Cobalt supply for e-car batteries uncertain in 2020s

Demand for cobalt is set to increase substantially over the next years, and fear of insufficient supply for a large-scale roll-out of electric cars has led the mineral’s price to skyrocket from 23,000 dollars per tonne to 90,000 dollars over the past two years, Germany’s Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR) has said in a press release. “We expect the shift to e-mobility to double the demand for cobalt to 225,000 tonnes by 2026,” the BGR’s cobalt expert Siyamend Al Barazi said. He warned that the difficult mining conditions in the world’s largest cobalt supplier country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, could lead to “substantial supply problems.”

Read the press release in German here.

See the CLEW factsheet Germany’s dependence on imported fossil fuels for more information.