Colbalt commentary in mainstream media, page-3

rick64, I kinda suspected that might happen.  Every now and again some articles don't get blocked.

Cobalt pits West against China

• Robin Pagnamenta
• The Times

When American physicists raced to develop the world’s first atomic bomb during the Second World War, they scoured the globe for the raw materials they needed.
Deep in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo on the mineral-rich Katanga plateau, they finally found what they wanted. The fabulously productive mines of Katanga contain a treasure trove of exotic materials, including the uranium and radium ores shipped secretly to the US for use in the Manhattan Project in 1944 and 1945.
The same region is now back in focus, for a different reason. More than half of the world’s reserves of cobalt — a key mineral used in the manufacture of electric vehicles and smartphones — lies beneath the central African country. Much of it sits in three giant mines: Katanga, Mutanda and Tenke Fungurume.
With the ore found here plentiful and of a higher grade than anywhere else, making it relatively cheap to extract, these mines are at the centre of an international scramble to lock in supplies.
The contest is pitting some of the world’s biggest companies — from Apple of the United States to Volkswagen of Germany, Glencore of Switzerland and Samsung of South Korea — against Chinese groups eager to tie up supplies as they attempt to become world leaders in clean technology.
“The competition for these resources is getting ever more intense,” Paul Gait, senior research analyst at Alliance Bernstein, says. “It’s starting to look very tight a few years out.”
Between 2010 and 2015 the worldwide demand for cobalt, which is used in the batteries powering everything from iPhones to Tesla cars, increased from 65,000 tonnes to more than 90,000 tonnes per year; but the real growth is yet to come.
According to estimates from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, annual global cobalt demand is set to rise from 100,000 tonnes to 450,000 tonnes by 2030. That is largely because of the projected growth in the market for electric vehicles as carmakers plough tens of billions of dollars into the technology and ramp up their production.
A typical car battery used by Tesla requires about 8kg of cobalt, about 800 times more than that used in a typical smartphone and 270 times the amount used in a laptop.
Cobalt has also been used for decades in industrial alloys in aerospace and advanced manufacturing, but in relatively modest amounts.
“The cobalt market was tight already,” Colin Hamilton, mining analyst at BMO Capital Markets, said. “But projections from just about everyone show further big growth in demand.”
Cobalt prices have quadrupled over the past two years to $US89,000 a tonne.
The cobalt rush, which is also triggering investment in lower-quality deposits in Australia, Canada and Scandinavia, is fuelling concerns about human rights and child labour in the DRC, where the metal is often produced under grim conditions by artisanal miners in unsupervised sites where deaths and accidents are commonplace.
Chinese and Lebanese middlemen buy it up and repackage it in bulk, either as a greenish powder or moist cakes of cobalt hydroxide, for the wholesale export trade.
Those are not the only worries. Ivan Glasenberg, chief executive of Glencore, the world’s top producer, has offered a further stark warning. Western carmakers, he claimed, were “waking up too late” to the fact that Chinese companies were moving swiftly to tie up limited global supplies, a trend that could have far-reaching implications.
“If cobalt falls into the hands of the Chinese ... you won’t see EVs being produced in Europe,” he said.
Mr Gait claimed China had locked up most of the world’s supplies for the next five years through direct ownership or bulk offtake agreements with others.
“This is a market that China has its footprint all over. The question is what is their intention? Is it for their own domestic market or to sell their own electric vehicles to the rest of the world?”
Glencore has not been immune to the trend. Last month the FTSE 100 group agreed to sell about a third of its cobalt production over the next three years — 52,800 tonnes — to the Chinese battery group GEM.
Another Chinese group, China Molybdenum, is the world’s second largest producer of cobalt. Last year it acquired the Tenke Fungurume mine.
Cobalt is a by-product of copper production which is only found in some copper deposits. South America is rich in copper but has relatively limited supplies of cobalt. Smaller deposits are found in Australia and Norway.
China has put EVs at the centre of a strategy to end air pollution in its cities and is making a concerted push to become the dominant player in processing raw cobalt into a chemical form that can be used by manufacturers.
Mr Hamilton said: “China is clearly trying to secure supplies pretty aggressively. For cobalt in chemical form (it) now controls 90 per cent of that market and they are seeking to control supply.”
A string of big western companies have rushed to lock in supplies in recent months, with Apple understood to be in talks with miners to strike a multi-year deal to secure several thousand tonnes a year. BMW, Volkswagen, Samsung and others are racing to sign contracts to ensure they have sufficient supplies.
Sceptics claim the cobalt trade could turn out to be a bubble, with some suggesting high prices could force carmakers to develop alternative materials; but the boom shows no sign of stopping.
The Times