Metals

From Ed Conway on rare earths:

From neodymium to selenium and yttrium,

Ah, yes, selenium is not a rare earth while scandium is.

And back while I was in this, right at the beginning in fact. The encyclopedias, the books on rare earths, they all said that scandium was used to propagate seeds. But when I spoke to the sort of people who propagated seens they knew nothing of this. Then a conversation with Joe Sauceville who was in his 80s at the time. He did do a bit of work on scandium. And he also made the selenium additive for urea which was then added into fertilisers and other things you might propagate seeds with. There are areas of the world – from memory and don’t test me on this but a swathe across from Iran to Kazakhstan being one such – where the soil is selenium deficient. So, you add a bit and the plants grow better.

Ah…..selenium is Se, scandium is Sc, and – again don’t test me on this – I think it’s the chloride that’s used to boost that propagation of seed.

So, SeCl, ScCl, we can imagine that somwhere down the line someone slipped the c for the e into it. And then as these sorts of entries of encyclopedias and rare earth books are created by simply copying selections from the last generation of them there we have it. The error propagates through the information space. And, yes, I did once meet the journo who had just written the Metal Bulletin rare earths book – as he said, he just copied from all the previous ones.

Which is, I think, fun. That we’re still getting this selenium mistake these decades later. Of course, this is just the subs at the Sunday Times getting it worng but it does amuse that it’s that same general error.

Rare earths are a group of 17 heavy metals that are abundant throughout the Earth’s crust. The United States Geological Survey estimated in 2024 there were 110m tonnes of deposits worldwide. That includes 44m in China – by far the world’s largest producer. Vietnam, Brazil, Russia and India also have significant deposits.

We all know because we’ve read me.

These are reserves (yes, check here) not deposits. It’s even there in that very document:

In North America, measured and indicated resources of rare
earths were estimated to include 3.6 million tons in the United States and more than 14 million tons in Canada.

Resources are larger than reserves – as we’d expect – and deposits are larger than resources.

No, this is not a call for you all to go and dump £10 in. Tjhat’s not, not ereally, ht point.

Sure, sure, it would be lovely if someone did put up the £1 million. But even that’s not wholly the point. There’re vast sums being thrown around in panic right now and npo bugger is listening to me. Bastards, eh? And this is one – very cheap in the scheme of things – of the things that really should be done.

No one is paying attention to the possibility of leapfrogging the Chinese state of tech. But that’s exactly what we should be paying attention to.

So, the GoFundMe is here.

I’m Tim Worstall here to work on beating China at the rare earths game. Not to beat them entirely, not on £1 million, but to take a big bite out of one specific problem. Or at least attempt to.

What we need to do is test “vacuum distillation of lanthanide halides” which is something that will make sense to about three people.

That’s something that really should be done. Whether it’s me that does it I don’t particularly worry about.

So, you know, spread the wpord….

Recent expressions of interest from the DLA include plans to buy up to $500mn of cobalt, up to $245mn of antimony from the domestic US Antimony Corporation, up to $100mn of tantalum from an undisclosed US company and up to a combined $45mn of scandium from Rio Tinto and APL Engineered Materials, a chemical manufacturing company based in Illinois that has offices in Japan and China.

I used to be (OK long time ago, but) the scandium supplier to APL…..Ho well.

This does mean that they don’t actually produce Sc themselves. The guys at Stanford Materials might be having a good time though. But then they source from China which might not be quite the point of the stockpile….

Analysts at Jefferies said the Rio deal, for around 6 tonnes of scandium oxide, was at a price that was “higher than market expectations”. Global consumption of scandium oxide is around 30-40 tonnes, according to price reporting agency Fastmarkets, with China the leading producer.

Difficult to know where that much is going TBH. I still keep in contact with a few etc and no one can quite work that out. We all have a feeling that it’s bad info, but bad info that keeps getting repeated by people so is the standard assumption. 10 tonnes seems more likely to many….

The price of germanium has soared this year as exports from China have fallen, with western traders warning of “panic” in the market as companies struggled to get hold of it. The germanium issue is one the Pentagon is trying to fix.

That’s easy. Process some more coal fly ash. $10 million will build a little factory to do it, no problems.

Donald Trump has threatened to impose additional US tariffs of 100% on China from next month, accusing Beijing of “very hostile” moves to restrict exports of rare earths needed for American industry.

Wall Street fell sharply after the US president reignited public tensions with the Chinese government, and raised the prospect of another acrimonious trade war between the world’s two largest economies.

All of the things necessary to deal with this are already underway. People are already setting up to mine non-China deposits. Make magnets outside China. Separate rare earths concentrates into the individual rare earths outside China. And on and on and on.

Of course idiot governments are going to throw money around and they already have been doing. But markets see? Prices change – as they are doing – and actions change. We’re done.

Sigh.

These 17 elements, occupying obscure nether realms of the periodic table from scandium to lutetium, are the saffron in the paella of modern technology: often present in tiny quantities but essential for the overall effect.

Yes, I like that.

