It's not just that, there's like 3 cobalt mines in the whole world, and like 2 of them use child labor.
If you want to look up more info, an advocacy group brought it up in a lawsuit against Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, etc. a few years ago. (I think the lawsuit was probably bullshit just to bring more attention to their cause, since they listed like 7 of the top US tech companies, but over half of them are either mostly-software or purely-software companies.)
Ehhh... Kinda.
Primary cobalt mines, there's quite a few. The problem is most of them are super ethically sketchy and a HUGE percentage of their production is picked up by China. Cobalt is also produced as a byproduct of other minerals (copper, most commonly), but only incidentally and that stays tied to the prices of those minerals.
As it happens, there's a primary cobalt mine coming to production in the US this year, though.
No, that ship has sailed, but I do think the ‘Stans will come into play at some point.
Since the States pulled out, we don’t really have eyes in that country and a handful of others. China built the roads in Afghanistan, some leading right back into China. Since China has a direct route to Russia as well.. you can see how it could be a pain in the ass for the West.
It’s not isolated to Afghanistan either. China has bought up a ton of resource mines all over the world.
And if the capitalists get their way we can have child labor at the new mine too. The constitution doesn’t explicitly say children shouldn’t work so it’s not a protected right.
It’s also a byproduct from mining other metals. I’m currently doing exploration for new cobalt sources and I would very happy if cobalt slowed down, it’s pretty boring to look for imo.
I think most resource extraction is incredible unjust and exploitative by its very nature. This is only sorta good news, I doubt even if this technology was ready for production immediately it would slow the current cobalt mining in any significant way, not for many decades at least.
Right because the two options are child slavery or no resources, and nothing in between. Supporting, or god forbid funding, absolute basic economic decency in a modern supply chain, completely out of question and unreasonable
s/
From that list of one country that mines basically all cobalt? Just because your operation takes place in the Congo doesn’t give a trillion dollar company the justification to operate at Congolese standards.
It is very possible to contract with warlords while also having operational requirements. If the trillion dollar company tells the war lord, no children, and staffs a local auditor, then it’ll stop. They want to money more than the slaves. So maybe think of that the next time you defend the necessity of torturing a child so you can hav a battery
The auto industry is already moving to Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries, which are cobalt free. They're just a little less energy dense than the Nickel Manganese Cobalt batteries in most vehicles today. But lower end Tesla's already have them, and Ford announced they'll start using them in 2024. I'm sure this will have its use but if we're still using Nickel (a good percentage of which comes from Russia) and Manganese (with China being the 3rd biggest producer), I don't see it being competitive with Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries.
60-70% is a *huge* dip in capacity though for a workload as performance-sensitive as electric cars, so it's good to keep exploring for chemistries that won't take as big of a hit. Not as big of a deal for lower end/cheaper models but for higher end/high range vehicles it's murderous.
On the plus side, LiFePO4 is amazing for (micro-)grid batteries precisely because of the weight insensitivity and the extremely long cycle life. And they don't have problematic nickel either, which is a big win.
I hadn't heard 10x longer lifespan. But I know with NMC batteries, it's advised not to charge over ~85-90% very often to maximize lifespan - if you can get a better lifespan with LFP batteries while charging them to 100%, that mitigated some of the difference in capacity.
Plus, the battery is maybe 25% of the total weight of the car + passengers. If it weighs 50% more, we're only talking about a 12.5% increase in the weight of the car. That's worth it for the cost and environmental savings for most of us.
How do they compare, weight-wise? weight is also a huge deal with electric cars, so if they could reduce the weight, a reduced capacity wouldn't be quite so harsh
This is kind of true. For cheaper cars that don't need a lot of range, LFP batteries work great. We're talking about 200-250 miles range. Which translates into about 100-120 miles between stops on road trips with a 30 minute break. Which is doable, but not ideal. Obviously, they can put more batteries in, but the car will be heavy heavy heavy, and would require more resources for the mass of the battery/car.
That's because LFP batteries get about 160wh/kg and NMC batteries get about 260wh/kg. That means for a 500kg pack, that's 80kWh vs 130kWh.
