Aluminium – the dullest of metals gets interesting
November 21, 2010
In my recent comment to NERN I said that more attention should be shown to the life-cycles of the major industrial metals such as aluminium, zinc, copper, nickel as a major source of energy savings. I’m going to go through the case study of Al to demonstrate that a metal doesn’t have to be rare to be big news.
Aluminium is a dull metal. Its uses are dull. Its geology is really dull. Its chemistry is dull. In fact its only really its processing that makes Al stand out and that’s because it is so energy intensive. You need vast amounts of electricity (for example Alcan Lynmouth has its own 420MW power station built adjacent to it) plus sources of sodium hydroxide and of fluorine (usually synthetic cryolite made from fluorspar these days) to get from the raw bauxite through semi-processed alumina to the metallic aluminium.
To give some scale; Alcan, probably the world’s single largest vertically integrated aluminium producer, ships 30 Million tonnes of raw ore a year to its refineries and it takes 4 tonnes of bauxite to produce 1 tonne of metallic Al. Global metallic Al production is between 35-40Mt depending on when you take the measurement which means that somewhere between 30 and 160Mt of material is shipped each year within the aluminium life-cycle before the metal even gets to the manufacturing stage. Of course the energy embodied in getting to metal is only one step.
UK estimates show that the difference in energy footprint between 1kg of primary production and 1kg of recycled production is 14kWh. The UK consumes around 1 million tonnes of Al per year representing an embodied energy of somewhere around 14M Mwh or 1.2M toe. Again to give some scale 4GW Drax produces around 25M MWh each year or 7% of the UK’s total consumption of electricity which implies that the amount of energy required to provide the UK with its Al needs is equivalent to roughly 4% of total electrical consumption (or 1 1/2 Sizewell B’s). Of course we don’t mine bauxite in the UK and much of the refined metal we use is produced elsewhere, so a lot of that energy is offshored to areas where we have no influence on the energy system employed. For example Australia, the world’s largest Al producer and exporter has grids dominated by coal, Guinea is a classic macro-hydro development story and former Eastern-bloc countries mostly use the Al smelter/nuclear power station combo that is also present at Wylfa on Anglesey. So we can pick our own baddies from that list 
Currently the UK uses roughly 50% recycled Al, about half of which is old scrap (mostly packaging) and half industrial new scrap, but still landfills 3 billion drinks cans a year.
So that all gives some idea of the scale of the aluminium industry in the UK and the world. The thing is that there is a new technology available that could cut energy requirements of primary Al production by 40% and cuts out the Bayer pre-production process with all its nasty caustic wastes. It also allows a higher percentage of recycled Al to be used within primary production so removing a step in the recycling chain and allowing for a smaller modular smelter. Its inventors claim that Al costs would be roughly 25% of current costs (down from $2,000 to $500/tonne) if their system were commercialised. Its essentially a conventional smelting technology that uses a flux, instead of the complex Hall-Heurot process that uses electrolysis.
In itself 40% of 14Twh is not even a 1GW conventional power station, but that isn’t the point. If you can drop the cost of Al by 75% you can massively increase its use in the automotive sector effectively swapping all steel chassis parts for Al and reducing overall rolling weight by 20%+. This is where the investment really starts to kick in because you can now structure the supply chain in the same was as the steel mini-mills with manufacturing close to consumption and a high % of recycling without excessive pre-processing. All of a sudden over the life-time of a car you have dropped the embodied energy by 50% and the daily energy consumption by 20%. This is a multiplier when taken with the drop in primary processing cost. I can’t claim to know what that multiplier would be but the 1 1/2 Sizewell B’s are joined by many oil wells (or however you are powering you personal transport these days).
So swapping Al for steel in cars is a realistic prospect. It needs investment to get it going on a national scale because it requires both new car production facilities and new Al processing capacity but on an energy basis it looks a stone cold winner. The best thing is that the process is exothermic so you can recover energy off the back of the smelter and optimise the process even further than the inventors have as yet.
