Lest we forget why we are holding heres a chart of EV vehicles growth (not including growth in Busses, electric motorbikes and bikes, electric boats and ships , and of course the 42 new Giga battery factories currently built now/all solar and wind power household storage applications/ and of course the usual growth in phones /computers/power tools /planes etc - see chart below.
please note very roughly .
first 1 million took 4 years to sell 2010-2014
second 1 million took 2 years to sell
third 1 million took 1 year to sell
fourth 1 million took 6 months to sell
fifth 1 million just over three months to sell.
at this geometric growth rate we'll soon enough be at 1 million per month soon?.
If an average EV vehicle has roughly 8 kgs of cobalt in its batteries (some more, some less) thats about 8,000 tons more needed for each million new cars.(each month?)
world production of cobalt was about 117k tons last year. 50% of that is needed for traditional non ev stuff - Planes/welding/oil and gas/catalyst/medical equipment,
- so roughly 60 k tons a year available for EV's.
At one mill new cars each month or so we'll need another 50-80 k tons a year extra cobalt very soon.
IMO maybe with DRC mines going at full tilt (which includes 35,k ton a year Kamoto-which just closed for a while) they can pull out 140-145 k tons a year for several more years . (thats only a 30k ton per year increase on today -or approx 3 million more new cars a year-ie a few months new sales)..
Then where is the rest going to come from?
By any market logic the Co price will have to rally to incentivise that extra production from those less easy and Co rich mines than those in DRC.
But the big miners want big, long life mines to get their teeth into. Do we know any potentially for sale now so the big miners can get ready for that shortage?
Oh yes theres this one rally cheap big one we heard of -I think it's soon to be defined as the fifth biggest in the world ?
Oh no boss its not in dodgy DRC, oh no its not in unstable communist Cuba, its actually the biggest in the free world ...
No boss no one else has bought it yet?
Hey, Boss, dont you think we'd better hurry and try and to buy it before someone else trys ?..........I hear the Chinese.....
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