Blasting for Batteries
An Oral History of the Critical Minerals Rush

About this book:

The green revolution has a dirty secret: it runs on rocks. To replace a single tank of gasoline, the world must excavate hundreds of pounds of lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare earths—tearing open salt flats in the Andes, razing rainforests in Indonesia, and sending hand-diggers into unstable shafts in the Congo. *Blasting for Batteries* drags the clean-energy transition out of the boardroom and into the blast zone, documenting the violent, globe-spanning scramble that erupted when the first Gigafactory broke ground in 2015 and the auto industry realized it didn't own a single mine.

Told entirely through the voices of the people who lived the rush—blast engineers timing dynamite in Western Australia, *creuseurs* chiseling cobalt by headlamp in Kolwezi, Indigenous elders watching ancestral watersheds drained for brine, metallurgists wrestling with acid autoclaves that melt under their own fury, and Chinese planners who spent decades locking down the refining choke points the West is only now waking up to—this oral history captures a paradox in real time: the metals essential to saving the planet are being extracted with the same ruthlessness that imperiled it.

From the penny-stock frenzy of the Canadian Shield to the deep-sea scramble for Pacific nodules, from the Nevada standoff at Thacker Pass to the black-mass pioneers trying to close the loop through recycling, *Blasting for Batteries* offers no easy absolution. It delivers something rarer: an unvarnished, polyphonic witness to the birth of a new cartography of extraction—one that will define the geopolitics, ecology, and human cost of the post-carbon world.