Its a remarkable thing that when a scientist, or in this case a group of scientists, announce a genuine basic scientific or engineering breakthrough that opens the door to a new avenue of research and poses all sorts of questions about the nature of matter, journalists and The Daily Telegraph in particular get completely the wrong end of the stick and others then decide that the scientists are worthless freaks.
The piece in the Telegraph is so riddled with inaccuracies and false conflations that it should be used as some sort of example of how not to do it in journalism schools. Lets pick it apart and see what he got wrong.
Japan creates synthetic version of rare earth metal palladium
WRONG
PALLADIUM IS NOT A RARE EARTH METAL THE RARE EARTHS ARE A SPECIAL GROUP OF ELEMENTS THAT HAVE BEEN IN THE NEWS RECENTLY. PALLADIUM IS A METAL THAT IS RARE ON EARTH, ITS A DIFFERENT THING.
AND THE JAPANESE SCIENTISTS DID NOT CLAIM TO CREATE A SYNTHETIC PALLADIUM, THOUGH THEY DO STATE THAT THEIR ACHIEVEMENT IS ‘AKIN TO MODERN ALCHEMY’
IN THEIR CONCLUSIONS THE GROUP SAYS
“we conclude that the Ag50Rh50 solid-solution alloy has an electronic structure similar to that of Pd (palladium)”.
THE USE OF THE WORD ‘SYNTHETIC’ BY RYALL IMPLIES A NEW MATERIAL WAS FORMED WHEN IN FACT WHAT WAS BEING CREATED WAS A VERY FINE MISTED MIXTURE THAT OTHER MOLECULES REACTED TO AS IF THAT MIXTURE WAS PURE SOLID PALLADIUM.
Japanese scientists have developed a synthetic version of the rare earth metal palladium, a breakthrough that it is hoped will eventually reduce industry’s reliance on exports from China.
WRONG
JAPANESE INDUSTRY IS NOT RELIANT ON CHINESE EXPORTS FOR SUPPLIES OF PALLADIUM. MOST PALLADIUM COMES FROM THE SAME DEPOSITS AS PLATINUM. RUSSIAN AND SOUTH AFRICAN MINES PROVIDE OVER 75% OF THE WORLD’S PALLADIUM. CHINA’S MAIN INTEREST IN PALLADIUM IS THROUGH RECYCLING OF WASTE CATALYTIC CONVERTORS. IT HAS NO MINES OF ITS OWN AND DOES NOT SIGNIFICANTLY INFLUENCE PALLADIUM PRICE OR AVAILABILITY.
By Julian Ryall in Tokyo 7:00AM GMT 03 Jan 2011
Researchers at Kyoto University achieved the world-first by uniting molecules of rhodium and silver, which do not naturally combine, through the fusion of ultramicroscopic particles of the metals after they had been reduced to a fine solution spray.
WRONG
THE USE OF ‘UNITING’ AND ‘FUSION’ IMPLIES THAT THERE WAS A FORCED BONDING BETWEEN THE METALS. IF YOU READ THE PAPER IT IS APPARENT THAT THE NANO-PARTICULATE SPRAY IS A SIMPLE MIX WITH A FEW ADDED CHEMICALS TO ALLOW THE NANO-PARTICULATE TO FLOAT TOGETHER WITHOUT STICKING TO THE CONTAINER. THE WIERD EFFECTS WERE SEEN WHERE NANO-PARTICLES HAPPENED TO SETTLE ADJACENT TO EACH OTHER. A TEMPERATURE OF 170C IS NOWHERE NEAR ENOUGH FOR NORMAL METALLIC ALLOYING TO TAKE PLACE, EVEN IF THE METALS USED WERE MISCIBLE, SO SOME SORT OF QUANTUM STATE DIFFUSION LOOKS A GOOD BET (NOT BEING A QUANTUM METALLURGIST THAT’S AS FAR AS I’M STRETCHING).
