Lithium Rising: The Race for Critical Minerals

[Atmospheric music] [Rumble of boat motor] [Water splash] [Speaking foreign language] [Rumble of boat motor] [Wave splashing] [Sound of child crying] [Baby babbling] [Dramatic music] DUNCAN WOOD: In our day-to-day existence, critical minerals are fundamentally important to many of the things that we do.

The use of rare earths in in smartphones not only makes them interactive, it makes them stronger.

The use of cobalt is not only important in building of batteries for EVs, which will dominate the marketplace in the future, but also in terms of the defense technologies that are much more resilient in warfare.

They're fundamentally important for the future of transportation in the way that uh, oil, petroleum, gasoline were fundamental at the end of the 19th century through the 20th century into the 21st century.

Currently, the United States government keeps a list of about 50 critical minerals.

They're minerals, which are essential for the effective functioning of the U.S.

economy, but in which there are challenges in terms of supply.

[Speaks foreign language] DUNCAN WOOD: Just as with oil, critical minerals tend to be located in countries which are often difficult to deal with.

[Chime of smartphone] NARRATOR: The smartphone, the toothbrush, the e-bike, the laptop, tablet, camera, hearing aid, and smartwatch.

The weed whacker, the pacemaker.

From the mundane to the lifesaving, lithium-ion powered devices get us through the day.

The demand for batteries and the minerals that go in them has skyrocketed in just a few years.

JOSE W. FERNANDEZ: Right now, most of those minerals are controlled by China.

That's a vulnerability.

[Motorcycle engines humming] DUNCAN WOOD: The United States really was asleep at the wheel for many years.

The Chinese had this vision of the future whereby if they could acquire a monopolistic position on critical minerals, that it they would be able to derive enormous political and economic power from it.

And they saw that much better than we did.

NARRATOR: Access to minerals such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel has emerged as a vital geopolitical, economic, and social frontline, and the race is on.

JINGJING ZHANG: When we say the critical or strategic mineral, critical to whom?

MALE: These are foreign companies coming into our ancestral land and making claim to it, and walking out millionaires.

DANIEL DESCHODT: What is Battery Valley?

MATTHIEU HUBERT: We are creating an industry that does not exist in Europe.

DUNCAN WOOD: We're engaged in a struggle for survival and competitiveness for an industry which means a lot to huge swathes of this country.

PRASHANTH PARAMESWARAN: A geopolitical conversation, a security conversation, a China conversation, a human rights conversation, a labor conversation all at the same time.

DUNCAN WOOD: We are on a desperately urgent search for critical minerals.

[Ominous music] NARRATOR: If you want to make a lithium battery... You will need lithium.

A soft, silvery, white alkaline metal.

Perhaps the largest lithium deposit in the world is located beneath these salt flats in Bolivia.

[Speaking Spanish] NARRATOR: Yet to date, most of Bolivia's lithium remains underground.

A fortune astonishingly close... [Sound of digging] NARRATOR: But still out of reach.

[Speaking Spanish] [Lyrical guitar music] [Speaking Spanish] NARRATOR: Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of miners have died in Cerro Rico since the 16th century.

It is known as "the mountain that eats men."

[Clanking of tools, digging] [Speaking Spanish] [Children speaking Spanish] [Car motors and honking] [Angry shouting] NARRATOR: In 2023, Bolivia signed three new international agreements to extract lithium.

One was with a Russian state-owned company, the other two with companies from China.

[Rumble of truck] [Speaking Spanish] HENRY CABOT LODGE JR.

: Stay out of this hemisphere and don't try to, start your plans and your conspiracies over here.

[Speaking Spanish] [Dramatic guitar music] NARRATOR: It's a 10-hour drive from the salt flats of Bolivia to the Atacama Desert in northern Chile.

It's ten hours through the Altiplano.

Through the Andean mountains... through the scars left by the open veins of Latin America.

[Truck motor hums] NARRATOR: But if you want to make a lithium battery, you will need the Atacama.

Chile is the world's second-largest lithium producer, and Chilean lithium comes from this desert, [Rush of water] the driest place on earth.

