If you've been following the electric vehicle market, you've
probably heard a lot about Cobalt, cobalt, the cobalt, cobalt, cobalt. The reason cobolt's been getting so much attention is
because it's one of the metals used to make lithium-ion batteries, which power everything from laptops and cell
phones to electric vehicles. The amount of different metals found in an EV battery can
vary depending on the battery type and car model, but a typical lithium-ion battery pack may contain around
14 kilograms of cobalt. Cobalt has been a popular choice for batteries because the
metal increases battery life and energy density, which in the case of EVs, means range, by keeping the
battery structure stable as the battery is continuously charged and discharged. But cobalt, which is usually extracted as a byproduct of
nickel and copper mining, is one of the most expensive materials in a battery. While battery prices have fallen 89 percent between 2010
and 2020, they still make up about 30 percent of the total cost of an
electric vehicle. For a typical vehicle with a, say, an 80 kilowatt-hour
battery, today we estimate that cobalt content alone costs around $800 in that battery. So that's not insignificant. For mass electrification to happe, there are lots of
sentiments that cobalt needs to be eliminated or reduced to the bare minimum. Cobalt extraction is also linked to human rights abuses and
child labor. These are some of the reasons why battery manufacturers
like Samsung and Panasonic and carmakers like Tesla and VW, along with a number of startups, are working
to eliminate cobalt completely. Elon Musk has been talking about removing
cobalt from Tesla's batteries since 2018. And some of the company's China-made vehicles
are already using cobalt-free technology. But although there are a number of different
cobalt-free technologies being tested, each has presented its own challenges. Cobalt helps to prevent battery fires, so if you eliminate
it, you have to replace it with something else that maintains safety and
longevity. EV sales worldwide are expected to skyrocket from 3 million
in 2020 to 66 million in 2040. And with increased demand for EVs, demand for raw battery
materials, like cobalt, is expected to outstrip supply. Comparing demand and supply for cobalt, there is,
geologically speaking, enough raw material in the earth's crust. Same with lithium, same with nickel, same with manganese. It's just that the production and the processing of that
material, just like all the other materials, is nowhere near the level of that it needs to be to sustain
the level of demand. One way to ease demand for new cobalt mining is by recycling
the cobalt found in old batteries. Companies like Redwood Materials in Nevada and Canada-based
Li-Cycle have emerged to do this. But some types of recycling have downfalls. Currently, cobalt is recycled, but the process in which it
is recycled is very environmentally unfriendly. You take all the old batteries and you smelt them at
temperatures higher than a thousand degrees C, and you can extract the cobalt
back out of it. The reason that that is done is because of how expensive
cobalt is. For the past four years, the average cost of cobalt was more
than the cost of all the other battery metals put together. The price of cobalt has also historically been
very volatile. Part of this volatility may be due to the fact that cobalt
is usually produced as a byproduct of nickel and copper mining and therefore tied to the demand and price
fluctuations of those metals. The mining and refining of cobalt is also geographically
limited. The majority of the world's battery-grade cobalt reserves
are located in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the mining of
cobalt is associated with human rights abuses and child labor, and so on. Chinese investors control about 70 percent of Congo's mining
sector. China also has over 80 percent control of the cobalt
refining industry, where the raw material is turned into commercial-grade cobalt metal
suitable for use in EVs. In light of the U.S. China trade war, cobalt supply is in a
precarious position for U.S. manufacturers. The reason China has really dominated is they've actually
quite embraced the lithium-ion battery revolution. To understand the importance of cobalt in batteries, we have
to talk about battery chemistry. A typical lithium-ion battery has three main components. The negative end is known as the anode and the positive end
the cathode. The two electrodes are separated by the electrolyte, a
substance that conducts an electric current. The movement of positively charged lithium ions from the
anode, through the electrolyte, and to the cathode creates free electrons, which travel through an
external circuit and carry the electric current used to power a device. When a battery is charged, this chemical reaction is
reversed. Different types of lithium-ion batteries are distinguished
by the metals that make up the cathode. This is where cobalt is found. Today, the market is dominated by NMC batteries, whose
cathode contain nickel, manganese and cobalt. Depending on the proportions of each metal in the
cathode, which are represented by the numbers following the cathode names, you will get different
properties in the battery. For instance, increasing the nickel in the cathode boosts
energy density, and therefore range, but also makes batteries more unstable. That's because adding more nickel usually means decreasing
the amount of cobalt, which prevents cathode corrosion that can lead to battery fires. Battery and car manufacturers try to optimize battery
chemistry on the parameters of costs, life cycle, safety and range. Some cobalt free batteries do already exist, but there are
trade offs. There is already a viable cobalt free battery and that is
lithium iron phosphate, or LFP. But the main downside of LFP is low energy density and
therefore driving range Can see lithium iron phosphate right now in busses, so
things that don't need to go that far and they have a regular routine, but not as
consumers, we want cars that can compete on a one-to-one footing with the internal
combustion engine, and those catalysts that don't contain cobalt right now are not able to deliver
that. The production of lithium iron phosphate, or LFP batteries,
is dominated by Chinese companies like BYD and Contemporary Amperex Technology Limited or
