Important Backdrop: Gecamines / Huayou, page-96

Good article today in popular news site which unfortunately isn’t allowed to be linked on HC. It was contradicting Elon Musk’s views from a few days ago where he stated he will reduce the amount of cobalt used in his EV’s. Here’s a snippet:

Special report: Experts are predicting continuing growth in cobalt demand despite Elon Musk’s comments last week about using less of the metal in his Tesla electric car batteries.

A day after Mr Musk’s comments, battery metal price analyst Benchmark Mineral Intelligence said it expected the use of cobalt in lithium-ion batteries to triple between now and 2026.

“While efforts are being made to reduce cobalt dependency, the order of magnitude of electric vehicle (EV) growth sales will far outweigh this,” Benchmark Mineral Intelligence said.

Electric car makers are focusing on two battery technologies: nickel-cobalt-aluminium (NCA) which has been favoured by Tesla and nickel-cobalt-manganese (NCM).

The NCM chemistry is much more popular among Tesla’s rivals.

NCM batteries will account for about 70 per cent of the total lithium-ion battery market by 2026, Benchmark predicts.

Far from the end for cobalt

Benchmark predicts Tesla will not be able to further reduce the use of cobalt in its NCA technology.

“There is little room left for Tesla to manoeuvre and further reduce the cobalt in its cells.

“Any new technology that could usurp NCA or NCM is on a 10-year horizon [and] cobalt’s use in lithium-ion batteries is here to stay.”