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Comment by baldfat | Hacker News Reader

This is scary and shows the growth of electric cars might not scale. The world's richest company, Apple, is buying up supplies of a dwindling resource that anything that uses a battery needs. This is the boost for others to research other car technology or a new battery that is always 10 years away for the last 20 years.

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I'm not sure if supply is really the primary factor motivating Apple. Cobalt appears to be difficult to source if you care about holding suppliers to ethical standards; the Cobalt situation used to be regularly called out in Apple's Supplier Responsibility Progress Reports: https://images.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-P...

Mining guy. Don’t be scared there is plenty of cobalt. HPAL tech has come a long way and plenty of laterite Ni-Co around the place. Lots of it close to the surface too.

I’m working on with a couple of companies already reviewing old drill cores for Co.

In general, mining is very responsive to price signals. If a given commodity becomes dear, prices go up, and mining recommences. A couple of years later, all is back to equilibrium.

Our planet is fully of all elements. True, some deposits have higher grade ores, right on or underneath the surfaces, and are more accessible via transport links than others. It all comes down to price.

Helium, on the other hand...

A similar thing is happening with helium too. The concern over the impending closure of the US National Helium Reserve prompted people to start looking, and the results are already promising: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-07/tanzania-...

...is mostly released instead of being collected from reactions like producing LNG because it is currently so cheap, but could be captured, recycled, or 'mined' in much higher quantities/efficiencies if prices went up?

I could be wrong or facile, but it still sounds pretty similar.

Hello mining guy - would you be perhaps up for a short chat? Our team is currently looking into innovation in the mining sector. My contact details are in my description.

Somehow I feel like I'm on a Terraria discussion board right now.....

Mining guy. Don’t be scared there is plenty of cobalt

Recycling could also easily kick into gear if/when prices rise high enough. See one of my favorite recent books, Junkyard Planet, for more: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/18/junkyard-plane...

Right now, many people don't bother recycling older phones and laptops because they can't get any money for them. If/when prices go high enough, we'll see recycling kick into high gear. The day you see Best Buy advertise "$10 for any phone!", you'll know we're actually seeing a sustained price rise.

Actually, it cost money in my city to throw away any electronic item. So either you pay for it to get thrown away on "Electronic Trash Day" or you hide it in the trash.

Exactly, we are seeing this with lithium too. Papers I have read show its extremely recyclable with potential high yields at scale so don't be scared... unless you're a junior lithium miner!

The fear is not that we're going to run out, it's that we're getting cobalt directly from the suffering of others, so called "Conflict Minerals" - child labor, slave labor, etc. It's the same story with Toyota and Neodymium, Intel and Tantalum, and so forth.

Dodd-Frank made these companies aware of the problem within, and these companies are actively working towards removing Conflict Minerals from their supply chains, even if that means buying direct from miners as regional traders and smelters prove unreliable sources of Conflict-Free minerals. That's the whole story.

It is only scary because business TV would be impossibly boring to watch if they weren't bouncing from one imaginary crisis to another, all between actual disasters that no one saw coming.

Are none of the battery developments in the pipeline cobalt-free?

LiFePO4 is my favorite.

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