More slick talk.Car producers “had room-to-room meetings with a lot of companies, like ourselves, trying to understand how to address their own supply chain,” "Like" ourselves, but possibly NOT exactly you? said Trent Mell, an attendee and chief executive officer of Electra Battery Materials Corp., a Toronto-based developer of mining and refining projects. Why would a car producing company have a meeting with a company that is what, 2 or 3 years away from cobalt production? Auto companies have recently expanded their teams and are now filling rooms with specialists in metals like lithium — the metal that’s ubiquitous in electric car batteries — and manganese, or in battery recycling, he said. “Once you might have had one or two people dealing with raw materials procurement.” Can Trent and his super fat executive team really produce enough recycled battery metal to supply ANY of these car producers, any size, any time soon?
I think the short answer to these "car producers" is to go where it's is, and buy from who is already deep in the game. For cobalt, it will be China, no question. At this moment, there is pretty much ZERO cobalt reserves/resources proved up anywhere else in the world aside from the DRC, which holds close to 90% of the worlds cobalt reserves.
Lithium is another conundrum as extraction is not always simple, brine vs hard rock exists, and the party is LATE to the attendees. Resources are just now being drilled off. Think about it. Voisey Bay. James Bay. The Ring of Fire. ALL at leat 10-20 years in the making to this point, and counting.
Trent is soon to leave this company. He has no stock, he is in way over his head, he has ZERO experience doing what he is trying to do, and his company is bleeding from several spots, including his bulging at the waistline executive team. Gonna need to drill another hole in that belt to keep their pants from falling.
But the guy can talk. Boy can he. Too bad it's out of both ends.