Whack-a-mole! Or, What’s in a Material Anyway?
Discovering geography and labor in battery development
This guest post was written by Ian Morse, a former mining and climate journalist and current PhD student at UW-Madison. His research combines insights from battery developments, climate science, mining operations, and political ecology. He runs the Green Rocks newsletter and works in the Klinger Lab.
In March, I attended my first battery conference – the International Battery Seminar and Exhibit in Orlando, FL (where I met some of you in person finally!). My poster was the one without any electron spectroscopy or coulombic efficiency charts. I came because I was interested in how battery scientists made decisions about the materials they use. With my background in mining, my real goal was snagging conversations with presenters and trudging through the maze of companies that came to network.
I lived on Sulawesi island in Indonesia, when the battery world began to pivot away from cobalt. Nickel was cheaper, brought electrochemical benefits and – most importantly in the public’s eye – didn’t spark anxieties quite like those concerning child labor and Congo’s cobalt. Despite plenty of evidence that narratives of violence surrounding Congo’s cobalt distracted and harmed everybody but the large-scale mining firms, the issue served well to launch a media wave that hasn’t yet diminished. Then, stories about marine waste and land-grabbing started emerging from Indonesia’s nickel industry that tainted yet another metal’s name. In 2020, EV companies publicized plans to return to LFP batteries, boasting that they wouldn’t have the reputational or price volatility of nickel and cobalt.
Yet, around the same time, the two largest iron ore (the F in LFP) companies had proven unable to prevent disasters. In Brazil, an iron ore tailings dam burst in Brumadinho, killing more than 270 people. In Australia, the sacred Aboriginal site Juukan Gorge was blown up to make way for a mine. Iron problems continue today: Indigenous Saami in Scandinavia fight an iron ore mine that says it’s critical for the energy transition. Communities in South Africa witness an iron project taking advantage of shoddy laws to acquire consent. A Honduran activist campaigning against an iron mine was shot and killed last fall. Mining is consistently the sector linked to the most deaths of environmental defenders, according to Global Witness. (Phosphate production deserves at least a parenthetical mention here for its gnarly interactions with the fertilizer market and forgotten waste.)
This has been dubbed the “whack-a-mole” problem: batteries keep changing chemistries, but by avoiding reputational risks, tangible problems are never fixed and keep popping up. This constant movement also makes it hard to plan; Ethan Alter and I wrote about its effects on recycling for this newsletter a few years ago. As one prominent battery scientist told me, “it’s like the tail wagging the dog”: While policymakers urge investments in mining to support batteries, it seems like battery developers end up catering to suppliers.
Is the problem simply finding a material that doesn’t have price turbulence or a problematic reputation? At IBSE, scientists and firms were grappling with the implications of choosing one material over another. These came out in cost estimates and clunky measures of mineral availability of minerals. To me, these debates connect to broader stories we tell about addressing climate change. This essay is about how to figure out what really happens when scientists and firms choose materials, – so that, hopefully, we can understand what climate problem-solving looks like. I’m also interested in continuing work with battery scientists, so reach out!
Mining for climate technologies is often portrayed as a paradox, as if the destruction wrought by mines contradicts the green promise of no-tailpipe car – as if mining harms just need to be managed in service of controlling carbon elsewhere. Maybe, in some world where carbon was actually controlled, this could be reasonable. But fossil fuel production continues to expand, the owner of the wealthiest EV company ushered in an anti-climate demagogue, and the renewable energy roll-out has yet to stymie the growth of emissions. None of this is playing out as the finance hegemons proclaimed in 2017, when they demanded that mining must expand for the needs of decarbonization.
So of course the battery world remains as vibrant and dynamic as ever. Replacing an entire energy infrastructure means getting creative about fitting energy storage into each electricity gap, and high prices continue to prevent wider adoption. Can lithium metal really serve as a safe anode? What electrodes allow fast charging without collapsing? What’s the right level of VC? How are binders even supposed to hold with expansion?
