The Biden administration said Tuesday that batteries from China could be contaminated by child labor, a move that could boost the electric vehicle industry while giving fresh ammunition to critics of the White House’s climate policy.
The Department of Labor said it would add lithium-ion batteries to the list of items made from materials known to be produced by slave or forced labor under the 2006 human trafficking law. mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where children have been found working in some mining sites.
The department released a list in the form of a report that excoriated the “clean energy” supply chain for the use of forced labor. It is grouped together with Chinese batteries and polysilicon – the key material used in solar panel cells – made in the Chinese province of Xinjiang.
About half of the world’s polysilicon comes from Xinjiang but is banned from the United States over concerns that it is produced by Uyghurs and other Muslim-majority groups through forced labor. Solar ingots – the term used for processed polysilicon blocks – as well as wafers, cells and modules are also added to the list of products made with forced or child labor, since many of their products are made using Xinjiang polysilicon.
“Clean energy is a central pillar of the Biden-Harris Administration’s policy goals. However, that clean energy future cannot — and will not — be built on the backs of forced labor,” the Labor Department said in its report.
The criticism aired by the department is similar to that issued by Republicans and fossil fuel industry allies against the Biden administration’s support for electric vehicles, which center on China’s dominance of the battery industry.
The Democratic Republic of Congo supplies more than 70 percent of the world’s mined cobalt, a metal used in batteries that power everything from consumer laptops and cell phones to electric vehicles and energy storage facilities for the power grid.
Meanwhile, China owns some of Congo’s largest cobalt mines and is the largest processor of the metal. There are no cobalt processing plants in the United States.
In 2016, Amnesty International, a human rights organization, published an investigation that found tens of thousands of Congolese children working up to 12 hours a day in small cobalt mining sites across the country.
Eight years later, a large percentage of the cobalt mined in the DRC comes from mines “where thousands of children work in hazardous conditions,” the Ministry of Labor said.
Car companies are increasingly making EVs with lithium-iron phosphate batteries, which do not use cobalt. But cobalt batteries may still make up a certain percentage of vehicles sold in the global market in the near future due to their unique properties, such as higher energy density that can enable faster travel speeds.
On paper, the department’s targeting of batteries appears to be a reason for applause from advocates for improving conditions in Congo who want the US to take greater steps in advocating for better treatment of mine workers.
But Mark Dummett, a researcher at Amnesty International who helped expose that children are mining cobalt in the Congo, was horrified by the actions of the Ministry of Labor.
Dummett said his concern lies in what he sees as a toothless approach from the department. Unlike the blanket ban against solar panels from Xinjiang, the US government’s list exists primarily for informational purposes and “is not intended to be punitive,” according to the department.
That means allies of the fossil fuel industry can now say the Biden administration believes “clean energy” relies on child labor but does little to address the problem.
“There is a danger with this labeling that is damaging the EV industry, the battery industry,” Dummett said. “Anyone who is worried about the state of the planet should be worried by that.”
Mining
President Joe Biden has boosted US battery manufacturing perhaps more than a president since the growth of modern consumer electronics through the latest Inflation Reduction Act, last year’s bipartisan infrastructure package and a number of other federal financing programs. To see also : NY health officials want to focus on balanced, long-term care.
But the administration has been mum about how it addresses risks in the supply chain to make batteries, including human rights concerns near mine sites where battery raw materials are originally gathered.
For example, the Department of Energy in July finalized a $102 million loan to Australian mining subsidiary Syrah Resources Ltd to expand a graphite anode plant in Louisiana for electric vehicle batteries.
The graphite for the anodes will come from the Balama Syrah mine in a region of Mozambique where violent fighters linked to ISIS have caused an international humanitarian crisis. Experts told E&E News that U.S. financing could cause dislocations that lead to mistrust that could be exploited by hostile actors (Greenwire, May 11).
Jigar Shah, head of the Department of Energy’s Office of Loan Programs, expressed confidence in the company at the time, saying the company issued “some of the best environmental, social and governance reports in the mining world.”
However, the DOE declined to say when it proposed the loan whether it included conditions that could help improve working conditions around the mine, which experts say would help reduce the possibility of conflict.
The Biden administration formed a working group earlier this year to come up with proposals to deal with domestic mining and sourcing from foreign countries. The working group’s recommendations aren’t expected until after the midterm elections.
It’s unclear whether Biden has the political appetite to start banning batteries based on the minerals they use, since doing so could raise one of his biggest priorities: swift action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Rachel Alpert, former State Department advisor on human trafficking issues and current partner at Jenner & amp; Block LLP, called the label and report “warning signs” that customs agents can follow the action.
“It puts the company on notice that they have to scrutinize this product,” said Alpert.
However, advocates for more action are not convinced that the situation will change.
Terrence Collingsworth, the lawyer who sued Tesla Inc. and a major technology company on behalf of families and children killed and injured in Congolese cobalt mines, he said he doubted that US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) would act.
Collingsworth pointed to the agency’s reluctance to curb cocoa imports from Ivory Coast in west Africa despite “overwhelming and undisputed” evidence of child labor. He proposed to the agency to act more than two years ago, he said, but “we still haven’t heard anything.”
“I have little faith in the CBP enforcement process when it comes to powerful multinationals,” said Collingsworth.
