What Cobalt Is Actually Used For: Batteries, Then Everything Else
EV batteries consume 43 percent of cobalt demand, with portable batteries adding 27 percent, making cobalt overwhelmingly a battery metal today.
Cobalt’s demand profile has shifted more dramatically toward a single end use than almost any other industrial metal, a change that reshapes how supply disruptions actually bite.
EV batteries
Cathode stabiliser in NMC and NCA chemistries, suppressing cation mixing and oxygen release during fast charging. Covered in depth on the materials science page.
Portable batteries
Laptops, phones, power tools, and other consumer electronics, the original lithium-ion cobalt market before EVs overtook it.
Superalloys
Jet engine and gas turbine components exposed to extreme heat. No mature substitute exists for this use, unlike the battery share above.
Hard materials & carbides
The cobalt binder phase in cemented tungsten carbide cutting tools and drill bits. Covered on the mechanics page.
Catalysts & chemicals
Petroleum refining catalysts and specialty chemical production, an older industrial use that predates the battery era.
Pigments & other
Ceramics, glass colourants, and a long tail of smaller industrial uses.
The current breakdown
According to the Cobalt Institute’s 2024 figures, EV batteries account for roughly 43 percent of global cobalt demand, and portable and other batteries (laptops, phones, power tools) add a further 27 percent, meaning battery applications together consume around 70 percent of all cobalt produced. Superalloys, used in jet engine and gas turbine components for their high-temperature strength, take roughly 12 percent. Hard materials and cutting tool carbides account for about 7 percent, catalysts and chemicals roughly 6 percent, with the remainder split across smaller industrial and pigment uses.
Why the cathode chemistry matters here
Cobalt’s role inside an EV battery is specifically as a cathode stabiliser, most commonly in NMC (nickel-manganese-cobalt) and NCA (nickel-cobalt-aluminium) chemistries covered on this material’s materials science page, where it suppresses the structural degradation that would otherwise occur during repeated charge cycles. Battery manufacturers have real economic and technical incentive to reduce the cobalt fraction in these chemistries, and lower-cobalt and cobalt-free formulations such as LFP (lithium iron phosphate) have taken meaningful EV market share, particularly in China, a real and ongoing substitution pressure that this material’s economics page covers in more depth.
Superalloys are a smaller but strategically distinct use
Cobalt-based superalloys in aerospace and power generation turbines represent a comparatively small share of total demand but carry outsized strategic weight, since there is no substitute material qualified for many of these high-temperature applications, meaning aerospace-grade cobalt supply is far less substitutable than the battery-grade share of demand, even though it is the smaller number.
Sources: end-use shares reference this project’s own verified demand data (Cobalt Institute 2024).