The elements of power, p.8
The Elements of Power, page 8
In his research, Whittingham narrowed his focus on the movement of ions—tiny particles with net electrical charges—and on how when they traveled in a specific direction, they produced an electric current. Surely, then, they could be moved around in a battery to store electricity. But what kinds of ions would he use?
One day, at his Exxon lab, Whittingham read an article about a rechargeable carbon fluoride battery developed by Japanese scientists for night-fishing floats. The battery included lithium, the lightest of all metals. Whittingham knew that lithium, a reactive metal, will give up an electron to achieve a more stable state, resulting in a positively charged ion that easily forms compounds with other elements. (The Japanese scientists weren’t the first to use lithium in batteries; it had been mooted as a battery material since the days of Thomas Edison.) Still, as he studied the metal, he realized it had drawbacks. Because of its tendency to shed an electron, lithium is known to be unstable—liable to catch fire in air and water.
Whittingham’s early work at Exxon involved combining lithium with tantalum (incidentally, a metal whose ore is, like cobalt, extensively mined in Congo). But tantalum was too heavy for use in batteries, and another metal, potassium, was too unstable. The work was fast-paced, Whittingham remembered: “You were making breakthroughs almost every month.”
Perhaps the most important of those breakthroughs came when Whittingham and his team decided to insert lithium ions into a metal compound called titanium disulfide to see whether it could be used to create an electrode in a battery. Whittingham didn’t want to use actual lithium metal in the battery, he said, “because the lithium forms these dendrites that can then short the battery out, and then you get thermal runaway, and then potentially fires.” Dendrites are microstructures that grow in vegetal, branchlike shapes as the lithium metal warps on a cell’s anode after charging and recharging. They can cause fires and deplete batteries.
To introduce the lithium ions, the scientists at Exxon used a technique called intercalation. In common parlance, intercalation means “to insert something into an existing sequence,” usually a calendar—for example, to slot February 29 between February 28 and March 1 in a leap year. But in chemistry, as Whittingham wrote a few years later, “it describes the reversible insertion of guest species into a lamellar host structure with maintenance of the structural features of the host.” A lamellar structure is one in which very thin sheets of material are stacked one atop another. Titanium disulfide’s atomic structure is lamellar, so the team at Exxon slotted lithium ions between the sheets. Clustered in the sheets at the positive electrode of the battery, the ions were attracted to the negative electrode, which would also have a structure that they could nestle in. In the process, electricity would be released. Each time the battery was charged and discharged they would jump back and forth, endlessly bouncing between electrodes. (The word intercalation has filtered into the battery-and-EV vernacular: A popular Substack newsletter on batteries, founded in 2020, is called Intercalation Station.)
To perform the feat of intercalation, the scientists devised a chemical process that included mixing a lithium-containing solution with the compound, allowing it to dry in a box for between three days and three weeks, filtering the results, and then washing them with hexane, a compound produced by distilling crude oil.
Soon, Whittingham and his team had created a workable battery—the first lithium-ion battery—with lithiated titanium disulfide as the cathode material, a liquid electrolyte of dissolved lithium salts and lithium foil as the anode.
On September 10, 1973—almost a year to the day from the beginning of the NATO-sponsored Belgirate Conference, where fast-ion transport was first theorized—Whittingham filed a patent for a new type of battery, a “chalcogenide battery,” named after the structure of the titanium compound. The move was not heavily publicized: Exxon and its scientists were locked in intense rivalry with other laboratories, especially Bell Labs, which at that time was still a behemoth to be reckoned with. In fact, the battery would not be publicly announced until 1976. Whittingham still remembers the time as the heyday of his work. “Everything was new,” he told me. “There weren’t many people in the field.”
