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Metals

An actually interesting bit of greenery

Not that there are all that many end of life solar cells currently, but there will be soon enough:

New research has proposed a cost-effective way to recycle solar panels to help handle an increasing volume of retired photovoltaic (PV) cells expected by the end of the decade.

In a paper published by a team from the University of New South Wales last week, researchers outlined a process to collect and extract valuable materials from solar arrays to see if it was technically, economically and environmentally feasible.

The process involves collecting solar arrays, stripping them of their aluminium frame, shredding the cells and using an electrostatic separation to collect valuable materials including silver and copper, reducing the panels to 2%-3% of their original weight.

The reclaimed material would then be shipped directly to a refinery for purification and processing.

Well, no, they’re not reducing the panels to 2 to 3% of their original weight. They’re stripping out the 2 to 3% that’s worth recycling, the rest goes to landfill (glass, plastic etc).

The process consists of module deframing, laminate shredding and material concentration using electrostatic separation. The latter outputs two fractions: a valuable mixture of silver, copper, aluminum and silicon, and a mixture of mostly glass, silicon and polymers. The valuable mixture accounts for only 2-3 wt% of the total module, which can be forwarded to the downstream industry for further refinement.

Now, of course, it’s a bit premature yet. But assume the paper actually stands up. The metals industry would happily take the Al/Cu/Ag/Si mix. Probably dump the Si along the way but still. Cu/Ag is old hat, a way to sift out the Al probably exists.

To be honest, if I knew of a 1 or 2 k tonnes a year stream of solar panels that could be had I’d probably try to set one of these little plants up. Because it would be a little plant. 5 tonnes a day of processing sort of size. Perhaps ship in a container sort of size.

Advice on the next gift from the British Government to Janet Yellen

She’s an economist. And has collected/been interested in minerals in the past.

Janet Yellen Likes Rocks. Foreign Diplomats Keep Giving Her Stamps.

So, combine the two. Some cassiterite from Cornwall. The very start of the Bronze Age…..we have direct evidence, from Phoenecian wrecks, of trade in Cornish tin back to 800 BC and possibly earlier.

For real fun add in some wolframite and tell the story of how it was exported to build the Kaiser’s Fleet.

One reason for the shrinking scandium market

Blue light from artificial sources is on the rise, which may have negative consequences for human health and the wider environment, according to a study.

Academics at the University of Exeter have identified a shift in the kind of lighting technologies European countries are using at night to brighten streets and buildings. Using images produced by the International Space Station (ISS), they have found that the orange-coloured emissions from older sodium lights are rapidly being replaced by white-coloured emissions produced by LEDs.

Those sodium bulbs – often – used scandium. To the point that when I was handling scandium going into the light bulb business – for a couple of years it was 100% of global usage in that industry, for near a decade around 80% or so – then pretty much anyone walking under a rich world streetlight was, in a tiny and infinitessimal way, trading with me.

But that market has distinctly shrunk. Down from perhaps 130 to 150 kg a year globally to 30kg last time I looked at it. Technological obsolescence is a bitch…..

More ESG

Benedikt Sobotka, co-chairman of the Global Battery Alliance, said so-called ESG rules, which encourage investors to put money into green and socially responsible projects, are starving new mining projects of funds because they are perceived as dirty under current rules.

There’s no shortage of the metals themselves of course – but it’s entirely possible to have a surfeit of stupid rules.

This is very fun indeed

Whether it’s a scam or not is another matter.

The base idea – that the wastes of the last generation (or, in Romania, three generations ago perhaps) of metal extraction technology are worth going over with this generation’s – yes, that works. Whether anything else in the story does, well, mebbe.

But what’s horribly obvious is that the reporter doesn’t understand the basics here.

Two industry sources explained to me that while most industrial waste possesses about 4% metal, the percentage in metal concentrate is at least 30. If the mining residue at Cuprom was typical industrial waste, then in order to become true metal concentrate it would have been necessary to undertake a lengthy process of refining and crushing, then mixing this material within considerable quantities of pure gold or copper. Only then could the magic 30% threshold be crossed. Otherwise, Roy Pitchford, a Zimbabwean mining executive, told me, Boldor was “just sending waste”.

