The Volt Rush Book Review

My closest encounter with mining was in a hotel. It was morning, and the window was covered in a thin layer of black dust from an open-pit coal mine, five kilometres away. The city of Krasnokamenks lies just 100 kilometres from the border with China. It takes a six-hour flight from Moscow and a ten-hour drive to get here. Apart from the coal mine, this small and rundown city is famous for having the only uranium mine in Russia, and for having three large prisons nearby, one of which "hosted" Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the tycoon who first dared to defy Putin.

At that time, I was a chief investment officer for a company operating five combined heat and power plants, one of which was right there, powering the uranium mining and the city with coal from another mine. If you do any business that involves making physical goods or energy, if you go up the value chain far enough, you will end up at a mine entrance.

When I started working in wind energy and wind turbine manufacturing, and later in lithium-ion batteries, I had colleagues and friends sending me news articles and videos of children in Congo mining cobalt and copper by hand. Then, while trying to secure materials for my gigafactory, I realised that most of it would come from China. Even if the nickel could be mined in Russia, it would still be refined in China.

I was aware of the mining and materials problem in the energy transition, but I haven't come across a comprehensive and clear view of this problem. Until I picked up a book by Henry Sanderson, "Volt Rush: The Winners And The Losers In The Race To Go Green". Here is why I think you should read it, if you are working in cleantech or if you are simply interested in what it takes to go green.

Mining is a shady business, done in shady places. Well, mostly. More often than not, getting access to mines required bribing, ahem, backing the right local warlord or politician in a time of great uncertainty. From Congo cobalt mines, to Peruvian lithium plateaus, to Indonesian and Russian nickel deposits, everywhere where institutions were weak, adventurers, opportunists or unscrupulous businessmen were taking advantage of the moment to secure critical mineral resources and enormously enrich themselves.

The first part of the book reminded me of another book I've read "The World For Sale" by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy. The book explored the murky world of international commodity traders like Glencore, Vitol, Trafigura and Gunvor. Some of them, like Glencore, also appear in "Volt Rush". The tricks, tools and tactics are the same. The level of risk and reward is so insane, it would scare the pants off any venture capital partner. I don't know any VC who would be willing to fly into a war-torn Libya to cut an oil deal, or stay in a hotel in Kolwezi in Congo in the middle of an armed rebellion and bodies lying in the street.

The mining industry and commodity trading are tough, highly risky businesses with their own rules. One of the things the book does well is demonstrate how the worlds of mining and clean technology collide, how they reshape each other, and how dependent the green revolution is on what we can dig up. It is not all doom and gloom, as it might seem. When VW tried to bully metal traders into long contracts at take-it-or-leave-it terms, and locked the trades on an empty stadium in Germany, they quickly and painfully learned that mining and commodities do not play by automotive OEMs' rules. But the process was hilarious.

In another example, the European auto industry was the only lever good enough to enforce ethical behaviour by miners. The refusal of European carmakers to source cobalt mined by children, and the enforcement of workers' health and safety measures, led to significant improvements in the ways many minerals are mined, not only cobalt.

But while US and European buyers were looking to transform the ways minerals reach their assembly lines, Chinese buyers had none such concerns, at least until pushed hard by their Western clients. The book left me with a clear impression that China developed all the clean technology not out of love for the planet. In fact, it seems like environmental issues were never considered. Chinese dominance in clean technology is firmly rooted in the desire of its leadership not only to be technologically independent but also to dominate entire industries. The book provides numerous examples of complete disregard for the local communities and the environment by Chinese companies, whether it is polluting rivers and beaches in Indonesia while mining for nickel, or turning a blind eye to child labour in cobalt mines in the Congo.

But the most interesting part of the book for me came closer to the end, when Mr Sanderson wrote about what seemed to be a rise in European battery manufacturing from 2018 to 2022 through the lens of Northvolt. The recent quote from Robin Zeng, CATL CEO, that Europeans cannot make a battery because they have the wrong design, wrong process and wrong equipment is well known and shared. What was not known to me is that the same Robin Zeng, in 2019, called on China to introduce carbon emission limits similar to Europe, fearing that without them, China would not be able to compete.

Sanderson shows that as early as 2017, European bureaucrats were very much aware of the risks of growing dependent on Chinese technology and supply chains: "We cannot sit idle while China is taking control of all the supply", said Maroš Šefčovič, then EU vice president, in 2019. Sounds familiar, right? Well, we all know how that worked out.

The book was first published in 2022. The COVID-19 pandemic just ended, and there was a genuine hope for the European battery industry's success. Despite the flop of Britishvolt, new gigafactories were being announced, and many were under construction. The future looked bright. But more than three years after this book was published, the EU and the West in general still hadn't made much progress, either in producing batteries or in securing the necessary raw materials.

I would recommend this book for anyone working in energy transition and cleantech. It helps to build a holistic understanding of how the world works and the true costs of energy transition. The best part of the book is that it doesn't fall prey to the "Nirvana fallacy" argument. It doesn't argue that failures in mining mean the energy transition should be abandoned. What it does is bring those failures to light so they can be examined and acted upon.