![]() Cobalt is often a by-product in the extraction of other metals, dampening the incentive to lower production in response to price drops. Indonesia has started up mining operations from scratch and China is planning new facilities. Congo, the world’s biggest cobalt exporting nation, will expand production by 38 percent this year, according to a report in The Economist. Price prediction: It is estimated that the demand for cobalt could rise from 2k tonnes to over 300k tonnes in 2030. Fast forward to today and the price of the blue metal, which had more than doubled between summer 2021 and spring 2022, to 82,000 a tonne, has collapsed to 35,000, not far from historic lows. The price of cobalt at the time of this writing is marginally lower than 10 years ago. This year, cobalt prices have jumped some forty per cent, to more than twenty dollars a pound. Figure 5 shows a 10-year price history for cobalt. The definition of CRMs has changed over time since its introduction in literature. Additionally, manufacturers of electric vehicles have adopted new battery technologies that require less cobalt. Over time, the sedimentary rocks were buried beneath rolling hills. cobalt at prices below prevailing spot price (Sovacool, 2019). Used in lithium-ion batteries, demand for cobalt started to climb as work-from-home policies boosted portable-electronics sales. For a long time, cobalt’s main use was in this pigment named after it (“cobalt blue”). Thus, a once-feared obstacle to the energy transition appears to have been removed. A tonne of the ‘blue metal’ now costs about 36,000 dollars, down 31 percent since the start of the year and 56 percent since the peak in the spring and summer of last year. Cobalt prices have dropped sharply, according to Trading Economics.
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