The elements of power, p.32
The Elements of Power, page 32
The Lobito Corridor’s future was unclear. But James Story, the U.S. ambassador to Angola, told Reuters that the Trump administration was still committed to developing the Lobito railroad and even that the government, which was cutting spending elsewhere, was continuing with the $550 million loan it had pledged to the project. When KoBold, a U.S. mining firm backed by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, began looking at developing a lithium mine in the southern Congolese town of Manono, officials there imagined the means of egress for the lithium ore would include an extension of the Lobito Corridor. But, still, by the time Trump’s envoy was flying to Congo, little copper and cobalt had left Congo and passed through Angola by rail on its way to the U.S. For the moment, road transportation still ruled.
Chapter 43
The Spice of Life
A wall of earth curls through over fifteen hundred miles of howling dust and scrub on Africa’s left ear. Around it, the vast desert plains of the Western Sahara are empty and flat, though it is occasionally marked by horseshoe dunes that move with the wind like a cast of crabs traversing an ancient seabed. The Berm, as the wall is known, is no natural phenomenon. Built by the Kingdom of Morocco, it is the longest defensive fortification in use today and second only to the Great Wall of China in terms of absolute length. It stretches from an Atlantic peninsula at its southern tip to well inside Morocco’s border at its north end. It is visible from space. Over one hundred thousand Moroccan troops man its barricades, and it is surrounded by land mines and barbed wire.
Amos Hochstein’s trips overseas had concentrated attention on critical minerals in countries like Congo; places like the Western Sahara hardly got a look-in. But inches beneath the contested desert, and sometimes even at its very surface, is phosphate, a resource that the world would soon be clamoring for as it sought cheaper, cobalt-free batteries.
The United Nations considers the Western Sahara to technically be “a non-self-governing territory.” Those who don’t mince their words call it “Africa’s last colony.” On the desert side, a movement called the Polisario Front is fighting a low-intensity war on behalf, it says, of the people who inhabit the region—the Sahrawis. The rebels speak Arabic and Spanish, because their land was originally colonized by Spain. In Spanish, their group’s name stands for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Río de Oro.
The parameters of the war were effectively frozen in 1991, when a ceasefire was agreed to, pending a referendum that never came. Like any war, this conflict affects civilians most of all.
Perhaps the best-known Sahrawi internationally is Aminatou Haidar. She is from Laayoune, the capital city of the occupied part of Western Sahara. Laayoune is a jumble of pinkish concrete that is often racked with demonstrations against Moroccan rule. A slight, birdlike woman in her fifties, Haidar, who has long been advocating for nonviolent resistance, has been beaten, imprisoned, detained, and interrogated by the Moroccan security services since she was a young woman. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, and she has been nicknamed the “Sahrawi Gandhi.”
Haidar is physically frail: After a hunger strike, she acquired a severe calcium deficiency that left her bones brittle and the vertebrae in her back warped. She wears powerful spectacles because her eyesight has been dimmed by the four years she spent blindfolded in a Moroccan jail. When I met her in 2017, Sahrawi activists in Laayoune had just been attacked by the Moroccan police during a demonstration. This was not unusual, according to Haidar. “During the last six months,” she said, “we have registered, I think, eighty-six demonstrations that were stopped or repressed.”
Phosphate was at the center of the lithium-ion battery boom, even though few people seemed to realize it. The essential element itself was also a resource whose scarcity portended an apocalypse: Its supply on our planet is finite. And when it goes, we go too. The science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov put it best back in 1975:
Life can multiply until all the phosphorus is gone and then there is an inexorable halt which nothing can prevent…. We may be able to substitute nuclear power for coal power, and plastics for wood, and yeast for meat, and friendliness for isolation—but for phosphorus there is neither substitute nor replacement.
* * *
John B. Goodenough’s lab at Oxford had been the first to create a battery cathode that contained phosphate. In 1987, Goodenough and another scientist, Arumugam Manthiram, wrote a paper showing that lithium ions could be intercalated at room temperature into a type of compound called a polyanion oxide. The oxide contained iron with tungsten or manganese. No cobalt or nickel was used in the structure.
The two scientists’ attention shifted, and in the early 1990s, they assigned a PhD student named Geeta Ahuja to continue their work. She expanded their investigation to look at other polyanions. Some of them contained the mineral that is found in such abundance beneath the desert at the Western Sahara’s Bou Craa mine—phosphates.
Ahuja’s project was eventually shelved because the scientists at the lab believed that the materials she was investigating weren’t going to be able to produce as high a voltage as the cobalt cathodes Sony had recently brought into production in Japan. But later in the decade, they decided to revisit the subject.
In 1997, Goodenough, along with two other scientists, announced in a paper that they had discovered a material from which could be made “a cathode of good capacity, and it contains inexpensive, environmentally benign elements.” They described this safe and cheap cathode material as “olivine LiFePO4,” but it would soon become known as LFP, or lithium iron phosphate.
