The elements of power, p.37
The Elements of Power, page 37
Museveni arrived at Makerere for a test-drive in late November 2011. Musasizi piloted the car, and the president rode shotgun. “This is very good,” Museveni said over and again, above the signature hum of the electric vehicle’s engine (the car was powered by sixty-four lithium-ion batteries connected in series). “What is happening at Makerere is a renaissance; you fellows are waking up from a long slumber,” he told the deans after the test-drive. Kiira’s green EV could represent the first step toward having a lithium-ion battery supply chain that began in Africa and stayed there.
* * *
It has become fashionable across Africa to insist that, someday, batteries and even electric cars will be made on the continent. It is hard to overemphasize the propaganda value of such stories. In early 2025, for example, Burkina Faso’s military dictatorship said that they had produced an “indigenous” electric vehicle, but the story was pure fantasy. It turned out that the cars were actually old Chinese cars that had been delivered to the country by a businessman connected to the Chinese state. Once they reached the country, they had been re-badged and used as a propaganda tool by a government that claimed it was casting off the yoke of French imperialism but had in fact pivoted to new masters in Russia and China.
In Congo, at the 2021 DRC-Africa Business Forum, President Félix Antoine Tshisekedi Tshilombo declared that the country should start building a battery industry “right after this forum.” The rhetoric has come thick and fast, even as actual progress has been slow. “Faced with the challenge of a carbon-free industry at the global level, it is common knowledge that the Democratic Republic of Congo has the ambition to become one of the major producers of electric batteries by 2030–2040,” Vuko Ndondo Kakule, deputy executive director of the Congolese Battery Council, told Germany’s DW news service in 2023.
This ambition, which has gained some traction in certain corners of social media, presumes that complex, power-intensive industries can be made to work in a country with an unreliable infrastructure and shaky electricity generation. At the moment, 80 percent of Africa’s raw materials are exported unprocessed, and African countries lose out by not refining materials. The concept of “value addition” (adding to value by moving down the supply chain and creating more and more complex products) only works when the conditions to create the products—the batteries and their precursor materials—already exist in the country.
Wracked by years of conflict and theft, Congo is no such place. A working paper published by the Harvard Kennedy School in 2023 looked at how Congo could improve its refining of copper and cobalt and produce battery precursors. The report’s authors cited various obstacles to Congo’s plans to move up the value chain, including corruption, spotty power generation, and a terrible transportation infrastructure. “Precursor production is not simple,” the report noted. “Australia—a country with an effective grid, functional logistics, a skilled workforce, strong governance, and dynamic capital markets—has had to prioritize a national multi-year plan to produce precursors at commercial scale.” Most of Katanga doesn’t even have electricity. In 2022, on my final trip to Samukinda, for example, the new chief, Rikomeno Samukinda, gestured to a power transformer and wires running off into the distance: “We don’t get any power.” How could a country that cannot power a village next to one of its richest mine sites expect to produce batteries with any efficiency anytime soon?
The report’s authors urged Congolese policymakers to prioritize better facilities for making copper wire and to “reframe precursor production as a long-term vision rather than an immediate strategic priority.”
U.S. State Department officials pointed out that the Biden administration’s Minerals Security Partnership might provide opportunities for countries outside China’s orbit to move down the value chain—that is, to capture more money by producing more finished products.
But there were always more immediate priorities in Congo. Education, electricity, roads—so many other critical things were screaming out to be given pride of place before investments in battery precursors.
* * *
When I visited Jinja in September 2023, the Kiira factory was still under construction and looked like it had a long way to go, despite the company’s promises that it would be ready by Christmas. An electric bus was parked in the sunshine outside.
Inside, Richard Madanda, a Kiira engineer, showed me some promotional videos, including one in which a new Kiira invention, a tricycle, helped small farmers water their fields and carry produce. The factory floor was empty save for a few prototypes, and as I was walked around, I was asked to imagine machinery, conveyor belts, robot arms, and scurrying workers. That was all in the future, Madanda promised me. The buses are currently built in an army-owned factory a few hours north of Jinja.
