The Elements of Power — the brutal cost of the battery industry
In another era, when oil was the undisputed lubricant of global capitalism, the economic historian Daniel Yergin charted the intersection of business and geopolitics in his 1992 Pulitzer-winning classic The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power. In 2026, Nicolas Niarchos, a journalist specialising in energy and mining, attempts something similar for the age of batteries.
Mostly he succeeds. The Elements of Power cuts like a fast-paced action film from battery labs in California, Tokyo and the backstreets of Shenzhen (where EV maker BYD started out) to mines in Africa and elsewhere where a combination of powerful companies, hucksters and mostly downtrodden miners scrabble for the minerals needed to power the energy transition.
The battery sections of the book trace the story of the invention of lithium-ion batteries based on research beginning in the 1970s by three scientists — M Stanley Whittingham, John B Goodenough and Akira Yoshino — who went on to win the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and to kick-start whole new industries and a race to limit carbon emissions well before that.
Much of the story unfolds in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the “Saudi Arabia of Cobalt”. Its huge reserves of the metal, at least half of the world’s supply, are as indispensable for the modern electric vehicle industry as its rubber once was for the tyres of cars powered by internal combustion engines.
Modern-day companies may not be lopping off the limbs of Congolese as happened in the era of Belgium’s King Leopold II. But in the age of batteries, it is still the Congolese who suffer environmental degradation and back-breaking toil at the wrong end of the global supply chain.
Three strong themes emerge. One is that of displaced morality, or the separation of governments and consumers in wealthier countries pursuing supposedly green ambitions from the costs unfolding someplace else. Niarchos argues that in order for some people to breathe cleaner air and to burnish their green credentials, environmental catastrophe and human rights abuses are being pushed elsewhere. It is what he calls “the convolutions” of a supply chain that comfortably removes “by degrees, the companies buying, selling, and making use of Congo’s minerals, from the harsh realities on the ground”.
The second theme is the way in which China, through its control of mines, refining and battery technology, has come to dominate the 21st century’s energy ecosystem as convincingly as the US dominated that of the 20th century.
Where once Americans, Japanese and Europeans led in battery science, today companies such as Fujian-based CATL, the world’s biggest producer of lithium-ion batteries, and BYD, the biggest manufacturer of EVs, reign near-supreme. CATL alone has 18,000 people working in its research and development department — more battery scientists than in all of Germany, Niarchos writes — while BYD employed a “staggering” 110,000 researchers in 2024.
This has much to do with China’s scale and unstoppable industrial progress. But in the author’s view, it is also a story of strategic mistakes in the west by individual companies — Exxon sold its battery business in the 1980s — and by “political flip-flopping”. The latter has been epitomised most recently, Niarchos argues, by the abandonment of Biden-era subsidies for the EV industry in the second term of oil enthusiast Donald Trump. 
Though the book went to press before Trump gambled so brazenly on unlocking Venezuelan oil, the author suggests that while the US bets on the technologies of the past, Beijing has already moved to the future. Europe and the UK have also rolled back commitments to accelerate towards net zero, while European industry has lagged in both battery technology and the manufacture of EVs.
Historically, the US was much slower to realise the strategic value of Congo’s cobalt — once viewed as an impurity — than it was to understand the importance of its uranium. It was fissile material from the Shinkolobwe uranium mine in Katanga, the province where most of Congo’s cobalt is now found, that was used in the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Today, many of Congo’s biggest copper-cobalt mines, including the giant Tenke Fungurume, once owned by US miner Freeport-McMoRan, have been swept up by Chinese companies. The likely outcome, Niarchos writes, is that the west is “soon going to be as dependent on Chinese batteries as we are now on Middle East oil”.
The third theme is what the author calls “the revenge of the miners”. Companies that were considered anachronistic by many in the 2000s are now roaring back as demand for lithium, cobalt, nickel, phosphate, graphite (and gold) soars. “Mining companies had long been considered dirty, a pollutive anachronism, but, all of a sudden, everyone was realising that they needed people who carved open the earth in search of its riches,” he writes.
One of the book’s messages is that mining should not be pushed out of sight, but should be cleaned up — both environmentally and socially. Somehow, he suggests, the industry must get past the Mark Twain definition of a mine as “a hole in the ground owned by a liar”.
Niarchos has an interesting biography. The son of a Greek shipping magnate, he began his journalistic career as a fact checker on The New Yorker before becoming a contributing writer. The Elements of Power, his first book, reveals a scrappy determination. Researched over four years, it includes much hardscrabble reporting in the mining towns of Congo, particularly in Katanga, as well as in other locations including the US, Peru and Sulawesi in Indonesia, where the landscape has been “wrenched from wilderness to dystopia” by a nickel mine.
One arresting story is that of Françoise Ilunga, the widow of an artisanal miner, who is left to bring up her children alone after her husband is crushed to death in one of the many mining cave-ins. Nitunga Ilunga was a wildcat miner known as a creuseur, or digger, of whom Niarchos writes elsewhere that he rarely saw them wearing shoes, let alone safety helmets. A fairly high proportion of the metal that trickles into the global supply chain — and thus into the batteries of EVs and mobile phones — is dug up by people like him.
Towards the end of the book, Niarchos includes a graphic account — commendably devoid of self-pity — of his five-day arrest, along with his Congolese fixer, on the outskirts of Lubumbashi. He is accused of spying and taken for interrogation to an almost comically decrepit detention centre, with wires sticking out of the walls, before being bundled out of the country by plane. He is now barred from Congo, such is the interest of the country’s elite in having a light shone in the darker recesses of a mining industry from which it is busily extracting rent.
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The book shifts dizzyingly from reportage to a thematic sifting through its main ideas. At its best, it’s an exciting approach. At its worst, it can blur into a jumble of incidents from different locations that can be hard to locate in the arc of the overall narrative. There is a sense that some of the chapters could be shuffled to an entirely different section of the book without anyone noticing. It would probably have benefited from a more rigorous edit and a stronger timeline.
Still, there are merits in a structure that demonstrates just how mind-blowingly interconnected (yet disconnected) the world can be. In just one example, the author draws a link between a period of heightened demand for phosphates in the battery industry and the suicide of Indian farmers as the supply of fertiliser dwindled.
The book ends with an account of 30 miners who died in a tunnel collapse near Kolwezi in Congo. Their bodies were quickly disposed of in a mass grave as all involved in the supply chain, including the Congolese authorities, sought literally to bury the evidence. It was just one small example, Niarchos writes, of “the horrific suffering that has come to be accepted as an unavoidable price for cleaner cities”.
The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth by Nicolas Niarchos William Collins £25/Penguin Press $32, 480 pages
David Pilling is the FT’s Africa editor
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