Cobalt Series 9: Lithium Battery Waiting for Price and when will "Cobalt"

Cobalt: New bottleneck for lithium batteries: Cobalt is more widely used in current lithium battery positive electrode materials than lithium. However, cobalt contains only one-sixth of lithium in the earth's crust, and only half of lithium is mined annually. Cobalt will be a major bottleneck in the cost of lithium batteries in the medium and long term. There are two kinds of positive materials containing cobalt: lithium cobalt acid and ternary materials. The former are commonly used in mobile phones and notebook computers, and the latter are widely used in new energy vehicles.

Lithium nitrate cobalt acid from small batteries is still promising: At present, the small batteries used in mobile phones and laptops are mainly lithium cobalt. Because of their high cobalt content, they account for a large part of the annual use of cobalt. Its main advantages are structural stability, mature technology, and higher capacity. But at the same time, the high cost of cobalt is always a big problem. Lithium spinel manganese acid has been produced since 1981 and is regarded as an ideal material for replacing lithium cobalt in the future. The main reason is that the price of manganese is much lower than that of cobalt, and it is widely sought after. However, the relevant technology is still very immature, and the process of this change still takes a long time;

Power cells are climbing up the Tri-yuan material step by step to "win": the high capacity of the Tri-yuan material is its biggest highlight. At present, lithium iron phosphate is the main competition with ternary materials. Its advantage is that the cost is low, but the corresponding low capacity is that it is difficult to replace ternary materials in passenger vehicles. At present, BYD is the main producer of positive materials in China, and BYD focuses on lithium iron phosphate. The rest of the walk is a "full-blown" strategy. Refer to Japan and South Korea enterprises, its lithium battery products have been dominated by ternary materials. Taking Panasonic, the world's largest manufacturer of lithium batteries, as an example, the 18650 lithium battery supplied to Tesla uses a positive material called lithium nickel cobalt aluminate(NCA). It can be said that at present, ternary materials represent the future development direction of lithium battery positive electrode materials;

What does the downstream enterprise think of cobalt price rise: compared with lithium iron phosphate, a disadvantage of ternary materials is the cost. Despite its medium-and long-term positive development, the possibility of an excessive increase in cobalt prices has cast doubt on such expectations. In 2015, the cost of lithium battery cathode materials accounted for 30 % of the total cost of lithium batteries. In 2016, with the cost of cathode materials further increasing, battery costs will continue to rise. The capacity and demand for cobalt are different between different types of ternary materials. In the long run, the capacity of unit mass positive electrode materials will continue to increase, and the average cobalt consumption per vehicle is expected to decrease. With reference to the trend in cobalt prices since January 2005, the current cobalt price has reached a historical low, and the proportion of cobalt in the total cost of new energy vehicles is very small. Therefore, the impact of the sharp increase in cobalt prices on the downstream is not obvious. Even if cobalt prices rise by 500 %, The downstream gross profit rate has only dropped from 25 % to 19 %, and it can be said that the space for cobalt prices to rise is still very large.

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