I would like to know the state of cobalt on the earth in the year 2100, but I hear that it might run out in 2025 or 2030. Cobalt is used to make electronic components. In a world where most of the countries work with renewable energy it is used to create batteries.
Since for my story cobalt is the key element I need this information, or should I ignore this fact and pretend that there will be cobalt available in the near future?
Space travel is not a possibility.
The DRC has enough cobalt to maintain current output for 30 years, and has about 50% of the world's known convenient cobalt reserves (source: ‘Peak’ cobalt is not on the horizon – S&P’s Global Market Intelligence). About a third of the remaining reserves are in Australia (source: Top Cobalt Reserves by Country). That gives perhaps 60 years at current output, though that only takes you up to the 2080s.
It is awkward to find information on unconventional cobalt sources, but such things almost certainly exist because cobalt isn't vanishingly rare, after all. Given a strong enough economic incentive, exploitation of more expensive and less convenient cobalt reserves, and more aggressive reclamation and recycling of existing cobalt, would become viable.
Notably, current estimates of cobalt reserves only look at continental deposits. There's almost certainly an awful lot of all sorts of valuable minerals at deep sea sites, cobalt included. As there isn't currently a good survey of deep ocean mineral deposits, there can be as little or as much of them in your story as you need, and they can be as easy (or environmentally sound) to exploit in your future setting as you want.
Cobalt is used to make electronic component. In a world where most of the country works with renewable energy is used to create batteries.
That's true now, but it won't necessarily hold true for the next 80 years, especially in the face of vanishing reserves of critical strategic metals.
What's more likely is that alternative materials and technologies will arise that will use other materials that are more readily available and reasonably priced. Such things are already on the way, but they're not quite economically viable yet due to the current availability of the problem materials.
Since for my story Cobalt is the key element i need this information, or should i ignore this fact and pretend that there will be cobalt avilable in the near future?
Do you need cobalt to be scarce to drive your plot? Great! There's a reasonable chance it will be! Would you like your setting to work even in the absence of cobalt? That's fine too! There are plenty of alternative technologies that are either being developed now or will plausibly arise over the next eighty years.
Whichever you want
Writing a story about cobalt? About damn time!
Writing a story about cobalt shortages? Make sure to mention cobalt running out!
Writing a story about cobalt but not centered on the shortages? Choose whichever works best for the story.
Want them to run out of cobalt? Simply declare that the cobalt ran out.
Want them to have loads of cobalt? Simply declare they found other materials to replace it. Things that used to be of cobalt are now made of other stuff. Or they stopped using the cobalt things, and now use other sorts of things.
Or declare they found a bunch more cobalt somewhere. Or they started recycling it. For example if you return your old toasters or batteries to the supermarket they will give you a few dollarydoos.
By the way what do batteries have to do with renewable energy?
In 100 years no metal will actually be that scarce.
Asteroid mining will unlock an almost infinite supply of raw materials for several centuries.
However, even if you don't believe in asteroid mining or don't want to make your people go to space, cobalt is both recyclable (so once extracted you can keep using it forever) and there are huge amounts of it on earth. Another answer has some data about current reserves but on top of that the oceans hide like 10x more (and probably even more that we haven't found yet).
https://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-3/mineral-resources/cobalt-crusts/
https://www.isa.org.jm/files/documents/EN/Brochures/ENG9.pdf
In general, when you read articles saying that we are "running out of x" the claim is mostly poorly based and it's being fueled either by ignorance or by someone's pockets.
The only valid point is about the price per unit which goes up as we keeping extracting said material but when there's demand supply will follow, eventually.
In any case, if it's fiction you can simply ignore reality and make it be whatever you want.
I'd like to make it clear though that by publishing a story where cobalt is scarce, and that scarcity causes problems to humans, you will be part of the problem as cobalt is currently being used by certain people and political parties for lots and lots of fearmongering.
If you insist on cobalt please use accurate data (ie not scarce) or focus on some other metal that people don't use to attack EVs, batteries, renewables, etc.
Gold is a good candidate. It's actually super useful as it's inside almost every single electronic device and it's orders of magnitude more problematic than cobalt (morally speaking).
