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We May Not Have Enough Minerals To Even Meet Electric Car Demand (jalopnik.com)
Citing two reports from Reuters and Bloomberg, Jalopnik reports on the scarcity of metals necessary for electric cars. From the report: [W]hile demand for nickel keeps increasing, half the world's nickel supply is too low in quality to use for car batteries. All of which is going to have seismic effect on the world's suppliers. In short: There will be winners and losers, and the winners will be the ones with the highest-grade stuff -- not unlike, I suppose, the illicit drugs market. "Some of the biggest producers of the higher-grade ores, including BHP Norilsk Nickel, Vale and Sumitomo Corp, are moving quickly to take advantage and seal long-term supply deals with battery producers," reports Reuters. "Among those losing out would be lower-grade nickel mines like Cerro Matoso in Columbia, owned by South32 Ltd and Glencore's Koniambo in New Caledonia, as well as Anglo American's mines in Brazil producing ferronickel."
What of cobalt? Bloomberg sent a writer and photographer to Cobalt, Ontario, about 300 miles north of Toronto, to find out. The town, which began life as a silver town, also is believed to have some cobalt, though no one's really found much yet. The search for a new source of cobalt isn't taking place in just Cobalt, Ontario, of course, as mining companies worldwide try to capitalize on the our electric car future. But the search is ramping up as the world's biggest source of cobalt -- the Democratic Republic of Congo, where about half of all cobalt comes from -- is increasingly unstable, making car manufacturers nervous and cobalt all the more valuable.
What of cobalt? Bloomberg sent a writer and photographer to Cobalt, Ontario, about 300 miles north of Toronto, to find out. The town, which began life as a silver town, also is believed to have some cobalt, though no one's really found much yet. The search for a new source of cobalt isn't taking place in just Cobalt, Ontario, of course, as mining companies worldwide try to capitalize on the our electric car future. But the search is ramping up as the world's biggest source of cobalt -- the Democratic Republic of Congo, where about half of all cobalt comes from -- is increasingly unstable, making car manufacturers nervous and cobalt all the more valuable.
If you can find a mine that produces any of these in pure elemental form, then I suggest you lay claim and get rich damn quick.
Until that time, I suggest that what comes out of mines are minerals, and from those we extract purer forms, which can approach elemental purity at times, depending on requirements. This article is about the mines, so you are simply being a pedant, sorry.
' It''s just a matter of paying for the extraction. It won't make batteries hard to find, just expensive.'
You think that is a useful comment? Hell, Seawater contains all of those elements! we could just extract from that!.
Good mineral sources have order*S* of magnitude more economic value than 'an element is common' implies, as I am sure you are aware.
The town of cobalt however is an odd inclusion - I suggest Bloombergs researcher needs up to strung up for that one.
Neither nickel nor cobalt is needed for lithium batteries. Tesla batteries contain both, but the Nissan Leaf uses manganese instead, and there are billions of tonnes of manganese reserves.
We will likely find both better ways to extract ore, and better ways to build batteries. Just ask Paul Ehrlich about betting against human ingenuity.
half the world’s nickel supply is too low in quality to use for car batteries.
1. There is plenty of nickel in the planet's crust.
2. Since nickel is an element, it can be refined into pure nickel with the application of chemistry.
3. All the elements in batteries can be extracted and reused, it's just a matter of chemistry.
Consider aluminum for a moment: despite being extremely abundant, it's rarely found in it's elemental state (which is why it used to be valued more than gold). Then we figured out how to extract it and now it's dirt cheap.
This is just click-bait alarmist bullshit.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
It's worse than that; neither of Jalopnik's "sources" make the claim that "We May Not Have Enough Minerals To Even Meet Electric Car Demand". Both of the sources are very upbeat about the market prospects, yet Jalopnik (which has long had an anti-EV lean, and particularly anti-Tesla) turns it into a doom story.
More to the point, the sources say just the opposite of what Jalopnik is claiming. To not put too fine of a point on it:
Got that? In 7 years, nickel supply only needs to grow by 10-40%. Which is nothing. I mean, great if you're a nickel mining company, but not exactly the plot of a post-apocalyptic movie.
The Bloomberg article about cobalt, by contrast, was about how the rise in cobalt demand is bringing life back into a dying town. A feel-good story about the current market which, again, Jalopnik turned into doom.
