Got Lithium? Warren Buffett Does -- But Does He Have Cobalt? January 21, 2019

Link at The Financial Times.

Bottom line: Warren Buffett now "guarantees" the US car industry will have enough lithium for EVs. This is really quite amazing.

From the linked story:

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has made a move into lithium, holding talks over an agreement to allow extraction of the battery mineral from its geothermal wells in California. 

The venture hopes to produce up to 90,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate a year from Berkshire’s Salton Sea geothermal plants, worth $1.5 billion at current prices. It has been in discussions to supply Tesla with lithium, a component for batteries to power electric cars, said people familiar with the company. If successful, the project could offer US carmakers and battery producers a secure supply of the metal, reducing reliance on the handful of large producers in Chile and Australia. 

The only current US supply comes from the Silver Peak mine in Nevada, run by Albemarle.

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From a google search:

Open book exams allow you to take notes, texts or resource materials into an exam situation. They test your ability to find and apply information and knowledge, so are often used in subjects requiring direct reference to written materials, like law statutes, statistics or acts of parliament.

Read disclaimer again.

Now cobalt. See this over at Bloomberg.

The man strolled over to unlock the doors, revealing hundreds of orange and blue drums piled four-high on pallets. Each container was full of chunks of cobalt, a formerly obscure, unwanted metal that got its name from the German kobold, or “goblin,” because it vexed medieval miners who, trying to extract more valuable substances from its ore, were instead rewarded with worthless powder or toxic gas.

It’s lately become highly valuable because it prevents the lithium-ion batteries found in mobile phones and electric cars from overheating and bursting into flames. Cobalt’s value surged more than 300 percent from 2016 to its 2018 high, reaching a record of almost $100,000 a ton.