Metals

In Ukraine, the opportunity for wealth creation lies in the rare earth minerals which Trump (on behalf of his country’s tech industry) wishes to mine – even though the US has access to a considerable supply of many of these on its own territory. Has he been persuaded by his tech entrepreneur friends that there can never be enough of these elements to satisfy their needs? Maybe. But whatever the particular logic of the case, this deal was the price of what would not have been US military protection but a kind of proxy surveillance of Ukrainian territory plus payback for previous armament supplies to which Washington thinks it is entitled.

Janet Daley seems to have rather lost it overall here. But to keep repeating – there are no valuable rare earths there. So, we cannot try to calculate what’s going on by assuming there are valuable rare earths there.

It’s about something else, not rare earths.

The Swedish startup Northvolt has admitted that a vital component of its batteries is imported amid claims that the company, which claims to run Europe’s first homegrown gigafactory, depends on Chinese suppliers.

It comes as a documentary programme to be shown in Sweden on Wednesday by the national broadcaster SVT, exposes the company’s failure to build a truly homegrown battery after its attempts to produce its own cathode active material at its Northvolt Ett factory in Skellefteå, northern Sweden, were unsuccessful.

Oh my, who could have thought it?

Ukraine has agreed to a US-proposed deal for the rights to its mineral wealth after Donald Trump backed down on his most extreme demands.

Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, is set to sign the deal in Washington DC as early as this Friday, bringing to an end a heated dispute with the US president over the terms of the pact.

The draft deal does not commit to Ukraine using the profits from its natural resources to repay the United States up to $500bn (£400bn), a key demand of Mr Trump, who has complained that the US “got nothing back” from its support of the Ukrainian war effort.

There’s no firm or actual value there. So, selling it in return for stuff right now is great.

The United States and Ukraine are poised to sign a minerals deal, Donald Trump’s national security adviser has said.

Mike Waltz said Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, will soon sign an agreement to hand over much of his country’s rare earth minerals as part of a peace deal to end the war.

It’s performance theatre, no more.

There are no significant mineral reserves nor resources. Sure, there are many mineral deposits, as there are on any piece of land. But all the valuations are being done at how much is it worth, lifted, refined, processed and ready for sale. Without taking into account the costs of lifting, refining, processing. Thus big gross numbers but the nett number is as likely negative as it is positive.

TBH here Z should bite that hand off. Because what is being signed away ain’t $500 billion, not in hte slightest. It’s not even known – as in, not known, not as in not certain – whether it’s all worth even $0.

What Ukraine has is scorched earth; what it doesn’t have is rare earths. Surprisingly, many people — not least, US President Donald Trump — seem convinced the country has a rich mineral endowment. It’s a folly.

It’s not the first time that Washington has gotten its geology wrong in a war zone. Back in 2010, the US announced it had discovered $1 trillion of untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, including some crucial for electric-car batteries, like lithium. The Pentagon went as far as describing Afghanistan as “the Saudi Arabia of lithium.”

That’s Bloomberg. And then there was me two weeks ago.

Someone’s been messing with President Donald Trump. The Donald is stating that Ukraine will use their very valuable rare earth deposits as security for the military aid that the United States will provide. The problem is that Ukraine doesn’t have any valuable rare earth deposits.

No, really.

I even quote the Pentagon quoting me to show that the Afghan claims were nonsense.

Timmy – two weeks ahead of Bloomberg…..

There’s that claim that an F 35 contains 400 kg of rare earths. It’s bollocks, but can we test whether it’s bollocks?

So, say the rare earths are in magnets (could be some in the electronics but that’ll be grammes). OK, so let’s say that all 400 kg is in magnets. Even, that the 400kg is magnets containing rare earths – this is to be polite and lax about the claim.

NdFeB magnets.

As we all know I get entirely lost in scientific calculations. So, the question is, OK, 400kg of magnets. How much magnetic power is that? And how difficult would it be to lift that off the steel deck of a carrier?

Matt Oliver
Industry Editor
18 February 2025 6:00am GMT

With Washington in a “great power” competition with Beijing, Ukraine’s resources – worth an estimated $15 trillion – may theoretically come in handy.

It ain’t true Matt. It ain’t true.

Elsewhere, reserves of rare earth elements could have important defence applications. Each one of America’s F-35 stealth jets, for example, contains around 400kg of components that are made using rare earth elements, according to the US Congressional Research Service.

That’s not – wholly – true either.

I have actually tracked that claim back. And you end up with it being a quote from a classified document. Which doesn’t make clear whether it’s “made with the aid of” or “actually rare earths”. And as I’ve pointed out more than once, a fighter jet carrying 400 kg of rare earth magnets would be stuck to the metal deck of a ship.

What could be true is that there are some compoenents, in which there is a magnet or two. Leading to an F 35 containing a kg or two of rare earths. Maybe that much.

