The oil crisis was real though. If it wasn't for the growth in supply from unconventional oil in the past 10 years, today's oil price would be over $150/barrel.
Don't bother, these are the same people who see (or don't see) herculean feats made to thwart things like Y2K, oil shortages, or the forestalling of climate change and say to themselves, "Aha, I was right - there was no catastrophe at all. Those fools, scurrying around spending tons of effort and money!"
But that's precisely the mechanism by which supply crises are resolved. A shortage leads to a sharp rise in the price of the material, which creates a profit opportunity for the development of unconventional supplies. The increased supply then resolves the crisis.
You can't assume the lack of innovation when our whole economic system is built to encourage innovation where most needed.
You cannot even assume that innovation can automatically fix supply issues: unconventional oil extraction is possible because unconventional oil is there in the first place. This might not happen with other minerals.
The great thing about capitalism is that it's agnostic about the solution, though. If the unconventional oil isn't there, there's a strong incentive to develop other energy sources like solar.
The previous energy crisis - Peak Whale Oil - was resolved that way. We didn't end up discovering a new source or species of whales. Instead, we found that this 300M year old black gunk that comes out of the ground could be refined into all the products that we used whale blubber for, plus several others. And there was much more of it available, and it took a lot less labor.
Very good, as long as it works. There have been cases in the past when people did not find the innovation they needed at some point, and have experienced extinction or close extinction. I would like to not risk that again, also because that would be the first time where the extinction risks to be global, not just local.
I liked very muche Collapse by Jared Diamond. He discusses some cases of this type, starting from the iconic history of Easter Island.
Those are both nonrenewable, use-once resources with fixed (on human timescales) supplies.
Metals are different; they're not really consumed, just tied up in manufactured products during the life of that product. After the product's lifespan, they can be reused. Different calculation entirely.
Why isn't a electric road or a overhead third rail a viable alternative to batteries? Batteries - become depleted, are expensive, heavy. With a grid - unlimited range, that can be supplemented by smaller batteries. Are there technical limitations more than cost.
There is no technical reason why it can't be done[1], it isn't without its challenges though; How would you deal with the fact that roads are used by vehicles with wildly different heights? What about underpasses, is there enough space to fit the overhead wires? You would also need to make sure that vehicles in one place can connect to the grid on other places. It seems like overhead wires will probably be the best solution, but will only be implemented on highways for use on freight vehicles, not on cities or for personal vehicles.
Ground level power supply systems also exist[2], but would require you to tear up the entire road network in order to implement them, are expensive, and apparently prone to water clogging (which could perhaps be mitigated) without mentioning the fact that they would probably require either an autonomous or guided vehicle in order to reliably maintain contact with the rail.
So, not really, the limitations are mostly about cost and political capital.
Your first point is already dealt with by electric railroads that run different height trains -- the wires are set at a level that the tallest train can fit under, and shorter trains have a higher pantograph to reach the wires. And since the pantograph is flexible, it can deal with varying wire heights.
Gaps in the wire for intersections and underpasses could be handled by having small battery packs in the cars. This also helps with the last-mile -- only large arterial roads need to be electrified and cars could drive the short distance on city streets on battery power.
One solution for in-road charging would be wireless inductive chargers like:
Though as you say, the real problems are price and politics. In the SF Bay Area, Caltrain has taken decades to get funding for electrification and has faced a lot of resistance from some communities for the construction and visual blight of overhead electrification. And that's just for one set of tracks, electrifying all of the freeways would be much worse.
Well, that was not really my point about height, I was just drawing attention at how ridiculous it would be to see, for example, a sedan (about 1.4 meters tall) connected to an overhead wire that is any where from 2.5 to 3 meters (about the height you would need to be able to pass a swap body) in the air.
Like I said, it is technologically possible, but for most intents and purposes seems like a wonky solution, at least for personal vehicles, mass transportation and freight are completely different scenarios.
As for the other points, you are right, there are fairly straight forward solutions.
Inductive charging is definitely a good option, which has already been explored by transport companies[1]. It again seems to be that politics and money are the main barrier for implementation.
I don't think there are significant technical limitations, it's really just cost and practicality.
Trams and busses and trains have been running off overhead lines for a long time, so it clearly works.
The main issues are that it doesn't obviously scale up (i.e. it works fine for a few trams, but not necessarily for thousands of cars filled with 1-2 occupants each) and it would be very expensive to roll out widely. Especially for last mile transport, where it basically becomes infeasible. There's just too much road.
