NPR.

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. Cobalt batteries seem 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.

Other Henry Sanderson went to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2019, where most cobalt comes from.

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

stalls 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.

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.

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.

We are going to use lithium-ion phosphate batteries.

They are cobalt and nickel-free.

This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Darien Woods.

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