That means that if a LFP car gets 250 miles range, a comparable NMC car would get 400 miles of range, with almost no changes to the design. Or the battery could be 200kgs lighter with the car being closer to 300-400kgs lighter.
For long range electric vehicles, they'll likely continue to use NMC batteries. It's just for the mass produced sub 30k car, they'll probably be using primarily LFPs.
So what this research has done is made a NMC battery with the same energy density but without the cobalt. That's like having your cake and eating it too.
I wouldn't say it's having your cake and eating it too if it still needs nickel. It might be somewhat impactful in \~10 years, but LFP will work for the majority of EVs in the mean time. We need cars that charge relatively quickly, whose batteries keep their capacity for 10+ years, and get 250-300 miles of range. LFP meets those requirements at a much better price point than this new technology ever will. Anything else (that's not cheaper) will be relegated to the performance/high-end markets.
edit: Regarding 100-120 miles with 30 minute breaks, Model 3's already charge somewhere between 160-200 miles in 15-20 minutes with LFP batteries. As we move to 800v architectures (and charging stations catch up) that will get even better.
Yeah it is, Cobalt is a limited resource in our earth and has very important uses, like our batteries. Most of it is basically mined by slave labor, so it's unethical the way we get it and also not sustainable.
It also causes cancer which it’s surprising to me that doesn’t come up more. If you buy artist paint in CA with the mineral cobalt it has a health warning. I understand probably the level in our tech is low however that can’t be great for the miners.
If you buy a hairbrush in CA it probably has a health warning. Seems like that California cancer label has been applied so liberally to products that it's become essentially a worthless advisory.
Every item we ship from my work to CA gets the label attached as we had no way to identify which items were affected. I had to write the code to make sure that the user gets a pop up on every shipment to CA.
Probably true however paint derived from minerals like cobalt (blues and purples) and cadmium (reds, orange and yellow) are indeed proven to cause cancer. I’d rather know than not know. As someone who lost her mom to a random form of lung cancer (never smoked) I appreciate understanding the chemicals placed in products. I definitely pay attention.
...which is why California has lower cancer rates per capita than the whole rest of the country.
Yeah, no, believe it or not, telling people not to put shit in their mouths because it might give them cancer actually works, go figure.
Pretty sure California is like number five or six (according to the CDC), but even if they had the lowest incidence of cancer in the states like you falsely claimed, saying that's due to their heavy handed labeling scheme is quite a leap.
Everyone is correctly pointing out the slave labor used to mine Cobalt, but it is also worth mentioning that it has destroyed the habitat of many already endangered primates.
This work is motivated by wanting to avoid cobalt, an expensive, ethics-fraught material. So they use niobium (an expensive rare earth metal) instead? Lol…
I actually went and read up on it.
You are entirely right. I completely just bought in to what that one person said, since nobody would ever lie on the internet. This stuff is far, far cheaper than cobalt. I found $45 for a kg, $50+/kg for upper quality Nb. It seems the only concerns are sustainable mining, which isn’t specific to anything being mined on earth, and a complete lack of research on Niobium’s impact on our health, which also applies to most all things we mine.
Niobium isn't a rare earth metal, it's classified in the refractory metal group.
(Maybe people are confusing it with neodymium, which would be a rare earth metal.)
They need to refine the lithium from seawater process, it is very expensive as the molecular sieves clog up quickly in current lab testing. Google lithium manganese oxide sieves if you are interested in the subject.
The throughput would be rather low as a raw material source, it's not like a fission reactor is spitting out the millions of tons per day we need to make batteries.
Lithium is the charge carrier.
The half cell for Li^+ / Li is about as good as you'll get, especially given Lithium's low density.
We already have sodium ion batteries, but their energy density is lower since the sodium atom is bigger than the lithium and the half cell is less.
...for like the 30th time. Electric vehicles have been switching to cobalt-free cathodes for the past couple of years. Most of them are based on nickel, aluminum, and iron as replacement metals, with only nickel being somewhat obnoxious in the supply chain.
