March 13, 2022 – Companies are betting hundreds of billions of dollars on electric cars and trucks. To make them, they’ll need a lot of batteries. And that means they need a lot of minerals, like lithium, cobalt and nickel, to be dug up out of the earth.
These minerals aren’t particularly rare, but production needs to scale up massively to meet the auto industry’s ambitions. There’s another big challenge: The existing supply chain is dominated by a single country: China. “China pretty much controls almost all the metals required,” says Kwasi Ampofo, the head of metals and mining at the research company BloombergNEF.
Beijing controls about three-quarters of the market for the minerals that are essential for batteries. China set out intentionally to dominate the processing of these minerals, as part of a plan to become a major player in electric vehicles. Beijing had the authoritarian power, the money, the massive market and the will to make that happen – much to the anxiety of the West