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Metals and Manufacturing

China goes all out to secure lithium, cobalt supplies – key to dominating the world electric car market – by Eric Ng (South China Morning Post – June 4, 2018)

http://www.scmp.com/

Cobalt, however, faces bigger challenges than lithium, which has seen bigger price gains over the past two years amid lack of certainty over new supplies, stockpiling and traders taking speculative positions

The emergence of electric vehicles has seen Chinese companies go on a global hunt to secure lithium resources. Now they are rapidly clinching deals to get hold of cobalt whose supply is even more concentrated geographically.

Cobalt, a hard, shiny, greyish metal, a by-product of copper and nickel mining, has seen the biggest price increase among various metals used to make electric vehicle batteries after a demand boom began two years ago, according to Ciaran Roe, global manager of metals pricing at S&P Global Platts.

“Unlike manganese, lithium and nickel, cobalt is limited in supply not just in terms of tonnage but also origin,” he said. “I can’t think of another commodity where supply is so reliant on one origin nation than cobalt.”

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US defense sector braces for Trump tariff fallout – by Joe Gould and Aaron Mehta (Defense News – May 31, 2018)

https://www.defensenews.com/

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration’s announcement that it will impose tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Europe, Mexico and Canada may hurt America‘s defense sector and imperil domestic jobs, analysts warn.

The tariffs, which will impose a 25 percent surcharge on imported steel and 10 percent on aluminum, will go into effect Friday, as the administration follows through on the penalties after earlier granting exemptions to buy time for negotiations. U.S. President Donald Trump announced the tariffs in March, citing national security concerns.

Europe and Mexico pledged to retaliate, exacerbating trans-Atlantic and North American trade tensions. The European Commission’s president, Jean-Claude Juncker, said Trump’s decision amounted to trade “protectionism, pure and simple,” adding that Europe would respond with countermeasures.

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[Electric Vehicles] ‘There is no knowing where the change will end’ – analyst – by Henry Lazenby (MiningWeekly.com – May 30, 2018)

http://www.miningweekly.com/

VANCOUVER (miningweekly.com) – The wave of change that the electrification of automobiles brings is moving beyond electric vehicles (EV) to the micro, artificial intelligence and autonomous mobility options, which should increasingly be brought into the outlook for the burgeoning market.

“Big gambles and bold leadership does not always guarantee results,” founder of The Daily Kanban and Bloomberg analyst Edward Niedermeyer cautioned an audience attending the recent Vancouver leg of London-based Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.

From his qualitative analysis, it is evident that cars are a very emotional and even irrational topic, with sales of EVs, sports utility vehicles (SUVs) and sports cars driven by desire, rather than need, from a consumer perspective.

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Pollution studies cast doubt on China’s electric-car policies – by Charles Clover (Financial Times – May 20, 2018)

https://www.ft.com/

The environmental case for electric vehicles in China has been complicated by research that asserts the cars produce more pollution than those with internal combustion engines.

The issue is likely to raise questions about China’s push to become the world’s EV champion by 2025. The government has justified devoting massive resources to encouraging domestic EV production — including billions of dollars in subsidies and production quotas — based on the proposition they are greener than petrol-engine cars.

But the environmental benefits were unclear, experts said. While China has been on a green energy push for years, coal still accounts for an overwhelming proportion of electricity production, meaning that charging electric batteries also burns carbon — often at a higher per-kilometre rate than petrol engines.

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Threat of Cobalt Supply Shock Is Top Risk for Electric Vehicles – by David Stringer and Martin Ritchie (Bloomberg News – May 21, 2018)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

A burgeoning risk of a supply crunch in cobalt — a key battery metal that’s more than tripled in price in two years — poses one of the biggest threats to forecasts for rising electric vehicle adoption.

Major investment in mines is required to avoid price spikes that could see cost reductions for lithium-ion batteries stall, Bloomberg New Energy Finance analysts said Monday in a report.