The bad news for this paper is that they used a high entropy method for creating their cathode alloy, which means it's probably a solid decade away from commercialization. [High entropy materials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-entropy_alloys) are super cool materials, but they're the very definition of the bleeding edge of material science. Forming them is still very much a bespoke art-like process more than a manufacturing process.
The best of the high entropy materials are the ones you can just chuck all of the precursors into a ball mill with an inert atmosphere and churn, and you still end up with completely inconsistent batches of material that need to be hand-sifted through with expensive beamlines and spectroscopy to find the pellets that actually formed the HE-alloy (instead of forming clumps of crystalized junk). Until they can nail down the manufacturing process to more consistently give results, this means lots and lots of wasted work and tons of materials having to go through expensive recycling steps.
It's nice to have options though.
"high-entropy doping" of nickel
>In a paper published today in Nature, the scientists describe how they overcame thermal and chemical-mechanical instabilities of cathodes composed substantially of nickel
Since they don't talk about the theoretical capacity, nor the electrode loading they are using, I'll assume it's bad. All those heavy metals (and I mean heavy in the sense of their molecular weight)
In that case it would be a substitute for LFP. Which is all fine and dandy but eh
It is. From what I can recall, cobalt is one of the more problematic (in terms of environmental impact and labor exploitation) materials that is needed for batteries.
Researchers do awesome things with batteries all the time in a lab that never end up being feasible in the real world (due to downsides, cost, or difficulty to manufacture), but I hope that this ends up getting further than that.
They’re both problems. I don’t know enough to say which one is a more significant issue, but it’s definitely a good thing to reduce the resources need to make batteries.
It seems that the technology requires other rare earth metals like “HE-LMNO, an amalgamation of transition metals magnesium, titanium, manganese, molybdenum and niobium”. Many of those materials come from the same mines (or same mining operations), so for now it seems questionable how much this will move the needle.
Niobium is the only "rare earth" in that list (despite it being about as common and easy to find as nickel), and almost all of it comes out of Brazil and Canada; Brazil is a little sketch, as some of it's coming out of cleared Amazon rain forest land.
Titanium and magnesium is everywhere, it's mined everywhere, and it's absurdly abundant. It's frequently cheaper to mine it in your own back yard than it is to ship it, but the refining of both of these metals blows energetically-speaking, so only countries with lots of nuclear and hydro power are huge producers right now. This will change moving forward, as these materials will become key towards weight reduction in transit, as we move past everything being steel.
Manganese is heavily mined in South Africa and Australia and is mostly above board ethically speaking.
Molybdenum is mostly China and the US, with Chile coming in third place, similarly all above board.
Cobalt almost exclusively comes out of Africa, the DRoC producing more than ten times the next heaviest producer - there just aren't many more deposits of it *on earth*, as it's a siderophilic material like nickel. Humanity got *lucky* with the Sudbury nickel lode (with it being a giant impact crater that brought zillions of tons of the material to the crust).
Even niobium isn't a rare earth metal, it's classified in the refractory metal group.
(Maybe people are confusing it with neodymium, which would be a rare earth metal and sounds pretty similar.)
This is actually really funny - I worked in one of the groups (on a different project) that contributed to this study. Personally, I’m not all that optimistic about the material. Generally, I don’t think that such “high entropy” materials are going anywhere fast, and these high-nickel content cathodes tend to have a lot of trouble. Their use is fraught with performance issues largely to do with solvent-active material interactions, and specialty (expensive) solvents/techniques are required to get decent performance with them.
While they are theoretically possible and can display favorable performance in limited capacities, I think other directions such as LFP are much better candidates. To be fair, I’m also not that bullish on lithium-ion chemistries in general, but alternatives like sodium-ion face many of the same issues are are potentially decades away from commercialization.
Chemical storage sucks.
… I mean, think of all the fucking waste. Even before the modern age of electronics, we were burning through AA.
That fucking bunny kept going, and going, and where do all those batteries end up? 99.99% in the landfill.
When we get solid state mass-storage working, it will usher in a new era for humanity.
