Metals

Replacing the blast furnaces with an electronic blast furnace

That’ll be electric arc furnace….

The west African state, led by Nana Akufo-Addo, a human rights lawyer, has long been seen as a beacon of democracy. However, activists and rights groups say civil freedoms are being eroded by authorities reluctant to tackle illegal mining, a practice that began before independence when the former British colony was still named the Gold Coast. The illegal mining is known as “galamsey”, a pidgin contraction of the phrase “gather them and sell”, in reference to the way in which artisans gather alluvial deposits dispersed by large-scale activity of mining corporations.

The earliest Portuguese slave trade was actually along this coast. Picking up (buying!) slaves further along, say about where Lagos is now, then selling them to the Ashanti here on the Gold Coast where they were used to do that gold mining. The gold being used to buy the slaves from the Portuguese. Gold being very much cheaper along this coast than it was in Europe.

This really isn’t anything new. Well, OK, that it’s the Chinese buying the gold – and selling the machines to extract it – is but the basic industry? Nah…..

Sirs,

Carole Cadwalladr says (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/17/how-to-survive-the-broligarchy-20-lessons-for-the-post-truth-world-donald-trump) that “Elon Musk isn’t worrying about the midterms. He’s thinking about flying a SpaceX rocket to Mars and raping and pillaging its rare earth minerals before anyone else can get there.” That Musk wants to get to Mars is well known, before anyone else is rather assumed. But for rare earths? Umm, no.

I write as one who actually did advise Musk, some years back, on the use of rare earths in his rockets. The Earth’s lithosphere itself contains some 10 million billion (yes, m, then b) tonnes of rare earths – and that’s just for one of the 17 of them. An 80 million year supply at current usage rates. Mars varies from 40 to 250 million miles from Earth. Transport costs are in the millions of dollars per kg, maybe tens of millions round trip at present. Rare earths cost between 50 cents and a couple of hundred dollars per kg right here right now dependent upon which one.

Getting to Mars for rare earths is just not one of those things. I’m unsure as to which of mining, geology, transport costs or capitalism Ms. Cadwalladr is uncertain about but it’s at least one of, if not a combination or all.

yours etc

Letters by Oliver Sacks review – valuable insight into a curious mind

Given his vast letter writing volumes that the one to me doesn’t make it is not a surprise.

As he says in Uncle Tungsten he’s had a dream about a scandium hamburger. He, at one point, ended up at a company that processed the scandium I provided them with. Where he was served a scandium hamburger. I then wrote and said where that Sc came from, how the supply chain worked. Given what the real Uncle Tungsten did for a living I thought this would interest him. Back came a very nice letter thanking, chatting about the supply chain etc. As others who have received letters from him point out it’s typewritten – he didn’t use a computer, not for letters at least – and the errata are corrected in fountain pen. Nicely archaic.

Anyway, my brush with glory.

It’s only in very recent years that I’ve realised something else. In those years of metals trading I did some work with Gerry Wise. He being the UK expert in germanium (among other things) and owning, I’m pretty sure, a small refinery. The thing is, Gerry was part of that very same North London Jewish small company network as Uncle Tungsten. Of perhaps Sack’s generation rather than Uncle’s. But wholly the same milieu. A lot of the country’s weird metals business was in those hands. I’m sure Wise and Uncle Tungsten would have known each other – that’s the way with networks – but of course now it’s far too late to ask.

Scientists have called for people to go “urban mining” after a study revealed that old cables, phone chargers and other unused electrical goods thrown away or stored in cupboards or drawers could stave off a looming shortage of copper.

The research found that in the UK there are approximately 823m unused or broken tech items hiding in “drawers of doom” containing as much as 38,449 tonnes of copper – including 627m cables – enough to provide 30% of the copper needed for the UK’s planned transition to a decarbonised electricity grid by 2030.

Well, that’s true, and if copper prices rise substantially then people will dig them out. This always does happen too – it’s why the Hunt Brothers couldn’t corner the silver market. They tried, prices rose and the household stashes came flooding out to the refiners.

