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rbut

It would have been nice to provide a source to back up this argument. So I looked it up.

4% of global cobalt use is used by refineries. 62% of global cobalt use is for EVs, and growing.

[1] https://www.perplexity.ai/search/How-much-cobalt-5scBTFEHRym...

[2] https://www.perplexity.ai/search/How-much-cobalt-5scBTFEHRym...

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You’ve posted this like it’s some kind of “gotcha” but I’m failing to see why. (Most) People who complain about EV cobalt use don’t actually care about it, or they would have complained about other uses before EVs were a thing.

Some people did genuinely care before, but we are really talking about the current anti-EV movement and their list of “Bingo” talking points.

When you point out alternative battery chemistries that don’t use cobalt as a viable alternative to both NMC EVs and ICE vehicles, they move on to some other anti-EV talking point they’ve been taught. My point still stands. It was never about the cobalt.

I didn't read it as a gotcha, but more of a reinforcing the point you made. Maybe the low 4% is being taken as "yeah but not really"? I know nothing about petroleum refining, so hearing cobalt was used was interesting to me, and then someone else provided more info.

> So I looked it up.

Note that the links you provided are not primary sources. They rely on this one tweet as the primary source. https://twitter.com/siddharthkara/status/1612587425087524864

Yeah, it was my impression the last time I looked into this that cobalt was a rather worthless element. Part of the reason for the terrible mining conditions isn't that cobalt is all that rare, but rather that it's not all that useful so you don't see a lot of need for industrial cobalt mining operations.

Because of it's relative uselessness and worthlessness, cobalt mines were shutdown. It's only semi-recently that there's been talks of turning the lights back on. Like in this mine [1]

[1] https://jervoisidahocobalt.com/

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