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Lithium isn't that much of a problem, but cobalt might bring some fresh freedom to parts of Africa.
by dna_polymerase 5y ago
Lithium isn't that much of a problem, but cobalt might bring some fresh freedom to parts of Africa.
- epistasis 5y agoAnd there's plenty of competitive, cobalt-free battery chemistries coming to the fore. And as you hint, cobalt's damage is a political problem, not a "we don't have enough of it" problem. With proper regulations, the battery industry could clean up what has been a long-accepted human rights nightmare. But nobody seems to complain about it unless they can use it as an excuse to continue fossil fuel use.
- sk2020 5y agoThere are 7M tons of cobalt reserves in the world. That is a “we don’t have enough of it” problem.
- brohee 5y agoKnown reserves, not reserves. (https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2021/mcs2021-cobalt.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2021/mcs2021-cobalt.pdf). Same known reserves were 4.5M tons in 2000. (https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/prd-wret/assets/palladium/production/mineral-pubs/cobalt/210300.pdf https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/prd-wret/assets/palladium...). Despite all the extraction that happened during those 20 years, we now have more known reserves than before, because unsurprisingly, the more you look for something, the more of it you find.
- sk2020 5y agoDiscovering 2.5M tons in 20 years does not come close to the demand. You would need at least 3X the rate of discovery forever assuming we only ever serve the need of passenger vehicles and never increase world vehicle production. That’s a big hand-wave.
- brohee 5y agoReserves grew despite increased extraction. So far we are discovering faster than we can extract. Obviously it is something to keep an eye on but panic is not warranted.