1. Short title This Act may be cited as the China’s Odious and Brutally Atrocious Labor Trafficking Supply Chain Act or the COBALT Supply Chain Act . 2. Findings Congress makes the following findings: (1) Cobalt is an essential component of lithium-ion batteries, which are predominantly used for electric vehicles, smartphones, and laptops, among other electronic devices. According to the International Energy Agency, the world is expected to see a fortyfold increase in lithium demand and a twentyfold increase in cobalt demand by 2040, as the demand for electric vehicles is expected to grow significantly during this period. (2) More than one-half of the world’s cobalt resources are in the DRC, which supplied approximately 70 percent of the global cobalt mine production in 2021. (3) Fifteen of the DRC’s 19 cobalt mines were owned or financed by PRC companies. (4) Firms based in the PRC hold a near monopoly in the DRC’s cobalt sector, according to the Biden Administration. (5) The mining industry in the DRC is beset with child labor and forced labor, disregard for worker safety, and environmental degradation. (6) Approximately 15 to 30 percent of cobalt produced in the DRC comes from artisanal and small-scale mining. An estimated 255,000 miners work in artisanal and small-scale mining in the DRC, of whom at least 40,000 are children. (7) Artisanal production was chiefly exported to the PRC or processed within the DRC by PRC firms, according to an article “China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and artisanal cobalt mining from 2000 through 2020” published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). (8) In the 2022 Trafficking in Persons Report, the Department of State emphasized that In the [DRC,] artisanal and small-scale mining of cobalt has been associated with forced child labor and other abuses , noting further that Since 2015, the TIP Report narratives on the DRC have highlighted forced labor of children in artisanal cobalt