THE WORD ‘ULTRAMICROSCOPIC’ IS A TRANSLATION THAT HAS NO MEANING IN TODAY’S SCIENCE AND THE SCALE AT WHICH THIS WORK WAS BEING CARRIED OUT COMMONLY USES THE TERM ‘NANO’ TO DENOTE THE SMALL SCALE.
Each particle is a mere 10 nanometers in diameter, Professor Hiroshi Kitagawa told the Yomiuri newspaper, but the new alloy has the same properties as palladium.
WRONG – SEE ABOVE.
ALSO THE PAPER MAKES IT PLAIN THAT PROPERTIES SUCH AS HYDROGEN STORAGE ARE VERY DIFFERENT.
Exports from China of palladium – which is a crucial part of next-generation engines and serves to clean exhaust gases and absorb high levels of hydrogen – were abruptly halted in the wake of a territorial dispute between Beijing and China.
WRONG
THE DISPUTE HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH PALLADIUM AND THERE WAS NO CONFIRMATION FROM CHINA THAT ANY DISRUPTION OF MINERALS SUPPLY TOOK PLACE. JAPANESE OFFICIALS WERE PRE-EMPTING ANY SUCH MOVE BY CHINA BY LODGING A FORMAL DIPLOMATIC PROTEST AT THE RHETORIC BEING USED OVER THE BORDER DISPUTE AND THREATENED TO APPROACH THE WTO REGARDING ANY FUTURE DISRUPTION OF SUPPLY OF RARE EARTH ELEMENTS, NOT PALLADIUM. WHICH AS WE HAVE STATED IS NOT IMPORTED INTO JAPAN FROM CHINA IN ANY VOLUME.
In September, a Chinese fishing vessel operating within Japan’s exclusive economic zone around the Senkaku Islands, the very southernmost tip of Okinawa Prefecture, rammed a Japanese Coast Guard patrol vessel.
The captain of the trawler was arrested, causing an outcry in Beijing, which claims the uninhabited islands as sovereign Chinese territory.
The Chinese fisherman was eventually released without being charged, but not before Beijing imposed a ban on shipments to Japanese firms.
MOSTLY OK BUT A LITTLE WRONG
NO BAN WAS ISSUED. THE CHINESE WERE MORE SUBTLE AND SIMPLY DELAYED SHIPMENTS IN PORT AND CUSTOMS CLEARANCE.
As well as Japan’s automobile industry, rare earth materials such as yttrium, praseodymium and thulium are important for companies here producing everything from infrared lasers to alloys for aerospace components, batteries, ceramic capacitors and parts for computer memory chips.
OK – BUT PALLADIUM IS NOT A RARE EARTH ELEMENT. THE ERROR IS MADE THREE TIMES IN ORDER TO JUSTIFY THE STORY WITHOUT IT THE SCIENCE IS PROBABLY TOO ESOTERIC FOR TELEGRAPH READERS TO BE INTERESTED IN. LAZY AND GREEDY.
The scientists said the new alloy will be difficult to produce commercially at this point but the production process is expected to lead to the development of more synthetic alloys that can be used as alternatives to rare earth metals.
AND THIS IS THE WHILE POINT OF THE SCIENCE (SO LONG AS THE RARE EARTH THING IS IGNORED YET AGAIN) – IT IS A BREAKTHROUGH IN NANO-PROCESSING AND WAS NEVER INTENDED TO REPLACE NATURAL PALLADIUM. SCIENTISTS OFTEN PICK THE OPTIMAL COMBINATION OF VARIABLES TO TEST A NEW CONCEPT BEFORE THEY GET ON TO APPLYING THAT CONCEPT. IF YOU READ THE PAPER THE WORKERS STATE THAT THEIR HOPE IS THAT THE TECHNIQUE CAN BE USED TO MIX OTHER CURRENTLY UNMIXABLE METALS;
OR IN THEIR WORDS “Following on from the discovery of the Ag-Rh solid solution alloy, we envisage the development of new solid-solution alloys of immiscible Ag-Ni, Au-Rh, Cu-Ru, and others that exhibit phase-segregated structures, even in the high-temperature liquid phase.”
