Batteries for Electric Cars Now Demand More Cobalt Than Phones

https://www.thedrive.com ^ | MAY 17, 2022 3:52 PM | HAZEL SOUTHWELL

[Red Badger]

Cobalt mining is still fraught with danger and unethical practices, and our dependency is only growing.

Cobalt is a problem material and it's one that lithium-ion batteries can use a lot of. As EV factory production ramps up for nearly all automakers, EVs have become the main driver of demand for cobalt, surpassing smartphones, which also rely on the metal.

Mobile devices have driven demand for cobalt until now because lots of little batteries still need a cathode and anode in each one. A phone battery doesn't need anywhere near as many materials as an electric or hybrid car battery, but on the other hand, there is a hell of a lot more phones getting made so the difference was about volume. There are about 15 billion mobile devices in the world, compared to 7.2 million electric cars.

With rising demand, there's rising competition for cobalt. The Financial Times reports that 176,370 tons of cobalt were produced in 2021. However, global demand last year required 192,904 tons, already outstripping what can be mined. The automotive industry demanded 65,036 tons of cobalt last year, which was more than a third of the total demand; comparatively, smartphones only accounted for 28,660 tons of cobalt.

And cobalt mining is bad. An awful lot of cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where a decades-long civil war has been funded by international mining companies willing to work with mines that exploit and endanger people, including using forced labor and child labor. The DRC is rich in minerals and low on infrastructure or economic clout and, boy, do companies want those sweet, sweet resources for the cheapest price they can get them.

Car companies desperate to dissociate themselves from the horrible image of poisoning pregnant women with heavy metals and causing stillbirths have created convoluted ways to say their cobalt is always ethically supplied. Such as BMW's 2020 announcement that it would use blockchain assurance to show the cobalt that left its suppliers' mines was the cobalt that turned up at its factories, without the risk of adulteration. Unfortunately, this rests on the suppliers promising really hard that they won't do all the awful things that cobalt miners (and the mining industry at large) have a tendency to do, so there's no magic bullet here.

Tesla said in 2020 it was trying to insulate itself from potential cobalt shortages by moving to nickel-only cathodes. That's a nice idea, but the world's third-largest nickel supplier was Russia and the price has gone up 5.6 times this year alone. Nickel isn't exactly a clean metal to use either, with mines like the one in Norilsk contributing to horrific environmental damage.

The FT's report quoted Tesla CEO Elon Musk saying that he'd consider buying a cobalt mining company, now, to secure supply of the battery material for Tesla."It’s not that we wish to buy mining companies," Musk told the Financial Times Future of the Car summit. "But if that’s the only way to accelerate the transition, then we will do that."

The problem is that an awful lot of good-grade cobalt is sitting in obsolete electronic devices. From Airpods to laptops, the human race has treated lithium-ion battery packs as an infinite resource when they're really not or, at the very least, disposable. Currently, recovering metals from smart devices is incredibly underdeveloped and involves crude acid leaching. That scene in "Bladerunner 2049" with children disassembling devices is a depressingly spot-on vision of the near future. We may be forced to turn to trash to retrieve what we've carelessly thrown in there and we could build packs that are easier to recycle, but that alone may not solve our problem.

Shortages of cobalt have happened before. In 2018, there was a huge runaway in the price, soaring to more $90,000 per 1.1 tons. That surge was largely due to overselling the demand, and hoarders were forced to sell their supply at around $25,000 per 1.1 tons the following year. Cobalt today, according to markets, is north of $75,000 per 1.1 tons.

[SeekAndFind]

RE: Batteries for Electric Cars Now Demand More Cobalt Than Phones

Hmmm... I wonder which publicly listed company in the USA is the foremost supplier of cobalt...

[ridesthemiles]

SURPRISE SURPRISE

[BobL]

Not a problem as they get their Cobalt from child labor in The Congo. Just don’t tell anyone with an electric car.

[allendale]

Only a fool would charge his EV in a garage attached to his house while his family slept.

[laplata]

Thanks for posting this.

[Renfrew]

“Only a fool would charge his EV in a garage attached to his house while his family slept.”

Would you keep a car filled with very flammable gasoline in that same garage?

[allendale]

Not while charging an EV next to it. Otherwise yes.

[Renfrew]

Good to get a sense of your intelligence level.

In this case it is determined to be pretty low. Spontaneous fires in gas powered cars occur at much higher rates than in electric.

