Metals

Finally actually read Uncle Tungsten. About which, two little points.

1) If anyone is stupid enough to think that we might run out of hafnium refer them to the chapter “The Land of Stibnite” where why we won’t is explained.

2) He talks at the end of dreaming of a scandium hamburger. And, once, he was presented with one. Here. About which, well, I donated a piece or two to that periodic table table. And that scandium hamburger was made out of my scandium.

Jus’ sayin’

Fun little thing from Wildcat Resources:

Previous exploration focussed on tantalum mineralisation and the majority of samples were not assayed for lithium

This is a potential mine just over the hill from Greenbushes, one of the world’s largest hard rock lithium mines. It’s got the same mineralisation (the tantalum is a big clue). But no one has ever bothered to even check for the lithium content.

This would not be part of lithium reserves yet, not even lithium resources. This – assuming it’s there but the asnwer is that yes, it is – it’s not recorded in any database at all. There’s a lorra, lorra, minerals out there.

Namibia is considering taking minority stakes in mining and petroleum production companies amid increasing concerns over local ownership of valuable resources.
“We are making a case that local ownership must start with the state, which holds ownership of our natural resources,” Mines and Energy Minister Tom Alweendo told lawmakers on Monday. “The proposed state ownership should take the form where the state owns a minimum equity percentage in all mining companies and petroleum production, for which it does not have to pay,” he said.

They already gain the royalties over value produed. In economics terms that is a share of ownership.

But here they come again, violating contracts already signed. Is it any wonder that so much of Africa is piss poor?

Oh, yes, elections are next year…..

So this company confirms a substantial rare earths find. The shares drop 15%.

Nope, it’s a lovely rare earths find. High in magnet metals, in an ionic clay (which has markedly lower processing costs) and, well, you know, super.

It’s just that there are some 10 or so companies announcing ionic clay finds in Australia alone over the past two months alone.

That’s the not-very-rare-earths then.

As I’ve been saying, Earth’s a big place. All of it made up of some combination of the same 92 elements. We’ve really not got a shortage of anything very much. Therefore prices based upon assuming a shortage aren’t likely to persist.

A 5 minute edited version of a one hour chat. A simple and straightforward explanation of why the we’re going to run out of minerals crowd are simply wrong.

As outlined in the initial announcement of the drilling results dated 29 March 2023, a
review and detailed analysis of the original intersections has been completed.
 Analysis has confirmed wide zones of low grade REE mineralisation
 The significant intersections indicate an average of 21% NdPr and 17% HREO from the
initial 22 holes drilled.
 The drill samples show Uranium (U) and Thorium (Th) grades average 3ppm and
23ppm respectively, these grades are lower than would normally be expected from clay
hosted REE mineralisation over a granite bedrock and significantly lower than hard rock
REE projects.
 Eight metallurgical composite samples have been compiled for submission to ALS for
preliminary leach test work.
 Results for the initial 58 holes into the gravity anomaly identified to the east of the clay
zone are expected to be received in May.

Lordy be, no, don’t invest in this stuff. But that’s the fifth Australian miner I’ve seen announcing an ionic clay rare earths deposit in the past two weeks, and the sixth I know of so far. That idea that this mineralisation was restricted to South China is somewhat blown. And so rare earths are not so rare. But of course the EU will insist we must all recycle everything because we’re running out of these scarce resources of critical minerals.

Idiots.

The president of Chile plans to nationalise the nation’s lithium-mining industry, placing the material critical for electric car manufacturing in the state’s control.

For:

The government will honour existing contracts with companies, he said, some of which stretch into the 2040s.

What they mean is that they’re going to nationalise the lithium development industry, not the lithium mining one. And that’s pretty much nationalised already to be honest. For to develop you need a licence from the nuclear ministry, which doesn’t grant them.

Just one of those things, eh?

Heavy Rare Earths Limited (HRE) is an Australian rare earth exploration and development company. HRE’s key exploration project is Cowalinya, near Norseman in Western Australia. This is a clay-hosted rare earth project with a JORC Inferred Resource of 28Mt @ 625 ppm TREO and a desirable rare earth composition where 25% are the valuable magnet rare earths and 23% the strategic heavy rare earths

The world and its Auntie agrees that we need many more rare earths for this EV revolution. OK. So therefore we need to recycle lots more, make at home, secure strategic supplies and and……except we don’t.

