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Battery Technology Innovation/Electric Vehicles

Cobalt Firm Says Chinese Car Companies Keen to Secure Supplies (Bloomberg News – April 16, 2018)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

Cobalt 27 Capital Corp., owner of the world’s largest private stockpile of cobalt, said it is in talks for potential tie-ups with major Chinese companies seeking to secure supplies of the key metal in batteries powering electric vehicles.

Car and battery makers from China have approached Cobalt 27 to discuss long-term partnerships and supply contracts, Anthony Milewski, chief executive officer of the Canadian firm, said in an interview in Beijing on Monday. Milewski said he has at least 17 such meetings lined up in major Chinese cities over the next three days.

“There’s a lot of interest and it is natural because it is where all this will happen,” Milewski said, declining to identify the companies. “China is going to be the world leader of electric vehicles.”

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‘Urban mining’ in South Korea pulls rare battery materials from recycled tech – by Jane Chung and Ju-min Park (Reuters U.S. – April 12, 2018)

https://www.reuters.com/

GUNSAN, South Korea (Reuters) – Workers at a rural South Korean factory are busy extracting some of the world’s most coveted metals, used in the batteries that power electric cars.

But they’re not digging in the ground or refining ore. Instead, they are sorting through a pile of lithium-ion batteries from old mobile phones and laptops.

As China’s aggressive hunt for overseas cobalt and lithium for electric vehicles pushes up prices and causes a global shortage of the key metals, South Korea is increasingly turning to such “urban mining” to recover cobalt, lithium and other scarce metals from electronic waste.

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Vanadium Batteries Need Elon Musk Moment to Kick-Start Market – by Ranjeetha Pakiam (Bloomberg News – April 9, 2018)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

Vanadium needs Elon Musk or another big player in the global battery market to get behind the metal in order to share center stage with other energy-storage components such as lithium and cobalt.

“When we get that moment, we’re off to the races,” Vincent Algar, managing director of Australian Vanadium Ltd., said in an interview at a mining conference in Hong Kong. The industry needs a Tesla Inc. or Panasonic Corp. to say “we like vanadium-flow batteries and we want to make them in addition to lithium-ion batteries,” he said.

The world’s biggest lithium-ion battery was installed in record time in Australia last year after billionaire Musk successfully bet he could help solve an energy crisis in the Pacific nation by deploying his Tesla technology to plug a supply gap.

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CRU/CESCO-Electric cars no game changer for copper demand in short term – by Peter Hobson (Reuters U.S. – April 9, 2018)

https://www.reuters.com/

SANTIAGO, April 9 (Reuters) – Copper bulls predicting a rapidly changing demand landscape due to the electric vehicle (EV) revolution and supply shortages are likely to be disappointed, as the amount of extra metal needed is expected to be small, at least over the next few years.

For some years now, copper producers have pushed the idea of surging copper demand as EV sales gain momentum due to governments and consumers around the world looking to cut carbon emissions from fossil-fuel cars.

The theme is likely to be a focus again at CESCO, consultancy CRU’s annual copper conference in Santiago this week, a gathering of senior executives from producing and consuming industries.

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The ongoing electric vehicle war – by Yoichi Funabashi (Japan Times – March 9, 2018)

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/

Yoichi Funabashi is chairman of the Asia Pacific Initiative and a former editor-in-chief of the Asahi Shimbun.

Postwar Japan’s economic development would have been impossible without the growth of its automobile industry. American journalist David Halberstam vividly described the post-World War II “economic reversal” that occurred when Japan overtook the American motor vehicle manufacturing empire in his 1986 book, “The Reckoning.”

Thirty years on, a new battle between nations in the automobile manufacturing space is emerging, as China in addition to Japan, the United States and Europe compete to develop and sell electric vehicles. More precisely, this competition centers around the development of CASE — an acronym derived from the words “connected,” “autonomous,” “shared and services” and “electric” — technologies.

