I could nitpick over your definition of "a very large amount of cobalt is used in petroleum refining", but the fact that an EV owner creates orders of magnitude more demand for cobalt than an ICE car owner speaks for itself.
>Ice vehicle recycling is mostly focused on extracting steel and aluminium however.
What other rare earths are present in an ICE car's engine? They are almost entirely comprised of alu and steel, which is why recycling them is so easy. Platinum is also very widely extracted from old catalytic converters.
Obviously modern cars also include a huge amount of (almost entirely un-necessary) electronics, but if you want to start talking about that, then we'll also have to include all of the other (almost entirely un-necessary) electronics we own.
Nice article on Tesla and battery recycling. Exactly which part supports your previous assertion that "Tesla recycles all of its batteries"?
>You need economies of scale for battery recycling to become more significant.
I get a feeling we'll be hearing this line for a long time.
Cobalt specifically is also becoming less relevant for EVs in any case because more recent batteries use less of it; or none at all in some cases. Like for example the solid state batteries discussed in the article.
Regarding recycling, Tesla is working with third parties as well as working on in house expertise:
https://electrek.co/2019/04/16/tesla-battery-recycling-syste...
You need economies of scale for battery recycling to become more significant. One minor challenge here is that batteries seem to last a lot longer than people expected a few years ago. Supply of used up batteries is simply not there yet. Mostly the industry is still focused on recycling batteries from laptops, phones, etc. So, not an urgent issue for Tesla to be working on yet. But there are of course plenty of startups in this space as it is such an obvious thing to start doing in the next decade. J.B. Straubel, the Tesla co-founder, just got a nice investment of 700$ million for one of those companies. So, very practical and lucrative apparently.