Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

by Siddharth Kara

The battery packs in electric vehicles require up to ten kilograms of refined cobalt each, more than one thousand times the amount required for a smartphone battery. As a result, demand for cobalt is expected to grow by almost 500 percent from 2018 to 2050,3 and there is no known place on earth to find that amount of cobalt other than the DRC.

None of these companies claims to tolerate the hostile conditions under which cobalt is mined in the Congo, but neither they nor anyone else are undertaking sufficient efforts to ameliorate these conditions. In fact, no one seems to accept responsibility at all for the negative consequences of cobalt mining in the Congo—not the Congolese government, not foreign mining companies, not battery manufacturers, and certainly not mega-cap tech and car companies.

There was not a single peaceful transfer of power in the Congo from 1960, when Patrice Lumumba was elected to be the nation’s first prime minister, until 2019, when Félix Tshisekedi was elected. In the interim, the country was subjected to one violent coup after another, first with Joseph Mobutu, who ruled the Congo from 1965 to 1997, followed by Laurent-Désiré Kabila’s reign from 1997 to 2001, followed by his son Joseph Kabila from 2001 to 2019.

As of 2022, there is no such thing as a clean supply chain of cobalt from the Congo. All cobalt sourced from the DRC is tainted by various degrees of abuse, including slavery, child labor, forced labor, debt bondage, human trafficking, hazardous and toxic working conditions, pathetic wages, injury and death, and incalculable environmental harm.

Our journey will then begin in an old colonial mining town called Lubumbashi. From there, a single road traverses the mining provinces deeper into the heart of cobalt territory. As we follow this road, the conditions of cobalt mining will be revealed with each passing mile through the firsthand accounts of the children, women, and men who dig for cobalt, as well as my own reporting on the mineral traders, government officials, multinational corporations, and other stakeholders that profit from their work.

The nation is bordered to the north by the Central African Republic, to the northeast by South Sudan, to the east by Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania, to the south and southeast by Zambia, to the southwest by Angola, and to the west by the Republic of the Congo and a sliver of coastline where the Congo River empties into the Atlantic.

The upper two-thirds of the country is dressed in tropical rain forest, second in size only to the Amazon and home to the largest population of great apes in the world. South of the forest, plateaus slope downward into sprawling savannas. The rugged peaks of the Rwenzori Range stand guard along the northeastern border adjacent to the Rift Valley and the great lakes of Africa.

it is always raining somewhere in the Congo, and the country has the highest frequency of thunderstorms in the world.

The major cities of the DRC include the frenetic capital, Kinshasa, located near the southwestern edge of the country along the banks of the Congo River. It is one of Africa’s fastest-growing megacities and home to more than seventeen million “Kinois.”

"Kinois", also known as Kinshasans in English, are the inhabitants of the Democratic Republic of Congo's capital, Kinshasa.

Mbuji-Mayi is capital of Kasai-Orientale Province, situated in the south-central part of the country and home to the largest diamond deposit in the world.

The capital of Tshopo Province, Kisangani, is located near numerous gold mines and serves as a trading hub i...

Perched at the southern end of Lake Kivu, Goma is the main city on the dangerous border with Rwanda, where coffee, tea, and ot...

Roughly 2,300 kilometers southeast of Kinshasa at the opposite end of the country is Lubumbashi, capital of Haut-Katanga Province and administrative head of the mining provinces. Kolwezi is the capital of the adjacen...

The soul of the Congo is its extraordinary river. It is the deepest river in the world, and through its system of tributaries, it drains a region the size of India.

By the time the river reaches the Atlantic, it empties with so much force that it clouds the ocean with sediment for a hundred kilometers offshore.

The source of the Congo River was the final great mystery of African geography, and the drive by European explorers to solve this mystery tragically altered the fate of the Congo and made possible all the suffering taking place in the mining provinces today.

Katanga has always been an outlier in the DRC. The people in Katanga largely see themselves as Katangans first and Congolese second. Crucially, Katangan leaders never fully subscribed to the premise that their mineral riches should be shared with the nation. Prior to Congolese independence, the Belgians established extensive mining operations in Katanga, and they also made every effort to keep control of the region after independence by orchestrating the secession of the province followed by the assassination of Prime Minister Lumumba. With so much money at stake, control of Katanga has always been a bloody affair.