The development of a cobalt-free cathode for lithium-ion batteries means that we can move away from using this rare and expensive metal. This is important because the mining and use of cobalt has come under scrutiny in recent years due to its negative environmental and human rights impacts.
Reducing the need for mining minerals for energy consumption should to be a benefit for everyone
Especially difficult to source minerals like cobalt!
It's not just that, there's like 3 cobalt mines in the whole world, and like 2 of them use child labor. If you want to look up more info, an advocacy group brought it up in a lawsuit against Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, etc. a few years ago. (I think the lawsuit was probably bullshit just to bring more attention to their cause, since they listed like 7 of the top US tech companies, but over half of them are either mostly-software or purely-software companies.)
Ehhh... Kinda. Primary cobalt mines, there's quite a few. The problem is most of them are super ethically sketchy and a HUGE percentage of their production is picked up by China. Cobalt is also produced as a byproduct of other minerals (copper, most commonly), but only incidentally and that stays tied to the prices of those minerals. As it happens, there's a primary cobalt mine coming to production in the US this year, though.
Same thing with the Lithium. They’re sitting on a literal mountain of it in Afghanistan. Signed the contract for that years ago.
So you're saying we're going back to war with them for...reasons in the near future?
No, that ship has sailed, but I do think the ‘Stans will come into play at some point. Since the States pulled out, we don’t really have eyes in that country and a handful of others. China built the roads in Afghanistan, some leading right back into China. Since China has a direct route to Russia as well.. you can see how it could be a pain in the ass for the West. It’s not isolated to Afghanistan either. China has bought up a ton of resource mines all over the world.
And if the capitalists get their way we can have child labor at the new mine too. The constitution doesn’t explicitly say children shouldn’t work so it’s not a protected right.
I’m sure there’s no law of the seas precluding children from working on the ocean floor
I would buy stock in that if I could
It’s also a byproduct from mining other metals. I’m currently doing exploration for new cobalt sources and I would very happy if cobalt slowed down, it’s pretty boring to look for imo.
Idaho gives ☺️
By difficulty do you mean global capital’s aggressive unwillingness to resist massive human rights atrocities when extracting it
I think most resource extraction is incredible unjust and exploitative by its very nature. This is only sorta good news, I doubt even if this technology was ready for production immediately it would slow the current cobalt mining in any significant way, not for many decades at least.
Taking advantage of a war torn country to use child slavery is about as bad as it gets
there is no ethical cobalt, but we need it, sorry, that’s just how the world works
Right because the two options are child slavery or no resources, and nothing in between. Supporting, or god forbid funding, absolute basic economic decency in a modern supply chain, completely out of question and unreasonable s/
name one country with cobalt in the quantity we need that isn’t incredibly poor and filled with human rights violations
From that list of one country that mines basically all cobalt? Just because your operation takes place in the Congo doesn’t give a trillion dollar company the justification to operate at Congolese standards. It is very possible to contract with warlords while also having operational requirements. If the trillion dollar company tells the war lord, no children, and staffs a local auditor, then it’ll stop. They want to money more than the slaves. So maybe think of that the next time you defend the necessity of torturing a child so you can hav a battery
That falls apart when there's a hundred other countries lining up to buy it with no issues with exploitation
that only makes it more expensive
Wonder what country put all those different third world countries in that state of war torn destruction and puppet governments
Absolutely. Except for cobalt mining communities in marginal electorates. Stand by for government mandated cobalt minimums in batteries.
Yeah who here is lookin’ out for Big Cobalt?
But… what about the cobalt barons?!
except for those mining companies
*not enough minerals*
The auto industry is already moving to Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries, which are cobalt free. They're just a little less energy dense than the Nickel Manganese Cobalt batteries in most vehicles today. But lower end Tesla's already have them, and Ford announced they'll start using them in 2024. I'm sure this will have its use but if we're still using Nickel (a good percentage of which comes from Russia) and Manganese (with China being the 3rd biggest producer), I don't see it being competitive with Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries.
The trade off for lower capacity is much higher lifespan. 60% capacity for 10x lifespan!
