Cobalt is an essential part of the batteries that power everything from iPhones to Teslas. The search for more ore is what’s driving one tech firm to the icy tundra of Greenland.
from J.P. Morgan’s London offices stepped off the two-hour private flight from Johannesburg onto the hot runway, soldiers sporting sunglasses and semiautomatics watched them closely. The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s brutal civil war had ended several years earlier, but peace remained tenuous, and the Lubumbashi airstrip was still heavily militarized.
The cobalt that today remains unmined at KOV—one of Gertler’s largest remaining interests in the DRC—is worth more than $39 billion. The metal has become a critical component in the global transition to a greener future, a reality reflected in its soaring price: $29,000 per metric ton in July 2020; by the time this story went to print in late March, $82,000 per ton. Most lithium-ion batteries depend on cobalt, and everything from iPhones to Teslas depends on those batteries.
In 2019 KoBold received backing from one of Silicon Valley’s top venture capital funds, Andreessen Horowitz, and further firepower from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a multibillion-dollar funding vehicle created by Microsoft cofounder Gates and seeded by a boldface group that includes Bezos, Bloomberg, Ray Dalio, David Rubenstein, Jack Ma, Reid Hoffman, and Sir Richard Branson.
“This is the best Norilsk analog in the world,” House had said before the trip, referring to a Siberian deposit site that was originally mined by Gulag prisoners under Stalin. Today, a company called Nornickel is the world’s largest producer of refined nickel, and its mines in the Norilsk region produced more than 4 percent of global cobalt in 2021. Over the past decade, the deposit has helped generate more than $120 billion in revenue.
The technique should solve a “sequential planning problem” that has long bedeviled mining exploration efforts, according to Jef Caers, a Belgium-born director of Stanford University’s Center for Earth Resources Forecasting, who examines KoBold’s data as part of his academic research while advising the company. “You want to drill with the idea to confirm or to walk away,” he explains, something House describes as the “speed to kill.
“We’re supposed to be going after the biggest, hairiest problems that are around,” says Eric Toone, the technical lead on the investment committee at Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the $2 billion–plus fund established by Gates that has backed KoBold. “There is almost no way to wrap your head around what scale means when we get talking about energy,” he says.
Problems quickly emerged. Bateman, a consulting firm owned by one of Gertler’s fellow shareholders, Beny Steinmetz, had conducted the feasibility study prior to the public offering, but after the IPO, it became apparent that “the methodology for doing the costing was not accurate,” Nikanor’s head of funding at the time, Brian Scallan, toldLowball projections may have helped entice U.K.
All this might make Trump’s pseudo-imperial fantasy of buying Greenland not sound like such a lark, though that proposal ultimately ended up as a $12 million economic grant to encourage mining cooperation. At Greenland’s only mining school, where students learn to dynamite rocks and build pit roads, the director has developed a million-dollar partnership with U.S. counterparts to help construct a training facility for an underground mine—the kind that might be built on Disko.
He was referring to various plots of land and aging facilities that separate Glencore’s underground mine from the vast pits and the refinery, which uses a chain of processes, including towering crushers, mills, and concentration systems, to convert ore into shining squares of copper and mountains of cobalt hydroxide. Back in 2006, the refining and concentrating facilities Donkin showed me were the only ones in the area but belonged to a Canadian competitor of Nikanor called Katanga.
One of the most thorough delineations of Gertler’s modus operandi came in 2016, when the Department of Justice reached a settlement with Och-Ziff Capital Management Group for $213 million and the hedge fund’s admission of guilt in a scheme to bribe officials in the DRC and Libya. That agreement obliquely referred to a “DRC partner” throughout—widely reported to be Gertler.
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