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Cobalt is suddenly abundant
- livueta 4y agohttps://archive.is/bRwO0 https://archive.is/bRwO0
- ggm 4y agoSupply chain scarcity is not equal to relative abundance in the world. This is why the Ehrlich/Simons bet[0] came out the way it did. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager
- wnevets 4y ago> Ehrlich could have won if the bet had been for a different ten-year period.[5][6][7] Ehrlich wrote that the five metals in question had increased in price between the years 1950 and 1975.[3] Asset manager Jeremy Grantham wrote that if the Simon–Ehrlich wager had been for a longer period (from 1980 to 2011), then Simon would have lost on four of the five metals. He also noted that if the wager had been expanded to "all of the most important commodities," instead of just five metals, over that longer period of 1980 to 2011, then Simon would have lost "by a lot."[7] Doesn't sound like a great bet to base anything on.
- ggm 4y agoThe idea behind the bet is stronger than the statistics of year shopping: the price of critical ingredients is subject to many changes, what was at stake was their availability expressed as price: Ehrlich argued for scarcity because of a flawed belief in exhaustion and limits to growth. Simon argued for supply chain dynamics, and had a strong sense the relative abundance of primary inputs was not the limiting factor. Sure, the specific bet could be lost and won in different windows. But the actual underlying point remains: were not facing exhaustion of resources as a limit to economic growth and development as much as exhaustion of willingness to invest in exploration and development of sources. "Oh God, there isn't enough cobalt or lithium for all the EV to be sold in the next 5 years" or "there isn't enough lithium for every car to be converted to EV" which are both variants of counterfactuals to actual rate of deployment, replacement of cars in the real world, the replacement of battery technology, new forms of battery chemistry, you name it PLUS extraction of new sources and discovery of new ore beds.
- wnevets 4y ago> Sure, the specific bet could be lost and won in different windows. But the actual underlying point remains: You are free to argue that but that is not why this bet turned out the way it did according to the quotes from the linked wiki. It sounds way more like a coin toss than any rule of the market
- pfdietz 4y agoYour point would be stronger if the bet hadn't allowed Ehrlich to pick the commodities in question.
- culi 4y agoThe selection is a pretty generic selection of metals though. Pretty representative of metals overall
- pfdietz 4y agoNot the point. Ehlich was free to choose the metals, so the fact that this particular choice wasn't in his favor doesn't make him look good. These were presumably the best bet he thought he could make.
- culi 4y ago> The idea behind the bet is stronger than the statistics of year shopping But the fact that this bet could've easily been lost and Simon mostly got lucky is direct evidence against "the idea behind the bet"... In the past 2 decades for example, the inflation-adjusted price of all 5 of these metals have increased.
- jcampbell1 4y agoEvery prediction in “The Population Bomb” turned out to be wildly incorrect. Simon was consistently right that the human standard of living would increase even as population increased. The arguments Erlichman made were like: not everyone can have a telephone because there is not enough copper in the Earth’s crust.
- zeroonetwothree 4y agoObviously if they had made a different bet the result could have been different. That’s literally always true.
- wnevets 4y agoNot if the argument is the market will always lower the cost of goods like metals over time. If that bet went 20 years instead of the 10 the price would have been higher. Would that have proved the other guy correct?
- brigandish 4y agoI would take any bet against Ehrlich, he's been wrong so many times that it'd be like throwing away money not to bet against him.
- userbinator 4y agobut the lion’s share I wonder if that was an intentional or unintentional pun.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- codeflo 4y agoPun?
- aylmao 4y agoThere's lions in The DRC.
- mdp2021 4y ago> There's lions in The DRC There's "Li-ion" in 'lion'.
- userbinator 4y agoWhat type of batteries is the cobalt being used for?
