Oil has been the world’s most sought-after and fought-over commodity for the past hundred years. But the advance of technology has brought us to the threshold of a new era in which demand for hydrocarbon fuel will shrink away, along with the geopolitical strife that has always surrounded its supply, because vehicles and machines will henceforth be powered by renewably sourced electricity. A cleaner, calmer planet awaits.

Or does it? The vital technology is the battery without which no modern device can function unless plugged into the mains. That applies not just to electric cars and mobile phones, Nicolas Niarchos tells us, but to the drones transforming warfare in Ukraine and elsewhere as well as a multiplicity of other items, from industrial robots to children’s toys. Today’s ‘elements of power’ are the rare minerals essential to all those batteries, of which the most in demand is lithium. Niarchos, a journalist for the New York Times and the New Yorker, has comprehensively researched the places where lithium and other substances with battery applications – including cobalt, nickel and phosphate – are dug out of the ground. He has also set out to discover who controls what his subtitle calls ‘the dirtiest supply chain on earth’. 

This shocking investigation focuses chiefly on the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where lithium is extracted in horrendous conditions by ‘artisanal’ self-employed miners for the enrichment of the country’s big businessmen and government officials – much of it to be exported to China, which leads the world in lithium processing