Cobalt-free batteries reign in Chinese EVs. Why not the US?

 

There’s been an era-defining race underway between two types of batteries used in electric vehicles: lithium batteries that use cobalt, and ones that use iron phosphate. Cobalt, a metal with a checkered human rights record, has been in the lead. Until recently. 

Henry Sanderson’s book on the elements that build electric vehicles is Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green.

Related episodes: 
The race to produce lithium 
How batteries are already changing the grid 
How batteries are riding the free market rodeo in Texas 
How EV batteries tore apart Michigan (Update) 
Batteries are catching fire at sea 

For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. 

Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez. Music by Drop Electric. Find us: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Newsletter. 

Transcript

ANNOUNCER: NPR.

[COIN SPINNING]

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DARIAN WOODS: If you take a look inside your phone or your laptop, you're likely to find a particular chemical element in the battery-- cobalt. Cobalt is a hard, shiny metal that helps stabilize lithium batteries that can store a lot of charge.

WAILIN WONG: Cobalt batteries seemed perfect for electric vehicles. They don't weigh too much, but can fuel the cars for hundreds of miles. But cobalt has downsides. It's expensive and has a significant human cost. Author Henry Sanderson went to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2019, where most cobalt comes from.

HENRY SANDERSON: A lot of the cobalt was mined by hand, by individual laborers, often including children, who dig it up with very little safety equipment and take this cobalt to sell it to stores on the side of the road, many of which are Chinese. And this cobalt then goes to China and makes its way into the battery supply chain and into the electric vehicle.

WONG: Back then, there was another battery available without cobalt, one that had been around since the 1990s-- lithium iron phosphate batteries. The two batteries had been in a two-horse race to fuel electric vehicles. But before 2020, the race really looked like it had been won by cobalt, and the future looked to be fueled by it, too.

WOODS: And yet, last week in a factory in Louisville, Kentucky, Ford made a big announcement. It was about its future electric vehicle plans, and cobalt was absent.

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SPEAKER 1: We are going to use lithium iron phosphate batteries. They are cobalt and nickel-free.

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WOODS: This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Darian Woods.

WONG: And I'm Wailin Wong. Today on the show, the great switch away from cobalt batteries. We explain how it happened in China and ask why the US is playing catch-up.

WOODS: On journalist Henry Sanderson's visit to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, he met a former child miner who had seen other children die as cobalt mines' roofs imploded. Henry learnt about entire road tunnels that would collapse from all the mining that had happened around it.

SANDERSON: Soon after I was there, there was a big cave-in, and lots of people lost their lives.

WONG: Cobalt batteries were associated not only with humanitarian concerns, it also had safety problems. Ships carrying electric vehicles have been catching fire over the past several years.

WOODS: Iron phosphate batteries were an alternative. They had cheaper chemicals. But they had one major flaw-- less capacity.

SANDERSON: People were worried about range anxiety. And China, when it first started to subsidize batteries and electric vehicles, nickel manganese cobalt batteries were prioritized.

WONG: Some engineers and business leaders thought differently, like Wong Chuanfu, the founder and CEO of BYD, the Chinese electric vehicle company that's now the biggest seller in the world.

SANDERSON: Even in 2002, you know, he thought that LFP, Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries were the way to go because he thought that the safety aspect was very important. If you're going to have all these cars on the roads, you needed them to be safe. And he also thought that they could be cheaper.

WOODS: So in the horse race between cobalt and iron phosphate batteries, BYD was betting on the iron phosphate horse. Then in 2017, the Chinese government changed the way its subsidies worked, and Chinese EV manufacturers would get more subsidies the denser the energy capacity of their batteries. So this really favored the high-capacity cobalt batteries. Around then, 80% of Chinese EVs used cobalt.

SANDERSON: For a moment, it looked like BYD or Wong Chuanfu had made the wrong bet by going with this cheaper technology. But then in 2020, China changed its EV subsidy structure to focus on cost over performance.

WONG: This was a key moment. Now cheaper cars are favored by the Chinese government, tilting the playing field more in favor of iron phosphate batteries. And this is especially the case given technical innovations from BYD and also the huge Chinese EV battery maker CATL.