I went to the IBSE conference, because as a journalist and now doctoral researcher, I’ve seen the discomfort between promising technologies and intractable mining grow and fester for over the last seven years. As I discover relationships between battery development, climate policy, and mining, “paradox” just doesn’t seem to cut it. This complexity deserves more than just a shrug at an apparent paradox, because real lives are at stake. It’s not an unfortunate contradiction or one that can be fixed by playing whack-a-mole. It’s the result of histories of mineral production entrenched and reborn as solutions crafted within rigid structures as particular visions of the world. As geographer Micah Fisher notes, “Climate policy is simple but lands in complexity.” Climate policy must land somewhere, and geographers can take on the task of understanding how that happens.
In 2019, I started to see where climate policy was landing. Policy thrust to persuade people to buy electric vehicles drove firms to nickel, and Indonesia made its lands and people available to produce it. While investigating several nickel projects, I had travelled to a village in Indonesia called Roko-Roko. From the capital, Jakarta, travelers take two flights and a five-hour boat ride to arrive on the small island where it sits. This lively town of fishers and farmers lies another hourlong motorbike ride away.
When I arrived, residents had just gotten internet access, thanks to a mining company that financed its construction. But it was bittersweet. I had become interested in the small island where Roko-Roko sits because a few months earlier, hundreds of residents had traveled to the provincial capital to protest the firm and several others on their island. Police clashed with protesters, injuring several with water cannons, tear gas, and batons. Then, without notice, bulldozers and backhoes had appeared on land that residents had long used for farming. They built and occupied a shack in a matter of hours to convey definitively that, in the face of this land clearing, this was still their land. There, they shared food, carved tools, and stood guard by an ancestral cemetery. The deputy governor broke promises made to the protesters, and national laws were enacted the next year that stripped protections from land defenders.
Despite court orders to cancel permits, the mine has turned Roko-Roko’s forested hills into a mine and painted its rivers and seas orange with the color of ore used to make nickel and cobalt. The mine’s owners and national officials promoted the mine as necessary to a global effort to reduce emissions. How did Roko-Roko become the place where climate policy landed?
We might expect cathode development to explain this question. Indonesia’s nickel reserves were caught in the middle of that whack-a-mole affair that moved from cobalt to nickel to iron. Beginning in 2018, Indonesian officials quickly seized the narrative of the energy transition, since it helped to bypass banks that were strengthening ESG requirements. This occurred with the help of policies that dispossessed rural communities of their land, fast-tracked permits past waste requirements, and created off-grid coal-fired power plants. The Indonesian government now faces widespread protest, deadly waste landslides, and jettisoned plans to reduce emissions.
Can these problems be avoided by switching materials? Everyone from the IEA to major EV firms to Greenpeace thinks so. Since 2020, LFP has pervaded debates about better designs. The thinking goes: It doesn’t carry the same reputational risks, and it’s more secure, since iron is far more abundant in the earth’s crust. It’s also a tried-and-true tech that has been used safely for decades.
One problem with the story of whack-a-mole is that it assumes battery innovation emerges distinct from material production: a product is created, and then its mines are built. Hence it seems significant to remark that “the tail was wagging the dog,” as if it is strange that the relationship feels reversed. It’s easy to think that after scientists perfect a product and policies are ready to roll it out, it’s just a matter now of getting the supply chains in order. Optimize materials in a battery, then scale it up with mines – a decades-long process.
But if we linger a little longer on Indonesia’s story, it starts to look like a player in battery designs and even climate policy. The nickel industry there could seize the battery moment, because of decades of laws and conventions that had more to do with the aims of a military dictatorship than any climate aim. Policies broadly conceived as resource nationalism had swelled nickel production. In nearby Papua New Guinea, a battery-nickel producer proved a successful model: stamp out local opposition, ignore pollution, channel profits abroad. Those same firms designed plants in Indonesia, and officials cleared hurdles to business development. By the time cobalt had taken a hit to its reputation (how strange to say a material can have a reputation), Indonesia was well positioned to contribute to the expected rise in demand. In this sense, supply came before demand.
At this point, a grand question stands out: Would nickel have appeared as an option for battery commercialization if mining firms hadn’t transformed places like Roko-Roko? What would batteries look like today (or energy for that matter), if justice hadve been delivered for communities stripped of their land?
