The elements of power, p.38
The Elements of Power, page 38
The former chief financial officer of Redwood, a bearded Tesla alum named Andy Stevenson, told me that the conditions were ripe for mass recycling of batteries in the U.S. A regulatory framework already existed for the handling, disposal, and treatment of hazardous materials, and batteries fit into that “pretty easily.” But battery recycling was expensive, he said, and would probably need some external funding, possibly from the government, to really get off the ground. “Ultimately, somebody is going to have to pay if the value of the materials is not enough to cover the costs of processing and recovering,” he noted. By 2024, Redwood was processing around sixty tons of lithium-ion batteries per day, the equivalent of 250,000 electric vehicles annually.
Nobody thinks that recycling is the entire solution. ABTC is recycling more than 115 percent of the number of batteries it originally planned to recycle. Redwood has among the most efficient recovery systems, one that reclaims 95 percent of nickel, cobalt, lithium, and copper. But, at present, only around 5 percent of batteries in the U.S. are recycled. And materials would need to be dug out of the ground to account for increased demand, even if every single battery was recycled and every single mineral recaptured. For us to fully rely on recycling, we would need a fully static population, fully static consumption trends, and a fully static economy. As Eric Frederickson, Call2Recycle’s VP, put it: “That will not happen in my lifetime. That will probably not happen in my children’s lifetime.”
If the world wants batteries, it will still need mines.
* * *
At Bunker Hill, Williams and Ash didn’t want to end up like the miners of the Idaho Cobalt Belt: huge amounts sunk into their mines but little to show for their money and efforts. “We negotiated a sensible purchase price,” Williams told me. A sticking point, however, was that the EPA was still owed $19 million for the cleanup. They struck a deal with the EPA that would allow them to use cash flow generated by the mine to cover that cost. “We then spent an awful lot of time and money coming together,” Williams recalled. They had “convinced the capital markets that it was worth funding and the EPA that we were trustworthy.”
At first, when the Bunker Hill team went to community meetings, the project was met with apathy. At a town meeting, they were told, “You realize that you’re about the tenth group to come in here and say you’re going to restart the Bunker Hill Mine?” They understood that they had to “prove themselves” and slowly started to win over the local community by showing their progress.
In 2023, real momentum seemed to be building behind Uncle Bunker. The team had recently spoken to members of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe about their ongoing concerns around lead-laced water. “We have reached out to them; we have spent time with them and offered on every occasion to share data with them,” Bradley Barnett, the vice president of sustainability at Bunker Hill, told me. “They know that we very much value clean water in the same way that they do.” The firm was aiming for “extreme transparency,” it said, and intended to share as much data as it could with stakeholders and the wider public in general. In early 2025, Teck, the Canadian mining firm, invested $40 million in the mine in anticipation of its production relaunch later that year.
Although some environmentalists were loath to accept new mining projects in the U.S., Bunker Hill was trying to show that environmental mining was possible and had a place in the U.S. “You see this all over the Western United States in all these communities where mines existed,” Ash said. “It was a big part of middle America, and the middle class. And then it just—it just got obliterated.” He blamed overzealous environmental regulation and people making rules far from the communities they affected for that obliteration. “They recognize that now,” he continued. “The inevitable consequences of a lot of that legislation and enforcement was to push it into jurisdictions where they have no visibility and they have no control.” Places, incidentally, like Congo.
Barnett knew the conundrum all too well. In another role, he ran a company called Critical Minerals International, and he had also been interested in investing in Congo. His efforts to build what he called a “model artisanal mine” near Kolwezi had been frustrated by government intransigence, but he still hoped that he could get some kind of project off the ground.
Barnett had also worked with Barrick Gold in Afghanistan, where he met Williams. At Bunker Hill, he told me, he was positive that what we were seeing was historic. The project was, he would write online a few months later, “the return of mining to the Western U.S., done right, by a team that is ready for a lot more.”
* * *
So that I could better understand the mine, Barnett suggested I go with him deep into Bunker Hill to see some of the tunnels. I donned a hard hat and a reflective vest, then clipped on a belt to which was attached a self-contained self-rescuer, or SCSR. Alan Longley, a health and safety manager, explained how the device worked, how once its cap had been removed, it would provide oxygen for at least an hour. It would be a lifesaver in the event of the release of poisonous carbon monoxide, as had happened at the Sunshine Mine in 1972, when ninety-one men suffocated after a fire. Longley remembered that time vividly. “Almost every family in the Silver Valley was, in one way or another, touched by that catastrophe,” he said.
At the entrance to the mine, I boarded an all-terrain vehicle piloted by another Brit, Tom Francis, a former Royal Marine. We plunged into the mine, and the warmth was almost immediately sucked from the air. There were twenty-six levels to the mine, Francis explained, connected via the corkscrewing passage by which we were descending.
The walls were braced with rusted metal, putting me in mind of a howling mouth fitted with particularly unpleasant dental work. Mining equipment from thirty, fifty, eighty years before lay abandoned, crusted over with decades of mineral deposits in shades of brown, yellow, and green. The air was filled with the tang of metal.