Essentially, it is a viable alternative, but only where public transport is the major form of transportation. If people are still driving thousands of cars rather than taking the bus then it's impractical.
1. It's expensive, and that cost doesn't work out when you have petroleum available as a fuel and can just carry your own energy supply around easily in a small tank under the passenger compartment. It probably still doesn't work out when you have coal, or coal-derived diesel, or vegetable-derived diesel, or "good enough" batteries, available, because those systems are simpler and don't have the funding problems (most of the cost is shifted to the user of the vehicle, which prevents the politically crippling cost of a public system).
2. When you finally designed a system, and standardized the vehicle heights and worked out all the other issues, I suspect you'd have reinvented electric trains. (Or some sort of essentially train-like system, or a system that's not advantageous enough over trains to warrant building it.)
Basically it's an idea that's pinched between existing technologies that are good enough in their current forms, and has an extremely high implementation cost. The risk-factored ROI just doesn't appear to be there.
> while demand for nickel keeps increasing, half the world’s nickel supply is too low in quality to use for car batteries.
Well that article sure disproved its own thesis quickly. If we can't even be bothered to purify cheap nickel, then we are definitely not facing a shortage.
Yeah I didn't really get it. It sounds like there's a lot of nickel, just not ... as much cheap nickel as we'd like? Or maybe as much as some people who own certain nickel mines would like? I'm not sure.
It's like any other nonrenewable resource; there's going to be an extraction cost that increases over time as the easily recovered deposits are used up.
But unlike oil, which can only be used once and is then gone forever, nickel and other metals get brought out of the earth and into circulation, and can then be used over and over. So the price of both recycled and virgin nickel will increase until demand is met.
I'm curious when it starts to become advantageous to mine old landfills for all the stuff we used to throw away and not recycle...
I am curious of that too; however, given that it does not happen yet (or, at least, so I think), I am brought to believe that it is not that easy, or at least not easier than mining ores (which still requires some degree of purification). That probably also applies to using the cheap nickel mentioned by the grandfather comment: it is not necessarily easy to purify it.
Difficult to believe. Cars are being churned day and night for decades, all of them use a lot of minerals. At least (in my understanding) the rare minerals that go into electric cars and their batteries are recyclable. Once the fleet is built, just recycle.
Of course, I'd prefer a future with electric trams in every street and fewer cars, all electric, all small and light to save in materials and energy.
In addition the "rare" materials are low in usage compared to carbon and other components for batteries. If I were to guess copper is probably of the largest concern.
What about the philosopher's stone? Surely with enough research in alchemy and Elon Musk's support, we could tweak it so that we can conjure all metals from thin air.
Deep sea mining seems more likely. The most valuable component of ferromanganese crusts, or manganese nodules, was the cobalt, even in the 1970s. More so today.
I don't think that the concept of asteroid mining is totally ridiculous, but I think it needs to be uncrewed, slow, with low delta-v. So even if you had a target asteroid and a robotic mining system all ready to go today, the products wouldn't reach terrestrial markets before a couple more decades passed.
Every article I see on modern transport problems reminds me that I can't understand why we don't have more public infrastructure invested for cyclists?
It really seems like the lowest hanging fruit, but there is not enough profit-motive or politcal incentive to really push it forward?
I would love to bike to work and take a shower on arrival--daily exercise that I need anyways, avoids stress & danger of driving, feels great to do. It's also a lot better for the environment than electric cars, and saves me a lot of time.
It could help with congestion, pollution, obesity, healthcare costs, and possibly improve social morale.
I really think it is an issue where no business or politician has enough incentive/ability to capture profit, so it doesn't ever get much traction, but the public benefit is quite large.
From what I understand Holland's bike infrastructure is seen as a gold-standard among transportation economists on how to reduce congestion and pollution--no?
There are people who don't know how to ride the bike. Shocking, I know, it was for me too. It might work in SoCal, but in temperate climates in winter, biking through ice, snow, and sludge is a non-starter for most. I, personally, don't do it during the summer either, because I sweat a lot and there is no shower at my workplace. Bikes get stolen all the time. The bikes stationed throughout the city for rent are heavy, with low centre of gravity and have only 3 gears.
Reasons why there isn't more public infrastructure for cyclists:
1) someone has to pay for it
2) it gets in the way of my car
That's it.
Seriously. It's no more complicated than that. I have watched bike lanes make their way into major cities and those are literally the only stumbling blocks. But really it's just #2.