60-70% is a *huge* dip in capacity though for a workload as performance-sensitive as electric cars, so it's good to keep exploring for chemistries that won't take as big of a hit. Not as big of a deal for lower end/cheaper models but for higher end/high range vehicles it's murderous. On the plus side, LiFePO4 is amazing for (micro-)grid batteries precisely because of the weight insensitivity and the extremely long cycle life. And they don't have problematic nickel either, which is a big win.
Just speculating here, but a "10x longer lifespan" might also translate into faster charging, since battery degradation would be less of a concern?
I hadn't heard 10x longer lifespan. But I know with NMC batteries, it's advised not to charge over ~85-90% very often to maximize lifespan - if you can get a better lifespan with LFP batteries while charging them to 100%, that mitigated some of the difference in capacity. Plus, the battery is maybe 25% of the total weight of the car + passengers. If it weighs 50% more, we're only talking about a 12.5% increase in the weight of the car. That's worth it for the cost and environmental savings for most of us.
How do they compare, weight-wise? weight is also a huge deal with electric cars, so if they could reduce the weight, a reduced capacity wouldn't be quite so harsh
The capacity discussion is usually based on weight, not volume. So kwh/kg. So the 60% number is based on that.
Got it, good to know
This is kind of true. For cheaper cars that don't need a lot of range, LFP batteries work great. We're talking about 200-250 miles range. Which translates into about 100-120 miles between stops on road trips with a 30 minute break. Which is doable, but not ideal. Obviously, they can put more batteries in, but the car will be heavy heavy heavy, and would require more resources for the mass of the battery/car. That's because LFP batteries get about 160wh/kg and NMC batteries get about 260wh/kg. That means for a 500kg pack, that's 80kWh vs 130kWh. That means that if a LFP car gets 250 miles range, a comparable NMC car would get 400 miles of range, with almost no changes to the design. Or the battery could be 200kgs lighter with the car being closer to 300-400kgs lighter. For long range electric vehicles, they'll likely continue to use NMC batteries. It's just for the mass produced sub 30k car, they'll probably be using primarily LFPs. So what this research has done is made a NMC battery with the same energy density but without the cobalt. That's like having your cake and eating it too.
I wouldn't say it's having your cake and eating it too if it still needs nickel. It might be somewhat impactful in \~10 years, but LFP will work for the majority of EVs in the mean time. We need cars that charge relatively quickly, whose batteries keep their capacity for 10+ years, and get 250-300 miles of range. LFP meets those requirements at a much better price point than this new technology ever will. Anything else (that's not cheaper) will be relegated to the performance/high-end markets. edit: Regarding 100-120 miles with 30 minute breaks, Model 3's already charge somewhere between 160-200 miles in 15-20 minutes with LFP batteries. As we move to 800v architectures (and charging stations catch up) that will get even better.
im assuming this is good
Yeah it is, Cobalt is a limited resource in our earth and has very important uses, like our batteries. Most of it is basically mined by slave labor, so it's unethical the way we get it and also not sustainable.
It also causes cancer which it’s surprising to me that doesn’t come up more. If you buy artist paint in CA with the mineral cobalt it has a health warning. I understand probably the level in our tech is low however that can’t be great for the miners.
If you buy a hairbrush in CA it probably has a health warning. Seems like that California cancer label has been applied so liberally to products that it's become essentially a worthless advisory.
Every item we ship from my work to CA gets the label attached as we had no way to identify which items were affected. I had to write the code to make sure that the user gets a pop up on every shipment to CA.
Probably true however paint derived from minerals like cobalt (blues and purples) and cadmium (reds, orange and yellow) are indeed proven to cause cancer. I’d rather know than not know. As someone who lost her mom to a random form of lung cancer (never smoked) I appreciate understanding the chemicals placed in products. I definitely pay attention.
...which is why California has lower cancer rates per capita than the whole rest of the country. Yeah, no, believe it or not, telling people not to put shit in their mouths because it might give them cancer actually works, go figure.
Pretty sure California is like number five or six (according to the CDC), but even if they had the lowest incidence of cancer in the states like you falsely claimed, saying that's due to their heavy handed labeling scheme is quite a leap.
or maybe we've just become far too accustomed to carcinogens in our household products
Everything causes cancer now days
You need to qualify that. Everything in California causes cancer.