Although the copious mineral riches of Katanga could easily fund numerous programs to improve child education, alleviate child mortality, upgrade sanitation and public health, and expand electrification for the Congolese people, most of the mineral wealth flows out of the country.

Despite being home to trillions of dollars in untapped mineral deposits, the DRC’s entire national budget in 2021 was a scant $7.2 billion, similar to the state of Idaho, which has one-fiftieth the population. The DRC ranks 175 out of 189 on the United Nations Human Development Index. More than three-fourths of the population live below the poverty line, one-third suffer from food insecurity, life expectancy is only 60.7 years, child mortality ranks ...

companies, most artisanal cobalt miners earn paltry incomes between one or two dollars per day.

The nexus of these links resides in a shadow economy at the bottom of the mining industry that flows inevitably into the formal supply chain. This merging of informal with formal, artisanal with industrial, is the most important aspect of the cobalt supply chain to understand. It is, despite claims to the contrary, all but impossible to isolate artisanal cobalt from industrial production.

Artisanal miners occupy the base of the chain. Known locally as creuseurs (“diggers”), they use rudimentary tools to dig in pits, trenches, and tunnels to find an ore called heterogenite, which contains copper, nickel, cobalt, and sometimes uranium.

The Congo’s artisanal mining sector is regulated by a government agency called SAEMAPE,

SAEMAPE has designated fewer than one hundred sites across the Copper Belt in which artisanal mining is authorized to take place, called Zones d’Exploitation Artisanale (ZEAs).

The small number of ZEAs is woefully insufficient to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of people who try to earn a living by digging for cobalt. As a result, artisanal miners dig in hundreds of unauthorized mining areas spread across the Copper Belt. Many of these sites are located right next to industrial mining operations since the diggers know there is likely to be valuable ore under the ground. Artisanal mining also takes place directly on many industrial mining sites, even though it is forbidden under Congolese law.

Artisanal cobalt feeds into the formal supply chain via an informal ecosystem of négociants (traders) and comptoirs (depots), also known as maisons d’achat (buying houses). These are the fuzzy linkages that serve to launder minerals from artisanal sources into the formal supply chain. Négociants are independent operators who work in and around artisanal sites to purchase cobalt from artisanal miners. They are almost all young...

they transport the ore to the depots for sale. In some of the larger artisanal mining areas, there are depots located on-site, in which case art...

There are hundreds of depots scattered around Haut-Katanga and Lualaba Provinces. There is no scrutiny at any depots as to the source or conditions under which the ore being purchased was mined. After the depots purchase ore from négociants or artisanal miners, they sell their supply to industrial mining companies and processing facilities. From this point forward, it is impossible to isolate artisanal from industrial production. Although Congolese law stipulates that mineral depots should be registered and operated only by Congolese nationals, almost all depots in Haut-Katanga and Lualaba Provinces are operated by Chinese buyers.

The formal segment of the supply chain begins with the massive industrial copper-cobalt mines that span the Copper Belt. Some of the mines, such as Tenke Fungurume and Mutanda, are as big as a European capital.

there were nineteen major industrial copper-cobalt mining complexes operating in Haut-Katanga and Lualaba Provinces, fifteen of which were owned or financed by Chinese mining companies. Most of the Chinese-owned mining sites I visited were secured either by a military force called the FARDC or the elite Republican Guard.

These armed security forces are devoted to two tasks: keep prying eyes out, and keep minerals secure.

Prior to export from the DRC, cobalt-containing ores must undergo a preliminary processing stage during which the cobalt is separated from other metals in the ore.