IN OTHER WORDS FORGET SILVER AND RHODIUM AND FORGET DELICATE MISTED SPRAYS, WHAT THESE GUYS ARE LOOKING FOR IS A QUENCHED SOLID THAT HAS THE SAME PROPERTIES BUT CAN WITHSTAND THE RIGOURS OF REAL-WORLD USE WHILST COMBINING RELATIVELY COMMON ELEMENTS. BASIC SCIENCE INVESTIGATING NEW IDEAS BUT WITH AN EYE TO THE FUTURE.
Joint research has already begun with car companies and Japanese electronics manufacturers, Prof Kitagawa said.
AT LAST SOMETHING THAT WE KNOW IS ALMOST CERTAINLY TRUE ! THE JAPANESE, THROUGH THEIR NATIONAL NATURAL RESOURCES STOCKPILER, JOGMEC, HAVE BEEN INVESTING IN ALL SORTS OF NATURAL RESOURCE PROCESSING TECHNOLOGY AND ALTERNATIVE MATERIAL DEVELOPMENT AS HAVE ALL THE MAJOR ECONOMIES.
(END)
If the journalist had actually read the original article (here translated from the original Japanese), clocked that some of the translation had some ambiguity, and then gone to the original scientific paper to address that ambiguity you wouldn’t have inane comment from all and sundry around the world aimed at a perfectly good piece of basic scientific research.
=======
A brief comment on the actual scientific paper which is visible on this link.
Its a really interesting piece of basic experimental science. Being able to spoof the properties of one metal by mixing adjacent metals together has all sorts of implications at a quantum level with regard to how molecules and atoms ‘decide’ which other molecules they can react with. In this case the fog of electrons appears to be fooling the incoming deuterium into acting as if something that isn’t there actually is. The really interesting bit is that only half the deuterium is acting that way and would love to know if this is a function of available storage sites or some other phenomenon.
Copper in Wind Power
September 24, 2009
Based upon the research that I detailed in my previous post we can say the following with a reasonable degree of certainty;
The UK will need to increase its raw copper imports by at least 10%, from 2007 levels, if it is to achieve its wind power objectives AND manufacture the components of that new industry on British soil.
The further offshore that wind farms are built, the more copper they use per MW of installed generating capacity (kind of obvious but you still need to crunch the numbers to show it).
The UK currently exports more copper scrap per year than would be required by the proposed new wind industry, based on figures from the British Geological Survey.
The copper cables that are being buried during wind farm construction are not planned to be recovered upon decommissioning. This policy constitutes a planned consumption of copper that is contradictory to the principles of sustainable development since it ‘offshores’ energy consumption and environmental impact associated with copper production in preference to reuse. However, it provides the UK with a readily available source of copper in the form of recoverable buried cables with a known location. This could be considered a hedge against security of copper supply in the long term.
I have found no evidence that this possible long-term hedge against copper supply risk is a conscious and explicit government-led policy, but given that we have another 3 billion people coming to tea before 2075 and that copper has no viable substitute for 100% of its applications, it sounds like it might be a sound policy from a security of supply standpoint. Completely unethical of course, harvesting resources from other nations to hoard for future use, pushing up prices by artificially constraining supply and forcing developing nations to utilise resources earlier in their development cycle than they would have otherwise. But pragmatically better to establish a new form of copper mine within UK territory before supply really gets constrained.
The question is what are the alternatives ?
The obvious answer that I came up with was recycling. The UK only recycles about 42% of its scrap copper (from the BGS again). Of that 37% comes from manufacturing (offcuts, the remains after pressings, and the like), the rest is recycling as you and I know it. The old copper heating pipes and wires from old motors that we have finished with only make up 5% of the UK’s total copper (re-)consumption, 19 times more comes from new mined resources and from the pristine factory scrap. That is massively wasteful on all sorts of levels.
I recently read a paper on a Markov Chain analysis of copper (Eckelman & Daigo, 2008) use that concluded that the average copper atom was used 1.9 times for technology in the 60 years between its extraction from geological reserve and its dissipation back into the environment. If we assume that copper should theoretically be used around 20 times before it is dissipated (using a conservative 5% reprocessing loss), we currently have a copper system in the UK that is roughly 10% efficient.