It’s also good to see someone who grasps the subject writing about it. Hmm. Perhaps someone who grasps what they’ve been told but good all the same. And LKAB, yes, know them. What they’ve got there is not, in fact, particularly remarkable. But gioven that they want to mine the area anyway it might well work out.

The High Court heard on Wednesday that the Government’s official receiver was ready to step in as administrator if Mr Gupta was unable to finalise a rescue deal involving £75m from US giant BlackRock.

State intervention would be the latest blow for Mr Gupta, the Indian-born entrepreneur who has been nicknamed the “saviour of steel” but whose industrial businesses have been pushed to the brink in recent years.

Mr Gupta built a steelmaking empire spanning three continents during the 2010s, largely funded by loans from alternative finance company Greensill. However, the collapse of Greensill in 2021 and a slump in the steel market caused much of his business unravel.

A very rough pencil sketch, you understand.

Steel is a declining industry. We simply use less these days. No, really. We use vastly less per capita, hugely less per unit of GDP and even, less overall despite rising population count and GDP. We also recycle a great deal more (for the US, perhaps 65% of all production is from scrap) and so on.

OK. There’s still money to be made in a declining industry. Buy up the failing assets and impose rigid – jeez, no, really solid – cost control on them and sweat those assets. Someone else paid to build ’em, you’re getting ’em nice and cheap, often free, and quite possibly with a taxpayer bung as well.

There is money to be made. Lakshmi Mital followed this route and he’s a decabillionaire.

So, Mr. Gupta runs the same idea two and three decades later. Could work, why not?

It didn’t, in detail. The concept is fine. He got some astonishing deals – the Scottish reservoir, aluminium works and free electricity for example. Plus a fine shooting estate. Negotiating money with the SNP was not a toughie.

But, overall, no, it didn’t work. Why? Mebbe the cost control wasn’t good enough. Mebbe Gupta didn’t have the Mittal skills? Even, could be, there were no steel deals left once Mittal had passed through. You know, a reason why Mittal didn’t buy it already?

Sweating a declining industry, sure. But it doesn’t always work.

Metals magnate Sanjeev Gupta is lining up a last-ditch bid to retain control of his ailing UK steel empire with the help of investment giant BlackRock.

The US firm is in advanced talks to provide financial backing for a deal that would allow Mr Gupta to retain control of the British arm of Liberty Steel, The Telegraph understands.

No, not that. But this:

Mr Gupta’s empire has been pushed to the brink after the collapse of its main lender, Greensill Capital, in 2021.

Back then I thought he’d be gone by some time in 2022. We’re in 2025. And while bits are falling off – isn’t one of the plants closed because it cannot afford to buy working stock? – he’s still hanging in there. Astonishing.

Not going to change the outcome but still….

Donald Trump is preparing to offer Vladimir Putin access to rare earth minerals to incentivise him to end the war in Ukraine.

The US president will arrive at the much-anticipated meeting with his Russian counterpart on Friday armed with a number of money-making opportunities for Putin.

They will include opening up Alaska’s natural resources to Moscow and lifting some of the American sanctions on Russia’s aviation industry, The Telegraph can reveal.

Proposals include giving Putin access to the rare earth minerals in the Ukrainian territories currently occupied by Russia.

Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, is understood to be among administration figures briefing Mr Trump ahead of his meeting with Putin in Anchorage.

But as Uncle Vova knows, those rare earths in Ukraine are worth nothing. They’re vague ideas from old Soviet surveys, no more than that. Certainly nothing that Russia doesn’t have plenty – masses – of itself.

The big question here is whether Bessent – and others – believe any different. Vova might go along with it for face saving reasons, might not. But as I say, the big q is whether the US Admin believes any different. Have they started to believe their own hype?

Google is overhauling its dominant search engine with an “AI mode” that will no longer provide links to other websites, in a major shift expected to cause turmoil across the web.

The tech giant will launch the feature in the UK from Tuesday. Instead of showing links to websites, the AI mode generates its own answers using information from around the web.

The update, seen as a landmark moment for the web, is likely to lead to more turbulence for websites that have already seen huge drops in traffic from Google as the company pushes AI-driven answers into its search results.

The truly interesting bits of research are when you can dig down far enough into the details to overturn the conventional wisdom. And of course that’s what AI is, the on balance conventional view of everyone currently on the web.

Hey, I once got Britannica to change their entry on scandium. Conventional wisdom can be wrong….

Using the new approach, the company says a fusion power plant with a capacity of about one gigawatt could generate 5,000 kilograms of gold per year.

The gold produced by the reaction is stable, but could contain some radioactive gold isotopes, potentially meaning it must be stored for up to 18 years, according to the company.

Knew there was something more to this modern alchemy story.

As Western nations scramble to secure new supply chains, analysts forecast a continued upward trajectory, driven by gallium’s indispensability and its increasing scarcity. This is no longer just a tech story; it’s a geopolitical one.

And yet, gallium remains off the radar of most retail investors.

At Strategic Metals Invest, we enable private investors to own physical gallium, individually stored in high-security vaults in Germany, with the flexibility to liquidate when the time is right.

If you’ve been looking for a tangible, future-facing asset to diversify your portfolio, gallium may be one of the smartest plays of the decade.

More here.

I was sure I’d written something about James Stunt’s gold business. Somewhere back in time – indicating that I didn’t think it was a very impressive business. Turnover was low. And profits in gold dealing are thin and far between. It’s a commodity business on commodity margins – a poor man’s view of what a rich and profitable business is because it deals with gold.

But, you know, can’t find it. Still:

Barclays has been fined £42m for money-laundering failings in a case linked to Bernie Ecclestone’s former son-in-law.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said the bank suffered multiple “failings in its financial crime risk management” while providing services to Stunt & Co, a gold bullion trader started by James Stunt.

Mr Stunt is a London socialite and art collector who was married to Petra Ecclestone between 2011 and 2017. His business was found to be at the centre of a £266m money-laundering scheme and he was prosecuted as a result of his involvement.

However, he was ultimately acquitted this year following a five-month trial at Leeds Crown Court.

Missed that trial entirely.

Four others involved in the scheme were separately convicted in March for their roles in what has been described as one of the largest money-laundering operations ever discovered in Britain. Police said the illicit funds were linked to organised crime, including drug dealing.

The FCA said Barclays failed to collect sufficient information about the source of £46.8m worth of funds paid into Stunt & Co’s account by another firm, Bradford jeweller Fowler Oldfield. The funds were later revealed to be the proceeds of crime.

Ah, yes, now I do recall the stories about that.

Anyway, my point was that a gold bullion dealer is a low margin business. Which still stands.

Donald Trump’s plan for a 50pc tariff on copper is designed to turbocharge the American metals industry and safeguard supplies for the US military.

But then, you know.

Given that it will protect the US copper industry from overseas competition it’ll make it worse, much worse. And everyone will end up buying their cable from abroad, not their copper.

Criminal gangs are targeting electric car chargers, stripping copper from the cables and leaving drivers unable to refuel.

InstaVolt, one of Britain’s biggest charging networks, said over 700 stations had been targeted in a wave that it has linked to organised crime. Incidents have risen from 140 a year ago.
….
He said that while there was only £20-£25 worth of copper in a charging cable, it cost the company around £1,000 to repair each station.

Who? Just who could be doing such a thing?

China holds major reserves of several key minerals including the vast majority of the world’s graphite, which is crucial for electric vehicles.

Carbon? China has the world’s reserves of carbon?

Now, natural flake graphite is nice stuff. But we can substitute for it – possibly with a little loss of performance – with synthetic graphite, made out of the sludge at the bottom of oil refineries.

And, of course, there’s our reserves thing. That’s not the amount extant, a reserve is, by definition, what we know absolutely is there, have proven we can extract, process and sell and make a profit doing so. Oh, and we’ve the licences and legal rights to do so.

So one explanation for why one place might have greater reserves of something is just that they’ve put more effort into making reserves – rather than some factor of geography. For, no really, mineral reserves are man-made.

Scunthorpe is the only place in Britain capable of making so-called “virgin steel”, high purity metal refined from raw materials.

Under net zero plans embraced by both Labour and the Conservatives, politicians had been urging steelmakers to concentrate on “green steel”, which is made by melting recycled steel items in electric-arc furnaces. Such green steel contains impurities that make it weaker than proper virgin steel.

No, really. Just nonsense. We make alloy steels in e-a furnaces. Alloy steels are stronger than “virgin” steel.

Everyone’s still swallowing the bullshit they’ve been fed by those who want the furnaces to stay open. “Weaker” just ain’t right.

Hafnium usage is maybe 500 tonnes a year. -ish, -ish. Scandium, mebbe 10 tonnes a year.

They’re gonna sell 3 million tonnes over a 31 year life of mine, are they?

Snigger.

It has taken until 2025 for a government to allocate the funding required to make the project happen. Today, we are setting aside £14.2bn to fund Sizewell C – so we can power the equivalent of around 6m homes with clean, homegrown energy that we control.

Where’s the British uranium mine?

Liberty Steel’s operations in South Yorkshire lost £340m in four years, according to figures that shine a light on the difficulties facing a business on the brink of liquidation that employs 1,450 people.

The company, owned by the metals magnate Sanjeev Gupta, is desperately searching for investors or lenders before a 16 July deadline, after London’s high court granted it extra time last week.

Its South Yorkshire subsidiary includes an electric arc furnace at Rotherham, plus steelworks in Stocksbridge and Brinsworth. Court documents suggest that previous efforts in 2022 to sell the latter two sites to an unnamed venture capital fund or a “Chinese conglomerate” came to nothing.

The Guardian revealed last week that the Rotherham plant and a similar operation in Motherwell, Scotland, have not produced any steel for about nine months because of a lack of funds to buy vital materials, with staff on furlough on 85% of their salaries.

So broke they can’t even get trade credit on scrap steel? Sheesh.

BTW, this is damn good reporting by The Guardian. And here. They can actually do it so why don’t they do it more?