Shortages of cobalt are likely earlier than previously forecast and the issue poses a potential challenge to EV sales over the coming five to seven years, according to the report.

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Tesla delivers bad news for cobalt price, boost for rare earths – by Frik Els (Mining.com – May 3, 2018)

http://www.mining.com/

Wall Street is aghast at Elon Musk’s dismissive attitude toward analysts’ probing following a quarter of record (but less than expected) losses for Tesla, but the electric vehicle maker did provide some answers to questions that’s been vexing the mining industry.

Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, a provider of price information and research on battery supply chains, parsed the numbers after Tesla gave a rare indication of the relative proportions of raw materials used in its latest lithium-ion battery for its Model 3.

At first blush it’s not good news for miners of cobalt, a crucial ingredient in batteries used in electric vehicles and cellphones that’s been trading near decade highs above $90,000 a tonne.

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Car owners had a sweet ride, but electric cars will end that – by Eric Reguly (Globe and Mail – April 27, 2018)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Imagine this line from an updated version of The Blues Brothers: “It’s 106 miles to Chicago. We got a full battery charge, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark, and we’re wearing sunglasses.”

Doesn’t quite work, does it? “We got a full tank of gas” was Dan Aykroyd’s line as he and John Belushi fired up their Dodge Monaco in the first movie. Gasoline-powered cars are branded into North American culture, and the idea of an American battery-powered car culture seems absurd.

How did gasoline-fuelled cars become so popular? The United States has about 263 million registered passenger vehicles. The strength and flexibility of the internal combustion engine explains only part of the story.

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Fuel cell frenzy as cars, plants deploy platinum to protect environment – by Martin Creamer (MiningWeekly.com – April 26, 2018)

http://www.miningweekly.com/

JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Hyundai has just launched its new Nexo fuel cell car in South Korea, pre-orders for which exceeded expectations, Honda last month launched the new 2018 Clarity fuel cell car, Doosan Fuel Cell America has cut the ribbon on three 460 kW fuel cells at the Waterbury Pollution Control Authority in Connecticut,

FuelCell Energy has announced an agreement to sell a 2.8 MW fuel cell power plant to the Tulare Waste Water Treatment Facility in California, Amazon has contracted with Plug Power to deploy fuel cell forklifts at its warehouses around the US, and the California Fuel Cell Partnership announced the opening of the state’s thirty-third hydrogen fuelling station.

These positive deployments of platinum-catalysed hydrogen fuel cells in the US follow strides taken in Japan, Germany and China to bring these fuel cells into service to protect the environment holistically, and they also precede a national fuel cell forum in Washington on June 12, ahead of a key US Department of Energy merit review.

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Daimler joins China’s Responsible Cobalt Initiative – by Yilei Sun (Reuters U.S. – April 25, 2018)

https://www.reuters.com/

LONDON (Reuters) – German carmaker Daimler has joined the Responsible Cobalt Initiative, a program established under a Chinese industry body to tackle risks in the cobalt supply chain arising from artisanal mining.

Cobalt consumers are under pressure to ensure the material they use is not tainted by child labor in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the source of about 60 percent of the world’s cobalt.

Amnesty International says about a fifth of the country’s cobalt production is mined by hand by informal miners including children, often in dangerous conditions. Daimler, owner of the Mercedes Brand, joined the RCI at the start of April, RCI Chairman Sun Lihui told Reuters.

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Platinum Mines in the World’s Top Producer Are Shrinking – by Felix Njini and Eddie Van Der Walt (Bloomberg News – March 26, 2018)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

“Ramaphoria” boosted the rand and revived investor sentiment on South Africa. But deep underground in the country’s platinum mines, there’s very little cause for optimism.

Producers in South Africa, which accounts for about 70 percent of the world’s mined platinum, are closing shafts and cutting thousands of jobs as a stronger rand combines with stagnating prices for the metal in squeezing profit margins.

