How the City of Kolwezi Supports the Electric Revolution While Paying an Enormous Price

The batteries inside every smartphone, tablet, laptop and electric vehicle produced today could not recharge without Kolwezi.

The cobalt found in its soil provides maximum stability and energy density to rechargeable batteries, allowing them to have greater capacity and to operate safely for longer periods. Removing cobalt from batteries would mean having to recharge our smartphones or electric vehicles far more often, and over relatively short periods the batteries could easily catch fire. Nowhere else in the world are there deposits larger, more accessible or of higher quality than the raw cobalt beneath Kolwezi.

In nature, this mineral is typically bound to copper, and the copper-cobalt deposits in the Congo stretch, with varying density and grade, along a four-hundred-kilometre crescent from Kolwezi to northern Zambia, forming an area known as the "Central African Copperbelt". The Copperbelt is a metallogenic marvel containing immense mineral wealth, including 10% of the world's copper and roughly half of global cobalt reserves. In 2021, a total of 111,750 tonnes of cobalt — representing 72% of global supply — was mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a contribution expected to increase along with the annual rise in demand from consumer-electronics and electric-vehicle companies. One might reasonably expect Kolwezi to be a booming town where bold prospectors strike it rich. Nothing could be further from the truth. Kolwezi, like the rest of the Congolese Copperbelt, is a land torn apart by the frantic race to satisfy the cobalt supply chain all the way to the hands of consumers worldwide. The scale of destruction is enormous, and the degree of suffering incalculable. Kolwezi is the new heart of darkness, the tormented heir to the Congolese atrocities that came before it: colonisation, wars and generations of slavery.

The ravenous appetite for cobalt is a direct result of today's economy driven by consumer electronics, combined with the global transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. Car manufacturers are rapidly scaling up the production of electric vehicles in line with government efforts to reduce CO₂ emissions following the 2015 Paris climate agreements — commitments that increased during COP26 in 2021. Electric-vehicle batteries require up to ten kilograms of refined cobalt each, more than a thousand times the amount needed for a smartphone battery. As a result, demand for cobalt is expected to rise by at least 500% from 2018 to 2050, and there is no other place on Earth where such quantities of the mineral can be found outside the Democratic Republic of the Congo.