The Child Mines of the Battery Age

Your phone is a small Congolese mine.

Every rechargeable battery you own — the phone in your hand, the laptop on your desk, the electric car in your driveway — holds a fragment of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Not metaphorically. Cobalt is the element that keeps lithium-ion cathodes from melting down, and three of every four tonnes of it are pulled from the red soil of two Congolese provinces, Lualaba and Haut-Katanga. There is no battery age without Kolwezi. There is no green transition without the men — and the children — who dig it.

This investigation traces the metal from the tunnels to the term sheet: the one-country monopoly, the two corporate giants who dominate it, the children who work the margins, and the government that has learned to switch the whole thing off at will.

One country, three-quarters of the world

The numbers admit no ambiguity. The US Geological Survey's 2025 commodity summary — the industry's bible — puts the DRC at an estimated 76% of world cobalt mine production in 2024, a record year, with Indonesia a distant second at 10%. The country's reserves, roughly 55% of the global total, give it about 27 years of production at current rates. What Saudi Arabia is to oil, the DRC is to cobalt — except Saudi Arabia never mined with children.

The concentration is structural, not accidental. Cobalt is almost never mined for itself: 99% of global output is a byproduct of copper or nickel extraction, according to the Cobalt Institute. The DRC's copper belt — the second-largest copper producer on earth, behind only Peru — bleeds cobalt as a matter of geology. Turn off the copper, and the cobalt vanishes; turn up the copper, and cobalt floods the market whether anyone asked for it or not. This is why oversupply arrived so fast, and why the crash that followed was so violent.

The two kings of the belt

Inside the Congolese monopoly sit two thrones. The first belongs to CMOC — China Molybdenum, the world's largest cobalt producer. Its two DRC mines, Tenke Fungurume (bought from Freeport-McMoRan in 2016 for $2.65 billion) and Kisanfu, produced 114,165 tonnes in 2024. In the first half of 2025 — during a national export embargo — CMOC still produced 61,073 tonnes, up 13% year-on-year. The company's target for 2025 was 100,000 to 120,000 tonnes. Behind CMOC stands another name: CATL, the world's largest battery manufacturer, holds a significant shareholding, completing a vertical chain from Congolese pit to Chinese battery to the world's EVs.

The second throne belongs to Glencore, the Swiss commodities giant under chief executive Gary Nagle. Its Mutanda and Kamoto Copper Company operations produced 17,700 tonnes in the first half of 2025 — up 23% — and the firm guided full-year 2025 output above 42,000 tonnes, higher than its initial forecast. In the first quarter of 2026, though, Glencore's cobalt output fell 39% year-on-year to 5,800 tonnes as the quota regime bit — the company postponed final processing to avoid costs while export limits restricted sales.

Refining completes the pyramid. The USGS notes that China is the world's leading producer of refined cobalt, and most of its feed is partially refined cobalt imported from Congo and Indonesia. The ore is Congolese; the metal is Chinese; the margin sits in between. This is the supply chain the West's "critical minerals" strategies are all written against — and the one they keep failing to escape, because the mine gate is in Kolwezi.

The children in the pit

Here the ledger turns moral. The DRC government's own estimates, cited by Amnesty International, put artisanal miners at 20% of the country's cobalt exports — some 110,000 to 150,000 people. In 2014, UNICEF estimated that about 40,000 boys and girls were working in mines across southern DRC, many of them in cobalt. In January 2016, Amnesty International and Afrewatch published "This Is What We Die For," documenting children as young as seven working 12-hour days, carrying heavy loads, for one to two dollars a day — without protective equipment, in hand-dug tunnels with no supports, breathing cobalt dust linked to fatal respiratory disease. Between September 2014 and December 2015 alone, the media reported fatal accidents involving more than 80 artisanal miners; the true figure, Amnesty wrote, "is likely to be far higher as many accidents go unrecorded and bodies are left buried underground."

The Bureau prints this with the caveats the record demands. The 40,000 figure is from 2014. Field researchers note that child labor in the pits has fallen sharply — the Congolese government's 2017 national strategy targeted it, and industry sourcing programs have pushed formalization; one minerals-programme specialist told Mining Technology that direct child mining is now rare, with children more often seen washing ore than digging it. The Bureau could not independently verify current numbers; the mines are remote, the workforce informal, and nobody counts precisely. What is certain is the historical record: the battery age was built, in part, on children's backs, and the companies at the top of the chain spent years unable to say exactly which pits their cobalt came from.

Kinshasa learns the switch

The newest entry in the ledger is geopolitical. In February 2025, with benchmark prices below $10 a pound — a multi-decade low, crushed by the very oversupply CMOC's expansion had created — President Félix Tshisekedi's government suspended all cobalt exports. The ban was extended through the summer, then replaced in October 2025 with a quota system: 18,125 tonnes permitted for the rest of 2025, an annual cap of 96,600 tonnes for 2026 and 2027 — roughly half of 2024's volumes — with 9,600 tonnes a year routed directly into a state strategic reserve. Unused quotas are clawed back mid-year by the regulator, ARECOMS. In August 2026, a further decree banned exports of copper and cobalt concentrates outright.

The price effect was spectacular. Cobalt metal rose from about $21,500 a tonne to roughly $57,320 — a gain of more than 160% — and Glencore, in its April 2026 production report, said it expected exports to "normalise" only in line with the remaining 2026 quotas. Kinshasa had discovered what Riyadh knew in 1973: when you hold three-quarters of the world supply of something the rich world needs, the export valve is a weapon. The quotas now run to at least the end of 2027.