Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green

by Henry Sanderson

Overview

'A remarkably hopeful and useful book...The climate crisis leaves us no choice but to build a new world and as Sanderson makes clear, we are capable of making it a better one than the dirty and dangerous planet we’ve come to take for granted.' Bill McKibben, Observer book of the week

We depend on a handful of metals and rare earths to power our phones and computers. Increasingly, we rely on them to power our cars and our homes. Whoever controls these finite commodities will become rich beyond imagining.

Sanderson journeys to meet the characters, companies, and nations scrambling for the new resources, linking remote mines in the Congo and Chile’s Atacama Desert to giant Chinese battery factories, shadowy commodity traders, secretive billionaires, a new generation of scientists attempting to solve the dilemma of a ‘greener’ world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780861543762
Publisher:	Oneworld Publications
Publication date:	07/28/2022
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	441,701
File size:	9 MB

About the Author

Henry Sanderson covered commodities and mining for the Financial Times for seven years. Prior to that he lived and worked in Beijing, where he was a correspondent for Bloomberg and co-authored a book, China's Superbank, about China's state capitalism and its impact on countries from Venezuela to Ethiopia. He tweets at @hjesanderson.
Henry Sanderson has covered commodities and mining for the Financial Times in London for the last six years, and has written widely about the resource implications of our move towards clean energy. He was previously a reporter in China for Bloomberg, where he co-authored an academic book about China’s state capitalism and its largest overseas lender, China’s Superbank (Bloomberg Press, 2013). A Chinese speaker, he has been interviewed by the BBC, Bloomberg Television, CNBC, and Charlie Rose. He tweets at @hjesanderson.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 The Battery Age 7

2 Dashed Hopes: The Troubled History of the EV 10

3 The Breakthrough: The Lithium-Ion Revolution 21

4 China's Battery King 32

5 The Chinese Lithium Rush 47

6 Chile's Buried Treasure 71

7 The Cobalt Problem 88

8 The Rise of a Cobalt Giant 95

9 Blood Cobalt 121

10 Dirty Nickel 150

11 The Green Copper Tycoon 169

12 The Final Frontier: Mining the Deep Sea 188

13 Reduce, Re-use, Recycle: A Closed Loop 207

14 The World's Greenest Battery 218

15 Cornwall's Mining Revival 228

Conclusion 243

Acknowledgements 247

Notes 249

Index 266

Editorial Reviews

‘Takes us on a carefully considered and well explained journey to show that [the switch to electric vehicles] may not be as simple a transition as we hoped for... Sanderson does a good job of getting the reader up to speed in terms of what goes into an electric battery, and why we need to be cognisant of the environmental impacts... very informative and well written in terms of the potentially toxic brew required to power EVs... a relevant and vital book.’

Irish Tech News

‘It’s a vital contribution to the emerging literature that’s pulling back the curtain on energy realities.’

Wall Street Journal

'A fascinating study'

The Times

'A remarkably hopeful and useful book...The climate crisis leaves us no choice but to build a new world and as Sanderson makes clear, we are capable of making it a better one than the dirty and dangerous planet we’ve come to take for granted.'

Bill McKIbben

'Volt Rush makes a great contribution in understanding what a green future entails—and what costs it might involve right now.’

Foreign Policy

‘The urgency of a green transition means the world faces new power struggles over access to scarce metals and minerals. Sanderson carefully walks us through the minefields that are the world's finite supplies of lithium, cobalt and nickel and reveals with startling immediacy the Machiavellian machinations for control over these precious resources. A riveting guide to our perilous future.’

Ann Pettifor

‘This is a terrific book. Henry Sanderson brings alive one of the most fateful questions of our time: who will control the resources that power a post-carbon world? What makes the book so compelling is the cast of colourful characters he meets and the insightful judgements he makes.’

James Kynge

'A remarkably hopeful and useful book...The climate crisis leaves us no choice but to build a new world and as Sanderson makes clear, we are capable of making it a better one than the dirty and dangerous planet we’ve come to take for granted.'

Bill McKibben

‘A potent reminder to green power advocates that a world running on batteries and sunshine may not fight over oil, but it won’t necessarily be free of conflict’

Financial Times

‘A must-read book, well written and investigated, on one of the most important ecological challenges we’ll face in the next decades.’

Guillaume Pitron

‘As we glide along serenely in our electric vehicle, recharging it with clean solar power and perhaps feeling a little smug, we prefer not to be reminded of the vast industries that got us there, industries that gouge out the landscape, exploit workers, spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and engage in ruthless geopolitical power plays. Along the way, as Henry Sanderson shows in his essential book, we have become dangerously dependent on China which now dominates global battery supply. Under President Xi Jinping, who uses economic blackmail to extract political concessions, China has got a lock on the future. All this can change and Volt Rush shows us how.’

Clive Hamilton

'An excellent book...provides much food for thought'

Literary Review

‘From China to Congo to Chile to the U.S., Sanderson lucidly reveals the global connections behind the complex processes of battery production and mining... Any reader interested in environmental studies, green politics, the global energy sector, or the mining industry will appreciate Sanderson's deep dive into the transition from fossil fuels to green and clean energy, and how this transition will affect society now and in the near future.’

Booklist

'Sanderson’s smooth, limpid storytelling brightens the deadening business of commodities trading: attention to the bizarre, often unpleasant characters populating the industry gives his narrative a personable shine.'

Red Pepper

Rory Barnett's narration strikes a hopeful tone in this evenhanded look at the past and future of green vehicles. With his clipped BBC accent, Barnett details the high cost and human capital of green vehicle development, along with the environmental impact of acquiring the raw materials needed. A Tesla, for example, uses a mile of copper wiring, and at the rate we are consuming copper, we're expected to use more in the next 25 years than humans have used in the last 5,000 years. Just as John D. Rockefeller and the oil barons profited from the internal combustion engine, newly minted billionaires have emerged who control the mining and distribution of lithium, cobalt, and other minerals essential in reducing fossil fuels. Despite the frightening geopolitical scramble for these resources, the message remains positive. R.W.S. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2022 - AudioFile