Energy & Green Tech
Spent lithium-ion batteries contain valuable metals that are difficult to separate from each other for recycling purposes. Used batteries present a sustainable source of these metals, especially cobalt and nickel, but the ...
Nov 15, 2021
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Energy & Green Tech
In our future electrified world, the demand for battery storage is projected to be enormous, reaching to upwards of 2 to 10 terawatt-hours (TWh) of annual battery production by 2030, from less than 0.5 TWh today. However, ...
Jun 23, 2021
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Energy & Green Tech
The proliferation of electric cars, smartphones, and portable devices is leading to an estimated 25 percent increase globally in the manufacturing of rechargeable batteries each year. Many raw materials used in the batteries, ...
Apr 29, 2021
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Energy & Green Tech
Many automotive companies worldwide are currently investing in the development of electric vehicles, which could help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Electric vehicles require large rechargeable batteries that exhibit ...
Energy & Green Tech
For decades, researchers have looked for ways to eliminate cobalt from the high-energy batteries that power electronic devices, due to its high cost and the human rights ramifications of its mining. But past attempts haven't ...
Jul 15, 2020
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627
Energy & Green Tech
Greater use of electric vehicles might be good for the environment, but further growth hinges on continued availability of critical battery components such as cobalt. Cell phones and other electronics also depend on the element's ...
Feb 19, 2020
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Energy & Green Tech
Lithium-based batteries are used to power most existing electric vehicles, yet the amount of time they can keep a vehicle going before they need to be recharged is still somewhat limited. In the future, high-nickel layered ...
Business
Cobalt hit the headlines Wednesday after Glencore shut a key African facility that mines the rare metal—and blamed prices that have been tumbling from highs seen in recent years on battery demand.
Aug 7, 2019
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Energy & Green Tech
Li-Cycle was little more than a drawing on the back of a napkin in a Yorkville coffee shop three years ago. Today, the startup founded by University of Toronto alumni is on the verge of an international expansion that its ...
May 2, 2019
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48
Energy & Green Tech
Rice University researchers literally have a solution to deal with the glut of used lithium-ion batteries left behind by the ever-increasing demand for electric vehicles, cellphones and other electronic devices.
Apr 1, 2019
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Cobalt ( /ˈkoʊbɒlt/ or /ˈkoʊbɔːlt/) is a chemical element with symbol Co and atomic number 27. It is found naturally only in chemically combined form. The free element, produced by reductive smelting, is a hard, lustrous, silver-gray metal.
Cobalt-based blue pigments have been used since ancient times for jewelry and paints, and to impart a distinctive blue tint to glass, but the color was later thought by alchemists to be due to the known metal bismuth. Miners had long used the name kobold ore (German for goblin ore) for some of the blue-pigment producing minerals; they were named because they were poor in known metals and gave poisonous arsenic-containing fumes upon smelting. In 1735, such ores were found to be reducible to a new metal (the first discovered since ancient times), and this was ultimately named for the kobold.
Nowadays, some cobalt is produced specifically from various metallic-lustered ores, for example cobaltite (CoAsS), but the main source of the element is as a by-product of copper and nickel mining. The copper belt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia yields most of the cobalt metal mined worldwide.
Cobalt is used in the preparation of magnetic, wear-resistant and high-strength alloys. Cobalt silicate and cobalt(II) aluminate (CoAl2O4, cobalt blue) give a distinctive deep blue color to glass, smalt, ceramics, inks, paints and varnishes. Cobalt occurs naturally as only one stable isotope, cobalt-59. Cobalt-60 is a commercially important radioisotope, used as a radioactive tracer and in the production of gamma rays.
Cobalt is the active center of coenzymes called cobalamin or vitamin B12, and is an essential trace element for all animals. Cobalt is also an active nutrient for bacteria, algae and fungi.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
