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Cobalt Town

Can the electric car industry bring this ghost town back to life? – by Sidney Stevens (Mother Nature Network – December 31, 2017)

https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/

Like so many mining towns throughout North America, Cobalt, Ontario has seen better days. The silver rush that transformed the modest community, located 300 miles north of Toronto, into a vibrant boomtown during the early 1900s has long since died away.

Today, the sleepy hamlet — some call it a ghost town — still bears scars from those heady, get-rich-quick days. The borough, built atop a honeycomb of abandoned mining tunnels, is not only littered with waste rock and capped mine shafts but also plagued by poverty.

But its fortunes could soon reverse. Cobalt, population 1,100, is poised to flourish once more due to its rich stores of the metal cobalt. Ironically, the town known for its silver was actually named for this shiny, bluish-gray ore. At the time it was mostly ignored. But not anymore.

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The 1903 Cobalt Silver Boom and its Extraordinary Economic Impact on Toronto and Ontario – by Douglas Baldwin (December 2017)

Douglas Baldwin is a retired history professor from Acadia University, Nova Scotia. This piece has been adapted from his new book, Cobalt: Canada’s Forgotten Silver Boom Town.

To order the book, click here: http://wmpub.ca/8094-SilverBoom.html

Speaking to the Empire Cub in Toronto in 1909, Rev. Canon Tucker told the story of a widely-travelled American who was asked where Toronto was. He thought for a moment, scratched his head and said, “Oh, yes, that is the place where you change cars for Cobalt.”

Although the value of the silver discovered in Cobalt far surpassed the riches uncovered during the Klondike rush only two decades earlier, few people today know of Cobalt’s history, or even of its existence.

Concentrated in an area less than thirteen square kilometres, about 400 kilometres north-east of Toronto near the Quebec border, Cobalt mines became the fourth-largest silver producer ever discovered.

When production peaked in 1911, Cobalt was providing roughly one-eighth of the world’s silver. During the First World War, the British government considered Canada’s silver supply so important to the war effort that it convinced Canadian Prime Minister Robert Borden to use his influence to prevent a planned strike in the Cobalt mining camp.

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Small Canadian miners in pole position for electric vehicle battery boon – by Nicole Mordant (Reuters U.S. – December 11, 2017)

https://www.reuters.com/

VANCOUVER (Reuters) – Canadian developers of cobalt and lithium mines stand to benefit from a round of investments from the makers of electric vehicles and the batteries powering them, a potential game-changer for small miners short on money to develop deposits of these critical battery ingredients.

Toronto-listed cobalt companies, Ecobalt Solutions and Fortune Minerals, are in talks, ranging from preliminary to more advanced, with more than a dozen groups, including car and battery makers, on financing their projects, their chief executives told Reuters.

The interest in miners from downstream players along the battery supply chain – a new area of investment for most – would provide a life-line to miners at time when equity funding for developers remains relatively tight after a five-year downturn on weak metals prices.

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‘Cobalt for cobalt’s sake’: Electric vehicle boom changing the equation for a mining byproduct – by Geoff Zochodne (Financial Post – November 30, 2017)

http://business.financialpost.com/

Investors have renewed their interest in an historic Canadian cobalt play amid a recent boom brought on by the adoption of electric vehicles.

Toronto-based First Cobalt Corp. has seen its stock price double in value since announcing last week that it had received shareholder backing for a three-way merger with fellow juniors Cobaltech Mining Inc. and Cobalt One Ltd. The deal includes past-producing mines near Cobalt, Ont., a town named after the metal and located approximately 500 kilometres north of Toronto.

With its acquisitions expected to close in the coming week or so, First Cobalt says it now controls 45 per cent of the land in the so-called “Cobalt Camp,” in addition to owning the only permitted cobalt refinery on the continent that can produce battery-grade materials. While the camp is still in its exploratory stage, shares of First Cobalt are up nearly 280 per cent for the year, closing at $1.47 Wednesday.

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The Canadian Ghost Town That Tesla Is Bringing Back to Life – by Danielle Bochove (Bloomberg News – October 31, 2017)

https://www.bloomberg.com

Renewed demand for cobalt, the metal, is breathing new life into Cobalt, the town.

Ironically, Cobalt, Ontario—population 1,100—was built on silver. Remnants of a boom that transformed the town more than a century ago are everywhere. A mine headframe still protrudes from the roof of the bookstore, which was previously a grocery.

The butcher used to toss unwanted bones down an abandoned 350-foot shaft in the middle of the shop floor and keep meat cool in its lowered mine cage.

