BOOK VALUE
The dirty cost of
CLEAN
POWER
From a cobalt seam beneath a Congolese home to the companies commanding the battery economy, Nicolas Niarchos follows the human and industrial chain powering the energy transition.
By Ebrahim Moolla
In 2014, a man digging a toilet pit behind his home in Kasulo, on the outskirts of the Congolese mining city of Kolwezi, struck a seam of cobalt ore. He kept the discovery quiet, cutting through the floor of the house and following the deposit underground. Neighbours eventually heard the digging. Before long, residents were opening pits across the neighbourhood and tunnelling beneath their homes in search of the metal that helps stop lithium-ion batteries from catching fire.
It is a remarkable origin story for the clean-energy economy. The electric vehicles and smartphones sold as polished products begin in places such as Kasulo, where the earth beneath an ordinary home may be more valuable than the life built above it.
The electric vehicles and smartphones sold as polished products begin in places such as Kasulo..."
In The Elements of Power, journalist Nicolas Niarchos follows battery metals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to laboratories, processing plants, and corporate boardrooms around the world. His subject is technology, but his deeper concern is power: who controls the minerals, who captures the value, and who is left carrying the risk.
Niarchos keeps returning to the people at the bottom of this chain. Odilon Kajumba Kilanga, an artisanal miner or creuseur, becomes one of the book’ s human anchors. Kilanga works in shafts threatened by collapse and struggles to meet modest living costs. When Niarchos visits his small room, he finds an old television and a carefully maintained collection of fashionable clothes. Kilanga is a man of pride and taste, not simply evidence in an argument about exploitation.
The book moves outward from such lives into the deals and technologies reshaping the global economy. China recognised the strategic importance of battery
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