| Click on blue article title to read full story. | | | | Cobalt | | | | Financial Times - February 1, 2018 Glencore, the Swiss miner and commodity trader, has flagged a big increase in cobalt production as one of its biggest copper mines restarts...... The London-listed group said it expected to produce around 39,000 tonnes of the metal this year, up from 27,400 tonnes last year, as its Katanga mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo come back on stream following a big investment programme…Cobalt is produced alongside copper and other metals such as nickel. The metal, which is needed to make batteries, has soared in price over the past year as the world’s largest car markets have announced plans to plough billions of dollars into developing electric vehicles…Some analysts think increased supplies from Glencore will help cool the red hot market over the next year, although questions remain over how the industry will source enough material in the long term if there is widespread adoption of EVs…More than half of the world’s cobalt comes from the DRC, a country plagued by lawlessness and conflict. | | | | | EVs | | | | Bloomberg - February 1, 2018 Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd., or CATL, already sells the most batteries to the biggest electric-vehicle makers in the biggest EV... and rare earths, and its mining companies are estimated to be responsible for 62 percent of the global supply of cobalt, the Cleveland-based The next global powerhouse in the auto industry comes from a small city in a tea-growing province of southeast China, where an unheralded maker of electric-vehicle batteries is planning a $1.3 billion factory with enough capacity to surpass the output of Tesla and dwarf the suppliers for battery-powered cars by GM, Nissan and Audi…The rising battery giant is, in no small part, a manifestation of China’s aggressive government support for electric vehicles… “We are competing with gasoline cars,” he said. “If we can’t win against gasoline cars, there’s no place for us in the market.”…CATL reaps further benefits from an aggressive government policy to acquire the minerals needed for battery makers. China is securing supplies of key materials such as lithium, nickel and rare earths, and its mining companies are estimated to be responsible for 62 percent of the global supply of cobalt, the Cleveland-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis said in a January report….The upcoming IPO should propel CATL to become the biggest lithium-ion battery cell maker in the world…. The company’s ramp-up, in turn, will extend China’s grip on global battery production to about 70 percent of the market by 2021, up from 54 percent last year, according to BNEF…When completed, the new 24 gigawatt-hour factory will catapult CATL to the top of the manufacturing capacity rankings. Currently, it has 17.5 gigawatt hours a year in capacity either in operation or about to come online. A gigawatt hour is the equivalent of 1 million kilowatt hours of electricity—about enough to power 1 million homes for an hour…The factory will boost that total to 41.5 gigawatt hours, surpassing LG Chem’s production, BNEF said in a November report. By comparison, Tesla’s Gigafactory will have a capacity for 35 gigawatt hours. | | Semiconductor Engineering - February 1, 2018 $90B committed to chasing Tesla may also accelerate research toward a new generation of power pack. that battery contracts were signed in 2005 for lithium cobalt oxide batteries. Those have since been replaced by lithium manganate batteries IT equipment vendors and consumer products vendors have been both the leading consumers of lithium ion batteries, and the most frequent researchers into their weaknesses. But 26 years after they were first introduced to power Sony’s CCD-TR1 camcorder, they remain the industry standard…A stack of patents and shelves of published papers shows how much work has been done on batteries. Nevertheless, technological development is much slower than pretty much anything else in the tech business…Alternatives to a lithium-ion battery have been in research for years. “You can build a battery with sodium ions or magnesium ions as charge carriers, but stabilizing the chemistry is not easy,” Srouji said. “It can take more than a decade to transition to a new charge carrier. Even within lithium-ion batteries, there have been many generations of chemistry…One anticipated shift is toward an all solid-state electrolyte, which could improve energy density by up to 40% within its developmental period. However, there are many remaining electrochemical and manufacturing hurdles, and that shift could require as much as a decade.”...Lithium ion has dominated the market for electronics because its light, energy-dense, holds its charge well, and shows minimal memory effect. It’s not the kind of thing a whole industry normally works that hard to escape. | | Metal Bulletin - January 31, 2018 Mass market electric-vehicle (EV) production will ultimately focus on shorter-range batteries, allowing automakers to manage their exposure...... the EV sector and anticipated supply tightness for the battery raw material. Metal Bulletin assessed low-grade cobalt prices at $37-38.40 By equipping mass-market EVs with smaller batteries, carmakers can keep their requirement for cobalt - and exposure to rallying prices - in check, Origuchi said, speaking at the Advanced Automotive Batteries Conference in Mainz, Germany. | | Bloomberg - February 1, 2018 The number of electric buses will triple within seven years, and virtually every bus in China will be battery-powered. . Warren Buffett-backed BYD Co., China's largest seller of electric vehicles, is well-positioned to take advantage of this government push. Nearly half of