Cobalt is a shiny, silvery-gray metal that is heavily used within advanced electronic manufacturing and industrial applications, particularly within most portable batteries and superalloys used to make gas turbines. The metal’s scarcity and geographical concentration continues to create problems for manufacturers, as it has done throughout history. It has also historically been used to create a deep blue pigmentation, something surprisingly rare in nature. Throughout the last year, the price of cobalt metal, has followed other metals like lithium and nickel in having periods of extreme volatility. The price of cobalt has always been volatile because of its extreme scarcity and comparatively low volume output, with an abundance of only 25 parts per million (ppm) in the earth’s crust, compared…