The race is on to determine which country will come to control this new mobility industry, characterized by the production of electric vehicles that are connected to the internet, self-driving and shared.

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Control of battery resources is key to EV leadership – by Yoichi Funabashi (Japan Times – April 9, 2018)

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/

Yoichi Funabashi is chairman of the Asia Pacific Initiative and was editor-in-chief of the Asahi Shimbun.

In this column last month, I concluded that whoever controls the battery supply will command the electric vehicle industry. But what does this really mean? I would like to examine the assertion more closely.

In 1991, Sony released the world’s first lithium-ion battery, which is now a central component of electric vehicles, plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHVs), and hybrid vehicles (HVs). Up until just a few years ago, Japanese companies commanded over half of the global market for lithium-ion batteries.

Today, however, Chinese companies control 60 percent of the global market. Japanese companies now have fallen down to a market share of little more than 20 percent, while South Korea’s share is less than 10 percent.

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SoftBank’s first lithium deal raises prospects for junior miners – by Susan Taylor and Nicole Mordant (Reuters U.S. – April 6, 2018)

https://www.reuters.com/

TORONTO/VANCOUVER (Reuters) – SoftBank Group Corp’s (9984.T) entry into the lithium sector, a hot commodity for electric car batteries, is raising hopes that small miners struggling to secure bank funding can tap alternative financing to cash in on booming demand.

Japan’s SoftBank, with investments including ride-services firm Uber [UBER.UL] and Chinese online retailer Alibaba (BABA.N), will invest up to C$99.1 million ($78 million) for a stake of up to 9.9 percent in Nemaska Lithium Inc (NMX.TO).

Separately, Nemaska is also in talks with U.S. private equity firm Orion Mine Finance on a streaming deal, a type of specialized mining finance, people familiar with the transaction told Reuters. Nemaska shares jumped as much as 20.5 percent on Friday, giving the Quebec-based company a market value of C$566 million.

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Lithium Glut Fears Tempered by Optimism Over Surging Demand – by Ranjeetha Pakiam (Bloomberg News – April 9, 2018)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

Warnings of a lithium glut may be premature. For one thing, doomsayers assume all the lithium in brine or hard rock deposits will get processed, but that’s not the case, said Jay Roberge, partner and managing director at Tehama Capital Corp., a Vancouver-based merchant bank.

“There’s no shortage of lithium in the world, but the concern is processing it and developing it into lithium carbonate, lithium products and lithium metal,” Roberge said in an interview.

“Not all lithium projects that will have a decent grade of lithium are necessarily economical, because you have to be able to process the lithium into the end-product.”

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As China ties up global lithium, Asian rivals must bet big on South America – by Dave Sherwood and Nicole Mordant (Reuters U.S. – April 6, 2018)

https://www.reuters.com/

SANTIAGO/VANCOUVER (Reuters) – South America’s lithium triangle is the lowest-cost place to produce the vital battery ingredient, but political hurdles will require Japanese and South Korean companies to make big investments to crack into the region as they chase Chinese rivals who have tied up resources in other parts of the world.

Even China, the leader in the global race for the metal used in batteries for everything from smartphones to electric cars, has had its efforts thwarted in the lithium triangle of Bolivia, Chile and Argentina, home to around two thirds of global reserves.

Because of China’s problems, market experts say the lithium triangle is one place South Korean and Japanese auto and battery makers can play catch-up.

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Chasing lithium around the world: Is the red-hot metal about to leave miners in the cold? – by Gabriel Friedman (Financial Post – April 5, 2018)

http://business.financialpost.com/

It’s 11:55 p.m. and Steven Howard has just returned to his hotel room in Beijing after a draining day of meetings to promote his lithium exploration company. The next morning, he would fly to Seoul to do it again, and then on to Tokyo.

“I’ve got wings and wheels strapped to my rear end,” he says about his travel schedule which included stops in Hong Kong, Shenzen, Huizhou and Tianjin.