Metals From Waste, Lessons From the Past to Shape the Future
April 23, 2010
This is a repost of a piece that I wrote for MetalMiner.
Until the 1900s it wasn’t uncommon to see women working in the tin and copper mines of Cornwall. These Bal Maidens all but ran the above ground operations taking the ore from the kibbles (ore buckets) and running it through hand sorting and processing, right up to the point of smelting. A combination of legislation, geology, automation and metals prices eventually smothered the Cornish mines, but we should remember that only 100 years ago virtually all hard-rock ores were hand processed everywhere in the world.
I was amazed by the resigned comments of US recyclers that it was simply uneconomic to recycle e-waste in the US and decided to take a look at the state of the art, because as the Bal Maidens demonstrate, time and technology do move on. It turns out that China is publishing scientific paper after scientific paper on industrial scale e-waste reprocessing. Some of the techniques, such as the dissassembly of printed circuit boards using ultrasound, are already operating at industrial scale. Others, like the use of super-critical methanol or water to boil the components off circuit boards, are still in R&D. But there is a definite and conscious technological effort going on to recover as much of the metal from e-waste as economically possible. Judging by the science the Chinese are having a great time mining these new deposits and are looking forward to the forecast increase in trade.
And it is potentially a very substantial trade. The figures quoted in the NYT do not do it justice. Using some of the more conservative grades reported in peer-reviewed journals, every year 50 million tonnes of e-waste could produce as much copper as 19 Bingham Canyons (4.7 Million tonnes) and as much gold as four AngloGold Ashantis (8 Million ounces). That’s around $50bn worth of refined metal, just in copper and gold. That is not to mention the millions of ounces of silver, thousands of tonnes of aluminium, steel, tin, nickel and lead and the possible extraction of some of the more specialist metals like gallium and cobalt. A back of the envelope calculation shows that if you had all the e-waste in one spot and efficient technology to exploit it you could build a company comparable in size to Rio Tinto or BHPBilliton.
When we hear about e-waste it is usually in terms of pollution due to mercury, lead and cadmium that is vented into the environment from small artisinal workshops. What we should also remember is that it is currently economic to have an estimated 700,000 Chinese employed in informal e-waste recycling. Right now there are around 7,000 people employed in the whole recycling sector in the US, similar to the number of Bal Maidens employed in the Cornish mines in the 1850s, and they are (were) all using similar manual techniques. China has started automating e-waste recycling and cleaning up the process as it does so. What is stopping the rest of us ?
Maybe we are waiting until we have to start mining our landfills. Its not as far fetched as it sounds. London hosted the first ever landfill mining conference in 2008. Any concentration of metals should attract attention as prices rise and landfill was no exception pre-crash. With advances in bacterial leaching, as well as an existing and substantial knowledge-base in both acid and alkali hydrometallurgy the only real technical issue holding back in-situ landfill mining is the grade, which in comparison to e-waste is low.
Which provokes the final question; why would you dilute high-grade e-waste with municipal solid waste and make metals recovery more difficult and less profitable in the future ? It seems to me that by exporting the raw material we have the e-waste business upside-down and it is waiting for the same kind of revolution that the mini-mills brought for steel.
FIT Company breaks cover
February 28, 2010
The UK’s Feed in Tariffs for low carbon energy production are about to come into effect and in a bid to steal a march on any potential competitors one specialist supply company has broken cover.
Ownergy seems to have a business model eerily similar to one that I suggested last June in my post Energy Ideas Part Two. Not only is it going to do all the technical assessment, design and installation, but its also offering management and finance for the installations and will be covering all technologies that attract an FIT.
The guy who is running it, Phillip Wolfe, is a big cheese in the Renewable Energy Association and seems to have had a big hand in the design of the FITs in the first place, so I doubt that he’s a regular reader of this blog. Who says that only the major energy companies can capture government policy mechanisms
Plastic Fantastic
February 5, 2010
I briefly mentioned the interplay between the plastic industry and the demand for oil, well the Financial Times recently did a piece on petrochemical prices that has shed a lot of light on the subject for me. Unfortunately the piece is behind a paywall, but you may be able to get to it with a free trial subscription.