- darth_avocado 4y agoIt’s not abundant, just more kids working to dig it up.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- _0w8t 4y agoPlease do not bring kids. It is irrelevant here and can be even factually wrong. In a poor country kinds are forced to do all kind of dangerous work. If not for cobalt they can be sent to fields and be subject for all chemicals used in modern agriculture. Or work in a sweatshop or in a factory with zero regulations about safety. The fact that they mine cobalt tells that this way more money can be earned than through other dangerous work. I.e. the problem is that the country is poor. Fix that and kids will spent time in schools, not in mines.
- darth_avocado 4y ago> Please do not bring kids Ohh I absolutely have to. You just justified modern day child slavery. Here’s a radical idea about fixing the poverty: pay them wages that help them uplift from poverty for mining the cobalt. But that’s never happening because you and I will not pay 10k for an iPhone or a million for a Tesla, and that ultimately is where the exploitation starts.
- nlitened 4y agoI don’t understand your point, is it some kind of sarcasm? You say that to stop child slavery, you would need to pay 10k for an iPhone, but you personally don’t want to pay that much, hence the slavery should continue to support your consumption habits. Why are you bringing up child slavery then if you personally justify it?
- pokepim 4y ago[dead]
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cocoggu 4y ago"It has since waned as people spend less time staring at their screens: as demand for consumer electronics fell, so did that for cobalt." Stop me if I'm wrong, but the article totally missed the fact that new car battery technologies are mostly cobalt free. I feel it better explains the lack of demand than the article explanation.
- photochemsyn 4y agoYes, was going to say just this. E.g. https://borates.today/lifepo4-batteries-vehicles/ https://borates.today/lifepo4-batteries-vehicles/ >"These days, LiFePO4 batteries are found everywhere and have various applications, including use in boats, solar systems, and vehicles. LiFePO4 batteries are cobalt-free and less expensive than most alternatives. It is non-toxic and has a longer shelf life."
- zaroth 4y agoOk… > Even a boom in electric vehicles has not been sufficient to counteract this, since manufacturers have done their best to reduce use of the formerly super-expensive metal.
- cocoggu 4y agoOops indeed not totally awake yet
- joak 4y agoWhen a resource is scarce we can either dig for more or replace by something equivalent. It was a time when there wasn't enough whales to light everyone. We killed (almost) all the whales before coming up with something else (oil)
- pfdietz 4y agoBiological resources like that are exceptionally vulnerable because harvesting them reduces the rate of creation of replacement whales, in a vicious cycle.
- meling 4y agoI wonder if some of the more scarce materials needed for EVs will turn out to be like the peak oil concern in the 80s… once a material becomes important enough human ingenuity seems to find ways.
- zeroonetwothree 4y agoThat’s the beauty of economics
- meltyness 4y agoAgreed, auto fuel is more abundant than ever. Consider EVs, Ethanol, LNG, hybrids doubling and tripling efficiency.
- AtlasBarfed 4y agoIt will be oversupplied. But I posit that the oil/gas industry is built on large scale facilities that may not survive seeing demand drop by 30-50%. I believe this will trigger a "reverse economies of scale" where gas will get more expensive and less profitable from the drop in demand making large refining facilities and the like less profitable. Which will cause closures, and further inefficiencies, and a downward spiral. What I most hope is that the tar sands and fracking oil becomes fundamentally noncompetitive, and what is left is the remaining conventional extraction reserves. I also hope it starves every petro-authoritarian state. Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, etc. But that's still a decade away, a lot can happen.
- thriftwy 4y agoRussia by the means of its territory may process and export any kind of raw material. Whether it is oil, gas, coal, iron ore, steel, nickel, wheat, cooking oil, lumber.
- msla 4y agoGiven how much the oil companies knew about climate change even then, Peak Oil was effectively always nonsense: The people who knew always realized we'd hit hard climate limits long before we'd "run out" of oil like some childish "Mad Max" fantasy. Of course, I wonder how many authors simply failed to understand the OPEC embargo, or the concept of an "embargo" in general. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jan/12/exxon-climate-change-global-warming-research https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jan/12/exxon-clima...
- leroman 4y agoIsn't there a bias built in due to products only launching if there was feasibility to begin with? The researchers had to believe this would be a viable direction as well as the industry.
