Fifty years ago, the global economy ran on oil. Wars were fought over it. Alliances were built around it. Regimes survived — or collapsed — based on who controlled it. Today, a soft, silver-grey metal most people have never heard of is quietly assuming the same role. Cobalt is the new oil. And the world is not remotely prepared for what that means.
Every lithium-ion battery in every electric vehicle, every grid-scale energy storage system, and virtually every smartphone contains cobalt. There is no mainstream substitute at scale. And nearly 70% of the world's cobalt supply comes from a single country — the Democratic Republic of Congo — where mining conditions have drawn some of the most serious human rights scrutiny of any supply chain on earth.
The DRC Cobalt Crisis: Human Rights at the Heart of Clean Energy
The Katanga mining province in southern DRC produces more cobalt than any other region on the planet. It also produces some of the most extensively documented supply chain abuses in the minerals industry. A 2023 Amnesty International investigation, following years of earlier reporting by the Washington Post and UNICEF, confirmed that artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) in the region still involves child labor — with children as young as seven working in hand-dug tunnels without protective equipment, earning less than $2 a day.
Large industrial mines operated by multinational companies have improved formal labor conditions, but the ASM sector — which accounts for a significant portion of total output — remains nearly impossible to trace with confidence through existing supply chain auditing systems. Apple, Tesla, BMW, and Samsung have each faced pressure over cobalt sourcing. Most have committed to responsible sourcing frameworks. The gap between the commitment and the reality remains wide.
The geopolitical dimension compounds the problem. China has over the past decade systematically acquired controlling stakes in DRC's largest cobalt operations. By controlling both the mining and the downstream refining infrastructure, Beijing holds leverage over the battery supply chains of every major Western automaker — a dependency that US and EU trade policy is now scrambling to reduce.
Deep-Sea Cobalt: A Cleaner Source — With Its Own Reckoning
The ocean floor holds cobalt deposits that dwarf known terrestrial reserves — untouched by labor exploitation, but home to ecosystems science has barely mapped. Credit: Hung Tran / Pexels
The deep-sea floor offers an apparent escape from both the geopolitical dependency and the human rights catastrophe of DRC cobalt. Polymetallic nodules — rock formations scattered across millions of square kilometers of the Pacific seafloor — contain cobalt concentrations comparable to, and in some deposits exceeding, the richest terrestrial seams. No child labor. No Chinese-controlled concessions. No artisanal tunnel collapses.
That social calculus is real. But as covered in ObjectWire's analysis of the trillion-dollar polymetallic nodule deposits, the environmental costs of deep-sea extraction are their own category of serious. Industrial seabed harvesting destroys seafloor habitat that may take centuries to recover — assuming it recovers at all — and generates sediment plumes capable of smothering filter-feeding organisms across hundreds of kilometers. The species living in these ecosystems have not been fully identified. We may be trading one form of destruction for another.
Why the Cobalt Crunch Is Getting Worse, Not Better
Global EV sales are accelerating. The IEA projects that by 2030, the world will need three to four times the current cobalt supply to meet battery demand alone — before accounting for grid storage and aerospace applications. Recycling programs are improving but are nowhere near the scale needed to close that gap. Cobalt-reduced battery chemistries (like LFP) are gaining ground in lower-performance applications, but high-density batteries for long-range vehicles continue to depend on cobalt-rich cathode formulations.
Meanwhile, the regulatory environment in the US is shifting. As ObjectWire reported, the Trump administration's rollback of Obama-era EPA protections has accelerated offshore and deep-sea extraction permitting timelines — compressing the window for scientific assessment of exactly the deep-sea ecosystems that hold the most cobalt. The race to the ocean floor is not hypothetical anymore. It is a policy trajectory.
The Uncomfortable Bottom Line
The clean energy transition has a cobalt problem that no press release about responsible sourcing fully resolves. The DRC option carries an undeniable human cost that supply chain audits only partially address. The deep-sea option carries an ecological cost that science is not yet equipped to fully quantify. And demand is rising faster than either alternative can scale.
Cobalt is the new oil — not just because the world runs on it, but because the pursuit of it generates exactly the same category of moral compromises that oil extraction always did. The only difference is that this time, the resource is powering vehicles we call clean.