The battery of a tesla model s, for. The increasing shift to clean energy and electric cars and trucks is spurring major investments in supply chains for materials like lithium, cobalt, and nickel. $173 trillion will be. The future of electric cars may depend on mining critically important metals on the ocean floor. Current technology for electric car batteries require cobalt, thought to be. Conservationists were quick to suspect ioneer, an australian firm that wants to mine the lithium that lies beneath the flowers for use in electric vehicle (ev) batteries. T&e found that only about 30 kilograms of metals would be lost after recycling in an electric car battery pack. A quarter of that, according to a february 2018 article on phys. org, is used for electric car batteries. In other words, only about 10% of all cobalt produced globally is used in. Before the battery production process, you have to produce the components of the batteries, like the cathodes, and you have to create the compounds that go into the cathodes.