All of a sudden, the atmosphere became more humid. Rusty-looking water was pooled on the floor. It was groundwater coming through billions of tiny fissures, and its color was a sure sign it needed to be “remediated”—plugged up by the team at Bunker Hill so that it didn’t leak into the Silver Valley’s water supply. Water flowed out of the old Bunker Hill Mine at four thousand gallons per minute.
When we were around half a mile into the hill, Francis slowed to a halt. The tunnels ahead hadn’t been cleared. I felt like we were deep enough already. The weight of rock, and of history, bore down from above. I imagined Uncle Bunker filled with thousands of people, like it had been during its heyday, when it was churning out tons of silver for tables and lead for the battlefields of far-off wars. After a while, we had seen enough. Francis made a three-point turn and pointed the nose of our buggy back, then we lurched upward, heading for the mouth of the tunnel, where the air would be clear and we would see sky and trees and light.
Driving into the Bunker Hill Mine, 2023
Afterword
Power Dreams
In many ways, history is repeating itself in Katanga—and in other places around the world where critical metals can be found. I had this revelation most powerfully in October 2021, at a schoolhouse beside the Berwinne River in Belgium, about a ten-minute drive from the Dutch border. It was early in the morning, and the directrice of the Dalhem Communal School, Séverine Botty, had welcomed me to the low-slung brick building. She showed me to the cafeteria. There, looking out from a commemorative placard affixed to a cream-colored cupboard, was Dalhem’s most famous son, Albert Thys, “the creator of the railroad in Congo, businessman and one of the first Belgian financiers of the early twentieth Century.”
In the dining hall, I examined the keepsakes of Thys’s travels and exploits in the Congo Basin: hippo tusks and kudu horns, a carved wooden cup and a pipe fashioned into an effigy of the man himself. I understood that his was a story of subjugation, that in the objects I could read traces of killing on a genocidal scale and, by extension, the current dilemma over how to power the world.
On one wall, there was a photograph of Thys in the Congolese port city of Boma. In it, Thys is staring into the distance, belly protruding from beneath his tailcoat, hand proudly resting on a carved African staff, pith helmet in the crook of his arm.
Thys was born in 1849 into a Belgium that was not yet two decades old (the country had split from Holland in the 1830 revolution). His father was Dalhem’s doctor, his mother the town’s primary school teacher. Shortly after Thys’s sixteenth birthday, King Leopold II, the country’s second monarch, took power. Leopold was desperate for a colony, so he looked to Africa and to Congo.
Thys became embroiled in the Belgian colonial project in Congo before it even began. Thys joined the army in 1865. By 1876, when he was recommended to the king by one of his military school commanders, the monarch was exploring African territories that he could make his. “At the beginning, there was Leopold II, and then there was Thys,” wrote one historian of Belgian mining in Congo, who explained how Thys’s work was the “flowering progenitor” of the many companies through which Leopold ran the colony.
Nsala looks at the severed hand and foot of his daughter.
At an 1884 conference of colonial powers, Leopold used philanthropic language to hoodwink the other European nations into allowing him to annex Congo as private property. His aim, of course, was not philanthropy but profit. To that end, in 1886, Thys created the very first of the corporate entities that would be used to cloak Leopold’s barbarism in the guise of a business venture. Such companies would proliferate during Leopold’s possession of Congo; they insulated the king and his fellow investors, mainly well-heeled Anglo-Saxons, from direct responsibility for the crimes that were being committed in the territory. They would be the first international firms to plunder Congo—a practice that, as we have seen, continued well into the twenty-first century.
By the last decade of the nineteenth century, the invention of the bicycle and the automobile had led to a boom in the demand for rubber (synthetic rubber was not invented until 1909). Rubber plantations are slow to grow, but Congo’s forests were full of the vines. Soon, European overseers were press-ganging local men into harvesting rubber. If they refused to work, their wives and children were kidnapped as collateral. After Leopold colonized Congo, entire villages were enslaved in the quest for rubber, and mutilation and murder were used to ensure loyalty. One particularly haunting image shows a man named Nsala staring at a severed hand and foot on the ground. “He hadn’t made his rubber quota for the day so the Belgian-appointed overseers had cut off his daughter’s hand and foot. Her name was Boali. She was five years old. Then they killed her. But they weren’t finished. Then they killed his wife too,” Lady Alice Seeley Harris would remember years later. “Leopold had not given any thought to the idea that these African children, these men and women, were our fully human brothers, created equally by the same Hand that had created his own lineage of European Royalty.”
Thys masterminded the use of corporate structures to carry out this plunder, harnessing not only Belgian greed but also the greed of shareholders in Europe and around the world. Like the lithium-ion battery, rubber tires were a globalized product that helped other people, in other places, to get around.
