Almost 14,500km from the dusty Congo savanna, miners have hit on an entirely new source of cobalt — the rare mineral at the heart of the electric-car boom — and not only can they take coffee breaks, when they take a break, they can grab a donut at Tim Hortons.
Scientists working for American Manganese Inc, located in the suburbs of Vancouver, have developed a way to produce enough of the bluish-gray metal to power all the electric cars on the road today without drilling into the ground: by recycling faulty batteries.
It is one of many technologies that entrepreneurs are patenting to prepare for a time when electric cars outnumber combustion engines, turning the entire automotive supply chain upside down in the process.
Instead of radiators, spark plugs and fuel injectors, the industry will need cheap sources of cobalt, copper and lithium.
“Mining batteries is much more profitable than mining the ground,” said Larry Reaugh, the president of American Manganese, which is patenting a method to draw out all of the metals in rechargeable batteries. “Rather than mining ore that’s 2 percent cobalt, you’re mining a battery that has 100 percent cobalt in it.”
Innovators like him have made so much progress that the likes of Tesla Motors Inc and Toyota Motor Corp could count on recycling for 10 percent of their battery material needs through 2025 if companies roll out large schemes, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
That will ease pressure on lithium and cobalt, whose prices have more than doubled over the past year.
Finding new sources of cobalt, in particular, could be a game-changer, because more than half of the relatively rare metal is sourced in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Not only is it one of the world’s poorest countries, doing business there is tough after decades of violence and corruption. Some artisanal mines still use child labor.
American Manganese wants to recycle the one in 10 lithium-ion batteries — used in everything from home electronics to smartphones — that fail quality-control tests and end up in hazardous-waste dumps.
Doing this could yield as much as 4,000 tonnes of cobalt, Reaugh said.
If true, that is equal to the material used in all electric vehicles on the road this year.
Add in the 311,000 tonnes of electric car batteries that Bloomberg New Energy Finance anticipates will stop working by 2025, and the potential trove of metals grows exponentially.
Recycling could have a “stabilizing effect” on battery metal prices, said George Heppel, a consultant at London-based commodity analysis company CRU Ltd.
After surging from US$10 to US$30 a pound in less than two years, cobalt’s price gains are poised to slow to US$32 by 2021 and US$41 by 2022, according to forecasts of Macquarie Group Ltd, one of the largest banks in commodities.
Pressure on lithium, sourced mainly from Chilean brine lakes, will also abate as new supply starts getting produced in Argentina and Australia.
“Recycling will help to ease supply constraints that we see coming in the next couple of years,” Bloomberg New Energy Finance energy storage analyst James Frith said. “It will be a big deal mainly because you wouldn’t get all the wastage going into the ground.”
That does not mean miners like Glencore PLC, the world’s top producer, will need to scale back production. As the number of electric cars on roads from Shanghai to Paris surges from 2 million now to 118 million vehicles by 2030, demand for cobalt will soar to 156,000 tonnes.
By then, cars that emit less greenhouse gas than combustion engines will be everywhere. The UK and France plan to outlaw the sale of gasoline and diesel-powered cars by 2040. China, which is tackling one of the world’s worst air pollution problems, aims for electric cars to make up 10 percent of new sales in two years.
“We expect recycling will take off in 10 to 12 years, when the first wave of electrified vehicles will near end of life,” said Marc Grynberg, the chief executive officer of Brussels-based Umicore N.V., one of the few companies capable of recycling electric-car batteries at an industrial scale at a plant in Belgium.
Umicore has agreements with Tesla and Toyota to recycle their expired batteries in Europe. It uses smelting to recover minerals to make cathode materials — the part of the battery that houses the chemical reaction and produces the electron.
At American Manganese, Reaugh says he can extract metals at a cost of about US$0.30 a pound and resell them to battery manufacturers for up to US$20 a pound.
Reaugh, who spent 40 years working for miners of precious and base metals in the Americas and China, is patenting a technique that removes the battery casing with robotics and soaks the cell in a chemical solution for 30 minutes to bring out the pure metals.
He plans to raise US$6 million next year to build a pilot plant near Vancouver.
“This is an immediate market,” he said.
With assistance from Mark Burton
China has claimed a breakthrough in developing homegrown chipmaking equipment, an important step in overcoming US sanctions designed to thwart Beijing’s semiconductor goals. State-linked organizations are advised to use a new laser-based immersion lithography machine with a resolution of 65 nanometers or better, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said in an announcement this month. Although the note does not specify the supplier, the spec marks a significant step up from the previous most advanced indigenous equipment — developed by Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment Group Co (SMEE, 上海微電子) — which stood at about 90 nanometers. MIIT’s claimed advances last
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has appointed Rose Castanares, executive vice president of TSMC Arizona, as president of the subsidiary, which is responsible for carrying out massive investments by the Taiwanese tech giant in the US state, the company said in a statement yesterday. Castanares will succeed Brian Harrison as president of the Arizona subsidiary on Oct. 1 after the incumbent president steps down from the position with a transfer to the Arizona CEO office to serve as an advisor to TSMC Arizona’s chairman, the statement said. According to TSMC, Harrison is scheduled to retire on Dec. 31. Castanares joined TSMC in
EUROPE ON HOLD: Among a flurry of announcements, Intel said it would postpone new factories in Germany and Poland, but remains committed to its US expansion Intel Corp chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger has landed Amazon.com Inc’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a customer for the company’s manufacturing business, potentially bringing work to new plants under construction in the US and boosting his efforts to turn around the embattled chipmaker. Intel and AWS are to coinvest in a custom semiconductor for artificial intelligence computing — what is known as a fabric chip — in a “multiyear, multibillion-dollar framework,” Intel said in a statement on Monday. The work would rely on Intel’s 18A process, an advanced chipmaking technology. Intel shares rose more than 8 percent in late trading after the
FACTORY SHIFT: While Taiwan produces most of the world’s AI servers, firms are under pressure to move manufacturing amid geopolitical tensions Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想) started building artificial intelligence (AI) servers in India’s south, the latest boon for the rapidly growing country’s push to become a high-tech powerhouse. The company yesterday said it has started making the large, powerful computers in Pondicherry, southeastern India, moving beyond products such as laptops and smartphones. The Chinese company would also build out its facilities in the Bangalore region, including a research lab with a focus on AI. Lenovo’s plans mark another win for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who tries to attract more technology investment into the country. While India’s tense relationship with China has suffered setbacks