While the last silver mines closed almost 30 years ago, a global push for the village’s namesake metal is promising to breathe new life into the sleepy town 500 kilometers (300 miles) north of Toronto.

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Cobalt’s Chemistry Experiment – by David Fickling (Bloomberg News – September 28, 2017)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

All batteries are not created equal. The 53 kilowatt-hour pack on a 2008 Tesla Inc. Roadster contains an estimated 38 kilograms of cobalt, a key element that some analysts fear may be running out. The same-sized battery on a 2017 Tesla would have about one-eighth of that, or 4.8 kilograms.

That’s the best reason to be wary of predictions that cobalt is heading toward permanently higher prices north of $100,000 a metric ton. The complex chemistry on which rechargeable batteries depends offers myriad opportunities to economize on any material that gets too costly.

Cobalt is a crucial ingredient for manufacturing most lithium-ion cathodes — the “positive” ends of the cell, equivalent to the nipple atop a conventional AAA battery. Demand for such cathodes is set to soar as the world’s vehicle fleet shifts from petroleum to electrical drive-trains, and as utilities build farms of rechargeable batteries to stabilize renewables-intensive power grids.

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Electric vehicles trigger search for lithium and cobalt – by Chris Tomlinson (Houston Chronicle – September 27, 2017)

http://www.houstonchronicle.com/

Automakers this summer touted plans to offer more electric vehicles, with Mercedes-Benz announcing it will spend $1 billion to add a battery factory to its plant in Tuscaloosa, Ala.

Ford is investing $4.5 billion in electric vehicle production, Volkswagen has promised 30 electrified models, and Volvo plans to go all electric or hybrid by 2019. Even Porsche will offer a battery-powered sports sedan called Mission E in 2020.

Automakers expect to sell 20 million all-electric vehicles in 2030, according to conservative estimates, prompting questions about where the raw materials will come from to make all of those batteries.

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Everyone wants cobalt, but few want to get tangled up in the world’s largest producing nation – by Lynsey Chutel (Quartz.com – September 27, 2017)

https://qz.com/

For too long, the Democratic Republic of Congo has known no competition in the cobalt market, to its detriment. The metal, which used to be just a byproduct of nickel and copper mining, is fast becoming one of the core ingredients of our technology-driven lifestyles. The instability in the DR Congo, however, is driving some investors to look to much smaller but more reliable cobalt sources.

Earlier this year, Canada began to notice the makings of a cobalt rush, starting in the town of Cobalt, Ontario—named for the mineral that was discovered there. More than a century ago, the region was the site of an old-fashioned silver rush, but its resources were soon eclipsed by Africa’s offering.

Prospectors are again returning to the town of Cobalt: By May this year, more than a dozen mining companies had staked their claim in the Canadian town, the Northern Prospectors Association told Canada’s CBC.

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Out of Africa for First Cobalt: Cobalt hunter ditches Congo J-V for northeastern Ontario – by Staff (Northern Ontario Business – September 18, 2017)

https://www.northernontariobusiness.com/

Only months after announcing it was buying into the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), First Cobalt is pulling out to concentrate on its exploration work in northeastern Ontario.

The Toronto-headquartered cobalt hunter announced Sept. 18 that it will not complete its “strategic alliance” on seven cobalt exploration properties in the DRC. Instead, the company said it will focus on its flagship property in the historic Cobalt mining camp.

It’s Greater Cobalt Project, includes an option for the former producing Keeley-Frontier mine, a high-grade mine that produced over 3.3 million pounds of cobalt and 19.1 million ounces of silver from 301,000 tonnes of ore, as well as a joint venture on a fully permitted cobalt refinery in the town of Cobalt.

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Eager for red-hot cobalt gains, investors think small – by Nicole Mordant (Reuters Canada – August 24, 2017)

https://ca.reuters.com/

VANCOUVER (Reuters) – Institutional investors hoping to profit from cobalt, this year’s high-flying metal, are buying into companies that are smaller than their usual fare to gain exposure to an industry supplying the burgeoning electric car market.

Prices for cobalt CBD0, a key ingredient in lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, have spiked 83 percent this year on forecasts that demand will double in the next decade as consumers switch to less-polluting cars. Nearly all cobalt, which prolongs battery life, is mined as a by-product of copper and nickel, making it difficult for investors to get direct exposure.

