Metals

British Steel is on track to be fully nationalised within weeks, the Guardian understands, a year after the government took over the daily running of the loss-making business from its Chinese owner.

The steelmaker, which employs 3,500 people at its plant in Scunthorpe, was taken under government control last April amid fears that the owner Jingye was planning to shut down the site.

British Steel operates the last two remaining blast furnaces in the UK but it is still economically controlled by the Chinese company, which bought it out of insolvency in early 2020.

Sigh.

As I might have pointed out before, one of the problems with this state involvement in industry is that it never does mean forming the new at that bleeding edge of the white hot technological revolution but often does mean subsidising, preserving, the remnants of the losers of the last.

Yes, yes, lovely, preserve virgin steel capability, whaddabout the Royal Navy and all that. But blast furnaces, in rich countries, have already lost that technological race….

A leading Irish metals refinery is part of an international aluminium supply chain that appears to conclude with shipments to arms producers feeding the Kremlin’s war machine in Ukraine, leaked records and public data suggests.

Well, yes. The plant converts buaxite into alumina, which is then sent off to a smelter to be turned into aluminium. Given that it’s owned by a Russian company the smelter is in Russia – where the cheap electricity necessary is.

And, shrug? Sure, some of the Al will end up in military stuff. You’ve got to get a long way down the piece before you get to this:

Rusal’s Aughinish’s spokesperson said: “We particularly underline the fact that both alumina and aluminium are an internationally recognised basic commodity, the very nature of which means they serve broad general purpose societal needs and vital for countless civilian industries.

It’s not, not really, a military thing….

Perhaps most revolutionary is Abson’s claim that, soon, he could teach anyone to make their own fuel cell within two weeks, something that could completely democratise the energy industry. Little wonder, he contends, the sector views him as a threat. “It leaves the establishment out of the picture,” says Abson, who studied philosophy and Taoist Chinese poetry at university. “The Government doesn’t like it. How do you tax it?”

It’s teaching someone how to make a fuel cell efficient enough to be useful that is difficult.

The question, of course, is if this technology is so marvellous, why is it not being widely used already? One of the biggest problems, says Abson, is getting through to the right people. The “dolts” who pass information on to the decision-makers, he claims, are either corrupt, stupid or afraid. “There is a Chinese wall between the Civil Service and the ministers. The Civil Service doesn’t want to change policy. They know what they know, and they act as a block to any information getting through.”

Lots and lots of work has been done on fuel cells. I can think of at least two, large, listed companies based upon them. I’m less than certain I would believe all of these stories that is….

Veronique de Rugy:

The United States has a rare earth problem, but it is not the problem Washington is trying to solve (see this and this). The debate in Congress has centered on supply and on the fact that China dominates the processing of rare earth elements and that this dominance creates a vulnerability. The proposed solution, Project Vault, is a $10 billion government stockpile financed through the U.S. Export-Import Bank. This is not a military stockpile. It is a civilian stockpile. And it is the wrong answer to the wrong question.

The cost of keeping the UK’s last remaining blast furnaces going at British Steel’s Scunthorpe plant could exceed £1.5bn by 2028 if it continues at its current rate, according to the government’s spending watchdog.

Ministers took the plant into public control in April last year, after its Chinese owner – industrial firm Jingye – threatened to shut down the loss-making site.

The National Audit Office (NAO), which monitors state spending, said the intervention saved thousands of jobs at Scunthorpe and prevented a “serious impact” on UK industry, including Network Rail, which buys steel for the railways from the plant.

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Shutting the plant would also have ended Britain’s “primary” steel-making ability because blast furnaces allow steel to be made from scratch, rather than relying on scrap metal.

While the NAO’s report highlighted the benefits of the intervention, it warned about the high cost of the rescue package, which had reached £377m by the end of January this year, including £15m spent on advisers.

The bill could soar beyond £1.5bn if operating costs continue at their rate of £1.3m a day, it said.

That’s just the cost of keeping that apprently vital primary steel making capacity.

Might well not be worth it.

Ebisawa, the government said, conspired to sell uranium and plutonium to a DEA agent posing as an Iranian “general” in charge of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Asked whether the uranium was enriched above 5% because the Iranian government needed it for nuclear weapons, Ebisawa said: “I think so and hope so.” He later forwarded an email in the name of a mining company offering 50 tons of uranium U3O8 concentrate powder known as “yellowcake” for $6,850,000.