Their experimentation, the trio of scientists wrote, “shows this material to be an excellent candidate for the cathode of a low-power, rechargeable lithium battery.” In electric-vehicle terms, this meant that LFP batteries would probably not power a high-spec, top-of-the-line Tesla sports car, but they would be suitable for a city runabout. Cost rather than mileage would give such a car an edge, as LFP batteries were cheap. Automakers—especially those in China’s fledgling car industry—would soon take note.
A couple of decades would pass before such batteries began to be adopted, but in the second half of the 2010s, more and more companies, especially in the electric-vehicle arena, started switching to LFP. Significantly, an LFP patent had not been filed by its inventors in China in 1997, and firms in the country were able to mass-produce the batteries quickly. The batteries would be engineered to become more powerful by companies like BYD and CATL, and China would dominate the manufacturing of the technology.
In 2024, according to the International Energy Agency, LFP cathodes represented around 40 percent of the world’s market share. NMC cathodes, the high-powered ones used in the Chevy Volt and in many Teslas, still retained top billing, at 60 percent. But phosphate batteries were on the rise: In the West, they were touted as safer, cheaper, and less geostrategically complex than their cobalt-containing cousins. In China, their low cost and high safety specs were praised by CEOs like BYD’s Wang Chuanfu.
The scientists in Goodenough’s labs had successfully read the tea leaves. LFP cathodes produced less power than their high-powered cobalt- and nickel-containing counterparts, but they had serious cost benefits. As records show, they anticipated some of the debates around the scarcity of lithium battery materials that only really started to preoccupy battery pioneers, miners, and device manufacturers some two decades later. Their primary motivation, they admitted, had been the cost of materials like cobalt and nickel, which were already expensive to acquire in the 1990s.
* * *
In 1975, the Western Sahara was taken from the Spanish by the Moroccans after an invasion and a series of backroom deals with Francisco Franco, then Spain’s dictator. A deadly war was fought on the territory’s sands, which were mined and strewn with unexploded bomblets. The territory is the last place in Africa that is subject to the UN’s Decolonization Committee, and it remains divided in two by the Berm, which Morocco built to effectively corral the Polisario Front into the most arid and inhospitable corner of the territory. Some two-thirds of the Western Sahara are occupied by Morocco, while a third is controlled by the separatists of the Polisario Front.
The partition’s logic is partially economic, thanks to the region’s store of phosphates. In the Moroccan sector is the Bou Craa mine, which accounts for, by some estimates, just under 10 percent of Morocco’s phosphate production. The mineral is shipped out to sea on a sixty-one-mile conveyor belt that has held the record as the world’s longest since the Spanish completed it in 1972.
The Western Sahara’s drab plateaus are stacked with phosphate because, like Katanga, the region was once the bed of an ancient sea. Over millions of years, dead animals and plants, shark teeth and skeletons, sank to the bottom of the ocean. Through a series of complex interactions with bacteria, this seafloor litter was stripped of its phosphates, which coalesced into rocks that were pushed to the surface of the desert by the shifting of tectonic plates and the collision of continents. A 1970 CIA report on the region pointed out that the phosphate of the Western Sahara is of “a quality comparable to the best grades of other producers,” and that it is “exposed on the surface and can be worked by open-pit mining methods. Thus, although the initial investment requirements are large, operating costs should be low.” The report’s authors suggested that the phosphate exports of the Western Sahara could “nearly equal” those of Morocco within five years.
But the mere presence of phosphates, still a relatively low-cost commodity, doesn’t justify Moroccan expenditures in the territory. For every dirham of profit that Morocco makes from the Western Sahara, it puts in seven. An official at the state-owned phosphate mining concern told me that the kingdom already has huge quantities of phosphate, and that the Western Saharan phosphate makes up less than 10 percent of Morocco’s annual product. In a 2014 speech, the country’s king, Mohammed VI, said that the Western Sahara is seen as a limb without which Morocco, or at least its monarchy, could not survive. “Morocco will remain in its Sahara, and the Sahara will remain part of Morocco,” he said, “until the end of time.”
Still, the Western Sahara has its uses. Thanks to Bou Craa, for example, Morocco has been able to set prices on the phosphate market, and its phosphates are used to procure international trade agreements. The kingdom produced forty million metric tons of phosphate in 2022, second only to China. As our global population grows and grows, creating ever more mouths to feed, demand for phosphate is booming. World Fertilizer magazine calculated that the market for phosphate fertilizer was growing at a compound rate of 5.5 percent every year. Morocco World News, a pro-Moroccan publication, called phosphate “the spice of life.”
Chapter 44
Lithium Is Sexy
In 1987, when she was twenty, Aminatou Haidar organized a demonstration in advance of an official United Nations visit to the Western Sahara. “We wanted to transmit a clear message to the UN that we wanted independence,” Haidar told me. “Morocco underwent a huge campaign of arrests that targeted both sexes. Women and men, old and young—nobody was spared. They started by arresting over five hundred people.”