CATL. One reason is an old licensing agreement that allowed
Chinese manufacturers to make LFP batteries without having to pay an expensive fee to the patent owners
as long as they sold the batteries within China. The last of these patents, which are owned by a Swiss-based
consortium, expired in September of 2021 in Europe and are set to expire in 2022 in the U.S.. This has opened the floodgates for major Western automakers
to use iron based battery chemistries. American and European OEMs are adopting LFP in parallel to
their high-nickel batteries because it has great advantages over
a high-nickel and cobalt-based batteries. Notably, it's a lot cheaper. The component materials are a lot more readily available
and abundant than nickel and cobalt, and it has a longer longevity. Lithium iron phosphate batteries are also generally
considered very safe, since iron is a very stable element. Ford and Volkswagen have both said that
they would offer vehicles with LFP batteries. Tesla already uses LFP batteries in the Model 3
and Model Y vehicles it manufacturers in China, and the company says it will now
expand use of LFP batteries to all of its entry-level Model 3 and Model Y vehicles. Previously, these cars used nickel cobalt aluminum oxide or
NCA batteries, which Tesla will continue to use in its long-range versions. For our long-range vehicles, we use a nickel-based cathode
and we use nickel because nickel is higher energy density for our long-range vehicles. But for our standard-range vehicles and for stationary
storage, I think all of that will move to iron cathodes. So moving to an iron-based chemistry, which
is sort of finally at the point where it's competitive on range when combined with an
efficient powertrain, I think that will be the vast majority of batteries in the
future will be iron based. Even Apple was reportedly in talks with Chinese
manufacturers to make batteries for its planned EV car project. Though those talks seem to have been put on
hold. In an effort to reduce U.S. dependance on foreign countries, the U.S. Department of Energy released a national blueprint in June
to help guide investment to develop domestic lithium battery manufacturing and support further R&D. Among its goals, the blueprint calls for eliminating cobalt
from lithium batteries by 2030. Two U.S.-based startups, Sparkz and TexPower, say that they
can help, though the companies have yet to prove out their
technologies in electric vehicles. Sparkz was founded in 2019 by Sanjiv Malhotra, a former
executive at the U.S. Department of Energy. The Tennessee-based company has 15
employees and was born out of a partnership with the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge
National Laboratory. Sparkz says it's raised over $10 million in grants from the
DOE, the California Energy Commission and several early customers to bring its
cobalt-free lithium-ion battery to the market. That was one of the key motivation factors for starting
Sparkz was to address the supply chain issues for lithium-ion batteries,
predominantly for cobalt, and make us independent of any supply chain that is dependent on China. Sparkz is still in its testing phase. The company says it's initially focusing on supplying
batteries for large transportation vehicles like busses and trucks, off-road vehicles like farming and factory
equipment and energy storage solutions. Sparkz says it's also in talks with two auto
manufacturers and will begin testing its batteries in their vehicles next year. Sparkz's technology focuses on replacing the cobalt in its
cathode, which also contains nickel and aluminum, with iron. The company says it's considered other metals but chose
iron because it's cheap, widely available in the U.S. and chemically stable, making it safe to use. Malhotra says Sparkz's battery cathode material, which the
company calls NFA, for nickel iron aluminum, improves upon both iron-based cathode chemistries
and those containing cobalt. The energy density of the cell using our cobalt-free cathode
is twice that of the LFP. And in terms of the cost, we're almost about 30 percent
lower than that of LFPs. Yet at the same time, this cobalt-free cathode meets
and exceeds the performance that you would see from a
traditional cobalt-carrying cathode, in terms of energy density, which
is the energy that you can pack in a certain weight or a certain volume. It meets the life expectancy of our traditional lithium-ion
battery, and in terms of cost, it's almost about 35 to 40 percent lower
than the cost of your typical lithium-ion battery. To create this NFA cathode material, Sparkz has licensed six
patents from Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The primary focus of these six patents is (A) on the design
of the material that's used while eliminating cobalt and
replacing it with iron. Secondly, the process to make the cobalt-free cathode a lot
more stable. And the third is the manufacturing process. So there is one patent that essentially reduces the time to
manufacture because the time to manufacture translates into cost. Sparkz says its cobalt-free batteries can be produced using
the same equipment used to make conventional cobalt-containing batteries. We're currently looking for about close to two million
square foot, where we will be setting up the manufacturing for these three parts of the value chain, the
cathode material, the electrode and the cells. And essentially, we've identified a couple of scale up
partners, and through some strategic partnership, we are looking to
have manufacturing for these three components starting next
year. Like Sparkz, Housto- based TexPower was founded in 2019. The startup was spun out of research headed up by Arumugam
Manthiram at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2020, the research team published a paper in which they
tested a cathode made of manganese, aluminum and 89 percent nickel, and found that their
cobalt-free material performed very well when compared to cobalt-containing cathodes. We do not see any downside with the performance of our
material without any cobalt compared to the performance of the
material containing cobalt. The cycle life, as well as how fast you can charge and
discharge and safety. This cathode composition was the jump off point for the