Ebisawa provided photographs of samples, alongside a Geiger counter measuring radiation, and promised the “general’ that the “plutonium” that would be even “better” and more “powerful” for Iran’s use. Prosecutors said the nuclear material came from an unidentified leader of an “ethnic insurgent group” in Myanmar who had been mining uranium in the country.

Samples of the nuclear materials were obtained and a US lab found they contained uranium, thorium and plutonium, and that “the isotope composition of the plutonium” was weapons-grade.

Conspiring to sell yellowcake is deffo naughty. You’ve got to have a licence to do so – I did at one time, never used it – but it’s also very different from selling bomb material. By definition yellopwcake is not enriched. It’s the first stage of getting from uranium ore to uranium. The enrichment stage requires a $10 billion (circa) plant which is something that varied naughties, other than governments, tend not to have.

Containing thorium is irrelevant. Lots of things contain thorium and it’s useless for bombs anyway. Plutonium, well. My guess – and I think I looked at this some years back, this case – is likely to be a milligramme or two. It is possible – not legally perhaps, but possible – to get it as samples. And anything above that size indicates that it came from reactor recycling, it’s just not a naturally occurring element (well, maybe that natural reactor in West Africa did produce it).

Significant – anything more than a handful of grammes – of plutonium is a vast, vast, red flag. Thorium is a nothing and yellowcake is naughty but pretty trivial. You can still get 20 years for trying to deal it without a licence of course.

In terms of actual danger from what this guy was trying to trade – assuming it wasn’t all just a con anyway – the answer is about zero. Still a crime but, you know.

Until a few years back it was easy enough to buy lbs (not tonnes, but lbs at least) of yellowcake in the US. Second hand and retail. It was used as a glaze on pottery up into the 1970s and a number of US high schools had some lying around at the back of a cupboard. No, really. 50lb sacks and so on.

My read on this – note, mine – is that this is deffo a bad guy and, legally, trying to sell yellowcake, yep that’s a crime. But the ability of this guy to contribute anything to a bomb programme is zero.

Officials are also examining the possibility of stockpiling certain critical minerals.
Metals such as gallium, germanium, yttrium, cobalt and neodymium, among others, are essential for making components that go into a wide range of defence systems, from radar in the Royal Air Force’s Typhoon fighter jets to the Royal Navy’s Dragonfire laser weapon.

Well, you’d not stock neodymium metal, just as an example. It oxidises, after 3 to 4 months it’s not worth using in magnet making. And so on an etcetera, there are ways to do it, ways not to, for all of them.

And, well, this is going to sound excessively pompous, but that’s fine for as all know I am excessively pompous. But this is a bit of the world where I have some knowledge. Quite a lot of knowledge in fact. I’m also at a Westminster think tank, part of that information fog that surrounds government. So, me, I’d sort of think that if the govts straining every sinew to pass a log of a policy here that there’d be some reach out. You know, Tim, you know some of this stuff, any ideas? True, true, I don’t know much about cobalt and I think a UK production chain from ore onwards is most, most, unlikely. But Ga, Ge, Nd and Y, yes, could at least inform the conversation a bit.

But has that government straining to produce that log reached out at all? No, no, they haven’t.

Again, I know this is excessively pompous of me. But when govt is trying to craft a plan you’d sort of hope they do reach out to those expert in that field. I am expert in this field and govt has not reached out. Therefore I don;t trust govt on such plans.

A corollary and opposite of Gell Mann Amnesia perhaps. As govt plans on something I know about seem uninformed then I assume that’s true of all govt plans.

The lithium boom: could a disused quarry bring riches to Cornwall?

No.

So that’s another of those questions in The Guardian we can answer.

They’re talking about Cornish Lithium and one part of that company I rather like. Extraction from geothermal waters. From an industry contact (one of those odd things, they came to me to ask a question, I asked one back) That’s certainly technically possible and why not do it?

But the specific being talked about here is the other one, hard rock mining. And they’re extracting from mica. So, like the zinnwaldite that European and Zinnwald are trying to do. And I know people who’ve looked at that process and they suck teeth sa to whether it’ll ever be economic.

So, you know.

But the answer to “riches” is still no. Mining these days just doesn’t need that much labour. That mine goes into full production? 300 jobs maybe. Sure, OK, good luck to ’em, hope it works out. But it’s simply not going to be “riches”.