WOODS: What BYD and CATL did was build batteries without unnecessary packaging. BYD even started building directly into the car's floor. With a battery pack integrated into the very frame of the car, that reduced the amount of casing and hardware needed, so more battery could be squeezed in.

SANDERSON: This was taking an existing chemistry and really improving it.

WONG: And to be clear, cobalt batteries still have more capacity, but by better designing the car and the battery packs, you could cram in more of the iron phosphate batteries and get more range.

WOODS: China's use of iron phosphate batteries skyrocketed. They're now about 80% of new EVs there. Cobalt cars in China and now far less common.

SANDERSON: So we've seen a five years' complete change in the world's biggest electric vehicle market.

WONG: But the US has been slow to catch on. In 2024, less than 10% of electric vehicles used iron phosphate batteries. This is a fact that American engineer Mujeeb Ijaz wants to change.

MUJEEB IJAZ: I came to the conclusion, especially at the start of the pandemic, that I needed to really start acting upon a vision that we bring North American battery manufacturing with sustainable materials into being.

WOODS: Mujeeb founded the battery company Our Next Energy, or ONE, in 2020. Mujeeb says that his company's iron phosphate batteries have demonstrated more than 400 miles of range. Mujeeb says this is innovation that has built off all the findings coming from China.

IJAZ: You know, it's no different than the entire philosophy of patenting ideas. And then you publish your ideas, and then people think about what you did, and they try to do something a little better. I think actually, that's human progress. That's actually the way in which technologies have always evolved, is that we've seen how a step leads to a second step that leads to a third step.

WONG: One of those companies that's building off what happened in China five years ago is Ford.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

JIM FARLEY: Ah, I'm so excited about today. We've been waiting three years for this-- for this moment, so--

WOODS: That big announcement by Ford CEO Jim Farley last week in their Kentucky factory was about constructing electric vehicles from the battery up, building off the techniques that BYD and CATL pioneered and taking it a step further. Jim also announced a refit of that Louisville factory to build cars that would use iron phosphate battery cells.

FARLEY: We will spend $2 billion here in Louisville modernizing this plant.

[CHEERING, APPLAUSE]

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WONG: Now, to be clear, none of these companies have been citing humanitarian concerns as their top reasons for shifting away from cobalt. This makes business sense for them.

WOODS: Yeah. No, it's a lot of self-congratulations for building batteries in America. But it's worth noting that Ford's iron phosphate battery factory licenses technology from CATL, the Chinese battery company, not American startups like Mujeeb's. Charles Poon is the head of high-voltage propulsion engineering at Ford. We asked him why.

CHARLES POON: There are really, like, two elements. One is being able to select a chemistry in this particular case in the right technology. And really, the second is to be able to drive the scale. And our electrification plans are going to be able to support a full-scale operation of a gigafactory.

WONG: To translate all this, CATL had the track record and the resources to build lots of batteries fast.

WOODS: Is there an argument for, I guess, seeding and supporting younger companies that may not be quite there yet, but maybe in 5 to 10 years, they could grow to be the next CATL?

POON: Oh, I mean, absolutely. I mean, just because we don't select one-- a supplier for a particular project doesn't necessarily mean that they are not being considered. In fact, Ford has many endeavors in our research and development and in our supply chain group, where we're constantly developing and working with startups to be able to build that robust and resilient supply chain in the future.

WOODS: Ford's announcement shows the US is taking steps towards reducing its cobalt demand, but there is an open question about whether the technology to enable that will be American or Chinese.

WONG: In the meantime, Mujeeb Ijaz from ONE is working with a large automotive company. Ironically, though, it's not American. It's the German car giant, BMW.

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WOODS: And you know what, Wailin? BMW has a track record here. In the early 2010s, it took a gamble on a young battery company that was thinking of switching to make EV batteries. That company was CATL, now the world's largest EV battery maker.

WONG: That is a good final detail. That's fun.

WOODS: This episode was produced by Cooper Katz McKim, with engineering by Kwesi Lee and Gilly Moon. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Kate Concannon edits the show. And The Indicator is a production of NPR. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.