The shareholders’ need for a constant stream of profit would push the men who had come to Congo, driving them to wipe out its elephants and jungles, enslave its population, and tear open its earth. Thys created companies for commerce, companies for industry, companies for railroads, companies for mining, and subcompanies for general stores and agricultural products. And Thys certainly didn’t rest on his laurels: An old postcard pinned in one of the display cabinets at the school shows the splendid twin-turreted castle he built as his residence near Dalhem. Though slightly more elegant in form, it still reminded me of the oversize palaces of the corrupt and the villas of the magnates of today.
Some of the companies Thys created were the forebears of successful European businesses that still existed as I wrote this book. Umicore—a publicly traded Belgian-French materials technology and recycling company that had a 2024 market cap of nearly €5 billion and the ambition to become a “sustainability champion”—has its roots in a firm that Thys created: the Compagnie du Katanga.
This company, which was the progenitor of the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, was key to the future financial success of the colony, and men like Thys dreamed of the riches it would bring them. By the 1890s, Leopold’s agents and British colonialists were both trying to seize the southern province of Katanga, and the British colonialists under Cecil Rhodes almost took power there in the late nineteenth century. As a writer for the colonial Journal de Congo once put it, Katanga “would have been English if not for Thys”—Katanga, the richest part of the Congo Basin and the prototype for the overseas resource extraction that would continue long after colonialism had ended; Katanga, the province where Thys helped organize a series of progressively more murderous colonial expeditions, culminating in its seizure in 1892.
A snapshot of the Union Minière’s many-tentacled ownership structure on the eve of independence, in 1960, shows just what an octopus Thys’s corporations had evolved into since their inception in the late nineteenth century. The “General Public” were shareholders, Tanganyika Concessions was a British firm that shared an interlocking board with the Union Minière, and the Société Générale was Belgium’s premier investment bank, so powerful at one point that it was called “the uncrowned queen of Belgium.” The structure was designed to be complicated and opaque in order to protect the people who ultimately benefited from the extraction of Congo’s minerals. And it uncannily resembled the web of companies that people like Gertler or Kabila would create in their quests for wealth.
* * *
In many ways, of course, things have changed immensely. These days, Congo is, after all, an independent state, run by Congolese. But the current ownership structures are even more octopean, and they ensure that little wealth goes back to the Congolese state. The penumbral transactions, the web of transnational business dealings spun by foreign businessmen as they sell off Congo’s minerals—all of this started with the Compagnie du Katanga. Then, shareholders were conveniently shielded from ultimate responsibility for what was going on in Congo. Now, in the twenty-first century, the convolutions of the supply chain comfortably remove by degrees the companies buying, selling, and making use of Congo’s minerals from the harsh realities on the ground.
In 1887, when Thys made his first trip to Congo, the Belgian monarch put him in charge of building a railroad. As Adam Hochschild describes in King Leopold’s Ghost, his seminal work on Congo’s colonization, the toll on human life was horrendous—the railway was “a modest engineering success and a major human disaster.” Men succumbed to heat, dehydration, malnutrition, malaria, shootings, floggings, and explosions of dynamite-laden cars. If they tried to escape, workers were chained together—conditions that recalled the worst excesses of slavery.
In 1892, Thys brought the first Chinese to Congo to work on the railroad. Leopold was apparently fixated on bringing people from China to Congo and creating five large Chinese settlements to stabilize his rule in the colony. This plan never came to pass, but Thys did end up employing 540 laborers from Macau for the rail project. Three hundred of them died, and after seeing the terrible conditions, several of them escaped, walking eastward in a desperate bid to make it home.
Undeterred, the Qing court in Beijing signed a treaty of commerce and friendship with Leopold’s colonial state that gave Chinese the right to work and own property in Congo. Executed in 1898, it was the first treaty between China and any African polity (though Congo was, of course, under outside rule), and it portended the Sino-Congolese relations of the twenty-first century that would give Beijing unprecedented access to all kinds of materials it needed to power the future: coltan and lithium, cassiterite and tungsten, and, perhaps most significantly, copper and cobalt.
* * *
The world is facing the biggest supply-demand dislocation in living memory with critical metals, and people have been desperately seeking other solutions. In the battery industry, everyone has their vision of the future. Some visions are limited—tweaks and changes to chemistry that will incrementally increase battery power and capacity. For example, battery makers in the twenty-first century have been testing materials like silicon as they strive to increase energy density in batteries using new anode materials. Other visions are more radical: The Japanese battery company official I met in Tokyo told me that the thorny problems around battery power wouldn’t be solved until nuclear fusion had been perfected.
Solid-state batteries are another frontier. Such batteries use a solid electrolyte that allows ions to be transported more quickly between the electrodes, and thus these batteries can be more powerful. Firms outside of China, like LG, Samsung, and Toyota, have developed powerful solid-state batteries; inside China, BYD and CATL are competing against smaller firms like WeLion to begin producing solid-state on a mass scale.
By the mid-2020s, SAIC, the firm that Robert Aronson had clashed with back in the 1990s, was also making electric cars. They also owned MG, the former British carmaker, and the firm’s general manager announced that they would launch an inexpensive model with a solid-state battery.