I don't know why people are downvoting this. I know the people who fought for 6 years to get one cycle track in Baltimore. Residents are still fighting it because it made them drive less fast and park differently.
Anecdata: a few years ago I was at a party hosted by an acquaintance who's a town planner. He'd invited a bunch of his town planner workmates. I asked each of them if they owned a bicycle. None of them did. They all had luxury marque cars, paid for by the state.
Exactly that! When the street will be congested with a lot of bikes then things will change. Right now people prefer cars even if it is bad for them for multiple reasons.
In most of the US, enough parts of the ear are too snowy, too rainy, or too hot for biking that relying on a bike as a primary method of commuting is non-viable; you need a car or nearby public transportation. And since you need to have a car or nearby public transportation anyway - there's not much incentive to bike at all.
Here in Germany they build a bit of bicycle infrastructure in the last years, but most of the time you see by the bad results that the planners themselves are still deeply stuck in their mind in a car-based society.
I mean, there's pages and pages to write, but basically it boils down to that. The bicycle existed before the car, will probably exist after it, but at least when cars and fuel was cheap, people preferred cars. So the infrastructure was and is built around cars. And car manufacturing, repairs, etc., are probably a trillion-dollar industry, so they are not really interested in anything that rocks the boat, and influence the political process to try and ensure this.
So on one hand you have a public that says, basically, "my car from my cold, dead hands", and on the other hand you have a giant industry which employs a significant number of Americans saying "we want to sell you those cars". It's sort of surprising there is any other transportation infrastructure at all.
It's not surprising the places you find the most alternative modes of transportation are where fewer people own cars. (E.g. NYC in particular, which I believe has the lowest rate of car ownership in the US.) There's a chicken-and-egg problem at work to get anything else funded.
Expecting the political process to lead us to a solution is, IMO, a mistake. The political process in the US lags behind public opinion by design, it does not lead (and often screws up when it tries). Public opinion needs to change first, then funding will change, and then infrastructure will change.
There’s a huge “counterparty” risk as well. That just about everyone else on the road is driving 2000+ lbs of fast moving vehicle practically ensures a bicyclist’s death in an accident. I sort of think of it as an arms race of sorts. The bigger the average vehicle the bigger you should buy your vehicle.
For many Americans, myself included, cycling is only something we can do every so often.
I lived without a car for years, and I cycled 15 miles a day for commuting/chores. I developed pretty painful patellar tendonitis, and I went to physical therapy, which helped significantly (but didn't cure the issue).
I'm lucky if I can commute 3 days a week on my bike. I love it so much, I even do it when I'm in pain. But it's not possible to do it every day for me, without serious pain.
However, I'm currently converting my bike into an e-bike :) That will make it significantly easier on my poor old man joints.
I think you are right, and I'm sorry you encountered this injury, but I would hate to see this thinking become an impediment to progress for cyclists. 15 miles at 10mph is just 1.5 hours of pretty leisurely exercise. 20mph is reasonable for a fit rider on a dedicated path with just an inexpensive steel-frame road bike.
About your pattellar tendonitis: I developed that when I was trying for an ambitious marathon goal. It took 1.5 years to go away -- in my experience nothing helped except the time. You might want to try getting off the bike for several months and picking up something else,
like swimming.
sorry about your injury, I am sure you must have, but have you tried adjusting your saddle height and riding cadence to see if they help?
I had a lot of issues with knee pain but after going to a higher cadence with a better saddle position I haven't had issues for many years even commuting 15mi a day each way every day. This said we're all different so n=1 and all that, good luck!
Weather. Weather. Weather. I know it doesn't rain or snow in California but it sure does in most of the rest of the world.
Lack of larger transportation possibilities. Yes, there are specialized transport bikes, but they still can't pack an IKEA haul and are almost as expensive as a small or used car.
Infrastructure built for cars (i.e. everything far apart).
Increased accident risk.
Not everyone being able or willing to drive.
Bikes get stolen which is super annoying.
If I already have a car for all the aforementioned reasons, a bike is an additional expense.
Don't get me wrong, I commute by bike every day there's no ice on the streets, but few others go so far, even here in Germany where the biking experience is already much better than in the US (but still a long way to go from the Netherlands).
I biked year-around in Boston. There is a lot of bad weather, and almost no bike infrastructure. Granted I love to be on my bike, and don't like the cramped Ts. I'm not saying everyone should do this, but my experience goes to show that if public infrastructure simply included some maintained bicycle paths it would be very possible.
