Elon grandstands. It's what he does

For those following battery chemistries, Musk's announcement is not news. So, why would Elon grandstand now? My guess is he is trying to secure a cobalt deal and using his unique position to rattle cobalt futures... Pity for him the price of cobalt went up yesterday!
It certainly rattled a few COB investors, but rest assured the institutions and those in the know didn't sell. They will be picking up the bargains from nervous mum and dad headline traders.

Below is an excerpt from benchmark minerals in response to Elon's comments...

"NCM versus NCA: Lithium ion’s fork in the road

The EV industry is taking two paths for choice of lithium ion battery: NCA and NCM, of which the latter is by far the dominant choice with auto makers outside of Tesla and most recently, Toyota.
Benchmark Mineral Intelligence has specialised in lithium ion battery supply chain data collection – which includes detailed cathode formulation research – since 2014 when the business was founded by industry specialists.
Benchmark forecasts that NCM batteries will make up 70% of the total global lithium ion battery market by 2026. NCA has been far less widely adopted and the main proponent remains as Tesla.

The end game with this chemistry is to develop NCM811, to which Elon Musk’s refers to. However, this is still a number of years away from widespread commercial adoption due to lifecycle and safety concerns but will offer a lower raw material costs and improved energy density.
In fact, Benchmark only expects NCM811 to have a material impact on the lithium ion battery industry from 2022 onwards when we forecast it to account for 10% of the cathode market.



In 2012, Tesla was consuming 11kg of cobalt per vehicle on average.
In 2018, Tesla consumes 4.5kg of cobalt per vehicle on average.

The end for cobalt?
Quite simply, no.

Panasonic and Tesla have made excellent improvements to their cell technology whilst being able to reduce cobalt dependency, but this is likely to pretty much be the end of the road of cobalt reductions in NCA.
There is little room left for Tesla to manoeuvre and further reduce the cobalt in its cells.
And with any new technology that could usurp NCA or NCM still on at least a 10-year horizon, cobalt’s use in lithium ion batteries is here to stay.
Benchmark estimates that cobalt’s use lithium ion batteries will triple between now and 2026 as a wave of EV demand engulfs the industry. Whilst efforts are being made to reduce cobalt dependency, the order of magnitude of growth sales will far outweigh this.
To put this into a very short term context, Tesla expects to increase its vehicle production by 150% between now and June 2018 – and the biggest Model 3 increases are yet to come. Benchmark expects output to sharply rise from September onwards.
This EV surge is far more significant than the reduction of cobalt intensity which is close to its limit.
Whilst their is political scrutiny on the cobalt supply chain, there is a huge amount of work to be done to simply increase supply to meet our EV demands.
More cobalt will be needed and the reliance on Democratic Republic of Congo as the primary supplier will increase.
The cobalt conundrum continues."
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Benchmark Mineral Intelligence