The main thrust of the matter is that the major petrochemicals that plastics are made from (naptha, benzene, ethylene and propylene) are under massive and rising demand pressure from Asia. So much so that the FT reports that an index of their prices has risen by 150% in the last year, now don’t get too excited. Just before that year started the same index as reporting an all-time low as demand stagnated during the recession. The story of surging demand is also told by this Indian site in a bit more detail.
My point is this; running oil refineries is an expensive, energy intensive, dirty (in terms of emissions) and sometimes economically uncertain business. The price volatility of the raw natural resources (including water) is multiplied by the energy intensive nature of its processing and carbon emissions pricing. Also the demand for the products is dependent on macro-economics that, to a large part, are tied to crude oil prices as well. It seems to me that the price risks that ‘oil as fuel’ users face are minor when compared to those that ‘oil as feedstock’ users face.
The demand imbalances that cause supply price shocks, like the one we are seeing now, are temporary and transient as we can see from this paper from the Middle Eastern Economic Survey, so long as they are not coupled with oil price rises. However, since most mid to long term forecasts show oil price rising steadily we can reasonably expect the price of petrochemicals to rise as a function of the raw material price rises, possibly a multiple of oil price rises.
Lets have a little context;
China currently imports around 21m tonnes of oil per month or 200m tonnes for 2009 (and rising fast). Some estimates see global peak consumption of around 100m barrels per day, thats roughly 5,000m tonnes per year, against today’s 85m barrels per day (4,250m tonnes per year).
Lets compare that to our main petrochemicals;
naptha – 215m tonnes per year
benzene – 10m tonnes per year
ethylene – 25m tonnes per year
propylene – 15m tonnes per year
That’s a total of 265m tonnes of the products per year or, in broad terms, a similar amount of oil to that which China will be using in 2010-2011. I pose the question – what happens to global oil prices if you take China out of the equation ?
So here’s where bio-plastics and biomass derived chemical feedstocks come in. China and India are the two main marginal consumers, they swing oil prices by their increases in consumption. Take ‘a’ China out of that equation and my strong guess is that your oil price volatility drops by a significant amount.
So by replacing petrochemicals with bio-mass derived petrochemicals you can actually have a disproportionate effect on energy price security, because you have taken the price and volatility multiplier that is refining out of the equation.
Of course you still need the energy and the water, but your raw material would be forestry products or agricultural byproducts. These are generally grown in climates where water isn’t a major issue, but you would need to be a little careful over both water supplies and food production.
Anyone fancy setting up a bio-petro-chemical production facility in the Canadian forests (to supply North America) or the Russian Tiga (to supply Chindia) ?
Random Energy Ideas Part Four
August 5, 2009
This one is a bit convoluted, but bear with me I wouldn’t type it all out just to annoy you.
Heat is an up and coming issue in the UK, specifically what to do with all that waste industrial heat from power stations and steel plants (if there are any left). Excess domestic heat can be dealt with by just opening the windows, or if you want to be super hi-tech pumping it into liquid or solid storage, but try that with the excess heat from even a modest power station and you’d end up standing in a pool of magma. What you really need is a set of complimentary large-scale parasitic industries that need large amounts of heat (almost) all day (almost) every day.
Apologies to proponents of domestic heating grids, but I don’t see the point of digging up the roads and changing everyone’s central heating system, if you can use the heat as efficiently in industry or agriculture. You are increasing resource use not decreasing it and I like to be able to control the heating in my house. I assume that everyone does, which means that we will all use the heat at the same time or not. Where does it go when ‘not’ is the majority thought ? The overall aim is surely, most efficient use of energy on a country-sized scale, which makes commercial or industrial use of waste heat much more preferable, especially since factories don’t care about the view and can be located next to the heat source on land that is cheap and nasty.
