Saturday, February 11, 2023

"Cobalt’s battery-powered boom has turned to bust"

Oh we had fun with the blue one 2016 2018, but then Elon Musk started making noise about the cost of cobalt and the writing was on the wall. Some links below.

From Bloomberg via Mining.com, February 9:

A blistering rally in the cobalt market is turning into a rout, putting pressure on miners and offering tentative cost relief for carmakers after a surge in battery metal prices last year.

Cobalt rallied sharply early in 2022 as demand for electric vehicles surged. But while automotive usage is still rising, there’s been a sharp drop-off in buying from another key sector — Chinese electronics — and cobalt prices have crashed more than 50% since a peak in May.

Pound for pound, the batteries used in laptops, phones and tablets contain much more cobalt than EV batteries, and demand from the industry has fallen about 30% to 40% over the past year, according to researcher Rystad Energy. At the same time, demand growth for use in EVs is moderating as more manufacturers shift to battery chemistries that don’t require cobalt.

For carmakers, cobalt’s boom-to-bust swing will have a minor impact on the cost of batteries, when compared with other materials like lithium, which is used in much greater volumes and is still trading at sky-high levels. Yet the collapse offers a stark illustration of how quickly the balance between buyers and sellers can shift in the small but rapidly expanding markets for battery metals....

...MUCH MORE

As far back as January 2018, Tesla was so far ahead of the curve that other EV manufacturers didn't know what Elon was going on about and blithely went on to create Cobalt Bubble 2.0.

"Batteries: Lithium-Iron may be Competitive With Lithium-Cobalt"
...but with so many technologies that failed to scale-up over the years we are a little bit jaundiced about wasting the reader's time chasing every rabbit that pops up.

However, if this works, Elon may have found the chemistry for the next generation of Powerwalls....

And in May 2018:
"BNEF Brief: Elon Musk's Warning on Cobalt Use"

Reiterated in June 2018
"Tesla leads electric vehicle race to cut cobalt dependency" (TSLA)
One of the reasons cobalt prices are rolling over, the other being supply coaxed onto the market by the quadruple in prices. it was a good run, funny how this commodity stuff works, what with the supply and the demand and the substitutions and the....

July 2021
"What Tesla’s bet on iron-based batteries means for manufacturers" (TSLA)
Although we are loathe to relay every chemical or manufacturing 'breakthrough' (having gone through the mid-aughts and a million pixels of stuff that didn't scale up), this is one we've flagged a few times....

October 2021
"Tesla will only use iron-based batteries for standard model EVs" (TSLA)

The industry started catching on in December 2021
Batteries: ...The Race to Build Europe’s Frst Lithium-Iron-Phosphate Battery Gigafactory
Lithium-Iron, it's all anyone is talking about....

By last year we were seeing stuff like:
Tesla's Pivotal Move In Battery Chemistry (TSLA)

Sometimes I think those poor souls suffering from Musk Derangement Syndrome don't have a clue. And would refuse to buy one even if they had Musk's money.

We've mentioned for the last couple years Elon's concern over nickel. Here's one of the funniest back-and-forth's I've seen in a while:

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