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Apple in Talks to Buy Cobalt Directly from Miners
- baldfat 9y agoThis is scary and shows the growth of electric cars might not scale. The world's richest company, Apple, is buying up supplies of a dwindling resource that anything that uses a battery needs. This is the boost for others to research other car technology or a new battery that is always 10 years away for the last 20 years.
- rmm 9y agoMining guy. Don’t be scared there is plenty of cobalt. HPAL tech has come a long way and plenty of laterite Ni-Co around the place. Lots of it close to the surface too. I’m working on with a couple of companies already reviewing old drill cores for Co.
- shaqbert 9y agoIn general, mining is very responsive to price signals. If a given commodity becomes dear, prices go up, and mining recommences. A couple of years later, all is back to equilibrium. Our planet is fully of all elements. True, some deposits have higher grade ores, right on or underneath the surfaces, and are more accessible via transport links than others. It all comes down to price.
- aaronblohowiak 9y agoHelium, on the other hand...
- sephamorr 9y agoA similar thing is happening with helium too. The concern over the impending closure of the US National Helium Reserve prompted people to start looking, and the results are already promising: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-07/tanzania-helium-find-may-be-double-first-estimate-explorer-says https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-07/tanzania-...
- leggomylibro 9y ago...is mostly released instead of being collected from reactions like producing LNG because it is currently so cheap, but could be captured, recycled, or 'mined' in much higher quantities/efficiencies if prices went up? I could be wrong or facile, but it still sounds pretty similar.
- wuschel 9y agoHello mining guy - would you be perhaps up for a short chat? Our team is currently looking into innovation in the mining sector. My contact details are in my description.
- pc2g4d 9y agoSomehow I feel like I'm on a Terraria discussion board right now.....
- jseliger 9y agoMining guy. Don’t be scared there is plenty of cobalt Recycling could also easily kick into gear if/when prices rise high enough. See one of my favorite recent books, Junkyard Planet, for more: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/18/junkyard-planet-adam-minter-review https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/18/junkyard-plane... Right now, many people don't bother recycling older phones and laptops because they can't get any money for them. If/when prices go high enough, we'll see recycling kick into high gear. The day you see Best Buy advertise "$10 for any phone!", you'll know we're actually seeing a sustained price rise.
- baldfat 9y agoActually, it cost money in my city to throw away any electronic item. So either you pay for it to get thrown away on "Electronic Trash Day" or you hide it in the trash.
- rmm 9y agoExactly, we are seeing this with lithium too. Papers I have read show its extremely recyclable with potential high yields at scale so don't be scared... unless you're a junior lithium miner!
- lsaferite 9y agoAre none of the battery developments in the pipeline cobalt-free?
- parametrek 9y agoLiFePO4 is my favorite.
- dade_ 9y agoIt is only scary because business TV would be impossibly boring to watch if they weren't bouncing from one imaginary crisis to another, all between actual disasters that no one saw coming.
- microtherion 9y agoI'm not sure if supply is really the primary factor motivating Apple. Cobalt appears to be difficult to source if you care about holding suppliers to ethical standards; the Cobalt situation used to be regularly called out in Apple's Supplier Responsibility Progress Reports: https://images.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-Progress-Report-2017.pdf https://images.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-P...
- awalton 9y agoThe fear is not that we're going to run out, it's that we're getting cobalt directly from the suffering of others, so called "Conflict Minerals" - child labor, slave labor, etc. It's the same story with Toyota and Neodymium, Intel and Tantalum, and so forth. Dodd-Frank made these companies aware of the problem within, and these companies are actively working towards removing Conflict Minerals from their supply chains, even if that means buying direct from miners as regional traders and smelters prove unreliable sources of Conflict-Free minerals. That's the whole story.
- tyfon 9y agoMaybe it's time to reopen the cobalt mines close by here [1]. Today it's a museum but at one point it supplied 80% of the worlds cobalt needs, mainly for colouring. I wonder at what price level it would become profitable again. It was closed in 1898. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaafarvev%C3%A6rket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaafarvev%C3%A6rket
- greglindahl 9y agoLong-term contracts are one of the better ways to encourage new supplies. There are a couple of new lithium mines in the US/Mexico which opened after signing contracts with Tesla. Cobalt is a small enough % of the price of things that use LiIon batteries that it's a good candidate for paying extra to ensure a reliable, non-conflict-area source.
- endswapper 9y agoI'm the founder of endswapper and the creator of the Internet of Materials (IoM). Materials markets are complicated, and affected by technology, informational, political and relationship frictions, all of which result in negative economic, social and environmental impact. You can see this in Apple's latest announcement about cobalt. We work to eliminate market frictions and manage/mitigate other priorities mentioned in comments here. We are currently building prototypes for the largest chemical/material companies in the world. You can learn more here: https://endswapper.com https://endswapper.com And a detailed discussion is available here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/internet-materials-master-plan-part-i-updated-christopher-bruce https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/internet-materials-master-pla...
- moneytide1 9y agoYou put 3 p's in the endswapper link
- endswapper 9y agoThank you! Edited.
- yeasayer 9y agoWhere are these new battery technologies that are invented every 6 months, according to the news?
- mitchty 9y agoThey always hit the reality of engineering and scale.
- Retric 9y agoBatteries have gotten a lot better and cheaper over time.