When Whittingham announced his discovery to Exxon, the company jumped at the opportunity to produce a lithium battery. The timing could not have been more on the mark. As the philosopher Ivan Illich observed in 1974: “It has recently become fashionable to insist on an impending energy crisis.” Critics such as Illich, a Catholic priest by training, were arguing for a world with less energy, but companies like Exxon were fervently searching for more sources to keep up with the world’s insatiable appetite for power. As the batteries that Whittingham developed have proliferated across the planet, that obsession has only deepened.
Chapter 9
A Spy in Priest’s Clothing
On a Wednesday in August 1975, a mustachioed man descended from a Learjet at an airfield outside the small town of Silva Porto, now Kuito, Angola. John Stockwell was dressed in a short-sleeved black shirt, complete with a cross that dangled from a large silver chain. One might have mistaken him for a missionary. Stockwell, however, had come to Silva Porto not to preach the gospel but to evangelize on behalf of the United States.
Stanley Whittingham might have been testing newfangled batteries in New Jersey, but Africa was not yet fully decolonized. Angola, lurching toward independence, was being fought over by the West and the Soviet Union. The country’s strategic position and proximity to Congo’s critical minerals made it quite a prize. The jet that Stockwell had arrived on had been lent to a rebel named Jonas Savimbi by a British businessman to whom the rebels had promised control of a swath of the country’s mineral riches after the war had been won.
Stockwell was in his late thirties, and he worked for the CIA. He had spent part of his early schooling at a mission in the West of the Belgian Congo; his career had taken him to Katanga, to Burundi, and to Vietnam. On that Wednesday, he was anxious and tired. His mind was spinning from dysentery, and his stomach swilled with thermos coffee that the jet’s copilot had proffered. What’s more, he was deep inside rebel territory and he did not yet know whether the rebels would be friendly to a U.S. agent like him.
Angola was the principal means of egress for Zaire’s minerals, and Savimbi’s camp lay athwart the Benguela Railway. In the early twentieth century, a Scottish entrepreneur had built the railroad to export the mineral wealth of southern Congo, and it was owned jointly by British and Belgian companies. Until the late ’60s, the Benguela Railway was how Europeans arrived to work in the Congolese Copperbelt, embarking on a shaky three-day journey from the Port of Lobito in Angola. Trains going in the other direction were filled with Katanga’s copper and cobalt, bound for international markets. Before 1975, this line curved through more than eleven hundred miles of savanna from the copper mines to the ocean along a route upon which slaves were driven toward the Atlantic in centuries past.
When Stockwell arrived in Silva Porto, the rebels took him to see the train tracks. “[I] stared down the visual infinity of rails and cross-ties,” Stockwell wrote. “I projected my mind beyond the horizon, six hundred kilometers to Benguela itself and the crystal waters of the Lobito harbor. Turning a hundred and eighty degrees, I looked nine hundred kilometers to Lubumbashi, and remembered the huge mines which disgorged tons of copper ore to be transported to waiting ships by an endless string of open railroad cars.”
In Angola, however, Stockwell saw no trains: The Katangese gendarmes, the force comprised of Tshombe’s erstwhile supporters who had fled Congo during the political foment of the 1960s, had sabotaged the tracks. “They wanted Mobutu to fall,” Jean Dusausoy, a mining technician for Gécamines at the time, told me. “They wanted to do that by attacking the regular operations of Gécamines.”
The gendarmes’ attacks in 1975 would continue to have a resounding effect on world trade well into the 2020s: After them, the Congolese began exporting their copper and cobalt via road through Zambia to ports in South Africa and Tanzania. This was a circuitous and expensive means of transportation, but it was much safer (rebels like Savimbi also began attacking the railway as Angola spiraled into civil war). Roving work gangs would travel up and down the tracks, fixing broken sections, but nothing could induce the Congolese to risk transporting their valuable minerals out through Benguela. The Angolan war ended in 2002, but even then, the trains did not begin running: It had become more profitable on the Congolese side of the border for politicians to ship minerals out by truck.