We went over to one of the cars, shrouded under a gray cover. Madanda pulled the covering back, and I realized it was the same vehicle that Museveni had been so impressed with all the way back in 2011. Kiira claimed it could reach 150 kilometers an hour and run for 80 kilometers on a single charge. Had more not been built? Not yet. By 2024, only around twenty thousand electric vehicles had been sold across Africa, and the continent had fewer than a thousand EV chargers, though at the end of that year, several African countries pledged to build batteries, electric cars, and electric bikes. Kiira would finally open its factory in late 2024.
Cina Vazir, one of the authors of the Harvard study, cautioned against seeing African EV factories as a panacea. First off, he wondered, who would buy them? “Africa’s EV projected demand is not too high,” he said. “Africa is also logistically kind of hard to shift things from one part to another? So, do you have the demand there?”
And at Kiira, it didn’t seem like Uganda had completely exited the globalized supply chain. I asked where the batteries that power Kiira’s electric vehicles come from. “China,” Madanda answered. “We get them from CATL, though we used to have a different supplier.”
Chapter 50
Uncle Bunker
In 2022, when Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, with its emphasis on building a resilient North American supply chain, into law, historical mining communities that sat atop critical metals within the country questioned whether they would once again see digging and drilling near their homes.
The town of Kellogg, Idaho, population 2,314, is one of those communities. It is a place that once had some of the richest mining anywhere on earth, but after the mines around it closed in the early 1980s, people moved away, and the area’s income dropped off a cliff.
On an evening in June 2023, about two dozen people were enjoying Sam Ash’s tri-tip barbecue and sipping beers on the porch of his house in downtown Kellogg. One of the guests wore a T-shirt that read I’m a Kennedy Democrat, in support of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who had recently announced he would be running against Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination. Another guest arrived bearing a sweet, creamy pudding topped with marshmallows. Almost all of them were employees of the Bunker Hill Mining Corporation, which hoped to revive mining in the area.
Part of the Biden administration’s plan was to use private businesses to restore a supply chain for critical minerals in the U.S. and allied nations, thereby reducing reliance on countries like Congo. In Toronto, in 2022, Jose W. Fernandez, the energy undersecretary, had helped launch the Minerals Security Partnership, or MSP, an association of North American and European countries, as well as Japan, Korea, and Australia. The aim of the MSP, Fernandez said, was “to promote public and private investment in responsible critical-minerals supply chains.” Mines like Bunker Hill could be central to such plans. “The private sector has been instrumental in identifying opportunities and leveraging expertise to promote shared regional goals,” Fernandez told me.
In Idaho, the sun began to set over the wooded hills of the Silver Valley. “If you would have come here in the 1980s, in 1981, when the mine closed, there wouldn’t have been a single tree growing on any of these hillsides,” Ash, who is the CEO and director of the Bunker Hill Mining Corporation, told me. They had been poisoned by smoke from smelters. “From a strategic-metals perspective, this is really the story of, you know, the impact and the outcome of an initially unregulated industrial expansion in the United States, which resulted in the United States recognizing that it needed to enact environmental regulations and also initiate cleanup for the damage that had been done. That resulted in the mining industry shrinking significantly in the United States.”
Ash was doling out the final plates, stacked with meat and beans, when Richard Williams, the company’s executive chairman, motioned for everyone to be silent. Before entering the mining industry, Williams had served as the commanding officer of the British Army’s Special Air Service, or SAS. His affect was one of quiet gravitas. “I’m very proud of everyone here,” Williams said. “I’m proud because you have chosen to be part of the revitalization of this community. I look, and I see what we have built, and it really is incredible.”