But this?

The study found that unused electrical goods could contain as much as £266m worth of copper. Scott Butler, from Recycle Your Electricals, which produced the study, called on the public to start recycling their unwanted electrical goods.

The group is now urging everyone to check its “recycling locator” for their nearest facility.

Congratulations to the PR bod there then. That’s £50k of free advertising gained by feeding The Guardian a story. Well done that man, vry well done.

Let us be clear about one thing: steel blast furnaces are in terminal run-off across the world. The US has not built one since 1964. It had 125 in the mid-1970s. Twelve are left today.

My saying was that no one is ever going to build another blast furnace in a rich country ever again.

No, not China, foreign competition. It’s that there’s so much scrap steel – we use less steel in anything we make these days – that recycling is the way to go in volume. This is why Nucor – whih hsa never run a blast furnace – hsa come from nothing to 50% or whatever it is of the US market. The decline of “the steel industry” is really the decline of blast furnaces and that’s a technological move, not a trade or foreign competition one.

Scientists have formed an unusual new alliance in their fight against climate change. They are using bacteria to help them extract rare metals vital in the development of green technology. Without the help of these microbes, we could run out of raw materials to build turbines, electric cars and solar panels, they say.

No, we’re not going to run out in any timescale that’s of any interest to humans.

But a new method? Why not?

“To get around these problems we need to develop a circular economy where we reuse these minerals wherever possible, otherwise we will run out of materials very quickly,” said Horsfall. “There is only a finite amount of these metals on Earth and we can no longer afford to throw them away as waste as we do now. We need new recycling technologies if we want to do something about global warming.”

“Afford” an interesting point. Because that is the point. Is this new recycling method cheaper than new material? Than other recycling methods?

Using such strains of bacteria, Horsfall and her team have now taken waste from electronic batteries and cars, dissolved it and then used bacteria to latch on to specific metals in the waste and deposit these as solid chemicals.

Hmm, dunno. We know how to take Li, Co, Ni and so on out of solution already. Most of the costs are in collecting, grinding and dissolving the stuff. So it’s not obvious that this is going to be a better idea. Explore it, by all means, but I’d not leap on it sa a grand solution.

Or, even, a dodgy expert in metals:

The area may soon be home to a large, open cut mine that will extract minerals including garnet, zircon and gold from beneath the flats.

Sigh.

TiGa has applied for consent to mine minerals for ilmenite

It’s an ilmenite mine – the source for titanium. You know, the white in white paint? That’s why the Ti in the company name?

Sure, garnet and zircon are usual byproducts but they are byproducts. It’s an ilmenite mine.

Now it is true that the definition of reserve for a fossil fuel is slightly different from the definition used for the sorts of minerals I’m more familiar with. But even with that I’d very strongly suggest that the Telegraph is wrong here:

Russia has found vast oil and gas reserves in the Antarctic, much of it in areas claimed by the UK.

The surveys are a prelude to bringing in drilling rigs to exploit the pristine region for fossil fuels, MPs have warned.

Reserves totalling 511bn barrels of oil – about 10 times the North Sea’s entire 50-year output – have been reported to Moscow by Russian research ships, according to evidence given to the Commons Environment Audit Committee (EAC) last week.

It follows a series of surveys by the Alexander Karpinsky vessel, operated by Rosgeo – the Russian agency charged with finding mineral reserves for commercial exploitation.

Antarctica is meant to be protected by the 1959 Antarctic Treaty that bans all mineral or oil developments. The UK’s interests are overseen by the Foreign Office – but it has been accused of ignoring the emerging crisis.

A mineral deposit is “there’s some stuff here”. A mineral resource is “there’s some stuff here and given a bit of work we’re between sure and very sure that we can extract at a profit” and a mineral reserve is “we have shown to the level of proof that a bank will lend to us, a stock market allow us to raise money on the claim, that we can extract from this deposit, using current technology, at current prices and make a profit. Also, we’ve the licences and legal right to do so.”

As this claimed deposit is in an area where extraction is illegal then it’s not going to be a mineral reserve, is it?