Here are some possibles, most of which turn out to have been mentioned before, but hey, in for a penny;
Industrial laundry – Got a few hospitals, hotels and army barracks that don’t need ‘special fabric conditioner’ ? Well, you most likely also have a full-time laundry. Its hot, it uses heat, it produces heat. Hitching these up to a waste heat system seems like a no-brainer. You have to factor in transport to and from the site to make sure that its actually a more efficient use of energy, but that happens all the time anyway.
Server Farms – what ? Don’t they need coolth rather than warmth ? Well yes, but any heat difference can be converted to the opposite heat difference with a bit of fancy thermodynamic engineering, you just can’t do it with 100% efficiency. Not only are server farms big electrical power consumers, so the shorter the cable run to them the better, but they also require large amounts of refrigeration. Instead of using electricity to power that refrigeration why not use waste heat from the local power plant. Don’t spend a million on PV so that you can tell your shareholders that you provide enough to do the server room lighting, spend it re-locating next to a power plant and knock holes in your energy budget. Or if you simply have to be somewhere else warm your own and neighboring buildings with excess heat from servers.
Greenhouses – worried about food security, food miles, invasive species, pesticide use, water consumption, whatever floats your boat really. The world of agriculture is a lot more controllable under glass. With waste heat you can heat or cool a set of glasshouses, collect & store the rainwater and you can control the humidity, exercise some degree of hygiene and you can keep more of the beasties off your cabbages. You’ll still need fertilizers and pesticides, but since they are not getting wsahed straight into the local river you need less. More to the point you can produce much more food locally over a larger portion of the year. No energy other than waste heat required.
Fish farms – along the same lines. UK fish stocks are said to be struggling. World fish stocks are said to be plummeting. I have no idea whether that is true, all I know is that whenever I’ve cast a hook over the side for mackerel I have never failed to catch my dinner. But I don’t do it very often and I’ve noticed that cod is not always alone on the menu in the chip shop these days. Anyway…..
On the shores of Lake Victoria the fishermen prize the tilapia. Its a nice looking fish with firm, white, tasty flesh. Its great fried whole, but will take the same range of flavours as a sea fish like a bass. They are freshwater, algae feeding, quick growing and easy to ‘domesticate’. They are an ideal farming fish as far as I can tell as a non-pescitorialist. They just won’t breed at a water temperature of less that 30C.
Again the food security, food miles argument comes in, but it also has a conservation element since we aren’t munching on sea-caught, wild stocks. Just a word of warning though, the tilapia that you can buy in the local UK supermarket are a farmed cousin of the tilapia nilensis that is hooked out of Lake Victoria. Its still tasty, but just not quite as nice, and a bit smaller. Maybe that’s wild vs farmed I don’t know.
You would have to do this fish farming in covered ponds with good circulation but, again, nothing but waste heat required. You could even float some aquaculture on the top of the ponds so as to grow the fishes food on-site and maybe take a crop from (I’m thinking of something like corriander with fibrous roots), but that’s only guesswork.
Other industrial-scale heat sinks
Food processing factories – all those cook-chill ready meals are prepared somewhere.
Ceramics – from tiles to toilet bowls, they all have drying facilities and large kilns that could benefit from pre-heating
Swimming pools and leisure centres – or indeed any large spaces that are heated year round like
Airports – heated runway ? well, terminal buildings anyway
Shopping Centres, hospitals, large office complexes.
Basically what I’m saying is, keep those damn heat pipes out of my house ! There’s plenty of other places to shove them before you get to me. If you want to include them in new developments that’s fine, I can decide to move into one or not, but my house is my home is my castle is my cave is my den. I don’t let just anyone in. Don’t even get me started on smart meters !
That sounds crazy but I’m only joking a little. The whole retrofit and external influence on home life is a serious issue and one that often gets forgotten in a blizzard of techno fixes and macro economics. Energy services are there to make life better. If the downsides outweigh the upsides don’t do it.
