A mine worker displays a handful of cobalt metal nuggets in Chingola, Zambia. Waldo Swiegers | Bloomberg | Getty Images

In a laboratory on an industrial park an hour's drive outside Boston, Tufts professor Michael Zimmerman is hoping a material he invented in his basement can help solve a crisis facing the electric car industry — which has inadvertently tied its fortunes to one of the poorest and least stable countries in the world. In between his teaching, Mr. Zimmerman runs start-up Ionic Materials, whose battery material could mark the future for the car industry as it races to go electric after a century of producing petrol cars. His hope is that his homegrown prototype could pave the way for a new generation of batteries that does not use cobalt, a silver-grey metal, more than 60 percent of which is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Backed by highly respected computer scientist and investor Bill Joy, who spent years searching for the perfect battery, Ionic counts the Renault Nissan Mitsubishi carmaker alliance, Hyundai and French oil company Total among its shareholders. Receive 4 weeks of unlimited digital access to the Financial Times for just $1. "The world wants to electrify vehicles," Mr. Zimmerman says in his office across the car park from a shopping mall. "I've never seen such a massive industry say [it wants] to completely switch technologies. Every single company, government and country — they all want to do it worldwide." The list of Ionic's backers reflects increasing concerns among carmakers over current battery technology and its reliance on the DRC. Cobalt supply is dominated by a handful of mining companies, including Switzerland-based Glencore, or mined by hand and sold to Chinese traders in the country. Child labor is common, according to human rights groups. In other words, the product that is the shining hope of the new economy is — for the time being — highly dependent on some of the most-criticized practices of the old industrial economy. For many experts, the battery will reign supreme in this century — just as oil did in the last. Batteries power our everyday digital lives, from our iPhones to our laptops. But they are also key for electric cars to replace petrol-powered vehicles and for some types of renewable energy. Without them, it will be much harder for the world to end its addiction to fossil fuels and limit the impact of climate change.

But batteries are complicated to produce and contain a delicate mix of chemistries that have to meet a demanding list of performance requirements. Customers expect fast charging, a long battery life and safety — and in conditions ranging from the cold winters to the heat of the Arizona desert. Without a big shift in battery technology, cobalt demand is set to more than double during the next decade — with the share from the DRC set to rise to more than 70 percent. Gleb Yushin, a professor at the School of Materials and Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, puts it more bluntly: the potential growth of electric cars will not materialize, he says, unless there is a battery breakthrough. "There will be no EV industry without DRC cobalt," says Caspar Rawles, who tracks the market for London-based consultancy Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. "Without the DRC, this ramp-up in EVs won't happen." Mr. Zimmerman began thinking about batteries five or six years ago, just as electric vehicles were starting to gain traction and the first Teslas were becoming popular. Back then, cobalt was a niche metal mainly used in jet engines and smartphones. Since then sales of battery electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid versions have grown from about 6,000 cars in 2010 to 1m cars sold last year, or about 1 percent of annual sales. There will be a further 340m electric vehicles (including passenger cars, trucks and buses) produced between now and 2030, according to analysts at McKinsey. That has led to an increase of battery factories. The number of "gigafactories" under construction, named for the gigawatt hours of batteries they can produce each year, has increased tenfold over the past eight years to 41, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. Simon Moores, the founder of the company, says the battery is destined to become the "oil barrel of the 21st century". Discovered by 96-year-old American professor John Goodenough while he was at Oxford university in 1980, the lithium-ion battery has proved pivotal for 20th century science and technology, paving the way for portable electronic devices from camcorders to smartphones. It has also become the standard choice for electric cars, which use hundreds of battery cells placed together in packs that resemble metal briefcases, and weigh up to 600kg. But since Sony commercialized lithium-ion technology in 1991 there have been few substantial improvements in the technology, Mr Zimmerman says. He believes the battery that powers our world may have reached its limit. "Everyone wants their smartphone to last longer and their car battery to not blow up," he says. "My belief is that lithium-ion batteries are at a dead-end right now; there's really no further improvement that can be made with the current technology." Battery cells rely on four main parts: a positive and negative electrode, a separator and a liquid electrolyte. The positive electrode, or cathode, is coated in a carefully processed metal oxide slurry that in most cars includes lithium, cobalt, nickel and manganese. When the battery is discharged, lithium ions flow to the cathode generating a flow of electrons and electricity. When the battery is recharged they flow back to the anode, the negative electrode, which is normally made of graphite.