"Volt Rush
By Henry Sanderson
Oneworld, 275 pages, $27.95
Among the pandemic's many disruptions, in early 2021 auto makers cut production because of a shortage of semiconductors. Car manufacturers today already spend more money on silicon than on steel, and that goes double for the makers of electric vehicles (EVs). The mainstream arrival of EVs owes as much to silicon, for power control, as it does to lithium, for energy storage. But the cost of automotive lithium batteries dwarfs the costs for silicon and steel combined. If EV aspirations are fulfilled, the next automotive supply-chain disruption -- and there's always going to be a next time -- will center on battery materials.
The aspirations are frenzied. A growing list of governments have already implemented, or plan to implement, bans on gasoline-powered cars. The world is going to build a lot of EVs, and to help make that possible, companies in Europe and the U.S. are furiously building dozens of gigafactories -- Elon Musk's term for massive EV battery factories. The upshot is that every $2 billion gigafactory will, over a decade of operation, purchase some $20 billion of battery minerals and materials. One might reasonably wonder: Purchase from where? And who benefits?
Now comes "Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green," from the British journalist Henry Sanderson, to illuminate the shadowy global supply chain of materials and mining needed for batteries. Despite its subtitle, "Volt Rush" is a delicious journey of discovery that focuses mainly on the winners -- the people, companies and countries that profit from the current EV mania. Spoiler alert: The battery-money gusher is not flowing into, but out of, Europe and the U.S., with the largest share going to Chinese refineries and upstream from there to mines -- some in China, and most in places as far ranging as the Congo, Chile and Indonesia, with many owned by China.
"Volt Rush" isn't about technology, other than a brief overview of the inventions making EVs possible. (There's an obligatory chapter on recycling, with unpersuasive "could if" and "would if" ideas, and another on the fantasy of near-term ocean-floor mining.) Rather, in the tradition of true investigative reporting, Mr. Sanderson travels through jungles and to mines and factories in pursuit of what makes "Volt Rush" compelling: stories about the people who figured out where and how to build the mines, and the staggering wealth these people quietly accumulated as a result.
"Volt Rush" lucidly traces the people and policies that led to China's remarkable dominance in the global battery-materials ecosystem. (China, we note, has a larger market share in energy minerals than Saudi Arabia has in oil.) Also covered by Mr. Sanderson are the late-to-the-party epiphanies of many auto makers regarding the darker side of global mining, including one schadenfreude-class story about Volkswagen's attempt to manage the cobalt supply chain.
The chapter "Dirty Nickel" begins with a statement from the ever-quotable Mr. Musk: "Please mine more nickel." It then features one of Mr. Sanderson's many environmental stories: In 2020, an accident at Russia's Norilsk nickel mine -- a key supplier to a Swedish battery factory -- led to two million gallons of diesel fuel being spilled into the Siberian ecosystem. The author quotes the marketing director for the Russian oligarch who owns the largest share of Norilsk: "Batteries are the best thing that's happened to nickel in 100 years."
Similarly, Mr. Sanderson describes an investigation into a China-owned nickel mine in Papua New Guinea that documented wanton, destructive disposal of massive amounts of mine waste, none of which "stopped [the mine] from operating and delivering nickel to China." It bears noting that adding more nickel in the battery chemistry is one way to reduce the use of cobalt, shifting hypertrophied demands from one mineral to another. Meanwhile, even though the share of cobalt in the battery supply chain is shrinking, absolute demand is still soaring.
Among the questions Mr. Sanderson leaves unanswered: Whether the world can mine enough materials for our current EV ambitions, and what the energy used in those massive mineral supply chains does to claims of carbon-free EVs. On the former, building green machines (EVs, windmills, solar) requires an unprecedented 400% to 8,000% increase in the global supply of a dozen minerals, including nickel, copper, cobalt, lithium and rare earths. The world will need hundreds of new mines, each taking a decade or two to build. Just trying to meet that kind of growth will stress environmental ecosystems and fragile governments, and trigger unprecedented mineral-price inflation.
And while Mr. Sanderson takes on faith that EVs are a lynchpin for zero-carbon nirvana, he does note, if only in passing, that a Chinese lithium refinery uses about two tons of coal to produce a ton of refined lithium. Numerous studies, including from VW and Volvo, reveal that emissions from the energy used to acquire and process lithium along with other battery materials means that an EV's carbon footprint is bigger than a gasoline car until you've drive at least 50,000 miles.
"Volt Rush," nonetheless, is a valuable expose of heretofore unknown characters in, and the characteristics of, the EV supply chain. It's a vital contribution to the emerging literature that's pulling back the curtain on energy realities.
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Mr. Mills is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He is a partner at Montrose Lane, an energy-tech venture fund, and the author of "The Cloud Revolution."” [1]
1. REVIEW --- Books: Batteries Sold Separately
Mills, Mark P.
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 10 Sep 2022: C.9.
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