Buyers ready to dig deep for world’s miners

I think there’s a good chance this will end in tears. Yes, yes, EV, the electric world, lots of metals needed. So, buy into that limited stock that will definitely rise in price, right?

There are four major areas here. Copper, cobalt, lithium and rare earths. Market prices of the last three are all below production costs (for many, at least) right now. The fourth, copper, well, might be a real shortage but I’m really not sure.

I tend to think – note this is not investment advice, this is just me having a thought – that the people running the miners are believing a bit too much of the hype. There’s a battle gong on in Oz to be the buyer of a really bit potential Li mine between billionaires. And yet at the same time there’s a brand new mine not operating because of low prices. Just doesn’t seem sensible to me.

I fear people are buying at the top…..

A mining company has announced plans to extract 10,000 tonnes of lithium a year from rocks beneath a County Durham beauty spot after drilling found vast volumes of hot brines laden with the precious mineral.

Lithium is an essential component of the rechargeable batteries that power everything from mobile phones to electric vehicles – but the UK is currently entirely dependent on imports.

Weardale Lithium’s planned processing plant in the Co Durham valley would strip the lithium from water pumped from deep underground reservoirs, creating the UK’s first domestic supply of the mineral.

If the deposits prove commercially viable then the UK could reduce its current complete reliance on imports which mainly come from Australia and South America.

The area is the second part of the UK to yield commercially viable lithium deposits. Cornish Lithium is already seeking to exploit similar deposits in Cornwall. It too expects to produce about 10,000 tonnes a year.

The idea’s sensible enough. Lithium is soluble in water. Therefore geothermal waters going through a nice granite etc (a usual host rock for lithium) might well be enriched in lithium.

It’s technically feasible – for a slightly weird reason the people who do this contacted me about something else – to extract the Li from the Cornish Lithium waters. Weardale I assume is somewhat similar. 50 ppm is good enough.

That’s not the same as comercially viable of course. And with the Li price down in the dumps perhaps it isn’t.

There are two other things e can test against. On the Rhine, and around the Salton Sea, there are geothermal energy plants. That water is also Li enriched. So, they’ve two revenues from that same water. And the Rhine, well, maybe the Li is commercially extractable. From what I hear the Salton Sea is (note, hear, not know).

But if with two revenue sources the Rhine is still, well, we dunno, then Weardale with only one revenue stream, well, is it commercially viable?

In the Weardale doc package there will be a price assumption for lithium. If that’s realistic and the numbers are positive then yes, commercially viable, subject to uncertainty about future prices. But what is that assumption?

If Greensill hadn’t gone bust then these loans would already have been called in and Gupta would be bust.

Administrators for collapsed finance firm Greensill Capital have warned they could attempt to seize assets from steel magnate Sanjeev Gupta to recover $587m (£472m) in unpaid funds.

GFG Alliance, a collection of companies headed by Mr Gupta, has been targeted by the administrators having been one of Greensill’s most prolific borrowers before its collapse.

As a specialist lender that advanced cash to companies so they could pay suppliers early, Greensill was reportedly owed £3.7bn from GFG at the time of its failure in 2021.

This includes $587m owed to the UK arm of Greensill Capital, which is yet to be repaid despite long-running negotiations, according to an update published by administrators at Grant Thornton.

But the administrators, they’re not going to be time sensitive – to put it politely. So, Gupta gets to keep hte working capital for another couple of years. And, who knows, maybe something will turn up? #

Getting into this situation, well, but he’s playing the cards he’s got damn well.

Britain and America have teamed up to block the trade of Russian metals to “prevent the Kremlin funnelling more cash into its war machine”.

The London Metal Exchange and the Chicago Mercantile Exchanges will no longer trade new aluminium, copper and nickel produced by Russia, in an effort to hinder one of the country’s biggest sources of revenue.

Delivery of new metal into warehouse is rarely a thing. Might, maybe, use futures to fix the price but that doesn’t necessarily use physical delivery into warehouse.

A marginal issue at best.

