had invested €1.3 billion (just shy of $1.4 billion in U.S. dollars) to develop the factory that made Blade. A slickly produced video showed a huge facility with fully automated production lines and a plethora of robot arms.

  The video claimed that BYD was “setting a new era for the EV industry.” The battery, which had been designed to maximize space in the electric car, featured very thin cells placed in a flat, bladelike fashion.

  The website claimed that the battery was safe and that even when punctured with a nail, it didn’t emit smoke, heat, or flame. Clearly, such batteries would have definite advantages in electric vehicles, and they would be safer in the event of a crash. They were also lighter and allowed more cells to be aligned in an aluminum honeycomb structure. It wasn’t just car batteries either: By the 2020s, BYD had over ten thousand engineers and some one hundred thousand employees working on what it called “the fruit chain.” Someone’s sly sense of humor masked a profitable “side hustle” for BYD, as The Wall Street Journal put it. The company was making around 30 percent of Apple’s signature tablets: iPads. In November 2024, Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, told reporters that the company “could not do what we do” without Chinese suppliers like BYD.

  By 2024, too, BYD had built not only its own manufactory town but also its own ship, the BYD Explorer, a bulk carrier that allowed it to transport cars. In the previous two years, BYD had increased its car sales by one million vehicles. The vehicles were selling in Europe, but Trump-era tariffs on Chinese cars, which the Biden administration had retained, meant that it was uneconomical to sell them in the U.S. The New York Times called BYD a “Tesla killer,” and even Elon Musk admitted that without tariffs, BYD would outcompete his firm. According to Bloomberg, Wang was worth almost $19 billion that year, making him the 110th-richest man in the world. Long gone was the workshop in Buji, when BYD’s initials stood for nothing and human beings were putting batteries together by hand.

  Early in 2024, BYD announced that it would be releasing an even more powerful version of its Blade battery that year. The latest Blade could give its vehicles a range of one thousand kilometers. It was even lighter and took up even less space. That year, Bloomberg mused that the CEO might be “China’s version of Henry Ford.”

  * * *

  In June 2023, I visited Novi, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, and Mujeeb Ijaz’s firm, Our Next Energy. ONE, as everyone called it, was focusing on an LFP-powered future. Detroit has long been the headquarters of the American auto industry, and the U.S. government was betting that companies in the area would be able to spearhead a new electric-vehicle revolution. ONE, which was producing several different types of flat batteries, with cells arranged in aluminum casing, had some of the most interesting new products to show in Michigan and elsewhere in the U.S.

  ONE had been coming up with impressive results, despite not having the heft of a BYD or a CATL. One of its batteries, code-named Gemini, was incredibly powerful, so much so that Ijaz was claiming it could power a vehicle over six hundred miles without recharging, finally putting an end to questions about “range anxiety.” It paired LFP technology with an anode-free range-extender cell; the lithium coating on the battery’s current collector formed an anode without a negative electrode, the graphite part of the battery that Akira Yoshino discovered back in the 1980s.

  In 2024, the firm brought a BMW iX, fitted with one of its Gemini batteries, to Los Angeles for what is known as a Worldwide Harmonized Light Vehicles Test Procedure (WLTP) evaluation. The wheels on the car spun arms on a machine that simulated the resistance of everyday driving. Engineers nervously watched the computers as the distance that the car drove slowly ticked up. After a few hours, the counter ticked past six hundred miles. “That SUV traveled six hundred and eight miles on a single charge,” Ijaz said proudly at the end. “I’m so excited about that.”

  Ijaz, a mustachioed auto-industry veteran with smiling eyes and a penchant for sleeveless fleeces, is the son of two Virginia Tech physics professors who came to the U.S. from Pakistan. ONE was not his first electric-car venture: At college in the 1980s, he built the power train for a solar-powered car project. He went on to work for Ford until he joined A123, the ill-fated battery start-up, where he ran the company’s automotive business. He spent some time in China when the firm was sold to a Chinese auto-parts company, and he saw firsthand how A123’s technology was being openly copied by its Chinese suppliers, including one that had been making bedsheets prior to acquiring the U.S. company’s battery blueprints.

  When he returned to the U.S., Ijaz was hired by Apple to work on a secretive project that entailed designing a car, which never came to fruition (he doesn’t like to speak about it). He came up with the idea for ONE during the COVID pandemic, while he was in lockdown with his family. He chose LFP as his cathode material, he explained, after studying the supply chains for cobalt and nickel and hearing about Tesla’s battery fires, which he thought were only going to become more common as more and more people bought the vehicles. Ijaz wanted to “push limits,” he said. “There are three key things for our company: double the range of EVs, avoid nickel and cobalt, and establish a North American supply chain.”