A CBP spokesman did not say whether the agency would consider new enforcement steps in response to the Labor Department’s report, saying only that it would “continue to use the resources at our disposal” to keep forced goods from entering the US.
Any US ban on cobalt imports could trigger a reshuffling of the global mining industry, raising prices and prompting more mines to open in North America over time, said Theo Yameogo, a mining analyst with consulting firm EY.
But that won’t happen quickly enough to avoid disrupting the switch away from fossil fuels, he said.
“I don’t believe that in two years, or even six years, we can rebuild an entire industry around battery metal in the US,” he said.
The Labor Department declined to specify whether it is recommending other government agencies take further action to limit child labor in the battery supply chain.
In a written statement, department spokeswoman Christine Feroli referred to the labeling and reporting as “investigative” and said the department was in “regular communication with other US government agencies in their work” and provided advance notice of its findings to “relevant agencies.”
The Labor Department also has “constructive engagement with the government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo” as part of the “Biden-Harris administration’s priority focus on labor rights,” Feroli said.
The department’s “staff work closely with their counterparts in other agencies to utilize this research across the full range of relevant government authorities,” he said.
Solar
The Labor Department report may also revive negative attention on a second key technology: solar energy. On the same subject : US is ‘not going anywhere’, Middle East envoy says as Chinese Xi expected to visit Saudi Arabia.
Solar’s forced labor issue has received considerable attention from federal lawmakers and customs officials. Last year, customs officials effectively blacklisted one Chinese importer, while Congress approved legislation that increased enforcement activities on products made from Xinjiang polysilicon.
And major solar importers have been reported to have impounded panel shipments at the border (Energywire, August 9).
Those moves haven’t entirely satisfied many of the solar industry’s critics.
The Coalition for a Prosperous America, for example, an advocate for domestic manufacturing and one of the most vociferous critics of US solar trade groups, sent a letter to CBP in August asking it to blacklist ten additional Chinese diesel-part suppliers.
Nick Iacovella, a spokesman for the coalition, said Tuesday that the Labor Department report “proves” the group’s position that clean energy “cannot be built on the backs of China’s enslaved Uyghurs.”
Solar’s largest trade group, the Solar Energy Industry Association, defended the industry’s progress in delinking from Xinjiang – something it called on members to do again in 2020.
John Smirnow, the solar group’s general counsel and vice president of market strategy, said US solar companies are increasingly sourcing panel inputs from Germany, Malaysia and the United States itself.
“[T]oday, the US solar supply chain is largely free of inputs from Xinjiang,” he said in a statement. Providing documentation on that, via traceability standards, is “soon to be a minimum requirement for selling to the United States,” he added.
That same protocol could be implemented to source cobalt in lithium-ion batteries, Smirnow said. Batteries are widely used as solar energy storage devices.
“As we said, there is no place in the U.S. market for products made with forced labor,” Smirnow said.
Politics
While the Department of Labor’s statement may not lead to immediate action, they create an opening for criticism of electric vehicles and solar panels. See the article : The U.S. delegation has been unable to secure the release of Americans arrested in Venezuela.
Republicans have drawn a line between abuses at polysilicon factories in Xinjiang and the broader energy transition.
Last month, 18 House Republicans wrote a letter to the Department of Homeland Security, expressing concern about the origin of solar panels purchased by the department and distributed in the US Virgin Islands, whose Democratic governor has set the goal of running the entire grid. solar energy.
And some in the GOP have started throwing grenades at the administration about China’s presence in the mining industry.
Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) last week wrote Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm asking her not to offer a loan to American Lithium, a Canadian company developing the largest US lithium mining project in Nevada. Lithium Americas is partially owned by Ganfeng, a Chinese company.
Biden’s handling of China and mining issues will face scrutiny from House Republicans if they win control in the upcoming midterm elections, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the top Republican on the House Oversight and Reform Committee, said in a statement to E&E News.
Republicans want to focus on the involvement of Biden’s son Hunter in the 2016 sale of an industrial cobalt mine to a Chinese bidder, Comer said, as well as how “continued outsourcing of critical mineral production leaves America’s clean energy, manufacturing, and other sectors vulnerable to the actions of our adversaries.”
“President Biden and his administration talk a big game about moving the United States to so-called green energy sources, but China’s monopoly on the production of critical minerals and the business dealings of President Biden’s son have made the United States dependent on Communist China,” Comer. said.
At the time of publication, the White House had not responded to a request for comment sent Tuesday evening.
An investment firm founded by Hunter Biden in 2016 helped a Chinese mining conglomerate take over a large Congolese cobalt mine from an American company, according to an investigation by The New York Times published last year.
It’s unclear whether Hunter Biden was directly involved in the deal, which happened while his father was still vice president. The White House has maintained that Joe Biden was unaware of the deal when it happened (E & E Daily, January 21).
Yameogo, a mining analyst, said that Republicans will not meaningfully address the human rights situation and corruption issues in Congo around minerals if their efforts are only focused on China and Hunter Biden.
He noted the case of Glencore, a Swiss-based mining company that mines large quantities of cobalt from Congo, which pleaded guilty in May to bribery and market manipulation.
Unless the actual policy comes out of a potential GOP investigation, Yameogo said, “it’s just going to be a witch hunt.”