* * *
Strange things began happening around Kolwezi in 1976 and 1977. Dusausoy, the technician, started to hear Africans in Kolwezi speaking Portuguese, which he attributed to the surreptitious infiltration of the city by gangs of Katangese gendarmes. They were “poor guys, lost, drugged, drunk, (often) armed and therefore dangerous because out of control,” Dusausoy later remembered. The metropole began to fill with soldiers.
In October 1976, Mobutu’s secret police announced a curfew that began at 6:30 p.m. and upset the easygoing rhythm of the city, which had, for expatriates, more or less reverted to the cosseted status quo of the colonial era. “No more cinema and tennis in the evening, and it wasn’t even possible to go round to a friend’s for a drink in the evening,” Dusausoy remembered. Rumor had it that American agents were in town. One day, while going to the bank, Dusausoy saw a white man in civilian clothing with a Colt .45 in his belt, a U.S. national who was purportedly working on a high-voltage power line project. “When you knew it was completely forbidden to have a gun, and that the town was full of soldiers, well, you had to ask yourself who this guy really was,” he said.
In March, the gendarmes struck. Dusausoy, who was often at the military’s headquarters or at the airport, heard the attack unfold over the airwaves. In the end, the gendarmes couldn’t hold the town, or choke off Mobutu’s economy by seizing the copper-and-cobalt mines of Kolwezi. Moroccan troops, airlifted to Congo by King Hassan II, an ardent anti-Communist, roundly defeated them, and they fled back to Angola.
* * *
Cobalt was basically ignored in the economic calculus of the Copperbelt until 1978. Copper was the hot commodity. Cobalt was a nice-to-have, a niche metal that in Congo offset movements on the copper market; it was bought and sold by a handful of traders who ensured that the global demand for the mineral was fed and used price moves based on scarcity and glut to turn a profit. A former commodities trader with the firm Marc Rich & Co. remembered that people who bought and sold cobalt worked with other metals because there was such little volume. The mineral was a small fry in comparison to metals like copper, iron, and even lead. The conflicts in Katanga, however, were about to thrust the blue metal into the spotlight.
That process had begun in the depths of the freezing London winter that marked the beginning of 1978, when a series of peculiar orders appeared at the city’s metals trading houses, where most of the world’s metals were bought and sold between trips to beery pubs and steak-and-chips lunches. Cobalt prices were about to balloon, but no one—apart from those, perhaps, who were doing the buying—quite knew why.
At the time, cobalt was only traded by around twenty dealers. The traders in this tiny community played their cards close to their chests: None of them, apparently, remarked upon or connected the dots between the steady stream of orders coming from the Eastern Bloc, from Poland, the German Democratic Republic, and, most importantly, the Soviet Union. The Soviet Bloc had been building up its stockpiles since 1976, just before the first gendarme attack, but now the effort would, in retrospect, seem more concerted.
And only about 10 percent of cobalt at the time was traded on the free market; the rest was bought in bulk through transactions between large suppliers and large consumers. It was fairly dull business. The mineral, a byproduct of copper and occasionally nickel, had a fairly fixed demand and a fairly regular supply—give or take the occasional strike at the mines producing it. Most of those mines were controlled by one company—Gécamines.
Cobalt may have been niche, but it was strategic: The main uses of the metal were military-industrial—it went into jet engines, missiles, and submarines. Seventy-one percent of the United States’ cobalt was imported from Zaire; worldwide, Mobutu’s nation enjoyed a 65 percent share of the global market. All of Zaire’s cobalt came from Katanga, and almost all of that from within the direct vicinity of Kolwezi.
The amounts that the Soviets had requested in the winter and early spring of 1978 were large in aggregate, but each order was small enough not to rouse suspicion: around thirty to fifty tons at a time. (The overall market was “around twenty thousand tons a year, if that,” a former cobalt trader told me.) The Eastern Bloc buyers also bargained hard for their cobalt, insisting on buying it for around $7.60 a pound. “They had a shrewd inkling of what was going to blow,” Lef Lubett, then chairman of the Minor Metals Traders Association, told The Washington Post after the extent of their buying became clear. It “was pre-emptive buying in expectations of a shortage.”