  In the long term, new technologies like LFP could have a dramatic effect on demand for cobalt, because a large percentage of global cobalt demand comes from electric vehicles. But Ijaz told me there was no immediate worry on the part of cobalt producers. Cobalt would remain key for things like small electronics—cell phones, computers, and portable music players. “You know, the world market of consumer electronic devices, they must use cobalt,” he said. Batteries like LFP were just not powerful enough at a small size to warrant ditching cobalt. “There’s no voltage option to get away from cobalt,” he said.

  Shirley Meng, the materials scientist who now heads a division at the Argonne National Laboratory, told me that it was a matter of science. “Cobalt matter has really nice packing density,” she explained. “With a smaller volume, we can deliver more energy. For mobile devices, lithium cobalt oxide is still desired.” The issue with cobalt was the way it was extracted and shipped around the world, she said. “I think cobalt will still play a role, but hopefully with a much more stable supply chain.”

  Despite the bad press that the mineral has been getting, it remains popular for energy storage. In 2023, 93 percent of cobalt’s demand growth came from batteries, which were in demand for electric vehicles, especially in the U.S. and Europe, where nickel-manganese-cobalt batteries were the standard.

  And even if cobalt were to be removed from all batteries, Congo still has huge reserves of other metals that are used to store power. In fact, experts said that beneath the town of Manono, in northern Katanga, Congo has one of the largest reserves of lithium in the entire world.

  In 2016, AVZ, an Australian mining firm, had acquired the exploration permits for Manono, but under Félix Antoine Tshisekedi Tshilombo, the Congolese government had blocked them in a series of backroom deals that seemed to benefit only a handful of figures who were close to the president, a powerful Chinese businessman, and the Chinese mining behemoth Zijin Mining. When I visited Manono, in 2022, the project was stymied, and the town was suffering economically. In 2024, Graeme Johnston, AVZ’s technical director, told me that the Chinese firms were “a bunch of gangsters” trying to wrest control of the Manono lithium concession. “We are facing a concerted and well-funded disinformation campaign in the DRC paid for by our Chinese mates,” he said. The fate of the mine should be of global concern, he added. “Since this deposit could supply twenty percent of the global lithium supply, it is logical to assume that those who end up with Manono will be able to control the world’s lithium price.”

  Later that year, KoBold, the Gates-and-Bezos-funded U.S. mining firm, visited Manono. Someone captured photographs of KoBold executives in the town’s airport and posted them to the social media site X, and the community of AVZ watchers were intrigued. It turned out they were in exploratory talks to buy AVZ’s share in the mine; the Australian miner had effectively been shut out of the country. “It is an amazing deposit and it would be an amazing opportunity for KoBold,” Jennifer Fendrick, the director of public policy at KoBold, told me. She said that the company did not want to repeat the extractive mentality of prior generations of foreign companies. “The immorality of working in Congo only comes into play if you are part of adding to the cycle of killing and theft. It’s not immoral if you are part of electrifying a village, if you are part of doing positive things, then that is a different story.” In May 2025, KoBold would announce that it was buying the license to mine lithium in Manono from AVZ, although the actual exportation of the metal would have to wait until a Chinese company finished a proposed highway to the town.

  * * *

  At ONE’s headquarters, screens flashed a nighttime capture of planet Earth as seen from space. Some places were lit up with electric light, while others were shrouded in darkness. ONE’s logo was emblazoned across the photograph. “You see the dark spaces?” Ijaz had said to one of his employees. “That’s ONE’s mission: We want to bring light to those dark spaces.”

  ONE had been a beneficiary of the Biden era. Among the administration’s aims was the goal of growing the EV market: Biden had spoken about wanting half of new U.S. vehicles to be electric by 2030. And he wanted to spur battery production and innovation across the country. The way he planned to do this was by massively increasing spending and by ring-fencing China’s supremacy in the supply chain. “We are now seeing the ability for one nation to use its dominance in critical minerals to exert leverage over other nations play out,” Undersecretary Jose W. Fernandez told me. “We want to ensure that the United States and its partners and allies don’t face a similar vulnerability.”

  In August 2022, the president signed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a hefty piece of legislation that stretched over 274 pages. The act earmarked just shy of $370 billion for investment in renewables. It extended tax credits for electric vehicles and provided “grants for domestic production of efficient hybrid, plug-in electric hybrid, plug-in electric drive, and hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles.”

  The legislation was also designed to protect the U.S. supply chain. It only provided credits for vehicles that were produced in the U.S. or in countries with which the U.S. had a free-trade agreement; vehicles that originated in a “foreign entity of concern” were excluded. It went without saying that the foreign entity of most concern was China.

