Acid battery rain
Once upon a time, some people decided it would be a swell idea to generate electricity from sources that were not directly extracted from the ground. Then they decided it would be an even more swell idea to electrify everything that could possibly be electrified. To save the planet. Then a war broke out. The people who wanted to save to planet made a heartbreaking discovery: their plans very much depended on things extracted from the ground and, horror of horrors, a certain byproduct of their processing.
I wrote about the sulphur crunch two months ago in what was a general overview of the brewing crisis in global supply chains featuring sulphur, which is most of them, it appears. Today, I’d like to zoom in on sulphur use in batteries specifically because in times of trouble we should look for fun wherever we can find it.
“The phosphate market was already constrained before the war because of rising demand for sulphur in other industries such as battery metals processing,” the Financial Times noted in a recent report on the devastation looming over the fertiliser industry.
Sulphur, inquisitive minds would know, is used extensively in all sorts of metals processing but notably in the processing of copper, nickel, and cobalt. With the growth in demand for these battery metals, demand for sulphur has also grown. And we know what happened with supply from the world’s biggest export region earlier this year. The transition can’t catch a break these days, can it?