Much like the recent boom in lithium, another battery ingredient, cobalt’s surge has resulted from heady forecasts for ownership of electric vehicles. UBS in May said it expected them to account for 3.1 percent of global car sales in 2021 and 13.7 percent in 2025, up from 1 percent this year.

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Hunt for Next Electric-Car Commodity Quickens as Prices Soar – by Laura Millan Lombrana and Susanne Barton (Bloomberg News – August 23, 2017)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

Niche metal cobalt is leaving bigger names like copper and lithium in its dust, triggering a hunt for new deposits from Idaho to Chile.

As one of the key components in the new breed of rechargeable batteries and with supply dominated by the Democratic Republic of Congo, prices have surged at four times the pace of major metals in the past year.

That’s caught the attention of governments, explorers and money managers, with annual demand set to increase 34 percent until 2026 as electric cars gain a bigger share of the global auto fleet, according to CRU Group.

Authorities in Chile, the top copper-producing nation, are embarking on a fact-finding mission with a view to restart cobalt production after a more than seven-decade hiatus. First Cobalt Corp. is merging with two other firms to create what it calls the world’s largest explorer of the mineral.

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Glencore turns bigger copper, zinc price bull: Nickel not so much – by Frik Els (Mining.com – August 10, 2017)

http://www.mining.com/

Miner and commodities trader Glencore (LON:GLEN) raised its revenue and profit outlook for the year on Thursday with the Swiss company citing the fast-growing electric vehicle market as a key driver.

“Most automotive players are now accelerating investment in/adoption of electric vehicle technologies, reflecting, in part, increasingly aggressive Government mandates around emission targets.

Growth in electric vehicle/energy storage systems requires changes in material flows, including the installation, rebuild and replacement of supporting infrastructure. Based on current and emerging technologies, these changes should benefit enabling commodities such as copper, cobalt and nickel,” Glencore said in a statement accompanying its half-year results.

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Boom times ahead in the Cobalt camp: Staking rush, exploration activity puts famed mining camp back on the map – by Ian Ross (Northern Ontario Business – July 31, 2017)

https://www.northernontariobusiness.com/

These are boom times in the Cobalt camp, but this is entirely new territory for Gino Chitaroni. “I’ve been in this business more than 30 years, I’ve never seen this before,” said the president of the Northern Prospectors Association.

The worldwide search for green-tech minerals, like cobalt, to feed the exploding electric vehicle and lithium battery market has put the historic silver mining district back in the spotlight for a largely discarded by-product metal.

“Eighteen months ago, if someone breathed the word cobalt, I would have thought they were on crack,” chuckles Chitaroni, a third-generation Cobalt-area miner and president of Polymet Labs in the town of Cobalt.

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Cobalt explorer makes a move in historic camp: First Cobalt kicks off exploration program with promise of richer days ahead – by Ian Ross (Northern Ontario Business – July 28, 2017)

https://www.northernontariobusiness.com/

Walking into a mining ghost town like Silver Centre is almost akin to experiencing what the first miners of the Cobalt camp’s famed Silver Rush faced at the turn of the last century.

But the focus this time is not on finding high-grade silver veins but exploring for cobalt, previously discarded as a waste material. For exploration crews, it’s like starting from scratch. “I grew up in Northern Ontario and crawled around mine sites all the time,” said Frank Santaguida, vice-president of exploration for First Cobalt Corp. “It’s surprising how quickly the land reclaims itself.”

His Toronto-based company has an option agreement with Canadian Silver Hunter to acquire 100 per cent of the former Keeley-Frontier silver and cobalt mine, a sprawling 2,100-hectare property, 25 kilometres south of the town of Cobalt.

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Hawthorne’s Cobalt letters – by Douglas Baldwin (CIM Magazine – February 2017)

http://magazine.cim.org/en/

Scheming brokers, including a famous author’s son, deceived many speculators during the Cobalt, Ontario silver rush

Two years after the 1903 discovery of rich silver deposits in northern Ontario, a Toronto brokerage firm asserted that “when you take into consideration that Cobalt’s mines have produced more in value than the Klondike is producing per annum, or has ever produced, you will have some idea of the great results that will come out of this camp when fully developed.”

Mining companies licensed to work in Ontario grew from 43 in 1903 to 683 four years later. For three consecutive days, mounted police in New York City cleared Broad Street of would-be investors who were obstructing traffic in their efforts to buy Cobalt shares from the curb brokers.

Stories of millions of dollars changing hands overnight were legion. The Canadian Annual Review recounted the tale of a North Bay resident who made $15,000 by merely picking up silver nuggets lying on the ground.

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