Howard, whose background is in oil and gas, leads one of the dozens of Canadian-listed mining companies looking to capitalize on the roaring demand for lithium being created by the world’s budding electric vehicle industry, before the bubble bursts.

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The move to EVs will take time, but the shift in commodity demand will be ‘dramatic’ – Gareth Penny (Metal Bulletin – April 4, 2018)

https://www.metalbulletin.com/

In a comprehensive interview with Andrea Hotter in the April 2018 issue of Metal Market Magazine, Norilsk Nickel chairman Gareth Penny gave his predictions for electric and hybrid vehicle growth and how the company will move to maximize the value of its products.

As the electrification of the global economy continues to increase demand for the metals that Norilsk produces, particularly nickel and cobalt, Penny predicts a dramatic shift in commodity demand patterns.

“Like most of these things, the move to EVs will take longer than people think, but when the time arrives, it’ll be even more dramatic,” he says.

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Dormant Swedish Mine Comes Alive in Rush for Car Batteries – by Niclas Rolander and Jesper Starn (Bloomberg News – April 3, 2018)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

The global race to develop batteries for electric cars is reaching deep into the pine forests of central Sweden, where a dormant graphite mine is getting a new lease on life.

Woxna, situated about 160 miles (259 kilometers) north of Stockholm, was mothballed in 2001 amid a slump in prices. Now, a Canadian company called Leading Edge Materials Corp. is preparing to revive operations.

Though graphite has grabbed fewer headlines than other battery components like lithium and cobalt, whose prices have surged in recent months, the carbon material makes up a large part of the raw material costs.

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COLUMN-Is there an electric accelerator to falling nickel stocks? – by Andy Home (Reuters U.S. – April 3, 2018)

https://www.reuters.com/

LONDON, April 3 (Reuters) – Stocks of nickel held in London Metal Exchange (LME) warehouses MNI-STOCKS fell by 46,344 tonnes, or 12.6 percent, over the first quarter.

The downtrend has been running for seven consecutive months but there has been a marked acceleration since the start of January.

Cancellation activity, metal being taken off warrant in anticipation of physical load-out, has also been elevated. There were 54,294 tonnes of net new cancellations last month, most of them at the Malaysian port of Johor.

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A Little-Known Cobalt Miner Wants to Out-Produce Everyone Except Glencore – by William Clowes (Bloomberg News – March 27, 2018)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

A little-known cobalt miner in the Democratic Republic of Congo plans to ramp up output so fast it will soon be out-produced only by industry leader Glencore Plc.

Chemaf Sarl, a closely held Lubumbashi-based company, and several other firms are capitalizing on a boom in demand that’s transforming small copper miners into major cobalt players, as refiners and automakers scramble to secure long-term supplies.

Prices for the metal, used to make rechargeable batteries in electric vehicles, have more than tripled in the past two years. New output from Congo means the supply of cobalt could exceed demand for a few years, as it did narrowly in 2017, Guildford, U.K.-based metals trader Darton Commodities Ltd. said in a February report.

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Exploration project’s purity surprises mining company: Frontier Lithium touts PAK project as a rare and valuable find – by Karen McKinley (Northern Ontario Business – March 23, 2018)

https://www.northernontariobusiness.com/

Garth Drever can’t hide his excitement over Frontier Lithium’s Pakeagama Lake Pegmatite (PAK) project’s initial findings and estimates. But he is reluctant to say it could be the first lithium mine in Canada.

“It could be a few years before we go into production, but we are very happy with what we are seeing,” said Drever, vice-president of exploration of the Sudbury-based junior mining company, formerly known as Houston Lake Mining.

“The deposits are very clean, very high grade and that’s generating a lot of interest.” He was speaking on the latest findings from the project at the monthly meeting of the Sudbury Prospectors and Developers Association on March 20.

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