[Speaks in foreign language] [Explosion] [Audio from propaganda film] NARRATOR: The Atacama's major lithium producers have sought the appearance of consent from the local communities.

They got it in exchange for royalty payments made directly to the communities.

[Water rushing] [Speaking foreign language] NARRATOR: If you want to build a lithium battery, you will need to refine your lithium, but that doesn't happen here, at least not yet.

Instead, it will be shipped across the Pacific Ocean.

Most often to the one country that dominates critical mineral refinement, yellow gold, white gold, silver.

What's the difference?

Once again, the riches of an era leave these shores.

[Flute music fades] [Driving string music] WANG HUIYAO: China was a latecomer in terms of, uh, you know, EV cars, solar panels, and, uh, green technology, uh, green power basically.

But remember, uh, you know, 10, probably 15 years ago, there was a big, uh, criticism on China.

Uh, a typical example was, was in Beijing, heavily polluted.

There's a smoke, there's a, you don't see a blue sky.

China said, "Okay, we- we, we realize we cannot pollute.

Let's find a new alternative.

Let's have a paradigm shift.

Let's develop the green, green energy," which China did now.

PRASHANTH PARAMESWARAN: Electric vehicles are one of the industries that they want to dominate as part of what President Xi Jinping has called the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, a multi-decade-long series of investments that they want to make in order for China to be dominant first as a regional power and then as a global power.

EVELYN CHEN: There were a lot of subsidies going on, uh, first to manufacturers, then to consumers who buy electric cars.

WILLIAM ADAMS: And I think having, sort of played, second fiddle to European and U.S.

auto manufacturers, China saw that it had an opportunity to leapfrog by jumping into this new technology.

EVELYN CHEN: When the time really comes, the supply chain, the technology is already mature for implementation.

WANG HUIYAO: The U.S.

is still dominant.

Oil and petroleum and and gas, green technology with green energy.

Now China's the leader.

DUNCAN WOOD: For a long time, the United States and other, uh, countries in the west thought, well, if it's to do with mining, if it's to do with getting these basic commodities, let's ask somebody else to do it for us, because then we don't have to worry about the dirtier side of this equation.

ANDREW MILLER: Actually, China isn't a leading producer from a mining perspective.

Geologically, it doesn't have the best assets.

What it has done incredibly strategically is move the processing steps in the supply chain to within its borders.

And that means that the raw material, wherever it's being extracted in the world, needs to sort of flow through China to make its way into the battery supply chain.

[Motorbike engines rattling] DUNCAN WOOD: And because the Chinese have been so strategic about, not just building that capacity within Chinese territory, but in other parts of the world, but owned by Chinese companies, they have this stranglehold on the market.

China, it dominates the map.

[Street sounds] PRASHANTH PARAMESWARAN: Indonesia, you had a president that came into office about a decade ago, looking for investment and saw China as that source and said, "Well if China's going to be the first mover, we owe it to ourselves to actually test that proposition."

And that's actually ended up what's- what's been happening.

I mean, Chinese companies have really flooded into Indonesia in the nickel space.

NARRATOR: Nickel is critical for extending a battery's runtime between charges.

Indonesia supplies over half of the world's nickel.

Its biggest mines and smelters are controlled by Chinese firms.

PRASHANTH PARAMESWARAN: But are the Indonesian politicians and officials striking the best deal, not just for themselves, but for Indonesia as a country and the Indonesian people?

[Sounds of industry] [Speaking foreign language] JINGJING ZHANG: The Chinese company either don't have this environment policy in place, they don't care enough about the, their environment.

I grew up in China.

I knew what the manufacture pollution looks like.

I grew up in a chemical factory.

Both my, my parents worked for the chemical factories, and that is a, "pollute first clean up, second."

This type of the, the development should not be repeated, uh, in other continent.

[High pitched screech] [Speaking in foreign language] NARRATOR: If you want your cell phone, your laptop, your electric vehicle to last longer and not to overheat, you will need cobalt.

Silvery blue, brittle, and rare, 70 percent of the world's cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

[Speaking foreign language] NARRATOR: 80 percent of the DRC's cobalt output is owned by Chinese companies.