Those present in Ukraine include neodymium, erbium, lanthanum and yttrium, according to the country’s institute of geology. It also possesses other critical minerals such as nickel, beryllium, manganese, gallium, zirconium and scandium.

An EU document published in 2020 highlighted scandium and gallium as “critical raw materials”, pointing to the former’s use in semiconductors and solar panels and the latter’s use in solid oxide fuel cells and lightweight alloys.

Ukraine and scandium. Well, yes, snigger. This is rather where I came in in the early 1990s. There was Sc in the iron at Zhivty Vody. Which for a couple of decades folk insisted was a major strategic resource. Acshully, they produced a kg or two experimentally. Then decided that was a tossery waste of money then the mine flooded. Then we all went and used Sc from the uranium processing plant on the Caspian instead.

That is expected to be the case for graphite in particular, partly because China – which refines 90pc of global supplies – has restricted exports in a bid to hurt American industries such as carmaking.

Ukraine is among the world’s top five countries when it comes to reserves of the metal, which can be used to make tough steel alloys, battery anodes, nuclear reactor components and vehicle brake linings.

Graphite’s a metal now, is it? Rather than an allotrope of carbon?

Ukraine is also a top 10 country when it comes to titanium, with an estimated 7pc of the world’s total, although exactly how much of the super-metal it possesses is currently kept secret.

Ignorance. World’s largest producer is the US. We’ve got a great big fuck pff plant on Teesside too. Processing mineral sands into titanium dioxide is a vast industry most of whose output is used to make white paint. Millions of tonnes a year.

What military types get all erect about is titanium metal. That’s a factory, not a mine. You also need cheap energy to do it. Ti metal is tiny, titchy, in comparison to white paint. And you’d most certainly not go off mining to make Ti metal. You’d build your factory then have a chat with the people who make white paint.

As I’ve noted before, the centre never does have the accurate information with which to plan. And here we’ve got that on this grand scale. Everyone’s planning military and diplomatic activity on the basis of completely shite information.

UKR has minerals, sure it does. Not one single one of them being important in any grander economic or strategic sense. But this is who and how they’re planning the world…..

The Telegraph has obtained a draft of the pre-decisional contract, marked “Privileged & Confidential’ and dated Feb 7 2025. It states that the US and Ukraine should form a joint investment fund to ensure that “hostile parties to the conflict do not benefit from the reconstruction of Ukraine”.

The agreement covers the “economic value associated with resources of Ukraine”, including “mineral resources, oil and gas resources, ports, other infrastructure (as agreed)”, leaving it unclear what else might be encompassed. “This agreement shall be governed by New York law, without regard to conflict of laws principles,” it states.

The US will take 50pc of recurring revenues received by Ukraine from extraction of resources, and 50pc of the financial value of “all new licences issued to third parties” for the future monetisation of resources. There will be “a lien on such revenues” in favour of the US.

Doesn’t matter whether there’re any rare earths there or not with that drafting now, does it?

Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro said the measures would help US steel and aluminium producers and shore up America’s economic and national security.

“The steel and aluminium tariffs 2.0 will put an end to foreign dumping, boost domestic production and secure our steel and aluminium industries as the backbone and pillar industries of America’s economic and national security,” he told reporters.

I’ve long said that Peter Navarro is truly dangerous. With The Donald we can assume – can, not necessarily should – that it’s all a negotiation leading to a deal. Navarro actually believes this tariff shit. Really thinks that it’s economically sensible to be doing this.

I hadn’t known that he was back. Now that I know he is then I’m a lot more worried. Because the fucker actually believes this shit.

Rare earth elements (REEs), including scandium, yttrium and lanthanides, are strategic resources with unique electric, luminescent and magnetic properties. However, owing to their highly similar physiochemical properties, the identification and separation of all REEs are challenging. Here a Mycobacterium smegmatis porin A nanopore is engineered….

That bacteria is indeed from there.

It was first reported in November 1884, who found a bacillus with the staining appearance of tubercle bacilli in syphilitic chancres. Subsequent to this, Alvarez and Tavel found organisms similar to that described by Lustgarten also in normal genital secretions (smegma). This organism was later named M. smegmatis.

The net result of this work repoted today is that you should be able to deterine the rare earths content of rock by wiping it against a suitably prepared and dirty-ish willy.

Which is interesting science, no?

Shevchenko in Donetsk, south-eastern Ukraine, may at first glance seem like another rural town destined to fall into Russian hands.

But below the surface lies something Ukraine will fight tooth and nail for: lithium deposits holding billions of dollars worth of critical minerals essential for electric vehicles, smartphones and modern energy systems.

This is shite. As we all know around here already. As explained again here.