- walshemj 9y agonot a lot better mores law does not apply to battery tech no matter how much the electric car evangelists would like it to be so
- Retric 9y agoCompare a Li-Ion battery from 1992 vs now and you are easily talking 2+x recharge cycles that's huge on it's own. But, you also get lower weight, lower volume, increased power, and lower cost. You can even get a vast array of form factors not just little cylinders. Granted, their are trade-offs and I would love to have 10x the power. Still, 2x energy by weight and 1/3 the cost means I have no problem saying batteries have gotten dramatically better.
- walshemj 9y agoCompare the advances in cpu tech or DRAM
- Retric 9y agoHow about the advancement in steal or gasoline. Batteries are old tech. CPU advancement is very similar to increases in engine horsepower over the first 80 years which steadily doubled up to rockets and then almost completely stalled out. Saying it's only they are only 10+x as good in the last 25 years overall is a silly standard. Recharge increase * weight decrease * cost decrease. Remember each of them are independently large improvements. If you see the same increases happen again electric cars in 25 years would have 1,000+ mile range and charge in ~30 seconds.
- bigtones 9y agoApple actually does this with a few different commodities. It sources Aluminium directly from mines and smelters in Australia [1], and prefers these type of deals over buying materials on dubious secondary markets like it is forced to do for Tantalum for batteries [2]. Before he became CEO, Tim Cook ran the entire supply chain for Apple and before that for HP/Compaq and he became a master of doing big deals to lock up global materials supplies to make it much harder for competitors to compete [3]. As a consequence Apple is known to have one of the most efficient large scale supply chains in tech. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com.au/how-apple-forced-microsoft-to-build-a-tablet-2012-6 https://www.businessinsider.com.au/how-apple-forced-microsof... [2] http://www.newsweek.com/2015/02/13/where-apple-gets-tantalum-your-iphone-304351.html http://www.newsweek.com/2015/02/13/where-apple-gets-tantalum... [3] http://fortune.com/2009/02/19/report-apple-has-cornered-the-flash-memory-market/ http://fortune.com/2009/02/19/report-apple-has-cornered-the-...
- gxs 9y agoFYI those articles are super old, one is from 2009. The landscape's changed quite a bit in the last few years.
- ksec 9y agoYou kind of expect, with their possibly the best supply chain teams and economy of scale, Apple will be getting some advantage over other players. Example they are possibly the largest NAND and DRAM purchasers, and yet it doesn't seems to be reflected in their product. I.e the NAND prices for Apple should be cheaper then say Lenovo, HP or Dell. I have had the same theory about Apple's diseconomies of scale long before Gruber publish it [1], although we may have no way to prove it, this Cobalt story may just be another example. Apple are willing to pay a premium for it, as long as the supply is stable. [1] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/07/17/iphone-2017-snell https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/07/17/iphone-2017-sne...
- wyldfire 9y agoThis seems less about scarcity and more about Apple protecting their brand. > ...child labor is still used in parts of the mining industry. > ...Apple has stepped up its engagement with cobalt suppliers after the origin of the metal in its supply chain came under scrutiny from human rights groups. A great many of Apple's customers care a lot about this kind of thing. Also, Apple may genuinely feel like they're obligated to be a leader in this area.
- chronic193 9y ago> A great many of Apple's customers care a lot about this kind of thing. And an even greater many of Apple customers do not care about those things. The number one deciding factor for many people in the world is how much the monthly payment will be. Full stop.
- as1mov 9y ago> A great many of Apple's customers care a lot about this kind of thing. For my own sanity, I'll assume this is sarcasm.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dilippkumar 9y agoI'm an apple customer. I care a lot about this kind of thing. It's one of the reasons I'm happy to be locked into the brand.
- ReverseCold 9y agoI'd almost be willing to argue that if an opinion appears on HN, it is likely to not be representative of the relevant population (especially for consumer goods like iPhones).
- as1mov 9y agoI'd reckon a vast majority of the users in the real world don't give a shit about it, people don't buy iPhone's because they care about privacy or child labor, they buy it because everyone else is buying it too.
- da_chicken 9y agoI don't see how this helps with the child labor problem that they were criticized for by Amnesty International. How do you "buy directly from the miners" and verify that the miners are actually the miners doing the work? I mean, is Apple going to send people into the mine to buy the ore as it falls from the pick?
- tinus_hn 9y agoAs with their other suppliers, they do send announced and unannounced inspections and they do take action when the inspection reveals issues. Apple is under a magnifying glass at every step of the supply chain even though they are the same as used by their competitors. They take this very seriously.
- dpkonofa 9y agoNo, but they will have unscheduled and unannounced visits to the mines to ensure that the workers there are not children. Unless the mining company somehow has a mole working inside the company, it'll be hard to react that quickly to a surprise visit. That's what they do with their other suppliers that they have direct connections to. They're attempting the same with Foxconn and, supposedly, it's improved the conditions for those workers significantly.
- da_chicken 9y agoReally? Downvotes for asking a question? Wow, ok.
- briandear 9y ago> is Apple going to send people into the mine to buy the ore as it falls from the pick? Yes.
- elhudy 9y agoWhich cobalt mining companies in particular is Apple engaging with? Any on the NYSE?
- cdibona 9y agoI'd guess Nevada Sunrise. Get to em before Tesla does...
- coolspot 9y agoPoor Gorillas. Their habitat is threatened by rare metal miners in Congo. It was already bad without electric cars, just with phone battery demand. [42] http://www.wired.co.uk/article/grauers-gorillas-bushmeat-conflict-minerals-technology http://www.wired.co.uk/article/grauers-gorillas-bushmeat-con... [64] http://www.mining.com/illegal-mining-in-congo-wiping-out-gorilla-populations/ http://www.mining.com/illegal-mining-in-congo-wiping-out-gor...