Bike paths can be plowed in winter just like roads. It's not actually a big deal to bike when it is snowing outside. Our grandparents fought in horrific conditions. We are afraid to do almost anything without a sticker and stamp of approval.
If we are going to talk about saving the world, but no one will even think we can put on a jacket and pedal on a bicycle path, maybe we should stop and self-reflect.
Maybe we are a generation of spoiled babies. We cry and whine about global warming, pollution, inequality, injustice, but we're not really willing to break a sweat. We just say whatever is politically correct and get on with it. At some point it is worth mentioning that it's all kind of an insult to the opportunity we have been given.
Sounds kind of like how we're running out of oil -- we're definitely using up the easy to find deposits, but as oil prices rise, the less easily available oil becomes marketable, so the oil keeps coming.
Eventually we'll run out, but making it harder to find just makes it more expensive. (well, that and the political problems caused by wealthy middle eastern nations running out of their liquid gold)
Cobalt and nickel are not the only materials that can fulfill the functions they cover. There are a couple of things worth noting here:
1. "Lithium Ion" describes a family of batteries, with varying chemical compositions. As an example, the battery in the Nissan Leaf uses no cobalt in its cathode:
"It uses a different material for the cathode called lithium-manganese-oxide with nickel oxide (LiMn2O4 with LiNiO2) that is inherently safer than the lithium-cobalt-oxide cathode material"
2. There are other battery chemistries outside of the Lithium Ion family, in varying states of maturity, that could (in time) become competitive with Lithium Ion in the electric car market. To give one example:
I dont understand this phrase. It's completely incorrect usage. If demand can't be met, then the price will raise naturally until demand is met. I can guarentee that for a raw material, this is bound to happen.
I suppose they could fix it just by saying "at the current price" at the end.
Cobalt is probably not a problem. See the annual USGS report for cobalt.[1] The main problem with cobalt mining is that it's usually obtained as a by-product of nickel. So nickel demand drives cobalt supply. Direct mining for cobalt is possible but not done much yet. Right now, there's a mild cobalt oversupply, because nickel refining produces more cobalt than is really needed. This is expected to change soon.
Potential supplies in the US, Canada, and Australia are substantial.
Not a fundamental problem for the next century. Also, much cobalt is already recycled.
The current demand for high quality nickel used in batteries is very small in comparison to overall world nickel production. This will continue for the foreseeable future.
Nickel is trading at very low prices historically and most producers are losing money at current prices.
This would imply that the current supply of nickel is more than sufficient for the worlds needs and that some producers need to shut down. (Why they don’t is fascinating on its own)
Most of the worlds nickel production is low quality ferro nickel used in the production of stainless steel.
Despite this we are not seeing larger premiums for high quality nickel products which would indicate that there is more demand for high quality nickel.
High quality/ high cost nickel producers know that their only chance to survive the over supply of cheap nickel in the world is if we see the same over exuberance as which we have seen with cobalt trading in recent months.
The only problem is that nickel is a much larger market than cobalt and as such is not as susceptible to small market changes, and as the article points out nickel does not face the same geopolitical supply risk as cobalt does in the Congo.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadYou can't assume the lack of innovation when our whole economic system is built to encourage innovation where most needed.
The previous energy crisis - Peak Whale Oil - was resolved that way. We didn't end up discovering a new source or species of whales. Instead, we found that this 300M year old black gunk that comes out of the ground could be refined into all the products that we used whale blubber for, plus several others. And there was much more of it available, and it took a lot less labor.
I liked very muche Collapse by Jared Diamond. He discusses some cases of this type, starting from the iconic history of Easter Island.
I'd guess that for just about all rocks we're much closer to the easy end than we are with oil, with no real worry of running out.
Metals are different; they're not really consumed, just tied up in manufactured products during the life of that product. After the product's lifespan, they can be reused. Different calculation entirely.
https://www.geek.com/tech/musk-shares-first-image-of-boring-...
People are really underestimating the impact of lower cost tunneling.
Ground level power supply systems also exist[2], but would require you to tear up the entire road network in order to implement them, are expensive, and apparently prone to water clogging (which could perhaps be mitigated) without mentioning the fact that they would probably require either an autonomous or guided vehicle in order to reliably maintain contact with the rail.
So, not really, the limitations are mostly about cost and political capital.
[1]https://www.siemens.com/global/en/home/products/mobility/roa...
[2]http://www.alstom.com/products-services/product-catalogue/ra...
Gaps in the wire for intersections and underpasses could be handled by having small battery packs in the cars. This also helps with the last-mile -- only large arterial roads need to be electrified and cars could drive the short distance on city streets on battery power.