The cost of cocoa, chocolate’s main ingredient, has been increasing all year, hitting a record high just before Valentine’s Day and again this week, when it was priced at more than $10,000 a tonne – meaning it is currently more valuable than several precious metals,

Journalists and numbers again.

gold, silver, platinum, palladium, rhodium, iridium, osmium, rhenium, and ruthenium

$10k a tonne is something like 30 cents an ounce (1,000 kg in a tonne, around and about 30 ounces in a kg (or, around 30 grammes in an ounce, either way)).

And absolutely none of the precious metals are priced at tens of pennies per ounce.

Methinks our scribe has got confused somewhere in ounces and tonnes, prices per.

The sacked chief executive of London-listed Endeavour Mining was involved in $15m (£12m) of “deliberately disguised” payments made to a party based in the UAE, an investigation has found.

Sébastien de Montessus transferred the money in 2020 and 2021 to an unknown entity, according to investigators, who said they had failed in their efforts to unmask the recipient.

London-listed Endeavour Mining fired Mr Montessus in January, alleging he had made an irregular payment of $5.9m to an unknown third party in March 2021 relating to the sale of its Agbaou gold mine in the Ivory Coast.

Fast growing gold miner able to make deals and sign contracts in West Africa.

The idea that there were not, erm, consultancy contracts is the surprising one.

The Industrial editor at the Telegraph:

The opening of America’s first cobalt mine for decades, marked with pomp and a ribbon-cutting ceremony, was supposed to be a step towards better energy security.

Instead, the facility in Idaho, built by Jervois Global, has become a victim of the problem it was meant to solve – reducing the West’s dependence on China for critical minerals, as Beijing seeks to dominate them.

“We are an unfortunate case study,” says Bryce Crocker, chief executive of Jervois. “I’d rather not be, but we are.”
…
Yet six months after opening, Jervois was forced to mothball the new facility as the price of cobalt plunged so low it became impossible to make a profit.

As Tim Newman will tell you, very loudly, the problem was Jervois screwing up the design of the refinery over contaominant elements in the ore. Which then, of course, leads to this:

Even on that score, Jervois’s Crocker sounds a positive note. His company is currently working with the Pentagon to expand the size of the US’s mine and open a potential refinery, helping to make the overall proposal more economically viable.

“We don’t need a 90pc market share, just a share that allows the portion of the product that goes into certain industries, which are genuine and critical, not to be cut off in the event of geopolitical unrest,” he adds.

“It’s an insurance policy. And I guess, since Covid and Ukraine, people are starting to realise that insurance policies matter.”

Plus the usual “Please Mr. PentagonMan, can I have some money”?

This also has the ring of a lot more hope than sense about it:

In Tyneside, one company seeking to do just this is Tees Valley Lithium. From 2026, the company hopes to begin producing lithium hydroxide and carbonate at a refinery near Redcar that will supply UK battery factories.

Paul Atherley, chairman of Alkemy Capital, the company’s parent, says he is “agnostic about the lithium price” to a degree because his company will be seeking to deal with car makers who sell to wealthier customers, not those looking for cheaper, entry level cars.

“We’re targeting that premium market, where anybody who is consumer-facing has to make a value decision about the product and the supply chain that goes into it.

“Customers also want to re-align their supply chains, so they’re not totally dependent on [China].”

You just try charging a substantial premium for local lithium for local people matey. You’re not gonna get far.

But to me the joy is here:

the price of cobalt plunged so low it became impossible to make a profit.

Over the past two years the metal’s value has tumbled from around $19,000 per tonne to less than $5,000, according to data from Benchmark Mineral Intelligence,

No, that’s not the cobalt metal price, which remains in the $25 to $30k per tonne range. Probably one of the salts.

Two years ago, the global price of nickel peaked at around $7,000 per tonne. Now it is below $4,000 per tonne following a significant boost in production by Chinese-owned mines in Indonesia.

Eh?

And, you know, if you’re that far out on the prices – which can be looked up real easy – then the strategy and real story stuff is going to be…..

