RE: not new and not for greta2 Feb 2021 01:02
Just looking at the article rather than the 'he said she said' stuff that followed:
1. The article was in wired magazine, I actually subscribe to wired as I was once a techy. Its not known for its engineering or science content, the article bears this out. It is poorly researched, many of the points in it are inaccurate and written to titilate rather than educate.
2. The word 'Nickel' is contained only once in the article, and then only to say its in short supply. It does make it kind of irrelevant for a company primarily targeting nickel production for stainless steel although admittedly we all hype up the Li Ion battery drivers. Lithium is dirty and expensive to extract, but even here the latest mines in Nevada are trying to use much more sustainable techniques. But we aren't a Lithium miner.
3. However we are a Cobalt as well as Nickel company (and Keiserite come to that). The paragraph in the article containing nickel and cobalt is:
"Two other key ingredients, cobalt and nickel, are more in danger of creating a bottleneck in the move towards electric vehicles, and at a potentially huge environmental cost. Cobalt is found in huge quantities right across the Democratic Republic of Congo and central Africa, and hardly anywhere else. The price has quadrupled in the last two years.
Unlike most metals, which are not toxic when they’re pulled from the ground as metal ores, cobalt is “uniquely terrible,” according to Gleb Yushin, chief technical officer and founder of battery materials company Sila Nanotechnologies.
“One of the biggest challenges with cobalt is that it’s located in one country,” he adds. You can literally just dig up the land and find cobalt, so there’s a very strong motivation to dig it up and sell it, and a a result there’s a lot of motivation for unsafe and unethical behaviour.” The Congo is home to ‘artisanal mines’, where cobalt is extracted from the ground by hand, often using child labour, without protective equipment."
OK it is not located in one country obviously, or HZM wouldn't have found any in Brazil. I accept the majority of current production does come from DRC, that actually is likely to make HZM Brazilian Cobalt more valuable rather than less. We are not planning on child labour either. The newest battery tech is reducing or even breaking the dependency on Cobalt, with Tesla and others forecasting eliminating it in the 90% Ni batteries. No mention of Nickel mining techniques but they must 'be bad'.
4. The title likely provoked some of the reaction. Not for Greta implies that Li Ion battery production wouldn't be approved of by Greta Thunberg. I don't know if she would or wouldn't approve. Mining anything means digging a hole in mother earth and pulling something out against her will. Its a dirty and energy consuming business, but the alternative is to revert to a pre-industrial rural idyll where everyone rides horses. Watch the methane levels from all those animals.
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