No, copper concentrate might well be 30% Cu as the definition of what is usually traded. But there’s no strict dividing line between waste and concentrate.

Now the shipment sat on a quay in Hong Kong. It was colossal – more than 2,700 tonnes packed into 123 shipping containers – and, in addition to allegedly being worthless, Chinese authorities claimed that it contained toxic quantities of arsenic and cadmium, two chemicals often found in mining waste.

They’re not chemicals, they’re elements.

No, I know, trivia. But indicative of the way the reporter just doesn’t understand the basics of the business nor economics behind it.

As to whether it’s a scam? Sure…..

Any estimates out there?

Copper Thieves Are Cutting Electric Car Charging Cables and Stealing Them

How much copper is in one?

$7 a kg is a reasonable guess. So, how many kgs? And the faster the charging ability I assume the thicker the cable, the more copper.

So, 10 kg a unit? Making this something adventurous teens to for a weekend’s booze and weed? Or 50kg, with there being several at a location, this is real business?

A Petropavlovsk detail I’d not known

As well as have having mines in Russia’s far east, one of the company’s prized assets is its ownership of one of only two factories in the country that extract gold and metals from ore, a difficult process.

That’s normally called a refinery but no matter. What does is that bars from that refinery are no, or no longer, good delivery into the London and Chicago bullion markets. That rather crimps refinery margins. It’s entirely possible to sell the stuff but at a discount. Either in other markets, or to another refiner who then recasts it.

Something of a detail of course……

This is very, very, amusing

Mr. Orlowski interviewed me (“had a Skype chat with me”) for a column of his. Amazingly, it wasn’t the column about rare earths, Which is something of a pity really.

But it’s a dirty business – processing one ton of rare earths may generate around 2,000 tons of toxic byproducts.

No, really, no.

Whatever toxicity there is will already have been there in the host rock – the thorium say. So the worst that happens is that the stuff that was already here gets moved around a bit. And 2,000 to 1 ratios? That means that your original concentration of RE to rock must be 0.05%. Which isn’t something you would mine for REs.

Japan found this out the hard way in 2010, when the PRC suspended supplies to Japan over a diplomatic dispute. It cut exports by 40 per cent, and the global price quadrupled.

And what happened then? That’s right. Mountain Pass reopened, Lynas built their refinery, RE prices collapsed.

Even after the US military became so dependent on Beijing that its USAF fighters couldn’t take off without Chinese magnets,

As DoD has repeatedly said (that idea that the F35 requires 700 lbs, or 900 lbs, is absolute nonsense btw) they use so few rare earths that they don’t need a domestic supplier, they don’t need a stockpile. It’s Congress – being able to dole out the subsidies is such fun! – which has repeatedly insisted that they have both. DoD keeps saying “No, ta”.

For example, a trinity of three known as the NdPr metals powers every magnet in every wind turbine.

That’s two metals. it’s actually FeNdB and you can add Pr if you like. Also Dy and Tb for high temps if you really want to.

Even China does more processing than mining now, so our foreign relations, and ensuring the stability of source countries such as the Congo, is critical.

Congo has bugger all to do with REs.

Even without net zero, our future will need rare earths more than ever. Both gas and nuclear power stations require turbines, and the minerals are also critical in drones, microchips and satellites.

Turbines? REs? Nickel cobalt, sure, but REs?

Sigh.

Kinnock on Tata and Port Talbot

If you want to have a levelling-up agenda, if you want to have sovereign capability and to reach net zero, you need a British steel industry,” said Stephen Kinnock, the Labour MP for the Port Talbot region. “The clock is ticking. The blast furnace technology that we currently have is not compatible with the transition to net zero.”

Yes, quite so, Matey. But electric arc furnaces don’t require subsidy. We’ve already got lots of them. Therefore, get rid of the blast furnaces, sure, but no subsidy for you.

