Cobalt

[rainbow]

We had a guy who went to get a PhD in the middle of his industrial career. Then he came back. All his work had been on electrochemistry for his degree. He would do some of it in the lab on small scale, but was never able to scale up any. As tricky as it is to handle, we preferred to use stuff like hydrogen for organic chemistry.

Probably making Ecstasy on the side.

[rainbow]

"The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) currently produces 63% of the world's cobalt. This market share may reach 73% by 2025 if planned expansions by mining producers like Glencore Plc take place as expected. But by 2030, global demand could be 47 times more than it was in 2017, Bloomberg New Energy Finance has estimated."

refining is tedious:
If purifying by electrolysis, an aqueous sulfate solution at 50 to 70 °C is usually used with a lead anode (corrosion products from which will not contaminate the cobalt oxy-hydroxide (CoOOH) electrolyte solution) and a stainless steel cathode which will allow for the easy removal of the deposited cobalt.[5] Electro refining in a chloride or sulfate medium at −0.3 V will make a cathode coating of 99.98% cobalt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt

Cobalt recovery is trivial. The biggest hydromet problems are uranium, cadmium, zinc, manganese, copper and nickel.
Our group of bright young things has found an easy, environmentally friendly way to solve all of these. Patents pending, I can say no more.

Patent granted. Recovering cobalt from used lithium ion batteries at 30% of the cost of mining.

[Svartalf]

great news

[JimC]

[macdoc]

refining is tedious:
If purifying by electrolysis, an aqueous sulfate solution at 50 to 70 °C is usually used with a lead anode (corrosion products from which will not contaminate the cobalt oxy-hydroxide (CoOOH) electrolyte solution) and a stainless steel cathode which will allow for the easy removal of the deposited cobalt.[5] Electro refining in a chloride or sulfate medium at −0.3 V will make a cathode coating of 99.98% cobalt.

I did that when I was in uni for a summer job ...prepared the liquor solution which involved lighting the century old sulphur furnace by hand.
Put on oxygen mask, light a sliver of wood, stick your hand and head inside the furnace and light the molten sulphur.

The liquor was in big tanks and slabs of mahogany were dropped into the tanks and high amperage electricity run through the tanks. The various metals would plate with high purity and then we would lift them out and scrape the high purity deposits off.
Working in 100F heat lifting those plates took two of us....was never so fit in my life...before or since.
Once in a while the tank would short out and an indoor Tstorm would result.
The air was full of chlorine gas so you had you mask around your neck all the time.
The "new" factory was 40 years in the 1960s and the original factory back to the 1890s or so.

My dad worked there for 31 years and only missed one day of work. He lived to 95 still alert and driving legally.
Such a dangerous place.
I got a look at why unions were so important at the time to protect the workers from those conditions.
I was working first day across from the blast furnace about 50 meters away as the ore raw ore poured out white hot, and as it slowly rotated in slabs on a huge turnable to us we would need to put large bolts into the slab to allow hoisting into the tanks to refine the nickel by electroplating.
They gave us heavy leather gloves that we dunked in water, grabbed a bolt and attached it to the still red hot slab..if you were slow, the back of the gloves would light on fire.... ...dunk the gloves to put it out and the next guy would try.
60 years later the first day sticks in my memory.

Workers welcomed honest unions that replaced the very corrupt ones. Dad told me about having to pay the his boss $5 a week to keep his job ....1/4 of his pay.

Every three months an armoured truck would show up with guards and load in a very heavy small barrel worth at the time $800,000 load with precious metals that started at platinum...once the nicket and then the cobalt had been removed they ran a new solution of sulphuric acid through the tanks and gradually it concentrated down to the material in the little but very heavy barrel. Dozens of high atomic weight metals sent away for further processing....that little barrel would be worth many millions now.

Fortunately cobalt and other strategic minerals are no longer needed for big batteries. Common materials are now in use and I expect to see the first vehicles with them be available in dealers by the end of the year.
These batteries will cost only 10% of lithium based batteries. Serious disruptor in the works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-io ... battery%20(NIB,sodium%20as%20the%20intercalating%20ion.

Catl is the largest battery manufacturer in the world and new batteries are now in commercial production.
Exciting times