SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
A number of metals are crucial components in a range of technologies, from smartphone batteries to electric cars. So could a market shortage and spiralling prices put the breaks on the global tech industry?
Cobalt has been used for thousands of years to give a deep blue-ish hue to pottery, paint and jewellery. But more recently, it has become a crucial metal used in the batteries powering millions of tech gadgets, including the electric cars made by Tesla and others.
About half of all cobalt demand comes from the expansion of electric vehicle production and development worldwide.
The problem is, we can't get enough of it. No wonder its price has doubled in the last year alone.
"We are definitely entering a period of deficit and that will start this year," says Lara Smith, managing director of Core Consultants, a commodities researcher.
"In 2016, the supply of cobalt was about 104,000 tonnes and demand was about 103,500. The hybrid and electric vehicles are in a nascent growth phase, so as we continue along this track we expect there to be a greater and greater deficit."
Only 2% of cobalt is mined directly - 98% of it is produced as a by-product of nickel and copper mining. Unlike other battery metals like lithium, cobalt is quite rare and its quality can vary geographically. About two thirds of the supply comes from Africa's Congo region.
It's little wonder then that First Cobalt Corporation in Toronto recently invested in seven large areas of land in the Central African "copperbelt" with the intention of finding more copper and cobalt reserves in the ground.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Wednesday June 14 2017, @12:23PM (6 children)
A mineral that up until very recently was of very little use, so much so that nobody actually went out of their way to mine it, is now useful and we are likely to start mining for it. You should invest in the advertised mineral mining company now, as they would really like your money, so they can make great big piles of cash by exploiting the natural resources of a region they dare not name their corporation after.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday June 14 2017, @12:52PM (5 children)
Its been in demand since WWII for high speed steel tools. Its never really been useless and has always been horrendously expensive. If it were cheap, all steels (or at least cutting tool steels) would have cobalt in them.
Figure a lathe blank (a little square thingy) in M42 high cobalt steel is like $20 where plain HSS is like $5. Figure as a rule of thumb adding 10% cobalt quadruples the price of steel but makes a sharp edge last maybe 10 times longer so it makes economic sense most of the time for industry use.
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Wednesday June 14 2017, @01:07PM (3 children)
That's still very little use when you compare it to other minerals. They wouldn't be processing it at all if it wasn't of some use, but the market, for example, for Lithium is about 185,000 tons [ft.com] and they expect that to rise too. I shudder to think just how much Iron is knocking about, or Aluminium.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday June 14 2017, @01:47PM (2 children)
Eh true, but if it had no uses it would be cheaper than lead and its about 80% to 90% the density of lead, so you'd have, like cobalt window well weights and stuff like that. Or cobalt weight lifting plates maybe. Cobalt sailboat ballast...
The demand has always been high enough for exotic steel to make the cobalt price pretty ridiculous. So if adding 10% cobalt adds three times the price of HSS steel, that would imply ten times as much added cobalt aka pure cobalt would be thirty times the cost of regular HSS and HSS is more expensive than plain old steel but not ridiculously so... I'd figure a bar of solid pure cobalt is about forty times the price of a similar bar of general purpose steel.
If cobalt were cheap, which it has never been, I wonder if you made an engine block out of cobalt steel and properly heat treated it, how long the engine would last... I suppose the piston rings would wear out unless made of the same material. Maybe you could get a million miles out of a cobalt steel car engine. Of course it would be really heavy...
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday June 14 2017, @02:08PM (1 child)
Marginally heavier, cobalt is just one place to the right from iron in the periodic table.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday June 14 2017, @02:55PM
My first car had 80s Trenton Michigan cast iron 4-cyl that weighed about 400 pounds and output around 80 HP and my second car had 90s Saturn aluminum engine and that weighed 190 pounds and output a bit over 120 HP. My current car outputs about 90 HP and weighs 69 Kg which is about 150 pounds. I wonder if I'll ever drive a car again with an engine that weighs more than me... Interestingly the MPG achieved by these similar cars has dropped continuously as the mass of safety gear increases. My Horizon had no AC and no air bags and occasionally got 37+ on the highway when the carburetor choke wasn't stuck on, and when I filled my car this morning I got 240 miles in 8 gallons which is 30 MPG. Of course the Horizon was burning pure gasoline and today its all E10...
Interesting to consider, presumably a cobalt steel engine could be run a lot harder and faster so for a given power output the system might be lighter even if the parts are denser...
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday June 14 2017, @02:03PM
Cobalt is also the binding matrix in tungsten carbide tools. Basically without Cobalt the machining industry would be severely crippled.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek