It found the Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency plans to stockpile almost 7,500 metric tons of cobalt. The report calculates that could instead be used to produce 80.2 GWh of battery capacity – more than double existing energy storage capacity in the US and enough to produce approximately 100,000 electric buses.
Lorah Steichen, the report’s author, said: “Every ton of cobalt or graphite stockpiled for the military could be used instead for electric buses, large-scale energy storage or other renewable technologies needed for the energy transition. These materials should accelerate decarbonisation, not fuel the insatiable war machine.”
There is no shortage of cobalt. It’s not that far above production cost at the current $50k a tonne. That’s not a price screaming an elemental* shortage.
*Sorry, not sorry.
Because cobalt is/was expensive a lot of research has reduced and often eliminated cobalt in many new battery designs. Demand has not grown as fast as expected. Consequently price has stabilized/fallen as any neo-liberal would expect. The side effect is that decarbonization is accelerated for free…… well better than free actually.
Wave the Green Peacenik flag by proposing to steal from the military.
Yeah…. That’ll work…. Nice Virtue Signalling though… 8/10.
I’m assuming that the DLA calculated that this was actually going to be needed by the military at some point considering likely threats etc.
So she wants it instead to be used for non-military purposes.
The report’s from the Transition Security Project? Right, so it’s “use it for what I’m pushing for instead.” You can’t hate NGOs enough.
Oh, well. The next Democrat administration would sell it off to spend on more immigration aid anyway.
Yep. Biden sold off the US strategic oil reserve to lower gasoline prices before an election.
That’s the problem with prepping. Other forces can eliminate your stockpile. Your wife is not going to allow the neighbors to starve while you still have food. Unless you are Ray Milland in Panic in the Year Zero (1962).
Does anyone know what the soldiers do with cobalt and graphite? I guess the graphite could be used to grease rifles but cobalt?
Plenty of uses in assorted alloys, magnets. Same for graphite. A stockpile buffers against production flow being interdicted until you can un-interdict it or ramp up other production.
Is it a general stockpile then, rather than a military one?
We had to lube the rotor mast of the Bell 47 with graphite powder spooned down the protective sleeve. The stuff went everywhere. But I suppose a ton of it would have lasted the whole fleet for a thousand years.
If there’s nothing else you’ve persuaded the world of, Mr W, it’s surely that most things written about metals are copper-bottomed rubbish.
“Lorah”… Is that how millennials spell Laura?
Isn’t it Websterian Dyslexia?
Or how Cilla Black and her ilk would have pronounced ‘lots of’?
100,000 electric buses
Gamecock welcomes the new ‘electric buses’ metric.
Indeed. I wonder how many Wales’s they would cover or perhaps football pitches (association, not NFL).