We used to think that “ionic clays” were rare and even then confined to China and the Burma border. Ionic clays are a much – much much – better source of the magnet metals than the more traditional ores.

This is the fifth – to my certain knowledge, at least the fifth – miner to announce ionic clay deposits in Australia alone in just the last two weeks.

Rare earths ain’t rare.

They’re not going to change their plans though, are they?

Already the mountain is the size of 125,000 jumbo jets, and will double by 2050. We need technology but our current cycle is unsustainable. We are recklessly mining, dumping and polluting the earth with materials toxic to humans and wildlife. In the process we’re also chucking away in e-waste the rare and finite raw materials essential to modern electronics, from smartphones to solar panels. Less than 1 per cent of these strategically vital elements are being recovered. This is self-destructive stupidity.

If those elements – metals – are worth recovering then they will be recovered. Because if they’re worth recovering then there’s a profit in recovering them. Says this bloke who has happily traded in scrap metal.

That they’re left mouldering in piles is because it costs more to get those “strategically vital elements” out of the pile than it does to go dig up some fresh rock and get them that way. That they’re not recycled is the proof we require that they shouldn’t be recycled.

And then this is truly laughable:

Consider making recycling a not-for-profit sector, as in France.

But that’s already why we don’t recycle, because there’s no profit in it. That’s also why we shouldn’t recycle, because there’s no profit in it.

Chinese mining bosses are funding Nigerian militant groups in order to secure access to the country’s mineral reserves,

Well, maybe, Probably the other way around, the militias are charging rents to the Chinese in areas they control. But, you know. This:

In one pocket of Zamfara, researchers found, interaction with militants runs so deep that some serve as runners for Chinese miners who have spread throughout Nigeria, controlling digs for gold. The country has some of the largest gold reserves in the world.

Does it? Nigeria doesn’t even appear in the list of the top 19 countries by gold reserves.

What’s he on about?

Nigeria’s gold reserves are a key factor in the nation’s economic health and strength. With an estimated gold reserves of 21.46 metric tons for 2022, Nigeria has one of the most abundant gold reserves in the world, accounting for about 5% of the global gold reserves.

Oooooh. But how much the central bank has down in the cellar has really nothing at all to do with how much is out there in the rocks now, does it?

The legislation also included investments of $7.5 billion in electric vehicle charging, $10 billion in clean transportation, and more than $7 billion in EV battery components. Additionally, it has been stipulated that all EV chargers funded through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act must be built domestically.

However, building all these things, from infrastructure to electric vehicles, requires resources which the United States cannot currently obtain without going through foreign adversaries, like Russia or China.

“The United States will continue to rely on China, Russia and other foreign nations for our supply of raw materials and rare-earth minerals, and this is unacceptable,” Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, said.

“America’s defense in the modern era increasingly demands the use of critical minerals, making it more essential by the day for our nation to have a sufficient stockpile of and reliable access to these materials,” Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, ranking member of the Senate Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, said. “At this very moment, our enemies like China dominate the supply chain of these increasingly vital materials, and are even expanding into regions such as Africa and Afghanistan, threatening our readiness in an emergency situation and jeopardizing our national security.”

Three crucial elements needed for projects like these are known as niobium, scandium and titanium. They are used in cars, bridges, military vehicles, buildings, aircraft and wind turbines, among other things. Because of their properties that make metals both lighter and stronger, these elements have the ability to improve the fuel efficiency of automobiles and help infrastructure last longer.

There’s the one mine that wants to produce Nb, Ti and Sc. A mine that is hopelessly uneconomic, even by its own records and proposals, without subsidy.

Only the one mine mind you.

Gee, I wonder.

Peter Cashin of Imperial Mining Talks about Scandium

With the global scandium supply dominated by Russia

It isn’t.

China these days……

The Kerala Minerals and Metals Limited (KMML) has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) under the National Institute for Interdisciplinary Science & Technology ( NIIST) to extract scandium from the spent acid used for the beneficiation of ilmenite at the pigment unit.

Well, OK.

The new concept has been developed in collaboration with the Research and Development Department of the KMML.

India suffers dreadfully from the “not invented or mined here syndrome”. If they didn’t they’d just give CleanTech a call and ask them to install a unit on the side of that titanium dioxide factory.

