The size of the fall
A kilowatt hour is the unit that measures how much energy a battery can store. Cobalt is a metal used inside the cathode, the part of a battery that stores its energy while the battery is charged. The Cobalt Institute, a trade group representing companies that mine and sell the metal, tracks the weighted average amount of cobalt used for every kilowatt hour of battery made worldwide, a figure weighted toward whichever cathode chemistry manufacturers actually used the most that year. That figure fell from 0.59 kilograms per kilowatt hour in 2015 to 0.24 in 2021 and 0.16 in 2022, a fall of about 73%, a MAOWCE calculation from those 2 Cobalt Institute figures.
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| 2015 | 0.59 |
| 2021 | 0.24 |
| 2022 | 0.16 |
Why manufacturers used less
The fall happened because manufacturers changed the chemistry, meaning the specific mix of metals, used inside the cathode. In 2015, 94% of all cobalt used in batteries went into lithium cobalt oxide, the cathode chemistry with the most cobalt in it, according to the Cobalt Institute. By 2022 that share had fallen to 46%, as manufacturers shifted toward nickel heavy chemistries that use less cobalt and toward lithium iron phosphate, which uses none. The European Commission Joint Research Centre found that in 2017 a lithium cobalt oxide cathode was 60% cobalt by weight, while a nickel cobalt aluminium cathode used in electric vehicles that year held only 10% to 15%, and lithium iron phosphate held none. Among electric vehicle cathodes specifically in 2017, the highest cobalt chemistry in use, called NMC 111, was 30% cobalt by weight and held 42% of electric vehicle cathode demand that year, while cobalt free lithium iron phosphate already held 24% of that same demand.
NMC and NCA name the metals in the cathode, nickel, manganese, cobalt, and nickel, cobalt, aluminium. LFP is lithium iron phosphate, which uses no cobalt at all.
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| NMC 111 | 30 |
| NMC 433 | 27 |
| NMC 532 | 18 |
| NCA | 14 |
| LFP | 0 |
It kept falling in 2024
The United States Department of Energy, a federal agency, states that an electric vehicle battery pack can hold up to 20 kilograms of cobalt in every 100 kilowatt hours of capacity, and that cobalt can make up to 20% of the weight of the cathode. Adamas Intelligence, a market research firm that tracks battery sales, found the average electric vehicle sold worldwide in 2024 contained 2.5 kilograms of cobalt, 13% less than in 2023. A battery electric vehicle, a car powered only by its battery, averaged 4.0 kilograms, down 14%. A plug in hybrid, a car with both a battery and a fuel engine that can also be charged from an outlet, averaged 2.2 kilograms. A regular hybrid, which cannot be plugged in, averaged just 0.3 kilograms.
BEV is battery electric vehicle, PHEV is plug in hybrid, HEV is a regular hybrid that cannot be plugged in.
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| BEV | 4.0 |
| PHEV | 2.2 |
| HEV | 0.3 |
| All EVs weighted average | 2.5 |
Not a solved problem
A study published in Nature Communications modeled the newest low cobalt chemistries, including one called NMC 955, at around 0.05 kilograms per kilowatt hour from 2020 onward, well below the sector average. The same study cautions that improving battery chemistry and recycling old batteries will not, on their own, close a future gap between how much cobalt the world will need and how much will be available.