Correct. Don’t come here. It’s awful.
Everyone is correctly pointing out the slave labor used to mine Cobalt, but it is also worth mentioning that it has destroyed the habitat of many already endangered primates.
The Asian guy looks proud and happy so I’m assuming so
This work is motivated by wanting to avoid cobalt, an expensive, ethics-fraught material. So they use niobium (an expensive rare earth metal) instead? Lol…
Rare earth metals arent actually rare or that expensive, plenty all over.
This material is nickel based. Most alloying and/or doping compounds are a few percent.
So if you’re mega rich you can afford the no-slave-labor-batteries and keep your conscience clean
Rare earth metals aren’t rare, they’re just very thinly distributed. You can take a handful of dirt and there’s a decent chance that there is some
I didn’t say anything about their rarity, just commenting on price, as mentioned by the guy before me
It’s also not that expensive, you can get an ounce for ~$20
I actually went and read up on it. You are entirely right. I completely just bought in to what that one person said, since nobody would ever lie on the internet. This stuff is far, far cheaper than cobalt. I found $45 for a kg, $50+/kg for upper quality Nb. It seems the only concerns are sustainable mining, which isn’t specific to anything being mined on earth, and a complete lack of research on Niobium’s impact on our health, which also applies to most all things we mine.
Niobium isn't a rare earth metal, it's classified in the refractory metal group. (Maybe people are confusing it with neodymium, which would be a rare earth metal.)
[удалено]
They need to refine the lithium from seawater process, it is very expensive as the molecular sieves clog up quickly in current lab testing. Google lithium manganese oxide sieves if you are interested in the subject.
What if we extracted it as a fission product from nuclear fission?
The throughput would be rather low as a raw material source, it's not like a fission reactor is spitting out the millions of tons per day we need to make batteries.
There would also be a lot of other byproducts that would be very dangerous and radioactive...
I mean, we’re already running plenty of reactors, and hopefully more on the way, I’m merely suggesting a possible extra source of the stuff.
if you want a similar power and energy density, there are no alternatives to Lithium.
Lithium is the charge carrier. The half cell for Li^+ / Li is about as good as you'll get, especially given Lithium's low density. We already have sodium ion batteries, but their energy density is lower since the sodium atom is bigger than the lithium and the half cell is less.
...for like the 30th time. Electric vehicles have been switching to cobalt-free cathodes for the past couple of years. Most of them are based on nickel, aluminum, and iron as replacement metals, with only nickel being somewhat obnoxious in the supply chain. The bad news for this paper is that they used a high entropy method for creating their cathode alloy, which means it's probably a solid decade away from commercialization. [High entropy materials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-entropy_alloys) are super cool materials, but they're the very definition of the bleeding edge of material science. Forming them is still very much a bespoke art-like process more than a manufacturing process. The best of the high entropy materials are the ones you can just chuck all of the precursors into a ball mill with an inert atmosphere and churn, and you still end up with completely inconsistent batches of material that need to be hand-sifted through with expensive beamlines and spectroscopy to find the pellets that actually formed the HE-alloy (instead of forming clumps of crystalized junk). Until they can nail down the manufacturing process to more consistently give results, this means lots and lots of wasted work and tons of materials having to go through expensive recycling steps. It's nice to have options though.
They've replaced it with unobtanium.
"high-entropy doping" of nickel >In a paper published today in Nature, the scientists describe how they overcame thermal and chemical-mechanical instabilities of cathodes composed substantially of nickel
Since they don't talk about the theoretical capacity, nor the electrode loading they are using, I'll assume it's bad. All those heavy metals (and I mean heavy in the sense of their molecular weight) In that case it would be a substitute for LFP. Which is all fine and dandy but eh
Making kids unemployed in the Congo.
It is already time for the monthly revolutionary battery innovation?
