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In his latest installment of “Critical Minerals Alaska” – a feature series for North of 60 Mining News that “investigates Alaska’s potential as a domestic source of minerals deemed critical to the United States,” Shane Lasley takes a closer look at Cobalt, one of the key metals underpinning the current EV technology revolution.

Once an obscure metal you rarely heard about, this co-product of Nickel and Copper has recently been afforded “critical mineral status” – primarily because of its application in Lithium-ion battery technology. Meanwhile, U.S. import reliance for Cobalt is pegged at 72 percent, with recycling providing most of the balance.  This may change soon. Writes Lasley:

“With at least one advanced stage exploration project in Alaska looking into the potential of producing cobalt alongside its copper, America’s 49th State could provide a domestic source for this critical metal.”

In light of recent price surges for Cobalt, battery makers, among them Tesla, are looking to develop technologies that require less of the material. However, as Lasley points out:

“Researchers and analysts do not see a scenario where the reduction of cobalt per battery can come close to offsetting the growing number of batteries that will be needed in the coming three decades.”

Simon Moores, managing director at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence and member of the ARPN panel of experts agrees, and in a recent tweet challenged Elon Musk to clarify what he meant when tweeting out his assumption that Tesla would reduce cobalt use to zero in their batteries in “next gen.” Moores believes it is “highly unlikely Tesla will be able to eliminate Cobalt from its supply chain entirely” and pegs the probability of such a scenario at one percent.

With demand on the rise, complex supply chain complications have companies turn to the United States as a potential source of supply.

As Lasley explains:

“One of the difficulties is cobalt is seldom mined as a standalone metal. Instead, this increasingly needed battery metal is typically produced as a byproduct at copper and nickel mines. This means that any future cobalt mines would likely need to consider the economics of the moneymaking metal in the deposit.

“This situation limits producers’ flexibility in adjusting the amount of cobalt mined in response to changes in demand and can result in periods of oversupply or shortage,” according to the USGS.

While at lower prices, the cost to recover cobalt from copper or nickel mines may not have been economically viable, the demand electric vehicles are putting on this metal has companies taking a closer look at the feasibility of recovering cobalt exploring and developing copper deposits in the United States.”

Further complicating the situation is Cobalt’s conflict mineral status, which has led to pressures on automakers to source the material outside the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), from which a majority of Cobalt is currently sourced.  This, as Lasley points out, “could add to the catalysts to establish domestic sources of this critical metal.”

To read the full piece, in which Lasley provides more detail on the feasible Cobalt development projects in Alaska, click here.

The advances in materials science have been fundamentally transforming the way we look at metals and minerals – both from a usage, as well as a supply and demand perspective.  With that, the nature of potential resource conflict has also changed.

As USGS National Minerals Information Center scholars Andrew L. Gulleya, Nedal T. Nassar,  and Sean Xuna observe in a new Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study, resource conflicts of the past “have often centered on fuel minerals (particularly oil). Future resource conflicts may, however, focus more on competition for nonfuel minerals that enable emerging technologies.”

The authors argue that while more and more stakeholders and researchers have acknowledged and are increasingly concerned about the concept of import reliance, “few studies assess import reliance and none compare import reliance of countries concurrently.”

Against this backdrop, Gulleya, Nassar and Xuna measure and compare the current foreign mineral dependence of 42 minerals for the world’s two largest national economies, the United States and China.

Among their key findings:

“We find that China relies on imports for over half of its consumption for 19 minerals, compared with 24 for the United States— 11 of which are common to both. It is for these 11 minerals that competition between the United States and China may become the most contentious.”

“Unless reliance can be reduced through substitution, improved processing efficiencies, increased domestic production, or recycling, the United States and China will increasingly vie for access to overseas assets that produce minerals in [that category]”

“Increasing demand for minerals that enable sustainable and defensive technologies may intensify international resource competition during the 21st century—especially for minerals that cannot be substituted and have highly concentrated production. While improvements in recycling, mineral processing, material efficiency, substitution, and domestic production may alleviate import reliance and resource competition in the long run, such factors are often constrained in the short run by existing technology, existing manufacturing capital, and long development timeframes.”

Policy makers – take note.

Advances in materials science continue to transform the way we use metals and minerals, and in doing so, also change the supply and demand scenarios for many materials. As we recently pointed out on the ARPN blog, demand for Cobalt has been soaring thanks to its applications in battery technology and the growing popularity of electronic [...]

A lustrous, silvery blue, hard ferromagnetic, brittle element, Cobalt’s physical properties are similar to Iron and Nickel. It forms various compounds, stable in air and unaffected by water.  Main uses include many alloys, including superalloys used in aircraft engine parts and high-speed steels, as well as magnets, and catalysts, to name but a few. It’s [...]

In a comprehensive interview with The Metals Report, analyst Mark Seddon explains why Tungsten should be on people’s watch list, or, as the interview headline suggests: “Why you should look twice at an ugly duckling metal.” Like some of the other critical metals and minerals we have covered on our blog – Antimony and Cobalt come to mind – Tungsten [...]

Compliance with federal law and a new SEC rule regarding the sourcing of so-called conflict minerals — Tungsten, Tin, Tantalum and Gold from the Eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and surrounding regions — remains challenging. For U.S. manufacturers to navigate and properly follow the new guidelines is just one piece of [...]

With the Eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo being a rich source of the so-called Three Ts – Tantalum, Tin and Tungsten – and these minerals having been used to finance the civil war in the region, “conflict minerals” are a hot-button issue. The 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law and respective rules [...]

After a few-month-long hiatus, it is time to bring back our Metals of the Month feature on the blog. In its context, we have been highlighting the breadth of our mineral needs and potential by showcasing the utilities of metals and minerals for which the United States is largely import-dependent, as well as associated challenges. [...]

Our friends at MetalMiner recently went over import and export trends for Tantalum against the backdrop of the August 22, 2012 SEC conflict minerals rule and they enlisted Chris Grove, director of communications at Commerce Resources, a junior Tantalum mining firm, to comment on the numbers. MetalMiner found that in spite of new rules being [...]

Gearing up for their upcoming conference on conflict minerals in early May, our friends at MetalMiner are stepping up their coverage of Tantalum, one of the four minerals commonly referred to as conflict minerals, with the other ones being Tungsten, Tin and Gold. A recent MetalMiner guest post by Chelsea Craven of Zepol Corporation looks [...]