* * *
Digging things out of the ground stateside is a complicated proposition. Until the 1970s, mining had been part of the bread and butter of U.S. progress, but then a series of highly publicized disasters, including at the Sunshine Mine, just east of Kellogg, shone a spotlight on an industry that resisted scrutiny. The conflict between activists and miners helped birth the environmental movement. After Nixon’s government founded the Environmental Protection Agency, Washington began to more strictly regulate the industry—so strictly, supporters of mining say, that entire communities were degraded and mining ceased to be a viable business on all but a small handful of sites.
The Bunker Hill site’s origin story reminded me of Kasulo’s, in Congo, for its element of chance. It began in the 1880s, when a carpenter named Noah Kellogg arrived in a remote corner of northern Idaho that the Schitsu’umsh ancestors of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe had long called home. By the time of Kellogg’s arrival, a gold rush had brought all kinds of fortune seekers. “His donkey, he ran off while he was camping, and he chased that donkey up to the top of the mountain, and the donkey kicked over a rock,” Ash told me. The rock glinted, and Kellogg decided to examine further. “He found one of the biggest silver mines that the world has ever seen.”
Mining began in 1886, and over the next hundred years, one and a half billion ounces of silver were produced at Bunker Hill. Over time, lead and zinc began to be extracted there too. “It was instrumental in the industrialization of America,” Ash went on. “It was considered absolutely a strategic asset by the U.S. government.” Lead from Bunker Hill was used for munitions in World War I, World War II, and the Korean War. The mine, which became known as Uncle Bunker, formed the heart of the community, providing livelihoods.
But in the 1970s, Bunker Hill fell on hard times. In 1973, a fire damaged the mine’s filtration systems, which were not replaced, and toxic chemicals were released that poisoned children living near the mine; emissions from a zinc smelter damaged trees. When sulfur dioxide began to come under regulation, Bunker Hill could not meet the standards set by the EPA. “Ultimately, what shut the mine down was its environmental performance,” Ash told me. In 1981, the mine closed.
A decade later, the Coeur d’Alene Tribe brought a lawsuit alleging that Bunker Hill and other mines around the Silver Valley were poisoning its water supply. Fish and clean water are part of the Coeur d’Alene people’s patrimony; their ancestors survived off the salmon they fished. Until 1968, the mining company had dumped toxic waste in a local river, killing off aquatic life. Now lead leaching through the soil and dripping through Uncle Bunker’s tunnels was killing the fish and poisoning the water with heavy metal.
The U.S. government joined the lawsuit in 1996. Bunker Hill had been declared a Superfund site, which meant that the EPA would take responsibility for cleaning it up. A huge processing plant was built in the valley beneath the mine to clean the water that would gush out of Uncle Bunker’s tunnels after the rains.
For a while, the mine’s ownership decided to fight the lawsuits; the site had changed hands many times, and the current owners said they were not responsible for the cleanup. “The EPA is probably the worst thing that’s ever happened to America,” Bob Hopper, the mine’s bombastic, chain-smoking owner told a radio journalist in 2003. He had hoped to rekindle mining when he bought Bunker Hill in 1992, but instead, he had assumed the mine’s liabilities. Hopper died in January 2011, and a few months later, the mining company that owned Bunker Hill paid $263.4 million to the U.S. government, the Coeur d’Alene Tribe, and the state of Idaho.
Williams had come across the mine as it was limping from crisis to crisis. A series of investors had tried to revitalize it and had been stymied by the toxic legacy and high reinvestment costs. But Williams was up for a challenge. He had found solutions in far harder places to harder problems, after all: When he left the SAS in 2008, he began working in the private sector, building a mining business in Afghanistan; from Afghanistan, he moved to South Africa and from South Africa to Canada, where he worked for Barrick, one of the world’s largest gold-mining corporations, as its chief operating officer. There, he met Ash, who then ran one of the company’s mines in Zambia. In 2021, Williams raised $3 million to study an old mine that he had found in Idaho’s Silver Valley.