The preliminary processing typically yields either crude cobalt hydroxide or cobalt concentrate. These semi-refined forms of cobalt are loaded onto trucks and driven to seaports in Dar es Salaam and Durban for export to commercial-grade refiners,

In 2021, China produced 75 percent of the world’s refined cobalt. The largest single refiner was Huayou Cobalt with a market share of 22 percent.5 Huayou owns Congo DongFang Mining, one of the largest copper-cobalt mining companies operating in the DRC. The vertical integration of Chinese companies across the cobalt supply chain has accelerated in recent years, solidifying the country’s dominance over the rechargeable battery industry.

“In Congo, we do not have sufficient electricity capacity to refine cobalt.”

Fully refined cobalt is combined with other metals to make cathodes—the positively charged part of a battery. The largest lithium-ion battery manufacturers in the world are CATL and BYD in China; LG Energy Solution, Samsung SDI, and SK Innovation in South Korea; and Panasonic in Japan. In 2021, these six companies produced 86 percent of the world’s lithium-ion rechargeable batteries, with CATL alone holding a one-third global share.

As far back as the Persian Empire and the Ming dynasty, cobalt was used to create blue pigments in art and pottery.

Cobalt is used in the manufacture of superalloys for turbines and jet engines; as a catalyst for cleaner fuels; in carbides used to make cutting tools; in materials used for dental and bone surgeries; in chemotherapies; and in the cathodes of rechargeable batteries. Given its wide range of uses, the European Union has designated cobalt to be one of twenty “critical” metals and minerals,

Initiatives to secure reliable supplies of refined cobalt that bypass China’s current monopoly have become matters of considerable geopolit...

the Central African Copper Belt holds roughly half of the world’s cobalt reserves at an e...

the artisanal mining crisis in the DRC would not be possible unless there were substantial deposits of cobalt at depths shallow enough to be accessible by a shovel.

the reason the copper-cobalt deposits in the Copper Belt are so shallow is because they are uniquely found in “sediment hosted stratiform deposits.” This type of deposit indicates that the cobalt-containing ores occur in discrete layers of sedimentary rocks that were initially laid down in water. Such deposits are the only ones with the potential to be pushed upward to the surface by tectonic activity, thereby making them accessible to artisanal miners.

located on the western shoulder of one of the most spectacular examples in the world of this tectonic a...

The East African Rift is a 6,500-kilometer fracture in the earth’s surface that stretches from Jordan to Mozambique; it is caused by three plates pulling apart from each other—the Nubian plate, the Somalian plate, and the Arabian plate. Beginning around 800 million years ago, tectonic activity in the rift caused ocean water to enter an enclosed basin in the Copper Belt region. Most of the ocean water evaporated, but some of the saline...

the salt layers began to move upward due to tectonic action, forming salt diapirs—domed rock formations in which a core of rock moves upward by several...

copper-cobalt ores across the Copper Belt are found both at great depths and near the surface.

below the level of a fluctuating water table, the copper and cobalt are combined with sulfur in the mineral carrollite, which is the primary source of industrially mined cobalt in the Congo. Closer to the surface, water combines with sulfur to create sulfuric acid, causing ores to “rust.”

Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, and Android smartphones were launched in 2008. Since that time, billions of smartphones have been sold, and each one of them requires a few grams of refined cobalt in their batteries. A similar eruption of gadgets took place in the tablet market. Apple launched the iPad in 2010, followed soon after by Samsung’s Galaxy Tab. Billions of tablets have since been sold, each of which requires up to thirty grams of cobalt in the battery. Add in laptops, e-scooters, e-bikes, and other rechargeable consumer electronic devices, and the aggregate amount of cobalt needed from all devices, save those with four or more tires, adds up to tens of thousands of tons each year.

The first rechargeable electric vehicle was invented in 1880s, but it was not until the early 1900s that electric vehicles were being produced on a commercial scale. By 1910, around 30 percent of vehicles in the United States were propelled by electric engines. Had the trend continued, we would all be living on a cleaner, cooler planet.

There are several developments cited for the shift to gasoline-powered vehicles. First, the U.S. government invested heavily to expand road infrastructure beginning with the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916. Driving across the nation required greater ranges than could be achieved by EV technology at the time. In addition, the discovery of large oil reserves in Texas, California, and Oklahoma made internal combustion–powered cars much cheaper to operate.