One solution for in-road charging would be wireless inductive chargers like:
https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/qualcomms-inductive-charg...
Though as you say, the real problems are price and politics. In the SF Bay Area, Caltrain has taken decades to get funding for electrification and has faced a lot of resistance from some communities for the construction and visual blight of overhead electrification. And that's just for one set of tracks, electrifying all of the freeways would be much worse.
Like I said, it is technologically possible, but for most intents and purposes seems like a wonky solution, at least for personal vehicles, mass transportation and freight are completely different scenarios.
As for the other points, you are right, there are fairly straight forward solutions.
Inductive charging is definitely a good option, which has already been explored by transport companies[1]. It again seems to be that politics and money are the main barrier for implementation.
[1]http://primove.bombardier.com/products/charging.html
Trams and busses and trains have been running off overhead lines for a long time, so it clearly works.
The main issues are that it doesn't obviously scale up (i.e. it works fine for a few trams, but not necessarily for thousands of cars filled with 1-2 occupants each) and it would be very expensive to roll out widely. Especially for last mile transport, where it basically becomes infeasible. There's just too much road.
Essentially, it is a viable alternative, but only where public transport is the major form of transportation. If people are still driving thousands of cars rather than taking the bus then it's impractical.
1. It's expensive, and that cost doesn't work out when you have petroleum available as a fuel and can just carry your own energy supply around easily in a small tank under the passenger compartment. It probably still doesn't work out when you have coal, or coal-derived diesel, or vegetable-derived diesel, or "good enough" batteries, available, because those systems are simpler and don't have the funding problems (most of the cost is shifted to the user of the vehicle, which prevents the politically crippling cost of a public system).
2. When you finally designed a system, and standardized the vehicle heights and worked out all the other issues, I suspect you'd have reinvented electric trains. (Or some sort of essentially train-like system, or a system that's not advantageous enough over trains to warrant building it.)
Basically it's an idea that's pinched between existing technologies that are good enough in their current forms, and has an extremely high implementation cost. The risk-factored ROI just doesn't appear to be there.
Well that article sure disproved its own thesis quickly. If we can't even be bothered to purify cheap nickel, then we are definitely not facing a shortage.
It's like any other nonrenewable resource; there's going to be an extraction cost that increases over time as the easily recovered deposits are used up.
But unlike oil, which can only be used once and is then gone forever, nickel and other metals get brought out of the earth and into circulation, and can then be used over and over. So the price of both recycled and virgin nickel will increase until demand is met.
I'm curious when it starts to become advantageous to mine old landfills for all the stuff we used to throw away and not recycle...
Of course, I'd prefer a future with electric trams in every street and fewer cars, all electric, all small and light to save in materials and energy.
Dude.
I don't think that the concept of asteroid mining is totally ridiculous, but I think it needs to be uncrewed, slow, with low delta-v. So even if you had a target asteroid and a robotic mining system all ready to go today, the products wouldn't reach terrestrial markets before a couple more decades passed.
It really seems like the lowest hanging fruit, but there is not enough profit-motive or politcal incentive to really push it forward?
I would love to bike to work and take a shower on arrival--daily exercise that I need anyways, avoids stress & danger of driving, feels great to do. It's also a lot better for the environment than electric cars, and saves me a lot of time.
It could help with congestion, pollution, obesity, healthcare costs, and possibly improve social morale.
I really think it is an issue where no business or politician has enough incentive/ability to capture profit, so it doesn't ever get much traction, but the public benefit is quite large.
From what I understand Holland's bike infrastructure is seen as a gold-standard among transportation economists on how to reduce congestion and pollution--no?
1) someone has to pay for it
2) it gets in the way of my car
That's it.
Seriously. It's no more complicated than that. I have watched bike lanes make their way into major cities and those are literally the only stumbling blocks. But really it's just #2.
I don't know why people are downvoting this. I know the people who fought for 6 years to get one cycle track in Baltimore. Residents are still fighting it because it made them drive less fast and park differently.
I mean, there's pages and pages to write, but basically it boils down to that. The bicycle existed before the car, will probably exist after it, but at least when cars and fuel was cheap, people preferred cars. So the infrastructure was and is built around cars. And car manufacturing, repairs, etc., are probably a trillion-dollar industry, so they are not really interested in anything that rocks the boat, and influence the political process to try and ensure this.
