China, Cobalt, Cars and the Congo

Bloomberg published on 17 October 2017 an article titled "Electric Car Makers Have an Africa Problem" by Leonid Bershidsky.

China is making a major push to produce electric powered vehicles. The batteries for these vehicles require cobalt. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has almost half of the world's reserves of cobalt and more than half of mined cobalt today. Chinese state-owned companies mine much of the DRC's cobalt. The DRC uses the profits from cobalt to pay off huge Chinese loans. The DRC wants to see the price of cobalt rise and wants China to refine more cobalt inside the DRC so that it can pay down faster the loans to China. China wants to maximize the importation of concentrate ore and to limit price increases so that batteries for electric vehicles are competitive. This situation poses a dilemma.