As the number of electric cars on roads from Shanghai to Paris surges from 2 million now to 118 million vehicles by 2030, demand for cobalt will soar to 156,000 metric tons. That doesn’t mean miners like Glencore Plc, the world’s top producer, will need to scale back production. “It will be a big deal mainly because you wouldn’t get all the wastage going into the ground.” “Recycling will help to ease supply constraints that we see coming in the next couple of years,” said James Frith, energy storage analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Pressure on lithium, sourced mainly from Chilean brine lakes, will also abate as new supply starts getting produced in Argentina and Australia. Recycling could have a “stabilizing effect” on battery metal prices, said George Heppel, a consultant at London-based commodity analysis company CRU Ltd.Īfter surging from $10 to $30 a pound in less than two years, cobalt’s price gains are poised to slow to $32 by 2021 and $41 by 2022, according to forecasts of Macquarie Group Ltd., one of the largest banks in commodities. Note: Figures show annual percentage change forecasts on price Dissipating RallyĪfter soaring since 2016, lithium and cobalt gains set to slow If true, that’s equal to the material used in all electric vehicles on the road this year.Īdd in the 311,000 metric tons of electric car batteries that Bloomberg New Energy Finance anticipates will stop working by 2025, and the potential trove of metals grows exponentially. Doing this could yield as much as 4,000 tons of cobalt, according to Reaugh. Some artisanal mines still use child labor.Īmerican Manganese wants to recycle the one in 10 lithium-ion batteries - used in everything from home electronics to smart phones - that fail quality-control tests and end up in hazardous-waste dumps.
Not only is it one of the world’s poorest countries, doing business there is tough after decades of violence and corruption. That will ease pressure on lithium and cobalt, whose prices have more than doubled in the past year.įinding new sources of cobalt, in particular, could be a game-changer because more than half of the relatively rare metal is sourced in the Democratic Republic of Congo. could count on recycling for 10 percent of their battery material needs through 2025 if companies roll out large schemes, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Innovators like him have made so much progress that the likes of Tesla Inc.
“Rather than mining ore that’s 2 percent cobalt, you’re mining a battery that has 100 percent cobalt in it.” “Mining batteries is much more profitable than mining the ground,” said Larry Reaugh, the president of American Manganese, which is patenting a method to draw out all of the metals in rechargeable batteries. Instead of radiators, spark plugs and fuel injectors, the industry will need cheap sources of cobalt, copper and lithium. It’s one of many technologies that entrepreneurs are patenting to prepare for a time when electric cars outnumber polluting petrol engines, turning the entire automotive supply chain upside down in the process. Scientists working for American Manganese Inc., located in the suburbs of Vancouver, have developed a way to produce enough of the bluish-gray metal to power all the electric cars on the road today without drilling into the ground: by recycling faulty batteries. And not only can they take coffee breaks, when they take a break, they can grab a donut at Tim Hortons. Almost 9,000 miles from the dusty Congo savanna, miners have hit on an entirely new source of cobalt - the rare mineral at the heart of the electric-car boom.
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