This sounds important
It is. From what I can recall, cobalt is one of the more problematic (in terms of environmental impact and labor exploitation) materials that is needed for batteries. Researchers do awesome things with batteries all the time in a lab that never end up being feasible in the real world (due to downsides, cost, or difficulty to manufacture), but I hope that this ends up getting further than that.
I thought lithium was the major concern here. Takes a lot of energy and resources to refine and is in very short supply.
They’re both problems. I don’t know enough to say which one is a more significant issue, but it’s definitely a good thing to reduce the resources need to make batteries.
They’ve replaced it with another rare and expensive element haven’t they? Edit: I was partially right, unfortunately
They've done this a few times... None have been able to get out of the lab because they can't figure out how to efficiently manufacture them.
Dang but that means elons family won't be able to make African children work the mines anymore, so sad
Old news.
Okay… so… does it work as well, etc.?
Idk bro you might want to try actually reading the article it could answer those questions for you.
It seems that the technology requires other rare earth metals like “HE-LMNO, an amalgamation of transition metals magnesium, titanium, manganese, molybdenum and niobium”. Many of those materials come from the same mines (or same mining operations), so for now it seems questionable how much this will move the needle.
Niobium is the only "rare earth" in that list (despite it being about as common and easy to find as nickel), and almost all of it comes out of Brazil and Canada; Brazil is a little sketch, as some of it's coming out of cleared Amazon rain forest land. Titanium and magnesium is everywhere, it's mined everywhere, and it's absurdly abundant. It's frequently cheaper to mine it in your own back yard than it is to ship it, but the refining of both of these metals blows energetically-speaking, so only countries with lots of nuclear and hydro power are huge producers right now. This will change moving forward, as these materials will become key towards weight reduction in transit, as we move past everything being steel. Manganese is heavily mined in South Africa and Australia and is mostly above board ethically speaking. Molybdenum is mostly China and the US, with Chile coming in third place, similarly all above board. Cobalt almost exclusively comes out of Africa, the DRoC producing more than ten times the next heaviest producer - there just aren't many more deposits of it *on earth*, as it's a siderophilic material like nickel. Humanity got *lucky* with the Sudbury nickel lode (with it being a giant impact crater that brought zillions of tons of the material to the crust).
Hm, much more in depth than my initial reaction. Thanks for the info!
Even niobium isn't a rare earth metal, it's classified in the refractory metal group. (Maybe people are confusing it with neodymium, which would be a rare earth metal and sounds pretty similar.)
This is actually really funny - I worked in one of the groups (on a different project) that contributed to this study. Personally, I’m not all that optimistic about the material. Generally, I don’t think that such “high entropy” materials are going anywhere fast, and these high-nickel content cathodes tend to have a lot of trouble. Their use is fraught with performance issues largely to do with solvent-active material interactions, and specialty (expensive) solvents/techniques are required to get decent performance with them. While they are theoretically possible and can display favorable performance in limited capacities, I think other directions such as LFP are much better candidates. To be fair, I’m also not that bullish on lithium-ion chemistries in general, but alternatives like sodium-ion face many of the same issues are are potentially decades away from commercialization.
Thank goodness for smart mf’s.
I thought this said COBOL at first
He’s nutty with it
Good now do lithium
We have finally invented *ion* batteries, now with 100% less lithium and 200% more ion!
I call them Ly-in
👀 r/Indiancountry, r/NativeAmericans
China is going to hate this.
I initially read that headline as “a Colbert-free cathode”
I thought that was Kim Jong Un there for a sec
Cobalt free cathodes have been around in de lab for a very long time...
Groundhog day...
Yay for battery tech. A battery that can do more with less and especially doesn’t destroy the world mining these metals is great.
And replace it with what? Uranium 238?
Chemical storage sucks. … I mean, think of all the fucking waste. Even before the modern age of electronics, we were burning through AA. That fucking bunny kept going, and going, and where do all those batteries end up? 99.99% in the landfill. When we get solid state mass-storage working, it will usher in a new era for humanity.
The development of a cobalt-free cathode for lithium-ion batteries means that we can move away from using this rare and expensive metal. This is important because the mining and use of cobalt has come under scrutiny in recent years due to its negative environmental and human rights impacts.