More than 200 people were killed this week in a collapse at the Rubaya coltan mine in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, Lumumba Kambere Muyisa, a spokesperson for the rebel-appointed governor of the province where the mine is located, told Reuters on Friday.

Rubaya produces about 15% of the world’s coltan, which is processed into tantalum – a heat-resistant metal that is in high demand by makers of mobile phones, computers, aerospace components and gas turbines. The site, where local people dig manually for a few dollars a day, has been under the control of the M23 rebel group since 2024.

It’s not “a mine”. It’s a whole wide area where people are digging holes with shovels by hand. It’s thus not one specific collapse, it’s a number of collapses over the area.

15% of world production? Could be, could be – if we include the whole wider area as well. The BBC seems to think different:

The swathe of golden scarred earth they mine is found in the sprawling, lush Masisi Hills of North Kivu province – around 60km (37 miles) north-west of the city of Goma – and holds 15% of the world’s coltan supply and half of the DR Congo’s total deposits.

Not that I’d really trust that. No one’s surveyed Congo with any accuracy, not since tantalum became a popular and useful metal at least. No one knows what the deposits are that is.

As to what’s really going on here this is shit poor people making a few $ a day. This is what mining is like in the absence of capital – and capitalists.

The US’s first overt attack on an Amazon nation last weekend is a new phase in its extractivist rivalry with China. The outcome will decide whether the vast mineral wealth of South America is directed towards a 21st-century energy transition or a buildup of military power to defend 20th-century fossil fuel interests.

Doesn’t mean anything of the kind. Everyone, everywhere, is going to pay market prices for those minerals. So there is no “direction” of what they get used for. Certainly nothing that’s directed by whoever’s in government.

When the former Guardian journalist Seumas Milne and I interviewed Nicolás Maduro in 2014,

Ah, well, there’s a sign of the terminally stupid then, woprking with Seumas.

‘N’ I don’t really drink red these days.

Nowt wrong this morning, but the dream was interesting – apparently the best source in all the world for scandium is vacuuming up the fatbergs from underneath fast food restaurants.

Even in the dream I was going, nah, nah, mate, really……

Cristina Dorador is on an urgent mission in the world’s driest desert, the Atacama in Chile. As the rise of drug-resistant superbugs kills millions per year, Cristina has made it her mission to uncover new, life-saving antibiotics in the stunning salt flats she has studied since she was 14. Against the magnificent backdrop of endless plains, microscopic discoveries lead her team of scientists to question how critically lithium mining is damaging the delicate ecosystem and impacting Indigenous communities.

The obvious implication being that the salt flats are where those life saving bugs will be found. As opposed to actually less likely than many other areas of the world – the salt flats are a fairly sterile desert. There could indeed be useful things up there, sure. But given fewer things overall less likely than many another environment.

But, you know, we get to say metals and mining bad, so there is that.

It found the Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency plans to stockpile almost 7,500 metric tons of cobalt. The report calculates that could instead be used to produce 80.2 GWh of battery capacity – more than double existing energy storage capacity in the US and enough to produce approximately 100,000 electric buses.

Lorah Steichen, the report’s author, said: “Every ton of cobalt or graphite stockpiled for the military could be used instead for electric buses, large-scale energy storage or other renewable technologies needed for the energy transition. These materials should accelerate decarbonisation, not fuel the insatiable war machine.”

There is no shortage of cobalt. It’s not that far above production cost at the current $50k a tonne. That’s not a price screaming an elemental* shortage.

*Sorry, not sorry.

Sunrise Energy Metals (ASX: SRL) has successfully raised major capital with its latest share placement to fund pre-construction activities at the Syerston scandium project in NSW.

I’ve been saying that site is a npo goer for decades now. But, well, it’s decades now, right?

The Syerston project offers a new stable supply that can stimulate the use of scandium in a wider range of new technologies

That’s something I wrote in a reporty for that project decades ago. But it’s decades now, right?

Demand is expected to rise to more than 117tpa by 2026 due to the increased use of scandium-aluminium alloys and solid oxide fuel cells, according to NioCorp.

Niocorp’s a project I predict is going to go nowhere as there’s no chance at all of its volume – and or price – predictions coming true.

But look how wrong I am. Projects I think won’t work are raising money off the predictions of people I think are wrong. ‘Mazin’ stuff, eh?

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.