It’s all already been invented, just has to be installed.

That commentary that the EU saved you from being mislead by by getting it taken out of Google. Of course, it has been syndicated, so the information is there, just not from the original source.

“There’s no shortage of lithium out there in the lithosphere – the crust of the planet,” Adam Smith Institute Senior Fellow Tim Worstall told Sputnik. “The only shortages can be of plants or mines that can extract it in any particular year.”

He noted how identified world lithium resources grew nearly 10 million tons in a single year, from 89 million in 2021.

“This ‘big’ Iranian find is less than the amount we find each year now that we’re all seriously looking for more resources of lithium,” he said.

The problem, he added, centers on extracting and processing the materials. For example, Worstall predicted it could take at least a decade to bring Iran’s lithium to market.

Such terrors that Brussels protects you from, eh?

So. Doing that morning self-Google to see if anyone’s written anything fun about me.

In response to a legal request submitted to Google, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read more about the request at LumenDatabase.org.

??

In the Regulation the legislator intends to set out a very broad and comprehensive prohibition.
Social media are operators and they offer a service to their users. The Regulation prohibits both
the broadcasting (which is a very broad concept in this Regulation) and the fact that operators
“enable, facilitate or otherwise contribute to broadcast”. The Regulation refers to “including
through transmission or distribution by any means such as cable, satellite, IP-TV, internet service
providers, internet video-sharing platforms or applications.” Furthermore, the circumvention
clause is worded in very broad terms. A broad construction of those terms is also consistent with
the objective of the Regulation, which aims to tackle the fact that RT and Sputnik have to date
gravely distorted and manipulated facts and have repeatedly and consistently targeted European
political parties, especially during election periods, as well as civil society, asylum seekers,
Russian ethnic minorities, gender minorities, and the functioning of democratic institutions in the
Union and its Member States (recital 6); the Russian Federation has engaged in continuous and
concerted propaganda actions targeted at civil society in the Union and neighbouring countries,
gravely distorting and manipulating facts (recital 7).

A reporter at Sputnik emailed me looking for a quote a few days back. So, what the EU doesn’t want you to see:

Just a few basic questions I had:

(1) I saw Bank of American predict the lithium market will be in surplus this year. Do you agree? What are the factors driving this and the likely impact on prices? How far might they fall?

Yes, looks like lithium will be in surplus this year. Although that’s always a slightly odd statement – there’s always demand “at a price”. What is really being said is that the supply of lithium has risen so much that the price will decline. As it has been doing of course.
(2) Do you still envision a major shortfall in lithium in the long run amid the transition to EVs?

There’s no shortage of lithium out there in the lithosphere (the crust of the planet). The only shortages can be of plants or mines that can extract it in any particular year. Yes, undoubtedly there will be times when there is a shortfall. As there will also be of surplus. That’s just the way things go. But is there – or even can there be – any substantial shortfall for any longer than it takes to open new mines or extraction plants? No.

(3) How do you think Iran finding a huge deposit of lithium will impact the competitive landscape and the price of lithium long term?

The Iranian find is an irrelevance to anything that matters today. 8 million tonnes or so of resources? That will take at least a decade to bring to market? Even if those resources can be converted to reserves and then mined? Seriously, who cares about this? No one should. It’s an irrelevance to anything happening in the marketplace either today or in any useful timespan.

Sure, it’s interesting for Iran and someone might well make good money out of it. But it’s just not germane to global supplies of lithium nor global availability. There really is lots and lots of lithium out there to find.

Glad you all feel so protected from that nasty Russian propaganda.

Abject idiocy:

The element’s global importance lies in its use to help crop growth. About 50m tonnes of phosphate fertiliser are sold around the world every year, and these supplies play a crucial role in feeding the planet’s 8 billion inhabitants.

However, significant deposits of phosphorus are found in only a few countries: Morocco and western Sahara have the largest amount, China the second biggest deposit and Algeria the third. In contrast, reserves in the US are down to 1% of previous levels, while Britain has always had to rely on imports. “Traditional rock phosphate reserves are relatively rare and have become depleted in line with their extraction for fertiliser production,” added Johnes.

This growing strain on stocks has raised fears the world will reach “peak phosphorus” in a few years. Supplies will then decline, leaving many nations struggling to obtain enough to feed their people.