Bunker Hill was registered in Canada, because the Great White North has historically been friendlier to mining than the U.S. has been. But Williams told me that he was interested in seeing whether mining could be reintroduced south of the Canadian border. It was partly an interest in history that motivated him; during the time I spent at Bunker Hill, employees excitedly showed me old newspaper articles and clips about the wealth of their mine. “We wanted to have our anchor asset here and then see where it took us,” Williams said. “We were big believers in regeneration.”
Ash and Williams strove to work with the EPA. Their vision included “building an ecosystem of new and green businesses” for the local community. After the initial $3 million investment, Williams raised another $20 million.
Bunker Hill’s proposal was that mining could be done in a sustainable way.
* * *
Silver, lead, and zinc are not lithium-ion battery metals. They are, of course, used in closely related industries: Lead is used in lead-acid batteries, zinc and silver in electronics. But cobalt is found about three hours south of Bunker Hill under the woodland of the Salmon-Challis National Forest. A 2022 Atlantic article by Michael Holtz proclaimed that “Idaho’s cobalt rush is here” and detailed the struggle by Jervois, an Australian company, to build a clean mine. Idaho could become an important source of cobalt for the U.S., though Holtz noted that the estimated annual production—1,915 tons—was a “drop in the bucket compared with the output of mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”
The development of what is known as the Idaho Cobalt Belt has hardly been linear. Jervois spent eight years getting permits to mine and was scheduled to go into production in 2022, but the mine closed before any minerals were dug out of the earth. The markets were partially culpable—cobalt prices fell that year, partly thanks to Chinese stockpiling of the mineral. But another culprit was geology. The cobalt ore that Jervois was sitting on contained what a company report from 2020 described as “elevated” proportions of the poisonous metalloid arsenic, and it was therefore more expensive to process in an ecologically friendly way. “The arsenic is associated with the cobalt in the orebody,” the report noted.
All of this meant that in June 2023, when I visited Idaho, the Cobalt Belt was not producing: The ore was lying there, waiting to be unearthed, and the mines were under care and maintenance.
At Bunker Hill, and in mines throughout the state and neighboring states, companies were having to deal with similar issues, as well as a central question: Did the U.S. want critical minerals enough to compete with China on the mining front? “We haven’t had a real mining industry in the U.S. for four decades,” said Ryan Melsert, the former Tesla employee who now heads the American Battery Technology Company, or ABTC. “We’ve outsourced most of that work. But there’s nothing stopping us from reinitiating that.”
In 2023, Melissa Sanderson, the former Freeport-McMoRan employee and official at the U.S. embassy in Kinshasa, took the helm of American Rare Earths, a firm that owns the giant Halleck Creek rare-earths mine in the neighboring state of Wyoming (she would later leave that position and join the company’s board of directors). “Why is permitting of mines in America so complicated? It’s because Americans hate mining,” Sanderson mused. “I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, and I grew up hating mining because what I knew about mining was what we saw on television about coal companies strip-mining the heck out of West Virginia, destroying whole forests, et cetera.” She continued: “I mean, powerful images remain, and they’re part of the historic reality of mining in America.”
The government, with its IRAs and security partnerships, was looking to change that. And when the Trump administration came into power, it, too, appeared to be keen on spurring U.S. mining. Its plans, however, were not particularly clear to anyone, including people in government. “We’re a long way from getting domestic mining to where it needs to be,” a senior U.S. official confided to me in Washington in March 2025.
* * *
Companies like ABTC look at mining what is already inside devices that we use today in order to build the batteries of the future. In other words, they focus on recycling. Many companies grind batteries down into pulps called “black mass,” and then use heat or water to refine them into an intermediary product. This product is then treated with chemicals and separated into its original materials, which are then reused in new batteries. It is not the only method. ABTC uses automated components to break the batteries to pieces. Another company, Redwood Materials, also helmed by a Tesla alum, JB Straubel, pulverizes batteries into mineral powders.