[Speaking foreign language] MVEMBA PHEZO DIZOLELE: The Chinese are not unique... When it comes to exploiting a place and taking advantage of it.

The Chinese use the same model, everybody else.

The model is exploitation.

The model is taking resources and the model, it calls for maximization of profit.

That is the game.

The question is how do African countries best position themselves so they can take advantage of what the Chinese are availing to them.

WANG HUIYAO: So if China has a big market, China can purchase, China can refine it, who else can- can provide that kind of capacity?

JOSE W. FERNANDEZ: There is a reality that we're all facing, and that is we cannot do it without a stable supply of critical minerals.

Experts tell us that we're gonna need 42 times the amount of lithium that we have today, uh, by 2040 or 2050, we're gonna need 25 times the amount of manganese that we have today.

Cobalt, right now, most of those minerals are controlled by China.

That's a vulnerability.

DUNCAN WOOD: Once you see supplies of those critical minerals being cut off, rampant inflation, empty shelves, or in this case, empty inventories.

And of course, in terms of the defense of military, uh, industries.

GIULIA SICCARDO: We have not invested in, in segments of the supply chain that are essential at all.

We have to catch up.

[Native American inspired music] NARRATOR: If you want to make a lithium battery with lithium mined in the United States, there is an option.

West of the Rocky Mountains beneath the Oregon badlands by the sagebrush deserts of northern Nevada, sits Thacker Pass, home to one of the world's largest lithium deposits.

Lithium Americas, a Canadian company, has broken ground on a massive open pit mine to reach it.

TIM CROWLEY: Typically, lithium is extracted from South America or Australia.

They tend to send that material, in a concentrate, elsewhere to get processed, in particular, China.

We're changing that.

We're changing it right here at Thacker Pass.

We need to produce these things here in the United States, and that's what we're doing.

[Music continues] NARRATOR: But there is a catch.

If you want to extract lithium from Thacker Pass, you will need an open-pit mine on land that borders the Fort McDermott reservation.

Land that the Paiute and Shoshone tribe had been herded onto following centuries of oppression.

The mine site itself is soaked red in Native blood.

NEWSREADER: "The Indians discovered their danger when the captain ordered Lieutenant Littlefield and nine men to advance between the mountain and the camp.

A charge was ordered and each officer and man went for scalps and fought the scattering devils over several miles in which time all were killed that could be found."

The Owyhee Avalanche newspaper, September 30th, 1865.

DAY HINKAY: America's been committing these crimes against us for hundreds and hundreds of years, but it seems like it's okay if it happens against First People or indigenous peoples.

It seems like America, the people, think it's okay.

NARRATOR: The Fort McDermott reservation Tribal Council supports the development of the Thacker Pass Mine.

MYRON SMART: I really don't understand that part.

And if you show them a little bit of money, you promise them, "Oh, we're gonna give you this.

We're gonna make this for you."

And then right away they're gonna, they're all for it.

GARY MCKINNEY: When this company will come in and say, "We're gonna buy you this.

We're gonna pay, pay for this, we're gonnna, build a new building."

That keeps them quiet.

DAY HINKAY: Some of the Indians still feel like the white man's a good man and he's, he's gonna help us, but he's not helping us.

He's helping himself.

They gotta accept who, who's gonna suffer.

[Cow mooing] ARLO CRUTCHER: My name is Arlo Crutcher, chairman of our tribe.

I'm a member of the Fort McDermott Paiute Shoshone Tribe.

Born and raised here on the reservation.

My grandpa was the first chairman of our tribe when they established a tribal government here.

He was the first chairman.

My dad was a vice chairman.

Work comes along with the season, springtime, turn them out on the range.

Ram, move cattle out, drive 'em out quite a ways, and do a lot of roping, riding.

Rodeo a little bit.

I, I guess you could say that's my, my lifestyle.

I'm a rancher-cowboy.

You know, I guess the only thing we can really call is our natural resources is uh, the land and the, the water that we're able to use.

But the rest of it, natural resources, it doesn't belong to us.

It belongs to the United States government.

That's just how it is.

They're gonna continue on fighting it, but it's here.

INTERVIEWER: Without the mines, what other opportunities are there?

