The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) supplies most of the world’s cobalt, but exporting semi-finished or finished products rather than raw materials would better help the country capture the value of the metal used in high power lithium-ion batteries.
A new report has found that the export of raw materials is not economically beneficial to the DRC and other countries with significant resources in the long-term, compared to exporting products like battery cathode precursor materials. At present, nearly all of the DRC’s cobalt capacity is exported to Europe and China for processing.
Not only that, but it would actually be cheaper to build manufacturing facilities for battery cathode precursor materials in the DRC than in the US, China and Poland and would have less intensity of carbon dioxide emissions.
In a new study, ‘The cost of producing battery precursors in the DRC,’ analysts from BloombergNEF found that at a calculated cost of about US$39 million, it could be three times cheaper to build a 10,000 metric tonne cathode precursor plant in the African country — which currently supplies about 70% of the cobalt used in global lithium-ion batteries — than in the US.
It would be more than twice as expensive to do so in China and about US$25 million more expensive in Poland. With the DRC largely using hydroelectric power, a new supply chain involving precursor materials made there would reduce emissions associated with battery production by about 30% from existing supply...
Read Full Story: https://www.energy-storage.news/drc-can-get-better-value-for-cobalt-by-processing-rather-than-exporting-raw-materials/
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