Solar panels. Clearly, going to be a big business in recycling them. Or perhaps is disposing of them. Which is where the musing comes in.

So, think of standard silicon (so, not the Cd/Te ones). Might be a bit of gallium/germanium in there for really top end ones. Aluminium frames. Don’t know what connectors are made of – gold perhaps? Plated obvs.

So there’s some metals value in there. But clearly the bulk is silicon. And that, I think, has no value. Or single digit $ per tonne levels perhaps.

Because the raw material is pretty valueless. Sand, effectively. OK, that’s then made up into silicon metal at a high purity – 99,9999%, say. At which point it costs maybe $20 a kg. But it’s the process of making the Si atoms up into the ingots of high purity metal that adds that value. A process that you’ve got to go through with the Si atoms you’ve just recovered from the solar panels.

Unless there’s a lot of gold and copper in there I can;t see such scrap panels as having a positive metals value once you subtract any cost of processing. That is, I can’t see a free market in solar panel recycling emerging unsubsidised.

Now this really is only a musing, I’ve not checked any of the numbers. But if it’s true then that just adds again to the cost of solar, doesn’t it? We’ve real, positive, disposal costs at the end.

Over at the Substack:

The point is that the honey trap does exist. And for the “black market” in nuclear metals and bomb making materials – as nuclear and bomb making materials that is, not as scrap into other industries – the only market that really does exist is the honey trap one.

It’s not that someone trying to sell you a bomb is dodgy, it’s that someone trying to buy one from you started their career eating donuts on an all night watchout.

So the advice is, if you’re looking for a career as a Yakuza nuclear bomb trader, then don’t. The career opportunity simply doesn’t exist.

By the way, if you’ve got some of those 10 metre zirconium/niobium tubes, seamless, then I’m interested. 1.1% Nb, 2.5% Nb, no matter. Even just the offcuts and scrap actually. Starting bid might be about $4 a kg. But if it is the tubes, neatly packed, unused, then could you make sure you drive a tank over them first? I really do want them only for the scrap value, that’s the only valuation that keeps us all out of jail.

The platinum arm of Anglo American is to cut 3,700 jobs in South Africa as the British mining company attempts to improve performance in the troubled division.

Anglo American Platinum (Amplats) said on Monday it aimed to cut jobs after a sharp drop in platinum metal prices, which had led to a collapse in profits last year.

The jobs under threat account for about one-fifth of the Johannesburg-based company’s total workforce, with Amplats also reviewing the roles of an additional 620 contractors.

Profits at Amplats, in which Anglo American holds a 79% stake, fell to R14bn (£586m) in 2023, down by 71% from R48.8bn in 2022.

“About” might be a bit early but…..

The platinum/palladium/rhodium market is dominated by two things.

1) Catalytic convertors

2) The stock of the metals in the current car fleet that will be recycled at end of life.

As an example, US Pt/Pd use seems to be 130k kg or so, recycling is 55k kg or so from car catalysts alone.

So, the move to EVs – or hybrids, or fuel cells, whatever. Sure, it’s not going to be 100% by 2030 or anything, but. So, we’re going to have that same flow of end of life catalysts coming to market and no more, or many fewer, being made.

Miners of virgin material are going to get screwed, right? Because yes, that recycling is vastly cheaper to do – that’s why a used cat actually has a value in your hands on the roadside.

It’s not an industry I’d be leaving my money in, put it that way.

It’s possible to think the other way, that fuel cells using Pt will take over. But actually sensible fuel cells are SOFC ones, which don’t use pgms.

Norway is set to become the first country in the world to allow commercial deep-sea mining after overcoming opposition from green campaigners.

The Nordic nation’s parliament is expected to approve opening up 108,000 square miles of its national waters, an area bigger than the size of the UK, to lithium and cobalt licences in a vote on Tuesday.

Lithium? From those seabed nodules? Sounds a little odd. Copper, cobalt, manganese, nickel, sure. But lithium? Think someone’s misread the press release there. Or the Weegies are even more odd than I thought.