In another era, when oil was the undisputed lubricant of global capitalism, the economic historian Daniel Yergin charted the intersection of business and geopolitics in his 1992 Pulitzer-winning classic The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power. In 2026, Nicolas Niarchos, a journalist specialising in energy and mining, attempts something similar for the age of batteries.
Mostly he succeeds. The Elements of Power cuts like a fast-paced action film from battery labs in California, Tokyo and the backstreets of Shenzhen (where EV maker BYD started out) to mines in Africa and elsewhere where a combination of powerful companies, hucksters and mostly downtrodden miners scrabble for the minerals needed to power the energy transition.
The battery sections of the book trace the story of the invention of lithium-ion batteries based on research beginning in the 1970s by three scientists — M Stanley Whittingham, John B Goodenough and Akira Yoshino — who went on to win the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and to kick-start whole new industries and a race to limit carbon emissions well before that.