HardAssetsInvestor

Written by Tom Vulcan  |

October 08, 2008

Cobalt: More Than Just Blue

Details

A look at the complexity, transparency and liquidity of this minor metal's market.

• LME to debut contracts
• Health benefits for animals ... including humans
• Far-flung sources (even underwater)

 

Strangelove: Well let's see now ah, searches within his lapel cobalt thorium G. notices circular slide rule in his gloved hand aa... nn... Radioactive halflife of uh,.. hmm.. I would think that uh... possibly uh... one hundred years. On finishing his calculations, he pulls the slide rule roughly from his gloved hand, and returns it to within his jacket.

—Dr. Strangelove: or, How I learned to stop worrying and learned to love the bomb

 

For Dr. Stangelove, Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, Air Force General "Buck" Turgidson and all others in the film, the Soviet cobalt/thorium bomb - the Doomsday Bomb - had the potential to wipe out all life on Earth as we know it.

While the film may be a comedy, granted a very dark comedy, for we small and worried boys growing up in late '50s and '60s Europe, in our dark moments the cobalt bomb (first hypothesized by the physicist Leo Szilard in the late '50s) was anything but comic.

Little did we know that, while theoretically possible, in practical terms such a bomb would require unrealistically huge amounts of cobalt to work: It would have to be some two and a half times as heavy as the battleship Missouri!

Now, along with molybdenum, the London Metal Exchange (LME) is proposing to introduce contracts in cobalt on the exchange in the second half of 2009. This is quite a development for a metal for which the total output in 1916 was only some 554 tonnes, of which 400 tonnes were oxides to be used in colorings; for example, cobalt blue.

 

Cobalt Now

Cobalt has come a long way both from being produced in such small quantities and used so narrowly.

Cobalt is now used in myriad different ways...

 

Source: CDI

 

...and is produced in significantly larger quantities. Last year, according to the Cobalt Development Institute (CDI) in the U.K., excluding cobalt from companies that produce it by treating various cobalt-containing intermediate products and scrap but do not report their numbers to the CDI, total refined cobalt availability was some 53,723 tonnes. (This figure includes the delivery of some 617 tonnes of cobalt by the U.S. Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) from the country's National Defense Stockpile.)

 

 

Demand for the year, according to a presentation given by Roskill Information Services (Roskill) at the CDI cobalt conference in Toronto this May, was some 58,900 tonnes. Demand was, primarily, for its use in batteries and superalloys, followed equally by that in hard metals and catalysts.

 

Source: Roskill Information Services

 

Some Important Cobalt Uses

Health

Because of its central place in cobalamin, or Vitamin B₁₂, cobalt is vital to most animals - including humans. Whereas the likes of cattle and sheep can get their cobalt through such means as licks, cobalt "bullets" and the addition of cobalt to the soil (a concentration of some 0.13 to 0.30 mg/kg will perk up the health of grazing animals no end), humans cannot just eat it. We have to get it from animals, dairy products or leguminous veggies: a lack of Vitamin B₁₂ in both animals and man can lead to anemia.

Some other uses of cobalt in the health field include as an antidote to cyanide poisoning, as an alloy used in prosthetics (for example, artificial hip and knee joints), for sterilizing medical supplies and food, for radiotherapy of cancers and, finally, in the magnets used in MRI and CAT scanners.

 

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