Bollocks. They think mineral reserves are the amount available.

No.

Reserves are the working stock of extant mines. Resources are the amount available for us. And note. Not the total amount, just the amount we know about in this particular form that we mine, phosphate rock:

Some world reserves were reported only in terms of ore tonnage and grade. Phosphate rock
resources occur principally as sedimentary marine phosphorites. The largest sedimentary deposits are found in
northern Africa, the Middle East, China, and the United States. Significant igneous occurrences are found in Brazil,
Canada, Finland, Russia, and South Africa. Large phosphate resources have been identified on the continental
shelves and on seamounts in the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. World resources of phosphate rock are more
than 300 billion tons. There are no imminent shortages of phosphate rock.

Again, that’s phosphate rock, not phosphorous. That, the element, is some 0.1% of the lithosphere.

23,000–24,000 × 1015 metric tons.

23,000,000,000,000,000,000 tonnes.

Or, 2,300,000,000,000,000 tonnes of phosphorous on the planet.

Which is possibly quite enough to be going on with.

Fucking cretins.

“We have reached a critical turning point,” said Prof Phil Haygarth of Lancaster University. “We might be able to turn back but we have really got to pull ourselves together and be an awful lot smarter in the way we use phosphorus. If we don’t, we face a calamity that we have termed ‘phosphogeddon’.”

Phosphorus was discovered in 1669 by the German scientist Hennig Brandt, who isolated it from urine, and it has since been shown to be essential to life. Bones and teeth are largely made of the mineral calcium phosphate – a compound derived from it – while the element also provides DNA with its sugar phosphate backbone.

“To put it simply, there is no life on Earth without phosphorus,” exlpained Prof Penny Johnes of Bristol University.

Abolish Lancaster and Bristol universities. By lunchtime.

As I never tire of telling, there’s an awful lot more out there of every mineral that folk generally realise. This is a list of lithium companies. It’s not a complete list by any means at all. It’s only the list of listed, stock market, companies that someone will pay me to write about.

Ticker Name GICS Sector GICS Industry

Payment
SGML Sigma Lithium Corporation
LIT Global X Lithium & Battery Tech ETF
SLI Standard Lithium Ltd.
CYDVF Century Lithium Corp.
BATT Amplify Lithium & Battery Technology ETF
APHLF Alpha Lithium Corporation
CXOXF Core Lithium Ltd
LITOF Frontier Lithium Inc.
GNENF Ganfeng Lithium Group Co., Ltd.
EEMMF E3 Lithium Limited
ALLIF Atlantic Lithium Limited
GNENY Ganfeng Lithium Group Co., Ltd.
SGML:CA Sigma Lithium Corporation
CRECF Critical Elements Lithium Corporation
ATLX Atlas Lithium Corporation
LI:CA American Lithium Corp.
LLLAF Leo Lithium Limited
LISMF Lithium South Development Corporation
FL:CA Frontier Lithium Inc. Materials
LCE:CA Century Lithium Corp. Materials
CRE:CA Critical Elements Lithium Corporation
TQLCF Tianqi Lithium Corporation
GBLRF Global Lithium Resources Limited
CTLHF CleanTech Lithium Plc Materials

We don’t need even all of those of that very partial list to come to market for there to be likely oversupply. Note that the list doesn’t include the large producers currently extant. This is only the companies that someone else hasn’t written about in the last 90 days…..

Years after initial space-mining ventures went bust, startup AstroForge has announced two missions in 2023 to obtain rare-earth minerals from a near-Earth asteroid.

Rare earths, from an asteroid? Given that concentrates are worth, hmm, a few thousand $ a tonne, seems like a remarkably expensive method of getting them.

The platinum-group metals (PGMs) — iridium, osmium, palladium, platinum, rhodium, and ruthenium — which are among the rarest mineral commodities in Earth’s crust. Just 30 tonnes of rhodium, used in catalytic converters, are mined every year, and only three tonnes of iridium. Mostly these minerals come from mines in South Africa, Siberia, with some mines in the U.S. and Canada.

That’s not a good start to a sciencey, science discussion now is it? Platinum group metals are not rare earths, rare earths are not platinum group metals. Sigh.

“The appeal of asteroid mining is elements that are rare in the Earth’s crust may be found near the surface of some asteroids, where they could be relatively easy to access,” says Michael Brown (Monash University). “But developing the technology to robotically and effectively mine tons of raw material from distant asteroids won’t be easy.”