So how can we view materials science as an actor in the network of interests that include climate action? As has been clear in battery development, materials shift with conflicting notions of what the “best” material is. In a recent webinar, University of Buffalo professor and founder of CoRE Krishna Rajan described the “best” as balancing performance and sustainability. At IBSE, the two main drivers were price and supply chain security, with a dash of concerns about reputation. To justify the use of some materials, presenters used price and country of origin most often. When we’re trying to get rid of fossil fuel infrastructure, it (partially) makes sense to make the alternatives cheap. And being able to rely on a consistent supply of materials is important.
Materials science then appears to be a process of discovery. Which materials work best in which ways? Adjust a composition here; test it to produce a C-chart. Add a bit of binder there; test it again. “What if?” seems to be the most common question that begins battery studies. The most prolific battery labs are the ones who have the most charging channels to test the most concoctions.
Inanimate materials have no power to determine their own physical chemistry – or to decide to jump into a new battery design. These approaches see materials as the arbiters of their own fates. That work and creativity comes from scientists and their labor. Scientists breathe life and value into materials. It’s also how a battery ends up embodying an entire social world.
In the same way, inanimate materials have no power to impact their own production. So why treat them as if they can? Taking basic elements from an ore and sending it across the world is only possible if thousands of people interact. Within the field of geography, we might call these social relations a “labor regime”. The material has no inherent qualities to make it more valuable or capable of reducing emissions – what’s being chosen is the social system that produces the material. For the scientists evaluating the properties of nickel in cathodes, do the material’s origins in fatal waste disasters appear anywhere? For the firms planning cost projections, where in the price is the opportunity to avoid allegations of forced labor? Where in the material is even the guarantee that it will be built into a renewable energy technology and not bombs?
So, another problem with the picture of whack-a-mole is that the motivations for shifting materials – price and reputations most prominently – have no material (i.e. tangible) connection with the problems they’re meant to solve. The price of a material abstracts the unspecified labor used to produce it, and a firm’s reputation exists only in imaginations. Ironically, the tact of shifting materials has had unforeseen and troublesome material impacts, since it’s filtered through these abstractions. Materials scientists don’t just deal with materials, but also commodities, which end up in a battery because rocks are imagined to have a price. Mine waste has no value, but it’s clearly very tangible to the workers and towns it buries.
How can materials science be made material? At first glance, the tools available to scientists and firms in the battery world don’t seem to offer many or opportunities to impact the labor regimes that produce materials. It doesn’t seem to prevent human rights issues at mine sites, nor the perennial problems of price volatility or supply chain security. But it’s so clear that battery scientists care about making sure batteries can fulfill their promise to make the world a better place.
If societies need to build out new technologies, real connections need to be made between science, mining, and consumption. There are some nascent attempts to make reputation a stronger factor by pushing companies to compete over sustainability credentials. The Klinger Lab, where I work, has proposed a “nationally determined contribution for energy transition minerals,” which follows the Paris Agreement framework for emissions reductions.
The whack-a-mole situation appeared as early as 2020, and much has changed since then. Indonesia continues to strengthen its nickel sector, so well in fact that it surpasses even expected demand. Nickel-based cathodes remain some of the most-produced. Despite the energy transition rhetoric, there are still no mechanisms to ensure that green-branded mining actually contributes to emissions reductions. The mine in Roko-Roko has begun production, sending ore to its processing center. Rivers on this island of 34,000 people have turned red. Barges leave the island floating on seawater as red as the ore they carry.
I’m interested in what battery science has to offer. New threads of research have gained steam: lithium metal, new electrolytes, silicon and the ever-contested sodium-ion battery. Researchers seem to be taking overall design more seriously, to enable recycling and target alternative uses. If you’re open to chat, reach out!
I’m left with many remaining questions about this intertwining of batteries and mining, including:
How does mining factor into the innovation of particular batteries?
Where in battery science are there opportunities to enable justice?
What values and visions of the world are instilled in a battery?
How can mining-affected communities be included in the design of climate solutions?
What makes a climate solution successful?
How can materials scientists find agency in this tangled web of climate solutions?
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The single most important thing in discussions of battery minerals is the reality of oil mining that will continue to wreak havoc indefinitely unless supplanted by something else. I know nobody likes the "lesser evil" argument but when the greater evil is like if Cthulu was bankrolling Stalin AND Pablo Escobar, I think we should be open to it.