Here's the basic fact: cobalt is found pretty much everywhere nickel and copper are. In most places, they don't bother to recover it because the market demand hasn't been high enough; it just gets thrown out in the tailings. As the demand and price rise (and EVs manufacturers can easily outspend almost all other demand sources for cobalt, because that ~15% in their cathodes makes so much of a difference), the only thing that has to happen is the addition of more recovery processes to existing copper and nickel mines. Most cobalt today comes from the Congo because their nickel-copper ores have the highest cobalt fractions (although contrary to popular myth, under 20% of the Congo's cobalt comes from "artisinal" mines; most come from big mines from international firms which use modern equipment and processes). But nickel-copper ores pretty much anywhere else on Earth can also recover cobalt, and will to whatever extent is needed to meet demand (in addition to the new demand launching a new wave of cobalt exploration, like that which is happening near the town of Cobalt).
How price sensitive are li-ion batteries to cobalt? Let's ignore, as ShanghaiBill mentioned, that there are entire chemistries that use no cobalt. Tesla's batteries have 0,22kg per kWh. Cobalt costs $60/kg (and this is during a time when speculators are trying to snatch up supply, so there's been a price spike). So that's $13,2 per kWh. Tesla's batteries currently cost about $180 per kWh; their primary goal is to get batteries down to $100/kWh. So although cobalt is the rarest element that goes into their batteries, it's still not that expensive of a component compared to what they can sell the batteries for.
The human body can be drained of blood in 8.6 seconds given adequate vacuuming systems.
Because mineral extraction companies don't go looking for rights for new sources until their existing ones are exhausted? It's common to have sourcing years worth of supply ready to go - just purchase the equipment and hire people to operate it. This plays into the old trope of "there is only 50 years worth of known Uranium reserves!" - that's not because there is only 50 years worth in the Earth, it's because they stopped surveying when they had 50 years worth of uranium at current usage rates, because it's not useful to find 100 years worth and keep it in a filing cabinet for 50 years.
When the known sources even remotely dwindle, they send out the geologists. And look! More sources! Because Nickel and Cobalt are really common, to the point where Cobalt is often treated as a waste product from extracting other minerals it is found with.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I'm not sure how to parse your word-salad.
You do know that cars today are made mostly from aluminum -- which is almost 100% recycled. There's steel in there, too... which is also almost 100% recycled. EVs are currently dependent on Lithium Ion batteries. Pretty much every electronics store not only has a recycle bin for mobile electronics, but encourages you to use it, too. Why? Well, sometimes they're legally required to... but Lithium Ion battery recycling is the best thing since sliced bread to manufacturers who use them in their products. Ever crack open one of those iPhones or Samsung Galaxies? Most of what's inside by mass is the Lithium Ion battery. Recycling them isn't difficult. Do you have any idea how much cheaper it is to just re-use aluminum, steel, and lithium rather than dig it out of the ground as a raw material to refine?!?!?
Teslas aren't made to be replaced every 3 years... most electronics aren't -- just phones and tablets as they evolved quickly... and they're just now starting to extend their expected lifespans. Computers used to be the same -- new every 2 years for every business... then every 3... then every 5... now, lots of places have 7 or even 10 year old PCs running Windows 10 just fine. The TREND is the opposite of what you describe. New technologies evolve fast, older ones tend to stagnate and flatten out growth curves and create longer-lasting products.
Teslas have fewer moving parts and fewer parts that need maintenance, so your basic gasoline powered car has more throw-away parts. The Tesla's biggest expense and liability is its lithium ion battery packs... which they're improving & by entering the Li Ion battery business, they have a stake in improving the batteries and lowering their costs -- which will include recycling the lithium from the old batteries eventually as well. There's no reason a Tesla couldn't run for decades just fine with only swapping out older battery packs to be recycled and replaced with new battery packs.
Further, the USA has barely scratched the surface of its mineral resources. We have confirmed rare-earth metals and lithium deposits we aren't touching -- because China is mining away just fine for cheaper than it'd be worth for us to bother... especially considering the environmental impact of mining in our own back yards. There is no shortage and no future shortage in sight -- just corporations staking claims to get the largest control over the current sources of raw materials... which is no different than any other time in history. If and when it becomes worthwhile, we'll dig for our own and make our own refineries.... but, more likely, we'll recycle what we have first -- just like with aluminum and steel... and to a lesser degree, copper and other precious metals. We do mostly send our electronics recycling (other than lithium) to China... where they use a nasty process to extract gold, palladium, platinum, and other precious or rare earth metals from motherboards. It's become more profitable to get some of those metals from electronics than from raw ore in mines already, too.