AstroForge plans to start small, literally, with its first CubeSat the size of two loaves of bread. Its first mission will test in-situ refining in a zero-gravity environment. “That’s really the piece that we see as the highest risk because it’s unproven technology in space,” says Acain. “So we’re launching a CubeSat up to low Earth orbit to understand and characterize our refinery in those harsh environments.”

Sounds feasible to me. Not that I actually know much about this but yes, iron rich asteroids are likely to have high nickel and so also pgm contents. You can refine them with a lot of ‘leccie – solar cells therefore. Why not?

The long-term plan is to have much larger spacecraft mine the surface of M-type asteroids and return to Earth only refined PGMs. It’s a big jump. “Scaling that up to return commercially viable quantities of processed material from asteroids millions of kilometers away is going to be difficult,” says Brown.

And that’s where the problem is.

“I hope the satellites are successful, but there are good reasons for caution,” said Brown. “The small satellites that will be flown in 2023 have masses of kilograms and budgets of millions, but commercial space mining missions would have masses of many tons and budgets of billions.”

Yes, a distinct problem.

AstroForge plans to take it milestone by milestone, but Acain thinks it’s an absolute necessity to extract these rare minerals off-Earth. “We have a finite supply of resources here on Earth – that’s a fact – and there’s more demand for these resources than ever before,” he says. The present mining process, he adds, is costly and polluting. “Taking it off-Earth is the only way we see to solve all of these issues.”

Maybe. But at what price? After all, we’re talking business here so price is an important consideration. Which brings us back to the opening line here:

Years after initial space-mining ventures went bust

As I wrote back then:

It’s also true that those nickel iron asteroids are likely to be rich in platinum-group metals (PGMs). They too can be refined with a bit of electricity, and they’re sufficiently valuable (say, for platinum, $60m a tonne, just as a number to use among friends) that we might be able to finance everything we’re trying to do by doing so.

OK.

Start from the size of the platinum market. This is some 6.2 million ounces a year. 6.5 million ounces of virgin material, that is: given the value of the metal some to all of past usage is recycled as well. At our $2,000 an ounce price guide, that gives us a market value of some $13bn a year. That certainly seems large enough to keep a space programme running. (Do note, I’m ignoring palladium, a similar sized market, and rhodium etc, which are much smaller ones. They don’t change the final conclusion by their inclusion or exclusion.)

Except that’s not quite how markets work. There are demand curves as well as supply ones: sure, a nice high price will encourage new entrants like Planetary into the market. But in order to shift all this new material, prices will have to decline. The important question therefore is how elastic is the market? How far, if at all, will the price fall if a new supplier enters?

From a recent trade report we’ve seen recently, an extra 250,000 ounces has come onto the market. This has led to a 25 per cent fall in the price of platinum. Ah! Price is very sensitive to an increase in supply, then. Or, if you prefer, demand is very insensitive to a change in price. They’re the same statement, really.

Ah. If you start bringing back platinum in sufficient volume to pay for the billions in satellite mining costs then you crash the price against your output of platinum.

Ooops! And the more you mine to cover your costs the lower the price received. For the price is to do with the rarity and if you’ve just gained another whole source then the rarity rather goes away, doesn’t it?

My opinion does not change therefore:

Guys, I wish you all the luck in this little blue marble of ours, but I do think this is best described as an adventure, not a business.

Spotter, VikingWill

As the push for deep-sea mining intensifies, experts are increasingly concerned that companies will kick up clouds of sediment, which could be laden with toxic heavy metals that may harm marine life. At least 700 scientists – along with France, Germany and Chile – are calling for a moratorium on deep-sea mining.

So, sand and dust and mud sitting on the floor of the ocean is fine. But stir it up a bit until it falls out of the water again onto the sea bed and that’s toxic pollution?

Because that is what is being complained about. No one is digging anything, there’s no release of anything. It’s that sea bed sediment being mixed up into the water for a bit.

Horrors, eh?

EPA vetoes Alaska mine to protect salmon in win for environmentalists
Move is a victory for the environment, economy and tribes of Alaska’s Bristol Bay region, and is ‘victory for science over politics’

Far more accurate to call it a triumph of politics over science…..