WOMAN: I mean, there's like drilling.

You got mining, um, traveling, like, I don't know, let's say, geez, um, I don't know, you know, it's just the jobs are very limited out here.

MAN: I needed some income.

I drive, uh, heavy equipment out there, um, haul truck and dozer.

Jobs are kind of hard, to find down here.

ARLO CRUTCHER: Sitting in this position here.

What, what do you do?

That's a question.

What do you do for your people?

Do you say no?

What's best for your community?

Because they're, they're here.

They're here.

REPORTER: The project has been supported by both the Trump and Biden administrations to reduce dependence on foreign minerals.

ARLO CRUTCHER: You know, this is probably one thing that two presidents that's never agreed on one thing and never will, had agreed on.

And they pushed it and that's why it came through.

REPORTER: Nevada's supply of lithium could be an economic giant for the state, but not everyone is on board.

RENE MARSH: The mining company, Lithium Americas, faces legal challenges from groups who wanna block the project.

[Native American singing] BETHANY SAM: It's the mining law of 1872, to still treat us like we're in the 1800s, you know, isn't sufficient enough for us.

REPORTER: The people are divided.

Some are visibly against it, but the tribal council isn't.

ARLO CRUTCHER: They're building us a $5 million project.

It's a daycare, Head Start, cultural center.

And we asked them to add in a computer lab to it.

So they're building that for us.

It's not much, but it's a lot for our, uh, our tribe because, uh, we don't, we don't have the money for that stuff.

MAX WILBERT: This tribe is one of the poorest in the nation.

Their poverty is being weaponized by these mining companies.

It's communities that have their back against the wall.

ARLO CRUTCHER: Some of the people who are protesting, they look at us, they look at me that way too.

As far as we're allowing lithium, we're allowing the white people to use us.

With an open mind, I can say we're, we're all guilty of it.

I'm not gonna argue it.

Sure.

How else are you gonna get some things done?

REPORTER: The federal judge has once again ruled the Thacker Pass lithium mine can move forward.

Today's ruling clears the way for the developer, Lithium Americas, to begin construction as early as next week.

[Footsteps] SHANIA LENOIR: My name's Shania Lenoir and I'm from Nevada.

I heard about this place that they were hiring, so I applied, ended up coming out here, and being one of the first seven.

INTERVIEWER: What kind of opportunity has it been for you here?

SHANIA LENOIR: It's been the best one ever.

TIM CROWLEY: When our mining contractor hires people, it's not for a temporary construction job.

It's for a long-term job, [Bulldozer engine starts] that they could have for many, many years to come.

Many decades to come.

We're gonna pay, uh, rough, roughly twice the state average, strong salary to support families.

SHANIA LENOIR: Well, a lot of my family don't like it.

They believe we're destroying the sacred sites, but I don't see nothing wrong with it.

They don't pay my bills.

If they don't like what I'm doing, they can go watch somebody else and complain about somebody else.

I plan on retiring from here and I'll probably be real old watching all the young people doing the things that I did.

OLDER WOMAN: I don't like it.

All the wind and the, the air that's coming this way, that's gonna affect all this reservation right here.

Even people with a lot of cattles, it's gonna ruin their, their, the land.

But there's nothing, there's nothing a person can do right now.

OLDER MAN: You're talking about some quality tablefare [sniffs].

OLDER WOMAN: We make um, gloves, moccasins, dress.

They scrape the hide, they soften it and they smoke it.

It turns a real pretty brown color.

All these um, Indian ways of doing things.

These young ones, like I have grandsons and what are they gonna think when they grow up?

When, when this land's all dried up and the water's gonna be gone, the water of life is gonna be all dried up.

OLDER MAN: Yeah.

It's crazy.

I think that mine, to be honest with you, shouldn't have even been there.

'Cause uh, whoever okayed something like that from this reservation didn't even get acknowledgement from none, none of these people.

So in my book, whatever they did was illegal.

Did they help certain people?

Yeah.

Did they help themselves?

[bleep] yeah, they did.

Who the hell gives a [bleep] about a bunch of digger Indians from Fort McDermott anyway?

