Human Rights Issues In Battery Mineral Mining Challenge Truly Green Electric Car Industry

As the climate crisis pushes more and more people to rethink their relationship with the environment, electric vehicles are becoming one of the main products consumers can purchase to make a positive change.

But driving an emission-free car won’t reach the goal of reducing global greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero. As part one of this series showed, fossil-fueled power grids continue to stand in the way of making the EV space truly emission-free — and complicate the quest for achieving clean sources for electricity. 

Batteries lie at the heart of any electric car and their production process is plagued with geopolitical complexities, moral dilemmas and extractive practices that continue to put vulnerable populations —as well as the climate— at risk.

We've Only Just Started Mining For Battery Minerals

The main challenges for achieving sustainability in the EV space generally revolve around the supply chain for raw materials, infrastructure and recycling, Simon Jowitt, an associate professor of economic geology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said in an interview with Benzinga.

Lithium, nickel, cobalt and manganese are needed to make EV batteries, and even more mining is required for the development of a power grid based on renewables like wind and solar. On top of that are the metals required to make the vehicles themselves.

"We already mine more metals than at any other point in human history and the move to a carbon-neutral economy will require more metal mining, that we do now, a lot more," Jowitt said.

Cobalt is one of the most sought-after minerals in this industry, as it's used in the majority of the lithium-ion batteries commonly found in electric cars, as well as smartphones and other electronic devices.

According to the Cobalt Institute, in 2021 the automotive industry surpassed the smartphone industry as the main source of global demand for cobalt.

While some car manufacturers, like Tesla TSLA, have announced plans to shift away from cobalt and nickel-based batteries in an effort to overcome supply shortages, the car industry continues to consume 34% of the cobalt mined worldwide.

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The Democratic Republic of the Congo is by far the largest producer of cobalt, accounting for 74% of total production. 

Mining is a central economic activity for the African country, where 90% of exports were from mineral extraction in 2021. The mining industry's track record in the Congo is plagued with reports of corruption and child labor, including a 2016 exposé by Amnesty International that found children aged 12 and 14 working 24-hour shifts in underground mines.

These practices have been reported to continue to this day.

“People are working in subhuman, grinding, degrading conditions. They use pickaxes, shovels, stretches of rebar to hack and scrounge at the earth in trenches and pits and tunnels to gather cobalt and feed it up the formal supply chain,” Siddharth Kara, a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School and author of the book "Cobalt Red," told NPR.

Mining for cobalt has also devastated parts of the Congolese environment, contaminating the air and water and eliminating millions of trees to make way for mining operations, which have also displaced locals from their homes.

University of Nevada's Jowitt says that in 10 to 20 years the world will need over five times that amount of cobalt mined today, as well as five times more graphite and lithium and twice as much nickel. He expects this growing need for battery minerals to plunge the industry into novel issues as metal demand exceeds supply for the EV and other markets.

While it is clear that demand for these minerals will grow exponentially, it's less clear how the industry will accommodate that demand in a sustainable and socially responsible way.

"Mining projects are becoming increasingly subject to delays," Jowitt said, mentioning that this is causing bottlenecks in the supply chain, thus raising the cost of batteries and end products, like EVs.

Electric Vehicle Mineral Supply, Consumer Demand At A Crossroads

In June 2022, the average electric car in the U.S. cost $66,000, according to the Kelley Blue Book. This marks a 13% year-over-year- increase, against 9.1% year-over-year inflation that month.

Yet prices have been in rapid decline in recent months as several EV companies, including Tesla and Ford F cut prices for their best-selling models, like Tesla Models 3 and Y and Ford's Mustang Mach-E, according to a New York Times report. By the end of 2022, the cost of an average electric car had dropped almost $5,000 in six months, to $61,488, compared with $49,507 for all cars, including gasoline fueled vehicles.

Tax credits put in place by the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 are creating more demand for EVs, which is expected to help lower prices even further as production levels grow.

Yet Jowitt describes the EV space at a juncture with "key challenges facing the minerals industry and hence the supply chains needed for a carbon-neutral economy."

In Bolivia, a country holding 25% of the world's lithium reserves, mining for the mineral has become a central point in the political agenda of both the government and opposition. The current president Luis Arce and as well as his predecessor Evo Morales have asserted that control over lithium reserves was behind a political coup that illegitimately removed Morales from office in 2019.

The country hasn't yet developed the extraction infrastructure needed to make its lithium mining commercially viable. After years of talks with Chinese, German and U.S. companies, Bolivia finally signed a deal with a consortium led by Chinese companies CATL, BRUNP and CMOC in January.

The issues over child labor in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as well as resource nationalism in South America reflect the key challenges facing the minerals industry and hence the supply chains needed for a carbon-neutral economy, says Jowitt.

"If you combine this demand for EVs in the U.S. with an unwillingness to mine more here, then we end up with situations where we not only ship environmental problems elsewhere, but those supply chains become open to abuse, they become insecure, and we also lose value and potential employment," he said.

He calls for consumers to become more involved in knowing where the materials used to make their cars come from. In his eyes, environmental, social and governmental challenges "are the main issues the minerals industry will face for the next few decades, and probably longer."

"If you're concerned about mining on indigenous land, about local impacts or labour conditions, I give you the biggest mining operations ever undertaken: for oil, gas, and coal, and the hungry machines that must constantly consume them," wrote writer and activist Rebecca Solnit in a recent piece for The Guardian.

While achieving a sustainable shift to electric vehicles presents some of the hardest challenges of our time, efforts to pursue carbon-neutral goals should be weighed against the impact of a fossil fuel-based economy.

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