So on one hand you have a public that says, basically, "my car from my cold, dead hands", and on the other hand you have a giant industry which employs a significant number of Americans saying "we want to sell you those cars". It's sort of surprising there is any other transportation infrastructure at all.
It's not surprising the places you find the most alternative modes of transportation are where fewer people own cars. (E.g. NYC in particular, which I believe has the lowest rate of car ownership in the US.) There's a chicken-and-egg problem at work to get anything else funded.
Expecting the political process to lead us to a solution is, IMO, a mistake. The political process in the US lags behind public opinion by design, it does not lead (and often screws up when it tries). Public opinion needs to change first, then funding will change, and then infrastructure will change.
I lived without a car for years, and I cycled 15 miles a day for commuting/chores. I developed pretty painful patellar tendonitis, and I went to physical therapy, which helped significantly (but didn't cure the issue).
I'm lucky if I can commute 3 days a week on my bike. I love it so much, I even do it when I'm in pain. But it's not possible to do it every day for me, without serious pain.
However, I'm currently converting my bike into an e-bike :) That will make it significantly easier on my poor old man joints.
About your pattellar tendonitis: I developed that when I was trying for an ambitious marathon goal. It took 1.5 years to go away -- in my experience nothing helped except the time. You might want to try getting off the bike for several months and picking up something else, like swimming.
I had a lot of issues with knee pain but after going to a higher cadence with a better saddle position I haven't had issues for many years even commuting 15mi a day each way every day. This said we're all different so n=1 and all that, good luck!
Lack of larger transportation possibilities. Yes, there are specialized transport bikes, but they still can't pack an IKEA haul and are almost as expensive as a small or used car.
Infrastructure built for cars (i.e. everything far apart).
Increased accident risk.
Not everyone being able or willing to drive.
Bikes get stolen which is super annoying.
If I already have a car for all the aforementioned reasons, a bike is an additional expense.
Don't get me wrong, I commute by bike every day there's no ice on the streets, but few others go so far, even here in Germany where the biking experience is already much better than in the US (but still a long way to go from the Netherlands).
Bike paths can be plowed in winter just like roads. It's not actually a big deal to bike when it is snowing outside. Our grandparents fought in horrific conditions. We are afraid to do almost anything without a sticker and stamp of approval.
If we are going to talk about saving the world, but no one will even think we can put on a jacket and pedal on a bicycle path, maybe we should stop and self-reflect.
Maybe we are a generation of spoiled babies. We cry and whine about global warming, pollution, inequality, injustice, but we're not really willing to break a sweat. We just say whatever is politically correct and get on with it. At some point it is worth mentioning that it's all kind of an insult to the opportunity we have been given.
Eventually we'll run out, but making it harder to find just makes it more expensive. (well, that and the political problems caused by wealthy middle eastern nations running out of their liquid gold)
1. "Lithium Ion" describes a family of batteries, with varying chemical compositions. As an example, the battery in the Nissan Leaf uses no cobalt in its cathode:
https://qnovo.com/inside-the-battery-of-a-nissan-leaf/
"It uses a different material for the cathode called lithium-manganese-oxide with nickel oxide (LiMn2O4 with LiNiO2) that is inherently safer than the lithium-cobalt-oxide cathode material"
2. There are other battery chemistries outside of the Lithium Ion family, in varying states of maturity, that could (in time) become competitive with Lithium Ion in the electric car market. To give one example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium%E2%80%93air_battery
I suppose they could fix it just by saying "at the current price" at the end.
1) we use those big lines full of electricity hanging adjacent to the road to power vehicles,
2) we stop using cars
Potential supplies in the US, Canada, and Australia are substantial. Not a fundamental problem for the next century. Also, much cobalt is already recycled.
[1] https://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/cobalt/mcs...
Nickel is trading at very low prices historically and most producers are losing money at current prices.
This would imply that the current supply of nickel is more than sufficient for the worlds needs and that some producers need to shut down. (Why they don’t is fascinating on its own)
Most of the worlds nickel production is low quality ferro nickel used in the production of stainless steel.
Despite this we are not seeing larger premiums for high quality nickel products which would indicate that there is more demand for high quality nickel.
High quality/ high cost nickel producers know that their only chance to survive the over supply of cheap nickel in the world is if we see the same over exuberance as which we have seen with cobalt trading in recent months.
The only problem is that nickel is a much larger market than cobalt and as such is not as susceptible to small market changes, and as the article points out nickel does not face the same geopolitical supply risk as cobalt does in the Congo.
We are unlikely to see a shortage of Nickel.