They’re waving around old suveys of mineral deposits and claiming they’re valuable reserves. Nonsense. Horrible, ghastly, nonsense and people are getting killed over it too.

The country is sitting on more than 20 rare earth elements, including cerium and lanthanum,

That’s v interesting, given that there are only 17 rare earths.

While the US does not disclose its stockpile levels of rare earth minerals, experts believe they are far below what would be needed during war.

Idiots, experts being those who desire subsidy and so are lying through their teeth. The Pentagon’s very clear that it has plenty, even for a widescale shooting war. Thank you.

while lithium is used to power US F-35 fighter jets.

You what? Bwahahaha. Who in fuck is Kieran Kelly?

The country’s estimated $12 trillion (£9.7 trillion) worth of rare earths

Well misinformed, obviously. If the global rarte earth market is worth $4 to $5 billion a year – about right – then there really ain’t anyone at all sitting on $12 trillion’s worth. A 2,500 year supply really just ain’t woth current unit values.

Jeez.

You state (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/05/donald-trump-rare-earths-ukraine-us-trade-deal-aid-russia) that the rare earths are “a group of 17 heavy metals”. One of them, scandium, is element 21, with an atomic weight of 45 -ish. It is therefore rather light as metals go. As the man who spent a decade running the shadowy international scandium oligopoly (no, really) I welcome this opportunity to be a pedant. Or as your correspondent Ms. Toynbee once described me in your pages, a “pendant”.

Yours etc

Yes, liked it, but not quite enough. They have, instead, just corrected the article.

Darn.

rare earths are a group of 17 heavy metals that are actually abundant in the Earth’s crust across the globe.

In a 2024 assessment, the United States Geological Survey estimated there were 110m tonnes of deposits worldwide,

No, no, they didn’t. USGS actually said there were 110 million tonnes of reserves.

We, here, we illuminati, know the difference…..

President Donald Trump says he wants to negotiate an agreement with Ukraine in which Kyiv guarantees supplies of rare earth metals, key elements used in electronics, in exchange for aid. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had floated such an idea last October as part of his “victory plan” for ending the war with Russia. “We’re telling Ukraine they have very valuable rare earths,” Trump said on Monday. “We’re looking to do a deal with Ukraine where they’re going to secure what we’re giving them with their rare earths and other things.” Trump, speaking to reporters at the White House, said Ukraine was willing, adding that he wants “equalisation” from Ukraine for Washington’s “close to $300bn” in support.

Ukraine doesn’t have any rare earths. Not in any realistic sense, not in any mining sense they don’t.

Sigh.

Rachel Reeves’s National Wealth Fund has invested £28.6m into reviving a historic Cornish tin mine as ministers race to hit net zero targets.

The investment is part of a £56m funding round into Cornish Metals to finance the reopening of Cornwall’s South Crofty tin mine, which could create 300 jobs and bring back an ancient Cornish industry.

I’m a little out of date, haven’t read up on them for a couple of years. But I think – think – that their break even cost (in mining there are two, one all in, one operating costs only) is actually higher than the current market price of c. $30k per tonne tin.

So, yes, the National Wealth Fund is pissing it up the wall.

Another way to put this is that South Crofty has been looking around for finance for some years now. It’s very much a marginal project – which is why it went bust, also why it’s found it difficult to gain finance. If the National Wealth Fund is to be investing in marginal projects, ones that cannot gain market finance because they’re more than a bit shit, then this does indeed mean that the national wealth is being pissed up against the wall.

This is my surprised face.

If we’re all still around in a decade we’ll be able to check and see, won’t we?

Diamonds are found there, gold too, but the most coveted riches are the lesser known ones: coltan, wolfram, cassiterite, and a dizzying array of other metal salts.

No, folk would must rather dig up diamonds and gold. Also, those are not salts, they are minerals. Ores even, but they are not salts.

This isn’t going to be a good piece about DRC and blood minerals now, is it?

There is growing scrutiny of technology companies’ global supply chains as demand for rare-earth minerals

Sigh, no.

Now, smuggled ores are a problem. Distinguishing between those from artisanal mines and those from slaved mines is difficult and also something we’d really, really, like to be able to do.

But the really big thing about this? We solved this problem a decade back with Dodd Frank. The result of that Blood in the Mobile campaign was a regulation which cost $4 billion in only its first year. And which, we were told – tho’ I vehemently disagreed that it would – solve this problem once and for all.

So, anyone talking about this really does have a duty to point out that the collective solution designed by the NGOs simply has not worked. Before, you know, everyone starts looking to the NGOs for this next solution?

Hmm. Perhaps not quite so much.

A member of the Japanese criminal underworld has pleaded guilty to handling nuclear material sourced from Myanmar and seeking to sell it to fund an illicit arms deal, US authorities have said.

Yakuza leader Takeshi Ebisawa and a co-defendant had previously been charged in April 2022 with drug trafficking and firearms offences, and both were remanded.