That has to offer massive opportunities to the copper recycling business, as well as opportunities to decrease the environmental impact of the copper cycle without compromising the ability of the UK to meets its wind power goals.
Supply Chains Blowin’ in the Wind
September 18, 2009
This will be a very UK-centric post, but there are things that you could take away to apply to other countries if you wanted to. Be aware though that the data that I present here is not peer-reviewed and it is only semi-quantitative. I’m not an industrial electrician and I have had no access to detailed designs of wind farms. I asked several wind farm developers but had no success. For these reasons I’m going to call this an order of magnitude, or pathfinder study to be used to identify areas for further research rather than providing definitive ‘answers’.
It has deficiencies. I know what those deficiencies are. Don’t moan at me.
I’ve rounded everything in this post to nice figures. The nasty ones stay with me unless someone makes a specific request, but please remember, this is order of magnitude stuff. I think that I’m in the right ball park, but those with the hard data don’t want to pitch in (to stretch the baseball analogy).
I have tried to come up with a figure on the total amount of copper needed to satisfy the current UK policies on wind power, and while I’m sure that my findings are not news in the wind farm development community they may be interesting to others.
The UK’s wind energy strategy is to install around 37GW of new wind powered generating capacity over the next 10 years to 2020, and about another 10GW in the following 10 years. But we’ll deal with the first 10 years only because the degree of technology learning will be quite substantial and there are several disruptive technologies at the pre-commercial stage right now, especially in the field of high temperature super-conductors.
If we assume that the average size of conventional wind turbines installed through the next 10 years is 5MW, we’re looking at 7,400 new turbines. Some will be bigger, some smaller, but 5MW seems like a good place to start since there are several prototypes that size already working in Europe.
25GW (5,000) will be installed offshore, 12GW (2,400) onshore. This is the rough estimate put forward in the UK’s Low Carbon Strategy, but obviously subject to commercial realities.
Yes, I know that those onshore are likely to be restricted in size due to the planning regime and that bigger turbines may be developed offshore, but this is an order of magnitude study remember. It doesn’t actually matter that much how many turbines there, minimum safe copper usage is broadly proportional to the power that it is being used to generate and conduct (though for commercial, safety and regulatory reasons the actual engineering may break that proportionality, but again no-one was willing to tell me by how much).
So first things first.
How much copper is there in a wind turbine ?
Quick answer, just under 2 tonnes per MW of nameplate generating capacity.
I’ve used 4 peer-reviewed papers to get this answer, which I realise is quite a low number of data points and I’d like to get more data on the copper consumption of large modern turbines, but there are only a few peer-reviewed papers on this and some of them don’t have the data in a form that is usable. The largest turbine that was included here was 2MW, which is an other issue.
That means that just in the tower and nacelle each and every one of our 5MW wind turbines will contain around 10 tonnes of copper.
Sounds a lot ? A typical 5MW nacelle (with rotor, generator, gearbox and transformer) will weigh 150+ tonnes in total, so its really not that much in context.
We have our first estimate – 74,000 tonnes of copper embodied in the turbines. Easy.
Of course technology is moving fast within the mechanical portion of turbine development, with gearbox-less models, generators with super-conducting coils, generators with dynamic numbers of coils, etc, etc. So we can reasonably expect that figure to drop somewhat, even over just 10 years.
However, a wind turbine siting on its own is no use to man nor beast. What it needs is a connection to the grid. Cabling is a less dynamic technology. In fact cables haven’t really changed much in the last 50 years, despite that massive electrification of the industrialised nations during that time. Hell, there are probably cables in my street that are almost that old ! Don’t get me wrong cable performance has increased, but not really in terms of the amount of copper used, more in the engineering surrounding the conductors in terms of resistance to damage or corrosion, or lightness. In this field aluminium conductors don’t really get a look in.
