Tesla battery supplier Matsushita announced in Tokyo, Japan on Wednesday that it will develop a battery for new energy vehicles that do not contain cobalt in the near future due to the surge in prices of key battery materials.
In recent years, with the rising prices of mineral resources and the widespread use of new energy vehicles on a global scale, the production capacity of cobalt has been reduced. A top-notch battery manufacturer has initiated a technical update to reduce lithium batteries. The amount of cobalt used.
Last week, Elon Musk wrote on Twitter that the Tesla Model 3 battery uses less than 3% of an expensive chemical called cobalt, and the next generation of batteries "will not be used" by some people. Said "blood drill battery" material.
Musk's "new generation" is a vague statement. There is no specific time, so it is impossible to know when he will honor his promise, but it may be difficult to achieve in the next few years.
What is cobalt, and where is it mined?
The average content of cobalt in the earth's crust is 0.001% (mass), and the total amount of cobalt in the ocean is about 2.3 billion tons. There are nearly 100 kinds of cobalt-containing minerals in nature, but there are no separate cobalt minerals, most of which are associated with nickel, copper and iron. Lead, zinc, silver, manganese, and other sulfide deposits, and the amount of cobalt is low.
At present, the raw materials for cobalt are mainly from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The cheap cobalt mine is an essential mineral for rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, powering smartphones, laptops and electric cars produced by companies such as Apple, Samsung and major automakers. Last year, 66% of the world's cobalt came from the Congo. This remote region in southern Africa is becoming the core of the world's crazy competition for cheap cobalt.
Cobalt is an important part of the battery. It is also the most expensive material in batteries, and for this reason it has a black chain of interest: for a long time, there have been human rights violations in the Republic of the Congo, including the employment of child labor mining. Electronic equipment and electric car companies are reluctant to pay large sums for manufacturing and are not willing to participate in local human rights exploitation, so they gradually reduce the amount of cobalt used in batteries and compete to develop a cobalt-free battery.
Workers, including children, work under harsh and dangerous conditions, sometimes meeting the world's rising demand for cobalt. Based on evidence found by staff, government officials, and the Washington Post on visiting remote mines, the Congo estimated that 100,000 cobalt miners used hand tools to excavate hundreds of feet of underground, with little or no security. Death and injury are common. Health officials say mining activities expose local communities to levels of toxic metals that appear to be associated with diseases including respiratory problems and birth defects.
Tesla currently uses a lithium battery of NCA (nickel, cobalt, aluminum) material, which has a very low cobalt content. In the past six years, Tesla and Panasonic (supplying batteries to Tesla) have reduced the battery's dependence on cobalt by about 60%. Although this is already very low compared to lithium batteries of other materials, it is very likely that it will be difficult to reduce the amount of cobalt used due to technical and safety issues.
Cobalt is a safe element in the cathode. When the amount is reduced, the life cycle of the lithium battery is reduced. At present, the market standard for electric vehicles is an eight-year warranty, which retains 80% of the original battery capacity. You need to make sure your battery can do this, otherwise the car manufacturer will have to replace the new battery with the customer during the warranty period, which is more expensive than the theoretical savings from cobalt.
There is also a security issue. When reducing the amount of cobalt, it is necessary to increase the amount of nickel. The battery may overheat and can no longer effectively cool itself, which can result in burning. Although this is a relatively low probability risk, it is not a desirable approach and requires special techniques to avoid this risk. In addition, low-cobalt formulations need to be produced in a special dry environment, so the cost of manufacturing these formulations is also costly.
The future of the cobalt market
As people pay more attention to environmental issues, new energy vehicles using lithium batteries will be the main trend in the future development of the automotive industry, which will inevitably lead to an increasing demand for cobalt, and this will continue for a long time. The demand for cobalt used to be mainly super alloys from jet engines and hardware. Today, more than 50% of demand comes from the battery industry.
At the same time, there are many new cobalt mining projects in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Caspar Rawles, an analyst at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, said prices will remain stable until 2022, when demand will exceed new supply and prices may rise.
The future of the battery
Some things are more advanced lithium-ion batteries, which use a smaller amount of cobalt and may appear in a few years. But we are really close to the physicochemical limits that these materials can do. For me, the next generation is like a solid battery, but they still have a long way to go. Other batteries, such as sodium-ion batteries, are still on a laboratory scale, from lab to mass production, and there is still a long way to go, possibly for at least 10 years.
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