  Administration officials including Amos Hochstein also lobbied to get sanctions on Dan Gertler lifted. The logic for this was explained to me one evening in Washington by a lawyer who was involved in advising the U.S. government on critical minerals policy: “People think that you need someone like Gertler in there, to counter the Chinese.” I asked what special skills Gertler had. “He’s got the experience, and he’s tough. Americans aren’t so tough anymore.” Sanctions on Gertler, however, were not lifted during Biden’s presidency.

  The authors of the IRA were keenly aware that China controlled the refining of cobalt and other critical metals. Companies like Chen Xuehua’s Huayou, the parent company of CDM, had poured money into refineries, where raw material from the mines is purified into chemicals that are suitable for batteries. Often, this is achieved through dirty, pollutive processes, and since the era of Deng Xiaoping, the U.S. and Europe have been happy for Chinese firms to do this work.

  The year after the IRA was signed, as if to underline the concerns that had led to the bill, the Chinese government announced export controls on gallium and germanium, two rare earths used in solar cells and fiber optics. China controls the market for these metals (60 percent of the world’s gallium, and almost 90 percent of the world’s germanium is produced there). It argued that the materials could be used for military applications and thus had to be exported under a different set of regulations than they had been before. Then Beijing announced new restrictions on graphite, the material used in the anodes of lithium-ion batteries. As an analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, put it: “China is leveraging its dominance of the global critical metals and raw materials supply chain to respond to expanded economic security policies in the West.”

  In 2022, China was the largest producer of refined cobalt, creating 76.1 percent of the world’s supply. And despite Europe and the U.S.’s “expanded economic security policies,” China was growing its refining capacity: In 2023, it would create 78.5 percent of the world’s refined cobalt. When I asked about what the U.S. needed to do to catch up, Fernandez, the undersecretary, listed the development of “processing capabilities for critical minerals” first. They are, he insisted, “particularly concentrated and need to be more diversified.”

  In 2024, when Trump was reelected, he promised to do away with the IRA. (By the time of Trump’s reascendance, many IRA-funded projects were hampered or paused due to higher-than-expected costs, even as Washington was abuzz with a sense of urgency to do something about the critical-metals gap with Beijing.) In his 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Trump killed electric vehicle credits, leading to a very public spat with an erstwhile ally, Elon Musk. Biden-style encouragement-through-investment seemed to be dead in the water.

  * * *

  All this political flip-flopping is bad for the development of the U.S. battery industry. By 2023, ONE was three years old and had raised $325.6 million from investors. It was also a recipient of IRA funding, because its goal was to create batteries that were compliant with the act. That year, too, the firm had announced it would put $1.6 billion into building a factory in Michigan. ONE looked like it might be able to compete with Chinese firms on some levels. But two years later, under Trump, the company’s future would be anything but certain.

  For U.S. firms, especially start-ups like ONE, it was notable that the IRA had created credits that were good for ten years. A problem with European Union legislation, one I witnessed when I visited automakers like Tesla and Stellantis (the parent company of GM, Citroën, and Fiat), was that it was often unclear, shifting, and mutable, unlike legislation in China, which had clearly set and defined goals. In 2024, officials at Stellantis seemed unsure about which credits applied to their vehicles. The U.S. act, Fernandez told me, “provides ten-plus years of policy certainty through clean-energy tax credits.” The point of this was “so companies can think big and bold and pursue long-term projects.” But of course, Trump’s new administration would reinject massive levels of uncertainty into the system.

  Mick Brown, of AVZ, surveys the Roche Dure mine at Manono in 2022.

  Though Ijaz thought the renewed focus on the U.S. battery industry was important, he also believed that China was already several steps, if not several thousand paces, ahead of the U.S. “They have innovated and invested in energy storage for twenty years in a way like no other country has,” he told me. “And their leaders now, I would say top scientists, top capability, they invest in them. And there is also a lot of clear technical know-how and leadership. It’s absolutely clear in my mind that we have a very long and difficult journey ahead to try to out-innovate and industrialize.”

  Chapter 46

  Red Seas

  Pertamina is a state-run oil-and-gas firm that has its origins in Royal Dutch Shell. The company was born when Shell was nationalized in Indonesia in 1957. During the Suharto dictatorship, Pertamina was infamous for corruption, a little like Gécamines under Mobutu. According to the historian Adrian Vickers, “through Pertamina, Suharto, and other members of the power group, had ready access to an ongoing source of funding, which meant that they were not accountable. They ran this cash cow into the ground.”