In my workings I used the ‘off-the-shelf’ wind farm cable of choice, the Nexans 33kV (submarine version) for connecting both onshore & offshore turbines. Since what I’m interested in is the mass of copper conductor not the engineering around the cable, the actual version is not very important and Nexans provided the most complete datasheet.
At this point I will say that my methodology breaks down in large onshore wind farms with complex cabling topologies. Since no-one will show me their designs or costings, I have had to assume a ‘least distance’ method. In other words I’ve optimised for cable length, not wind farm cost. What my results show is that this is a reasonable assumption for onshore wind farms of about 30 turbines or less. Above that the cost of system elements, such as the sub-station, and the installation costs appear to start to exert a significant influence and I believe that my model over-estimates the amount of cabling used. The line of best fit to my data is logarithmic, so I’m guessing that my over-estimation gets worse the larger the wind farm is.
However, the number of onshore wind farms that have 30 or more turbines is low in the UK. I found 3 in this study of 30. Outside Scotland this is likely to remain the case due to constraints on space, and wind farms of 5 to 10 turbines currently typical in England and Wales.
Total copper use (without grid connection, because that is site specific) for onshore wind farms in the UK is 5.6 t/MW according to my model, with its warning attached for over estimation. A ‘safe’ estimate would be about 4 t/MW.
The methodology is more robust for offshore wind farms because the industry-standard cable topology seems to be single runs connecting rows of turbines with the single runs being gathered at the sub-station for conditioning and voltage step-up before transmission via the inter-connector.
Once you get to the inter-connector you are looking at a very serious piece of kit and a critical point of failure. You could loose one cable connecting a whole row a turbines and retain two thirds of output in a typical topology of a 3 row 30 turbine farm. Loose the inter-connector and you loose all output. Each inter-connector is a custom design. Fortunately, enough design detail is usually publicly available to make a good guess at the copper content (you need the total number of cables, number of turbines and their rated power output, and the transmission voltage to make an order of magnitude calculation). I only worked with 3-phase AC, since I could only find enough detail on one planned wind farm with HVDC.
So, to cut a long story short, my back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that offshore wind farms use copper at a rate of 9.6 t/MW by the time you connect them to the grid, with roughly one third of all copper being used in these installations contained in the inter-connector.
Not surprisingly the intensity of copper use goes up with length of inter-connector. My rough estimate is an additional 80kg of copper per MW per km of inter-connector. My R-squared is 0.31 on this, so there is a decent correlation, but its not brilliant. Note; distance to shore is not the same as inter-connector length. There may be a loose correlation between the two, but to give a couple of examples; one particular installation in German waters plans a 115km long inter-connector with 40km of that onshore, while another in the UK is 12km from shore but has a 43km cable route to the best available grid connection point.
To summarise;
Large wind turbines require around 2 tonnes of copper per MW of nameplate generating capacity.
Onshore they require a roughly similar amount in cabling infrastructure before you attach them to the grid, but my model overestimates the amount in large wind farms and this skews the result by a significant but undetermined amount. I estimate that my model doubles the cabling requirement in large onshore wind farms only, but I don’t have the hard data to back that up. A ‘safe’ estimate for total copper is therefore 4 t/MW onshore.
Offshore wind farms require more than double the copper per MW of installed capacity of their onshore cousins, but that includes the connection to the grid.
We will use 10 t/MW offshore and 4 t/MW onshore.
So this gives up our next estimate.
25GW offshore equals 250,000 tonnes of copper offshore
12GW onshore equals 48,000 tonnes of copper onshore
For a total of about 300,000 tonnes of new copper required just by UK wind power up to 2020.
Put that into context, in 2007 the UK exported 373,795 tonnes of copper and copper scrap (according to the BGS European Mineral Statistics)
Import trends from the same statistics show that copper will, effectively, no longer be imported into the UK as a raw material by 2011.
So even spread over 10 years at 30,000 tpa, this is a significant shift in raw material requirements for a country with virtually no manufacturing capacity left.
I’ll leave it there and discuss the potential implications in another post.