What “blew” in May 1978 was the second invasion of Katanga by the gendarmes. While there is no suggestion that the Soviet Union engineered the attack, the Soviets had been training the gendarmes in military intelligence, and their Cuban allies had given them artillery and other military instruction. This time, the gendarmes managed to take Kolwezi.
* * *
George Forrest was living in Kolwezi with his family at the time. Forrest’s father, Malta, had come to Congo and grown a transport business into a subcontracting empire for Union Minière. Malta even ran many of the firm’s most important mines for four years after the Wall Street crash of 1929. George, who turned twenty the year Congo became independent, traced his roots to New Zealand and the Greek island of Rhodes. He did not feel particularly Belgian—Greeks and Jews had been relegated to a rung below the Belgians in the caste system of colonial Congo. Rather, he and his family felt Congolese, African, and especially connected to Kolwezi. George decided to remain in Congo after decolonization, unlike many Belgians, who had fled, and he took the reins of his father’s business.
In May 1978, several hundred civilians were killed in the fighting, many of them by Zairean troops. Those who survived were left with scarring memories. Forrest, for one, saw his home invaded by armed rebels who threatened to shoot him. As massacres intensified in the city, French paratroops scrambled to be deployed, and Mobutu hurried to the front, piloting a plane full of journalists into Kolwezi to show his bravado.
The gendarmes were defeated by the superior firepower of the government and the paratroops, and they again headed back to Angola. Mobutu’s army, so ineffective at defending Kolwezi, began to terrorize the Lunda population living around the city, and tens of thousands of civilians fled to Angola and Zambia.
This time, cobalt prices skyrocketed. By the end of May, prices for the mineral on the free market had risen by some 500 percent. Officially, the metal was worth forty-two dollars a pound. On the black market, a pound of the metal was worth fifty bucks. “It generated some of the highest prices for cobalt ever seen,” the former cobalt trader told me. Engineers and Europeans left Kolwezi in droves. Forrest decided to move away with his family, only to return decades later as one of the most important people in cobalt mining. Production plummeted and prices soared. For a brief moment, it was even profitable to fly cobalt out of Kolwezi; usually, only precious metals like gold and silver warranted such white-glove treatment.
The U.S. government decided to put together a strategic stockpile of cobalt, which was key for the armaments business. The stockpile reached more than twenty thousand tons in the mid-1990s, but by the year 2000, it had been sold off, prompting soul-searching when cobalt became vital again. Questions about Soviet stockpiling were raised in Congress, and people started to look for alternatives to cobalt. Some businessmen suggested that deep-sea mining would reduce dependence on Zaire.
Reading reports from the time, I found it all a bit eerie: The exact same solutions were being proposed in the late 2010s and early 2020s, when I began reporting on cobalt and battery minerals. Even as cobalt prices fell back to normal levels after the 1978 invasion, and as the commodities market resumed its inevitable pace, something had changed. Washington was sitting up and taking notice. Cobalt had become critical.
Part 2
Trade and War
“Trade cannot be maintained without war, nor war without trade. The times now require you to manage your general commerce with your sword in your hands.”
—Governor-General Jan Pieterszoon Coen, Dutch East Indies Company, 1614
Chapter 10
Putting Out Fires
The fire began in the midriff of a Harlem apartment building at around 2:00 p.m. on February 23, 2024. The flames spread quickly, eating through the 120-year-old frame and wooden floors. Thick black smoke began to billow from windows. By the time the New York City Fire Department arrived, the fourth and fifth stories were burning, and firefighters had to rappel down the side of the building. They made three rope rescues; one resident even had to jump from the sixth story. Seventeen people managed to escape with injuries. Fazil Khan, a twenty-seven-year-old journalist who had moved to New York from New Delhi, a person described by his friends as “the most honest person I’ve ever met,” did not make it out.
