Supply and Demand Risk for Cobalt, Lithium and Graphite in Lithium-Ion Batteries

A recent set of articles on how Cobalt might be a limiting factor to large scale Lithium-ion battery production, or at least at the anticipated increasingly lower cost per kWh:

The Supply and Demand Giga-Risk for Cobalt, Lithium and Graphite in Lithium-Ion Batteries:
http://investorintel.com/technology...batteries-three-critical-mineral-constraints/

Cobalt Cliffs – A Bullet Through The Heart of Bloomberg’s EV Hype:
http://investorintel.com/technology...llet-through-the-heart-of-bloombergs-ev-hype/

Tesla: Another Thing To Worry About:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/3957884-tesla-another-thing-worry


Although I've read that the new "2nd Gen LEAF" batteries will be NMC, it's interesting that the original LEAF batteries don't use Cobalt - maybe Nissan was aware of this supply limitation and it was one of the reasons for going with the LiMnO2 chemistry?

Lots of other things going on in battery R&D, so I suspect that ultimately there will be ways around any Cobalt shortages.

Thanks for the articles!

Power Japan Plus claims that they have developed an advanced battery which does not require metals to achieve the results. Instead, the carbon can be derived from plants.

It's hard to tell how real this is, but it appears there is hope that we can build better batteries without digging up the entire Earth.

What the first article misses is that plenty of extractsble minerals go into tailings dams due to the extraction process not being economic. Mining companies will only extract secondary minerals if they can turn a profit as a result (and will also shut down secondary extraction if it is operating at a loss). In the case of copper and nickel, if prices of secondary minerals goes up (and these minerals are present in the primary ore), then companies that currently discard these minerals will respond by modifying their process to extract them.