The future looks equally bleak, as reduced demand for diesel engines and the rise of electric cars threatens to erode the need for the metal used to cut pollution.

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BMW says electric car mass production not viable until 2020 – by Edward Taylor (Reuters U.S. – March 22, 2018)

https://www.reuters.com/

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – BMW (BMWG.DE) will not mass produce electric cars until 2020 because its current technology is not profitable enough to scale up for volume production, the chief executive said on Thursday.

Munich-based BMW unveiled its first battery electric car in 2013, and has been working on different generations of battery, software and electric motor technology since then.

The i8 Roadster model, due to hit showrooms in May, is equipped with what BMW calls its fourth-generation electric drive technology. Advances in battery raw materials and chemistry has increased its range by 40 percent over the previous version, BMW said.

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VW Just Gave Tesla a $25 Billion Battery Shock – by Chris Reiter and Christoph Rauwald (Bloomberg News – March 13, 2018)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

Volkswagen AG secured 20 billion euros ($25 billion) in battery supplies to underpin an aggressive push into electric cars in the coming years, ramping up pressure on Tesla Inc. as it struggles with production issues for the mainstream Model 3.

The world’s largest carmaker will equip 16 factories to produce electric vehicles by the end of 2022, compared with three currently, Volkswagen said Tuesday in Berlin.

The German manufacturer’s plans to build as many as 3 million of the cars a year by 2025 is backstopped by deals with suppliers including Samsung SDI Co., LG Chem Ltd. and Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd. for batteries in Europe and China.

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How vanadium-coated smart glass saves energy – by Valentina Ruiz Leotaud (Mining.com – March 8, 2018)

http://www.mining.com/

Smart glass windows made with vanadium are capable of saving more energy by stopping thermal radiation from escaping and, thus, preventing heat loss during the winter, and by avoiding infrared radiation from the sun from entering the building during the summer.

This is according to a compilation of studies made public today by VanadiumCorp Resource (TSX-V:VRB). The Vancouver-based company owns 100% of the Lac Doré vanadium-titanium-iron mine located in the eastern Canadian province of Quebec.

Based on research advanced by the U.S. Department of Education and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, VanadiumCorp’s CEO, Adriaan Bakker, said that vanadium defies the Wiedemann-Franz Law, which states that good conductors of electricity are also good conductors of heat.

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Deadly mineral that endangered town of Asbestos might save it (Bloomberg News/Montreal Gazette – March 7, 2018)

http://montrealgazette.com/

Residue from asbestos mine is rich in magnesium, which can be transformed into a light metal used in everything from medical implants to Tesla electric cars

There’s no running away from the past in Asbestos. The town’s most prominent landmark is a crater more than two kilometres wide — and deep enough to lodge the Eiffel Tower — a testament to the world’s once-bottomless appetite for the deadly mineral that sustained the local economy for decades and gave the town its name.

Quebec once produced half of the world’s asbestos and offered the highest-paying mining jobs in Canada before concern about cancer led to the fire-resistant fibre being banned in more than 50 countries, with the mine finally shutting down in 2012.

But now it turns out that the future of Asbestos may actually be in asbestos. Well, not in asbestos, per se, but in the millions of tons of discarded residue that piled up over more than a century of mining for it.

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U.S. unveils steep tariffs, raising peril of trade war – by Steven Chase, Greg Keenan and Adrian Morrow (Globe and Mail – March 2, 2018)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

U.S. President Donald Trump is firing the first shot in what could amount to a global trade war, announcing plans to slap hefty tariffs on foreign imports of steel and aluminum as a means of protecting American jobs.

The Canadian government was quick to threaten retaliation against the United States if steel and aluminum from Canada are included in the administration’s trade action.

Mr. Trump said on Thursday he intends to levy 25-per-cent tariffs on steel imports and 10-per-cent on aluminum imports, sending U.S. stock markets tumbling over fears of global retaliation and higher inflation.

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