- ianai 4y agoThere’s an observation in environmental economics about mining for resources acting similar to a banking instrument. As more resources are devoted to a scarce resource like cobalt more mines become economically viable. Most easily seen with oil where whole fields will shut or open with the movement of the price of oil. Forget the name of it, buts it’s yet another case of economic actors reacting to market incentives. Just remember this the next time someone says something can’t be done because of the immediate inflexibility of supply to meet demand in a market. There’s almost always a lag time between start of production and demand for it. They might be uninformed or trying to misinform. I suspect similar will hold true for charging infrastructure, solar panels, and other grid infrastructure. Wiring up new power plugs is not fundamentally new technology. Good time to be an electrician I suspect.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y agoThis is also a great example for why capitalism is so successful. It's not perfect, but a centrally planned system would, in practice, react much more slowly and/or less accurately.
- ianai 4y agoYes. No central planner had to be convinced or bribed to let cobalt be mined. Just capitalism doing its thing.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lostlogin 4y agoI might be missing sarcasm, but Glencore is a corrupt company operating in corrupt countries. They bribe officials and have decent fines to pay as a result of their practices when setting up cobalt and copper mines. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63858295.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63858295.amp
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- ObviousHumanGPT 4y agoNew NCA and NCMA batteries are using less than a tenth of the cobalt of old NCA chemistries in old Tesla and Nissan Leaf vehicles, and more than half of electric vehicles being built today use a LFP or LMFP chemistry with no cobalt or nickel at all. Cobalt demand could be met almost entirely by recycling batteries at end of life.
- specialist 4y agoThis Volts episode is a good overview. Focus is on lithium, of course. But same calculus applies to all the elements; Cost of recycling vs mining, alongside policies over supply chain, environmental impact, etc. "The state of the lithium-ion battery recycling market - A conversation with battery analyst Yayoi Sekine of BNEF." [2022/12/09] https://www.volts.wtf/p/the-state-of-the-lithium-ion-battery#details https://www.volts.wtf/p/the-state-of-the-lithium-ion-battery... My impression, after listening, is that recycling is ramping up asap. And the industry is so young that the eventual shape and size is hard to predict. Also, much governmental investment is needed to accelerate innovation.
- ObviousHumanGPT 4y agoJB Straubel's (Tesla cofounder) new company Redwood Materials has developed a pyro-metallurgical and hydro-metallurgical process to separate most of the valuable materials. Dunno about the logistics or economics of getting the vehicle batteries to processing centers. Most sane countries have a lead acid battery recycling deposit to divert batteries from landfill. Might be a good idea to implement one for large lithium batteries as well.
- tjoff 4y agoHow does this affect longevity? And how can you know that whatever mix you ended up with in your car will work long term?
- bawana 4y agoCapitalism is another word for ‘Only look at profit’. It is famous for short term management decisions that create hard-to-change and expensive infrastructure. Unexpected’externalities’ will always develop as human activity exceeds the environment’s ability to compensate for the disturbances we create in millenia old equilibria. Capitalism is also only valid for voluntary transactions. Consider an event like illness- people do not choose to get sick. But we have put capitalism clothes on this beast. Capitalism gaves us in the US ‘managed care’ , an administratively burdened healthcare system, and new burdens like corporate suites for healthcare with 7 figure salaries. For example, corporate managers see empty beds in the hospital. They reduce staffing. Then there is a flood of illness clogging the ER. They need nurses in a hurry. They hire temp nurses (3 to 6 month minimum contract) that get paid double. The remaining staff nurses feel shafted. They quit and become traveling nurses too. The hospital goes from a 10 mill surplus to a 30 mill deficit. And the traveling nurses dont know where anything is so everything moves more slowly reducing throughput. Delays in Operating room (the major profit center) reduce case load further. In such a system, a slow to change ‘centrally planned’ arrangement might actually be better
- justnotworthit 4y agorelevant book: https://www.superabundance.com/ https://www.superabundance.com/