He was then additionally charged in February 2024 with conspiring to sell weapons-grade nuclear material

And, erm. Rilly?

During a sting operation including undercover agents, Thai authorities assisted US investigators in seizing two powdery yellow substances that the defendant described as “yellowcake.”

“The (US) laboratory determined that the isotope composition of the plutonium found in the Nuclear Samples is weapons-grade, meaning that the plutonium, if produced in sufficient quantities, would be suitable for use in a nuclear weapon,” the Justice Department said in its statement at the time.

One of Ebisawa’s co-conspirators claimed they “had available more than 2,000 kilograms (4,400 pounds) of Thorium-232 and more than 100 kilograms of uranium in the compound U3O8 – referring to a compound of uranium commonly found in the uranium concentrate powder known as ’yellowcake’.”

The thorium. Well, it doesn’t go bang. Also, 99.98% of naturally occuring Th is this isotope. So, it’s probably just Th itself. And that could be – could, obvs – just a byproduct of Burma’s rare earths industry. Th is a normal byproduct of a rare earths industry.

Yellow cake is just the standard uranium oxide. Not enriched or anything.

Now it is naughty to trade those across borders. Within not so much but across, yes. You should have licences and so on. But while they’re indeed nuclear they’re not really nuclear. I’ve, wholly legally, bought and sold a bar of thorium, for example.

The weapons-grade plutonium, that’s a different thing. But my very strong suspicion is that this is a gramme or two – if even that. There are odd bits of lab samples that sometimes float around out there. But not the some kgs that would be necessary to actually do anything other than a dirty bomb. And to produce more in any quantity requires both a reactor and also a reprocessing plant. That second is the real limit – they’re rare things.

As to the value of this to anyone trying to build a bomb. To build an actual Bang! the value is zero. No one actually trying to build a Bang! would have the slightest interest in this material at any price at all.

To someone who would like to mix some gunpowder with something “nucular” to scare people, yes, it’s got value. But it’s also not rare material in the slightest so that value’s pretty low.

The truth being that near all (and it’s the “near” which is the dangerous bit) of this illegal market in nuclear weapons materials is the dimmer crooks selling it to undercover agents. Anyone who really wants to build a Bomb! isn’t interested in this shit in the slightest.

The UK steel industry has called for the government to promise to buy British as it prepares for a major expansion of offshore wind generation.

Wind generation has become a key part of the UK’s energy system, contributing 29% of generated electricity in 2023. However, despite the huge increase in the number of turbines, only 2% of the steel used in British offshore wind projects over the past five years was made in the UK, according to a study by the consultants Lumen Energy & Environment, commissioned by UK Steel, a lobby group.

Gosh, really?

However, much of that forthcoming demand will be for plate steel, which is not now made at sufficient scale in the UK. Making more in the UK would require investment from private companies that may not be forthcoming without a government pledge to favour British products

So the demand is that we should subsidise the creation of a plate steel industry in order to build steel for a subsidised wind industry which will then get charged higher prices – requiring higher subsidy – and this will make Britain richer?

There is a point at which we tell ‘ em to fuck off, isn’t there?

“We oppose metals mining because it has been technically and scientifically proven that mining is not viable in the country,” the environmentalist Luis González told reporters.

So you don’t have to worry about this then:

El Salvador overturns metals mining ban, defying environmental groups
President Nayib Bukele pushed for the legislation that will grant government sole authority over mining activities

El Salvador’s legislature has overturned a seven-year-old ban on metals mining, a move that the country’s authoritarian president, Nayib Bukele, had pushed for to boost economic growth, but that environmental groups had opposed.

If it’s not possible to do then it won’t happen. Doesn’t matter what the law is, does it?

At lesat we now know why the President was making that absurd claim that there was $3 trillion of gold there. Rhetoric to get the bill passed…..truth in politics, eh?

Engineers in the Bristol works of Airbus leave nothing to chance when they are putting their metal alloy wings through their paces. A pair of hydraulic jacks bend, twist and bounce the 18-metre wing used in the Airbus A320, in a test that replicates the forces exerted on it over the equivalent of 240,000 flights — five times the normal lifespan.

For Airbus, where the safety record of the company’s commercial aircraft is paramount, exhaustive testing of this nature is standard stuff.

They once bought scandium (well, OK, aluminium scandium master alloy) from me to build a whole wing like this. Which they then tested, for years, in exactly this manner.

“The way to make an aircraft more fuel efficient is to make the wings long and slender. You create more lift and less drag,” Partridge explained. “The other key way to save fuel is to make the wing lighter.” Airbus’s albatross wing is made from carbon fibre, rather than the heavier metal alloy versions that adorn its existing aircraft.

Not every investigation into a new material leads to use in production runs….