One night, three or four days before the UN was slated to arrive, the Moroccans came to Haidar’s house. “I was arrested,” she said. “They put me in a car, and they started to quickly drive around the street.” She was taken to a police barracks near her home. The car circled the streets of Laayoune to give Haidar the impression that they had traveled farther than they had. She was worried that she, like some of her relatives, had been taken to a secret jail inside Morocco, and she feared she would never return.
For most of Haidar’s imprisonment, her family didn’t know where she was. She had been disappeared by the Moroccans. (Under international humanitarian law, enforced disappearances are considered crimes against humanity.) She was held in solitary confinement for a year. “When it was very cold, it was freezing; on the ground, where I was lying, we had no covers,” she told me. “In the first year, I contracted rheumatism because I was thrown into a corridor where it was really cold. And in the summer, it was boiling.” Some of her fellow prisoners were bitten by dogs set on them by policemen.
“We didn’t know if we would be able to leave from this hell,” she said. She thought she would be locked up forever. “Our faith in God helped us through. And we were also determined, because we were convinced that we had all the justice of our cause and international law on our side. We were convinced that the Sahara is not Moroccan and that tomorrow or after tomorrow, it will gain its independence.”
In 1991, Haidar was released into an atmosphere of new hope for the region. Morocco and the Polisario Front had agreed to stop fighting and to hold their referendum. But, as earlier noted, through the 1990s the promised referendum never arrived. In the early 2000s, James Baker, the former secretary of state who was then the UN secretary-general’s personal envoy for the Western Sahara, probably got closest to negotiating a long-awaited deal, but Morocco’s king managed to scupper it. “Mr. Baker’s proposals endanger the very founding principles of the Kingdom,” Mohammed wrote in a letter to President George W. Bush, raising the threat of the “redeployment of terrorist groups in the region.” In the margin of his copy of the king’s letter, now at the Princeton University library, Baker wrote “WRONG!”
Morocco sought to control the narrative after that point. Plans for a referendum were continuously delayed and undermined. When journalists attempted to report on the Western Sahara, they were followed, harassed, and removed. In the late spring of 2017, I tried to visit Laayoune, the capital of the territory. I was stopped before getting off a Royal Air Maroc flight and then sent to Las Palmas, in the Canary Islands. By chance, Haidar, who had become an internationally renowned activist after her imprisonment, was also traveling to Las Palmas, where she would attend a conference; she told me about her long history of activism, all her hunger strikes and protests to bring awareness to the plight of the Sahrawi. “I have lived the suffering in my own flesh,” she said.
In December 2020, as hostilities flared up between Morocco and the Polisario Front, President Trump announced recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the Western Sahara through a tweet (“Morocco’s serious, credible, and realistic autonomy proposal is the ONLY basis for a just and lasting solution for enduring peace and prosperity!”). The United States set up a consulate in Dakhla, but it stopped short of actually recognizing Moroccan sovereignty. Since then, both sides have fired heavy weapons over the Berm and used drones to attack each other’s positions. (The Bou Craa phosphate mine has not been affected.) The problem of the Western Sahara, Baker said, “has not been handled well, and that’s why it continues to persist.”
* * *
The supply-chain issues surrounding both a territory that is quite literally at war and a commodity whose very existence the world relies upon to feed itself should be concerning. But nobody seemed to be considering it, neither among State Department officials I interviewed in 2022 and 2023, nor at battery conferences in Michigan and Stuttgart. No one professed to have considered supply-chain constraints on phosphates.
One of the arguments in favor of adopting LFP batteries is that the materials needed to make them are much easier to access than nickel and cobalt. Iron, after all, is abundant. “We’re definitely not going to run out of iron. There’s so much iron it’s insane,” Mujeeb Ijaz, the U.S. EV start-up Our Next Energy founder, told the Financial Times in March 2023.
Only a few people had concerns about a phosphate supply crunch. On a 2021 investor call held by Mosaic, one of the largest producers of phosphate fertilizer in the world, company officials noted that three hundred thousand tons of purified phosphoric acid had been redeployed from use in fertilizer production to use in the making of LFP batteries. That year, India’s stock of phosphates plummeted by around a third. Farmers committed suicide because they could not secure enough phosphate for their fields. “It’s going to become a battle, and let’s face it, fertilizer manufacturing isn’t exactly sexy,” one of Mosaic’s officials said. “Lithium is.”
Awareness of the limited supply of phosphates only really began to hit home in 2023. “LFP batteries also contain phosphorus, which is used in food production,” a report from the International Energy Agency said that year. “If all batteries today were LFP, they would account for nearly 1% of current agricultural phosphorus use by mass, suggesting that conflicting demands for phosphorus may arise in the future as battery demand increases.”
By 2024, the auto industry was using 5 percent of the world’s purified phosphoric acid; Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, a consulting firm that tracks minerals used in batteries, predicted that this figure would increase to 24 percent by 2030. Morocco, on the other hand, had become a key piece of the Chinese electric-vehicle supply chain—Chinese firms used the “Made in Morocco” designation to circumvent U.S. tariffs on goods made in China. In 2024, Morocco announced plans to electrify 60 percent of its vehicle production over the next half decade.