material that TexPower is trying to commercialize. We're commercializing our nickel manganese aluminum based
chemistry that's cobalt free, higher energy density than current lithium-ion battery
cathodes and operates stably and safely. Globally, the most widely used cathode material today is NMC
622. This cathode is composed of 60 percent nickel and 20
percent each of manganese and cobalt. TexPower says it's able to increase the energy density of
its cathode material by replacing cobalt with larger quantities of nickel. But increasing nickel in the cathode has traditionally come
with its own challenges. Nickel is highly reactive with the electrolyte. So cobalt is typically added to minimize the degradation of
the cathode structure and then other elements like manganese are added
also to improve the thermal stability.So all these other elements
that are added are typically added to make up for the deficiencies of nickel. TexPower says that it's navigating this instability problem
by adding aluminum and manganese, as well as a number of proprietary substances, known as dopants, as
stabilizing agents. The result, the company says, is a cathode material that is
20 percent cheaper than the conventional NMC 622 cathodes. But producing this material is tricky. Decreasing the cobalt in the material makes the production
harder. It will also be difficult to get consistent properties from
batch to batch. So the process TexPower is developing is to minimize
that kind of concern so that when you produce tons and tons of
material, you will have consistent properties from one batch to
another batch. Whereas cobalt is generally easy to synthesize into a
cathode material, getting the right reaction using nickel requires close monitoring and control
over factors like temperature and oxygen flow and pressure. It took years for the team at UT Austin to fine tune the
production process of their nickel manganese aluminum cathode material. TexPower will use the same process to
produce its cathode material at scale. Our production technique is immediately scalable. It's the same production technique that they use
industrially. And so next year we're building a production line for
hundreds of kilos of material per year. TaxPower makes just the cathode material and plans to
partner with other companies to produce battery cells. We have a contract with the Department of Defense in
conjunction with 24M, where they're producing a high-energy cell with a lithium metal anode and
our highest energy cathode material, and we're reaching energy
densities in excess of 500 watt hours per kilogram. That's around double current commercial lithium-ion
batteries. Still, Erickson says that it may be a while before
TexPower's cathode materials are used in EVs, although it is in talks with a number of automakers. The automakers have a year or several years of safety
testing and things like that that they'll go through before they'll
put it into a commercial vehicle. But as early as the end of 2023, we could have some
prototypes in electric vehicles. Although cobalt-free battery performance continues to
improve, experts believe that the future EV battery market will consist of a number of different
battery chemistries for different applications. We calculate around 20 percent of the global battery
electric vehicle market by 2030 being taken up by these new cobalt-free
chemistries. We expect that the sort of entry-level, low-cost vehicles,
for example, the standard range Tesla Model 3, will be LFP or
lithium iron phosphate and then followed by these cobalt-free materials,
which will account for most of the mainstream volume vehicles. And then at the top end of the range will be high-nickel
batteries, which will account for high-performance, high-range vehicles. Other battery breakthroughs could help enhance cobalt-free
chemistries. Car companies Hyundai and Kia announced they're working
with U.S.-based Factorial Energy to replace liquid-electrolyte batteries with solid-state
electrolyte batteries. This would give batteries an even longer range and added
safety benefits. With these cobalt-free batteries, they operate at higher
voltage, and that's one reason why they are more susceptible to battery fires. With solid state batteries, it's just like your solid-state
hard drives. It's a solid electrolyte. It's able to withstand higher voltages. It can potentially deliver higher driving range, which is
what's the most important thing for a consumer, but also higher safety and
faster charging times. We just have received another grant from the California
Energy Commission for next generation batteries, which is basically solid-state
batteries using our cobalt free cathode, which has the potential of doubling the energy density that
we have today. So basically making it almost four times that of LFP. Meanwhile, others are focused on improving the battery's
form. Certain companies like, for example, BYD are attempting to
offset the range disadvantages of LFP with certain things like what we
call cell-to-pack technology, where we do away with splitting
the battery pack into modules. We just have the entire battery pack as a number of cells
together, and that gives you a better range advantage. But whatever advancements we make, experts stress the
technology needs to be widely accessible. When you think of cobalt-free cathode chemistries, what we
are hoping to have is batteries that are more accessible to all. That makes it easier for developing countries to adopt a
lot of the technologies that we are trying to develop without fear for
costs, without fear for performance. The industrial revolution left many people behind. We cannot afford for this renewable energy revolution to
leave anyone behind.
Holy moly, journalism!
Only 7:00 in so far, let's see how it plays out.
Good amount of information wish the first 5 min was not a recap
I quite like CNBC’s in-depth shorts. Always learn something new when I watch them.
Right, because disruptions always happen linearly, as everyone knows...
I wonder if all those anti-EVers who complain about child labour cobalt in EVs will now dispense with their petrol cars given how much is used to refine petrol and they have a child labour free alternative now?
SPOILER - they wont
Fantastic.
I want to know how to post this on my facebook & friends to watch (automatically) without clicking the youtube URL