The Elements of Power

The blood-soaked true story of cobalt, the blue mineral powering the green revolution

Our world is shifting away from hydrocarbons and fossil fuels to renewable forms of power that rely more than ever on batteries. As demand for these products has grown, so has the need for minerals that are used in their production, in particular cobalt, a metallic element that is overwhelmingly mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, site of the world’s largest cobalt reserves.

In The Elements of Power, New Yorker writer Nicolas Niarchos takes the reader on a vivid, deeply-reported journey from the mines of Congo to the factories of China to trace an element that has become indispensable for the technology upon which modern society is based. He explores how we became addicted to a supply chain that wreaks havoc across the globe, is defining US/China relations and extracting a terrible price in child labour, corruption and exploitation.

From the origins of battery technology in the 1970s, via Cold War manoeuvring, right up to the present day with companies like Tesla and Apple's reliance on cobalt, The Elements of Power will be the definitive account of the new mineral rush, doing for cobalt what Daniel Yergin’s Pulitzer-winning The Prize did for oil.