the municipal buses on the road around the world will be electric within seven years, with China expected to dominate the global market as it aims to cut urban pollution and support domestic manufacturers... Public buses are a key part of the urban transit infrastructure, and the fact that they serve routine, fixed routes makes them ideal for electrification. Cities across the globe increasingly see electric buses as a way to reduce local air pollution, and such municipalities as Paris and Amsterdam have set goals to switch to zero-emission buses in the coming years. Earlier this week, mayors of some of California's largest cities, including Los Angeles and San Jose, urged the state's environmental regulator to introduce incentives and requirements to spur a shift toward electric buses from ones that use diesel or natural gas | | Metering & Smart Energy International - February 1, 2018 Chubu Electric Power and Toyota to commence electrified vehicle battery reuse and recycling verification project. Japan’s Chubu Electric... hybrid electric vehicles. The two companies will re-use lithium-ion batteries from electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles Based on the results of this verification test, scheduled to begin in 2018, the two companies aim to introduce power generation capacity of approximately 10,000kW, equivalent to 10,000 batteries, in 2020…The initial stage will involve nickel-metal hydride batteries, which are currently being used in large quantities in hybrid electric vehicles…The two companies will re-use lithium-ion batteries from electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles by 2030. | | | | | Cobalt's other uses | | | | CNBC - January 31, 2018 NEW YORK, Jan 31 (Reuters) - Boeing Co on Wednesday forecast full-year profit well above Wall Street estimates as it looks forward to its... Boeing Co on Wednesday forecast full-year profit well above Wall Street estimates as it looks forward to its busiest year ever for plane deliveries, sending its shares up almost 5 percent BATTERY USAGE ACCOUNTS FOR ~50% OF COBALT DEMAND. THE SECOND LARGEST USE OF COBALT IS IN SUPERALLOYS, INCLUDING THOSE USED BY THE AEROSPACE INDUSTRY TO MAKE JET ENGINE TURBINES. AN AIRPLANE ENGINE CONTAINS ~ 800 KILOGRAMS OF COBALT. Boeing said it aims to ship between 810 and 815 commercial aircraft in 2018, as much as 7 percent more than the industry-record 763 jets it delivered in 2017, putting it ahead of Airbus for the sixth year in a row. Airbus delivered 718 jetliners last year…Both companies are speeding up production at their factories to chip away at the large backlog of orders for new jetliners, created over the past few years as airlines want new, fuel-efficient planes to cope with a surge in demand for air travel…Despite the rising output, their order backlogs have kept growing. Boeing said its total backlog, which includes military aircraft and other products, rose to $488 billion at year-end, compared with $474 billion at the end of the third quarter. | | Unknown - February 1, 2018 Intel and GlobalFoundries are replacing some copper connections with the resilient, conductive metal Today’s computer chips contain tens of kilometers of copper wiring, built up in 15 or so layers. As the semiconductor industry has shrunk the size of transistors, it has also had to make these interconnects thinner. Today, some wiring layers are so fine that electrical current can actually damage them. And chipmakers are running out of new ways to deal with this problem…Cobalt has three times as much inherent resistivity as copper but is far less prone to electromigration. For that reason, manufacturers are switching to cobalt for the metal layers that make up short-range connections within and between transistors. In other chip layers, the wires are thicker and connect over longer distances, so sticking with copper is best…At IEDM, Intel reported that moving to cobalt interconnects for the ¬finest-featured two layers of its 10-nm process technology, where interconnects are smallest, reduces electromigration by a factor of 5 to 10 and lowers resistance by a factor of 2. These improved interconnects should help the semiconductor industry shrink transistors ever further—without tripping over a wiring problem…Intel is the first company to switch from copper to cobalt for this part of the chip. For its process update, the company also changed from tungsten to cobalt for the layers of metal that contact transistor gates. Tungsten had been the metal of choice because it is resilient and doesn’t allow electromigration to knock it around. But tungsten has high resistance. | | | | | Congo | | | | Financial Times - January 31, 2018 The Democratic Republic of Congo is heading for a stand-off with some of the world’s largest mining companies after legislators passed a... Under the amended legislation, royalties for cobalt could rise from 2 per cent to 10 per cent just as global carmakers look to secure supplies of the metal to meet ambitious targets for production of electric vehicles…The chief executives of Glencore, the Swiss-based commodities group, and Randgold, the UK-listed gold miner, have both travelled to the DRC to oppose the new law, which still has to be signed by President Joseph Kabila. ..“It will affect the [miners’] bottom line and it will be passed on to the consumer,” said George Heppel, an analyst at consultancy CRU in London. …The revision to the law comes as the country is embroiled in a political crisis triggered by Mr Kabila’s refusal to step down as president in December 2016 at the end of his constitutional mandate. ..Bishops have accused the government of “barbarism” in causing the deaths of peaceful demonstrators last month who were demanding the election be held this year. | | | | |