[Scoffs] [Speaks a Native phrase] OLDER WOMAN: Mm-hmm.

[Camera shutter] [Static] MALE VOICE: The potential with lithium is 3.04 volts.

Graphite counter potential is minus 0.7.

Many of the lithium-ion cells have a nominal potential of 3.7 volts.

The graphite intercalation behavior face changes, decomposes aspects in the electrolyte to form a passivation layer.

Only with this passivation layer are you able to make the solventation handoff to make this thing store energy.

Lithium ions migrate from the anode to the cathode across the electrolyte.

And then, and each one carries one electron of charge difference, and this is how the battery works.

[Man singing in French] DANIEL DESCHODT: In the 1980s, the shipyard closed down.

We all left this area, the steel industry.

We had a big shipyard.

We had, um, two refineries, refining crude oil.

When the last refinery closed down in Dunkirk, the Dunkirk area lost approximately 10,000 jobs.

So Dunkirk no longer.

[Speaking French] [French song continues] DANIEL DESCHODT: And I came back here 15 years later and participating to the redeployment of the, of the Port of Dunkirk, to reconsider what could be the new industry for Dunkirk.

What is Battery Valley?

It's uh, you've probably heard of the Silicon Valley, maybe?

[Chuckles] There are four gigafactories in France at the moment, under construction within 80 kilometers away from the Port of Dunkirk.

And these gigafactories are bringing other activities such as, uh, manufacturing of camps and precamps for the batteries, uh, recycling for the batteries and all the way to, uh, the, uh, automotive industry, which this is new business.

[Factory worker soldering] [Speaking French] YOUNG FEMALE WORKER: We saw how the battery charges, and then you have uh, the energy on the cell.

I think it's a great opportunities for young people in Dunkirk, it is the, the best sector to be in because it's the, the sector where we will have the, the most work.

MATTHIEU HUBERT: We are creating an industry that does not exist in Europe.

Batteries in Europe, it's close to zero now.

[Speaking French] MATTHIEU HUBERT: So we have to train people, we have to coach people... [Speaking French] MATTHIEU HUBERT: And they will be able to learn and to be very efficient within the company.

[Speaking French] MATTHIEU HUBERT: We have a deadline, very clear deadline in 2035.

It won't be possible to buy anything but an electrical car in Europe.

So what do we have to do to build, develop, design batteries for Europe, in Europe?

We decided to do so, but 10 or 15 years after, so here we are now trying to catch up.

Yes, we are for sure.

We are, we are late.

[Techno pop music] MALE FACTORY WORKER: This is a mechanical process to make these stacks.

We need four stacks to make one cell.

We need eight cells to make one module and the car maker needs around 12 modules to make one battery.

We will uh produce 82 million cells per year.

900,000 cars for one year.

MATTHIEU HUBERT: This region is creating a new industrial revolution.

It'll be a very important, pivotal, for sure, region for the rest of France and the rest, the rest of Europe, definitely.

[Triumphant music crescendos] [Ethereal music starts] THOMAS FREY: If you compare a lithium-ion battery to oil or gas, you use oil and gas once, and it's gone.

But with a lithium-ion battery, those metals don't degrade.

The materials inside them are infinitely recyclable.

You can use the lithium, the nickel, the cobalt over and over again, literally infinitely.

We're here at Ascend Elements in Covington, Georgia, and we uh, recycle electric vehicle batteries.

So we take them in here, we recycle them, and then we create a material that can be put into new electric vehicle batteries.

FACTORY WORKER: We are able to pull lithium, nickel, and uh, copper, aluminum out of these batteries that are spent, and we are able to reprocess it into what's gonna become a new battery in a vehicle in the future.

We recover everything out of those batteries rather than send them down a waste stream that has them go to a landfill.

We have a lot of stock here in the United States that already contains all this.

We just need to find a way to refine it, recycle it, rather than sending it to landfill.

NARRATOR: From the salt flats of South America, to the red earth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, from the smelters in Indonesia, to the factories in northern France, to recycling plants in rural Georgia, the hunt for critical minerals redefines communities, economies, and geopolitics.

And this race is just getting started.

[Slow rock music plays]