[GaltAdonis]

Cobalt-sheathed nuclear bombs produce much, MUCH more radiation
upon detonation than 'standard' atomic (uranium/plutonium) bombs,
nuclear (hydrogen) bombs, and even 'old-style' neutron bombs.

Just sayin'...

[allendale]

Hopefully you are not one of those delusional people susceptible to crude propaganda who actually owns an EV, charges it in an attached garage and posts on FR.

[cymbeline]

“Would you keep a car filled with very flammable gasoline in that same garage?”

Gasoline is flammable only when combined with oxygen. In a container it won’t burn, whereas lithium batteries have materials within them that can all by themselves catch on fire by uncontrollably self-distarging.

[bigbob]

Such a shame we didn’t mine the crap out of Afghanistan while were were wasting money there...

[Night Hides Not]

I wonder which publicly listed company in the USA is the foremost supplier of cobalt...

I'll be Paul Pelosi knows the answer to that, courtesy of his wife.

[Parmy]

Is the acquisition of cobalt environmentally sensitive?

[Chad C. Mulligan]

Spontaneous fires in parked gasoline cars are non-existant. In my 77 years, 40 of them as an engineer, 15 of those in the auto industry, I've never even heard of one. There just isn't any source for ignition heat.

Contrast with battery charging, where there is current flowing (usually quite a lot of it). Add to that the unfortunate characteristic of lithium cells to outgas and overheat when even mildly overcharged, which easily happens when the cells are connected in series. One bad cell in a series string will depress the total voltage, fooling the charge regulator electronics into continuing the charge even though all the other cells are full.

You can get around this to some extent by monitoring the voltage of all the cells in the string individually, but with a car battery pack containing many hundreds of cells this gets to be an incredibly complex design problem. Infant mortality in just one component out of the thousands in the charge control circuits gets you a potential fire.

THEN you have also to take into account that lithium cells normally get warm while charging, so you have to monitor individual cell temperatures as well, to guard against a dangerous overheat, Another several hundred sensors and circuits, any one of which can suffer component failure.

[Chad C. Mulligan]

Is the acquisition of cobalt environmentally sensitive?

VERY. A lot of it is extracted as a byproduct from open pit copper mining, but there are also a lot of illegal "mines" in the "Democratic" Republic of Congo that employ children.

[Wuli]

We need to disrupt the battery industry domestically, with laws that forbid the manufacture or import of batteries using cobalt that is not sourced from friendly countries. Besides supporting “made in America” we have to quit supporting shit holes and dictatorships and start sharing with friends only when we can and when we need to.

here’s who has the most cobalt

https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/largest-cobalt-reserves-country/

[Chad C. Mulligan]

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cobalt-children-mining-democratic-republic-congo-cbs-news-investigation/

[fireman15]

Would you keep a car filled with very flammable gasoline in that same garage?

And yet somehow out of a fleet of approximately 1.5 billion petroleum fueled vehicles, the number of house fires started by them while their owners slept is basically nonexistent. In contrast manufacturers have had to warn owners not to charge their electric vehicles in their garage while they were sleeping. So yes, tonight once again I will take a chance and park my gasoline powered car in the garage, but no I would not charge a Chevy Volt in the same garage while we were sleeping.

You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the danger that gasoline presents when stored in a vehicles fuel tank.

You do realize that gasoline stored in a vehicle's fuel tank cannot be ignited unless the vapors in the empty portion of the tank are mixed with enough oxygen to get them within the flammable range? The flammable range for gasoline is between 1.4 and 7.6%. Under 1.4% the mixture is too lean to burn and over 7.6% the mixture is too rich to burn. In open air it is quite easy to get gasoline to burn, in an enclosed tank not so much. And what ignition source is found within the tank of a vehicle parked over night in a garage?

I have been to many fires where vehicles were totaled when the structure, they were in caught on fire but the contents of the vehicle's fuel tank never caught on fire. My crews and I also put out many vehicle fires where the vehicle was totally involved, but the contents of the fuel tank never caught on fire.

Electric vehicles have a completely different set of safety issues. Charging giant vehicle battery packs inside creates known and sometimes serious safety issues.

It is one thing when a cell phone battery shorts out and catches on fire or explodes while being charged. We are talking about a battery that typically weighs an ounce or two. When we are talking about a Tesla battery using the same basic chemistry but weighing more than a thousand pounds and holding tens of thousands of times more electrical energy... it is a completely different problem. You pretending to be blissfully and willfully ignorant about the risks involved with massive lithium-ion battery packs is very disingenuous.