Christ Almighty that’s bad science

This is true for a few reasons. For example, helium atoms don’t like to make bonds with other elements or even themselves. This results in them having a very low density — much lower than the density of the particles that make up air, Toledo said.

Gold also, quite famously, doesn’t bond with other elements. It is very dense all the same. The density coming from the make up of the atom, not the behaviour of the atoms once made up.

Good God that’s bad science.

So here’s a pesky thought

Lithium often comes from spodumene. Spod is also often enough a source for tantalum. Spod gets processed in great factories in China. Not all spod mines bother to extract the tantalite. But those vast waste streams in China from the spod concentrate processors – how much Ta is in there? And Nb, Sc and a couple of others too – quite possibly Sn and REs and Cs.

Not something I’m going to do but just that pesky thought. How good would the waste streams from spodumene concentrate processors be as ores?

Ignorant, idiot, nonsense

Uganda on Wednesday said recent exploration surveys have shown it has gold ore deposits of about 31 million tonnes and it wants to attract big investors to develop the sector hitherto dominated by small wildcat miners.

Over the last two years aerial exploration was done across the country followed by geophysical and geochemical surveys and analyses, Solomon Muyita, spokesperson for the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development, told Reuters.

Muyita said an estimated 320,158 tonnes of refined gold could be extracted from the 31 million tonnes of ore.

Damn foolery.

Firstly, the level of exploration they’ve done doesn’t prove anything of the sort. Aerial exploration just doesn’t prove to that sort of level of detail.

Secondly:

About 244,000 metric tons of gold has been discovered to date (187,000 metric tons historically produced plus current underground reserves of 57,000 metric tons).

So, you know, no.

What they’ve done – after that exploration and proof error – is get the units wrong. If 31 million tonnes of ore produces 310k tonnes of gold (to keep the numbers simple) then that’s 10kg of gold per tonne ore. Good gold ore these days is under 10 grammes per tonne ore.

320k kg, maybe and perhaps, though that would be damn rich even then. 320 tonnes.

Politicians and numbers, eh?

Original spotter Jeff Katz.

There is, sometimes, a reason for single sex environments

The state’s sparsely-populated Pilbara region remains a major hub for iron ore extraction, with workers typically flown out for weeks at a time by the likes of British giants Rio Tinto and BHP, as well as US-based Chevron.

They live in camp-style accommodation and spend long hours in the company of colleagues. For women, this crowded, male-dominated environment can prove not only exhausting but potentially dangerous.

Many said they faced leering male colleagues on a daily basis, inappropriate comments about their bodies or sex lives, the theft of underwear from laundry machines, unwanted advances and repeated sexual assaults.

Would be interesting to know actually. When did these sites become non-single sex?

Wondrous

However, the European Commission is currently assessing a proposal by the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) to classify lithium carbonate, chloride and hydroxide as dangerous for human health.

That would result in a more restrictive regulatory framework for their use at a time when the EU is aiming to be self-sufficient in electric vehicle batteries by 2025.

The proposal doesn’t ban lithium imports, but if legislated will add to costs for processors from more stringent rules controlling processing, packaging and storage.

Sigh

Subeditors, eh?

The fight for rare Earth minerals

Getting the capitalisation properly wrong.

There are varied headline styles that one can use. One is to capitalise as in a normal sentence (others might be capitalise all “big ” words, capitalise all words, even run ALL CAPITALS) but even that would mean either “rare earth” or “Rare Earth” but not rare Earth.

Tsk, the young people to today etc….

Good grief

Someone does actually, sometimes, listen:

More recently, and more colloquially, the British economic writer Tim
Worstall commented on the U.S. government’s view of Afghanistan’s large
deposits of iron, copper, and lithium: “The problem with all of this is that
those minerals are worth nothing. Just bupkis.” The reason for his assertion: “The value of a mineral deposit is not the value of the metal once it
has been extracted. It’s the value of the metal extracted minus the costs
of doing the extraction. And as a good-enough rough guess the costs of
extracting those minerals in Afghanistan will be higher than the value
of the metals once extracted. That is, the deposits have no economic
value”—“As we can tell,” he adds, “from the fact that no one is lining up to
pay for them.”

