While Chinese companies are stepping up their DRC, other countries' ore suppliers are actively building or exploring new projects. Eurasian resources with an annual output of 14,000 tons of RTR project started construction in February this year, is expected to officially put into operation in 2019.
As of 2016, the world's proven cobalt reserves of 700 million tons, the current annual production of cobalt is about 120,000 tons, according to the 2016 reserves and mining point of view, cobalt can be mined for 58 years, the static mining years Than copper (copper static recoverable life of 38 years) for about 20 years, more lead is more than 3 times the lead mining time, in colored products in a high position.
Whether it is the existing mining years of cobalt, is now under construction and exploration of the project, or the ocean and other places of the prospective reserves, cobalt resources are far from scarce. Moreover, from the Congo (gold) the existence of grasping the reality of this point of view, Congo (gold) cobalt ore exploration is still inadequate, cobalt exploration potential is still great.
Cobalt upstream raw materials mining and smelting countries in the middle of the existence of greater access. Finland, Belgium and other countries, although there is no cobalt ore, but have a certain size of the smelting capacity, and resource-rich Congo (gold) to provide refined production negligible.
At present, China is the world's largest producer of cobalt smelting. In 2015, China's cobalt smelting production accounted for 49.66% of global production, while in the early 21st century this accounted for only 4%. Over the past 10 years, in addition to 2011 and 2012 by the supply and demand imbalance, the impact of falling cobalt prices, domestic cobalt production growth rate is negative, the rest of the year growth rate remained at more than 10% level.
