“China decided that minerals and metals were going to play a big role in the future of energy and defense and began to make investments across supply chains” for raw materials, processing, and battery manufacturing, he said. That is the product of Beijing’s deliberate, decadeslong effort to build up its own industry, Bazilian added. Mining for graphite, a key component in batteries, is overwhelmingly done in China. Some 70 percent of the world’s cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the mining industry has a dirty underbelly of human rights abuses and reports of child labor. Indonesia, for instance, produces 40 percent of the world’s nickel while lithium-sometimes dubbed “white gold”-is largely sourced from Australia and the so-called lithium triangle in South America. The bulk of these raw materials can be found in a handful of mineral-rich nations. The World Bank has projected that billions of tons of minerals could be necessary to supply clean energy technology by 2050. To power the energy transition in the coming decades, these battery inputs will become even more pivotal. That explosion was largely driven by China, where roughly one-quarter of all new car sales were electric or hybrid. Global sales of electric vehicles doubled in 2021 from the previous year, according to the International Energy Agency. “Any really serious move towards decarbonizing energy and transportation systems is going to require a massive increase in the amount of battery capacity that’s out there,” said Cullen Hendrix, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.Īs demand for electric vehicles skyrockets, nations have been scrambling to tap the riches in the ground for these batteries. “That happens to feed into one of the only roughly bipartisan areas of agreement in the United States, which is that we’re in some sort of economic war with China.”įorged from critical minerals-including lithium, nickel, cobalt, and manganese-lithium-ion batteries can hold considerable energy, making them crucial to efforts to swap out fossil fuels for cleaner alternatives. “China is the dominant player across the supply chain for almost all of these critical minerals,” said Morgan Bazilian, director of the Payne Institute at the Colorado School of Mines and a former lead energy specialist at the World Bank. That dominance has transformed those powerful batteries-and the key metals they comprise of-into a thorny geopolitical flash point during a period of heightened tensions. After a decadeslong push, Beijing wields considerable control over supply chains for lithium-ion batteries, which are critical to everything from electric cars to smartphones. In the quest for the clean energy revolution, the United States is one of many countries that have ramped up investment in electric vehicles manufacturing and renewable energy sources to power the shift away from fossil fuels.īut that is an industry that has already been staked out by another power: China.
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