This from the chapter:

DON’T COUNT YOUR ROCKS BEFORE THEY’RE MINED

Of this report:

SIGAR

Special Inspector General for
Afghanistan Reconstruction

QUARTERLY REPORT TO THE UNITED STATES CONGRESS

JAN 30
2018

Not that I know anything about this

But could be, could be:

The A350-900 entered service in 2015, designed to take on Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner and made of carbon fibre reinforced polymer, followed three years later by its larger variant, the A350-1000. There are 475 A350 planes in service, with Qatar being the world’s second-biggest operator.

The airline claims cracked and peeling paint it discovered poses a safety issue if the aircraft is hit by lightning and has grounded its entire fleet of A350s. Airbus says the problems are merely maintenance issues that do not compromise the integrity of the aircraft.

Airbus did significant experimentation with Al/Sc – my beloved scandium – which is sorta the other way of dealing with the same problem. How do you make the fuselage lighter? Al/Sc can be welded, instead of requiring rivets. This can shave perhaps 10% off the weight – with all the knock on effects on fuel consumption etc. You also don;t, particularly, need to paint or lacquer it.

Carbon fibre and polymer is the other way of trying to achieve that same end goal.

Wouldn’t it be fun if the wrong decision was taken?

Yes, Bernie Sanders is an idiot

Nasa has identified over 12,000 asteroids within 45m kilometers of Earth that contain iron ore, nickel, precious metals and other minerals. Just a single 3,000ft asteroid may contain platinum worth over $5tn. Another asteroid’s rare earth metals could be worth more than $20tn alone. According to the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, “There are twenty-trillion-dollar checks up there, waiting to be cashed!”

The current global rare earths market is worth $3 to $5 billion. Add $20 trillion of supply to that and what happens to prices?

Damn bloody stupid idiot plan

Tees Valley Lithium:

He hopes his plan will help end the reliance Europe has on China for lithium production.

China controls about nine tenths of the world’s lithium hydroxide supply and Europe will have dozens of battery-producing “gigafactories” by 2025 which will require more than 325,000 tonnes of lithium hydroxide per year, his firm estimates.

“If at the end of the day, a lithium battery has come from China, the product is going to have a huge amount of embedded carbon in the production of it, which makes absolutely no sense if you use electric vehicles to decarbonise the transport industry, then have it full of materials with deeply embedded carbon,” he says.

The biggest lithium producer is Australia, mining almost half the world’s lithium in 2020, according to the US Geological Survey, while Chile, the second-biggest producer, has the largest reserves.

Forget Chile, entirely different process. This bloke is talking about processing spodumene concentrate, not lithium from brines.

At present, spodumene, the raw material mined for its lithium, is shipped to China for processing from mines in Australia and South America. What is loaded into ships is mainly byproduct, which means a lot of waste is shipped halfway around the world for little gain.

“If you’re going to ship lithium spodumene concentrate to China, you’re exporting 95pc waste on a ship,” says Atherley.

“The UK has got the opportunity to do it sustainably by using electrochemical methods, rather than traditional methods that the Chinese use and do it using offshore wind.”

So, in order to save transport costs he’s going to ship it from Oz to Britain, not Oz to China?

Err, yes?

His company wants miners to do some initial processing to get the percentage of lithium in their shipments from less than 10pc up to 40pc. It can then be transported to the UK and refined here.

Oh, and as well as that he wants a more inefficient system of processing? The reason this isn’t done already being that those spoke plants, which upgrade to 40%, aren’t efficient at the size of a mine. The whole reason for the concentration of spod concentrate processing being that the efficient size of a factory is one girt big ‘un.

Sigh.

Be easier just to get the stuff from those geothermal waters under Cornwall.