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.
What to do about a thing like a Green Bank ?
March 22, 2010
So the UK Conservative party want to build a Green Investment Bank to consolidate all the funding functions currently held by bodies such as The Carbon Trust and the Marine Renewables Deployment Fund.
Fair enough, seems like a good idea. Use ISAs to fund it ? Again, no objections there.
Here’s what it needs to be successful;
A strong research department.
That’s it. Nothing else. Just a set of market savvy investment analysts to make sure that the technologies and projects that are being invested in are not complete trash. It won’t be able to afford the best brokers or indeed the best analysts, but then its aim is not to outperform the market. It would be good for the country if it did, home-grown profits count double in this game, but there is no shareholder imperative to work against (or indeed with) so fiduciary responsibility is replaced by electoral responsibility.
The analysts need to have cross-sectoral visibility so that they are not working against each other but apart from that nothing special needs to be in place, except some independent oversight to build confidence in the market that these are kosher companies with realistic chances of commercial success.
Of course if the worst happens and all its investments come to nought, that could be a lot of cash that the govt has to refund to the ISA holders, but presumably there will be some form of hedge against catastrophic loss.
We’ll have to wait and see what Labour’s equivalent looks like when the last pre-election budget is announced on Wednesday, but Reuters is reporting a £2bn investment fund with half from assets sales and half from private investment. I’m sure that there will be more detail than that, but if Alistair Darling’s announcement conforms to the leak, sorry briefing, then it really isn’t very imaginative. Its just another pot of cash with another set of criteria. £2bn isn’t enough to kick-start any major infrastructure projects (the super grid is estimated at around £30bn, the high speed rail at £30bn and each of the 8-12 new nuclear reactors is supposed to be around £5bn (very roughly)), so you have to ask where is this money aimed at ? We’ll find out on Wednesday I suppose.
Forging ahead
March 18, 2010
Finally Sheffield’s Forgemasters has got the government assistance that it has been looking for to build a 15,000 tonne press needed to manufacture the largest nuclear reactor components. I say finally because the project finance team has been working for 2 years to finalise the deal, before that the forge was conceived and designed, so my guess is that at least 5 years of work has gone into this and without it UK plc would seriously loose out in any new nuclear build.
The help is in the form of an £80m loan so we tax payers aren’t going to get stung for the full £80m unless Forgemasters goes bust immediately. We are effectively paying just over half the interest on the total loan by standing 57% of the total £140m required to build the kit. So, rough guess on a 5 year loan at 10% pa, the tax payer is taking £40m off the total bill that Forgemasters will have to pay. Its an opportunity cost to us, rather than an expenditure. Westinghouse, Lloyds and the European Bank are actually putting up most of the money. If you want a comparison the new windturbine blade test facility in Blythe is receiving over £25m worth of grants and supporting infrastructure, but then that’s a brand new capacity for the country and it deserves help too. I don’t know about you but I’d rather my money went into manufacturing than banking, maybe that’s just me 
I have to say I don’t think that’s a bad deal with the nuclear industry going the way that it is and it is a big piece of the supply chain for the UK’s own new nuclear generating capacity. So whether you regard £40m as a speculation against later export revenue, an investment in reducing import expenditure, a way to retain some real, world-leading manufacturing expertise, or simply a way to create several hundred skilled jobs for the next couple of decades it can’t be bad news.
Right now 15kt presses are not exactly common with only Japan, China and Russia reported as having capacity on this scale, with South Korea and India both wanting to enter the field.
Other people’s comments;
The Dark Lord lays out the argument in this article from last year.
This article from the Institute of Engineers has a similar flavour.
The WNA’s view of developments.
Even the Guardian seems to accept the logic of the loan
There is a second interesting point within the funding announcement (its near the bottom) was that Forgemasters would be ‘overseeing’ development of Indian forging capacity in a £30m deal. That is a technology transfer deal, effectively to show the Indians how to forge the smaller components of nuclear power systems. So we gain access to their market at the expense of some of our older technology. Swings and roundabouts. The big money is in the big kit, but a £3m per year revenue stream from tech transfer is enough to pay quite a chunk of the loan interest without tying up too many resources.
Of course you could take the other view, that nuclear power is bad/unnecessary/expensive/foolish/dangerous whatever form it comes in and we shouldn’t help its development through taxpayer assistance, whatever form it comes in. Personally I can’t justify that opinion ethically or economically as long at we in the UK use medical isotopes and invest in other less proven energy sources, such as coal with CCS or solar PV. I can see the arguments, but I think that they are emotionally driven rather than empirically based. The argument against spreading nuclear power technology to countries that currently don’t use it is much stronger, but even there its not black and white.
So I think the Forgemasters deal is great for Sheff and good for the UK. Let’s stop fannying about and start building big kit. Don’t care if its 300m tall 10MW offshore wind turbines, giant steel sea snakes or nuclear pressure vessels, the sooner we start the better, then we can stop hand-wringing and get back to helping the last billion out of crushing poverty.
Metals in short supply ?
February 13, 2010
A program from BBC Radio 4 that looks at possible shortages in the metals supply chain.
This link will only be active until Feb 18th, sorry.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00qjx5q/Out_Of_This_World/
Its an OK program. It covers the basics well, the researcher obviously found the two main sides of the argument. He didn’t chase down their fundamental positions though.
He looks a new technology as a solution mainly in recycling of metals, skipped over substitution in a sentence, had some kook from Surrey Uni muddying the waters with talk about space mining phosphorous (of course you aren’t going to mine bulk commodities in space to throw down Earth’s gravity well, that’s stupid ! If you were that desperate you’d use them to farm in space and throw the products down the well. Idiot !)
The guy who seems to being interviewed in a pub is a co-author of the UK’s only public, government sponsored report that I’ve seen on this topic. The report is OK, though quite why someone would employ a consultancy that specialises in the environmental impacts of waste disposal to conduct a metals supply study is a mystery. Its a bit like employing an undertaker to speak about health issues.
The MaterialsUK group is carrying out a much fuller examination of all this including something that I advocated in my thesis on copper supply, a full materials flow analysis to find out how much of what is where in the UK’s economy. Once you know that, only then can you really start to tailor policy towards material consumption. David King was right that we must eventually get to a post-consumption economy, but there are a few steps that we must take to get there. Knowing how we consume is one of them.
A quick question; at what point did mining engineers suddenly become the people who find minerals ? As a resource geologist I must have missed that meeting
Just a final word on the whole materials security discourse. This is being driven by two main movements; the anti-consumption environmental movement and the American economic/energy independence/security side of the tracks. Bit of an unholy alliance really It should be recognised that the majority of pressure coming from West of the Atlantic is from the industrial/military and for those who are really interested; the US’s stance towards material security is embodied in the book “Minerals, Critical Minerals and the US Economy” . The majority of public pressure coming from Europe is from the anti-consumption angle, but economic imperatives to support high value, high-tech manufacturing in Germany and the Franco-centric nuclear industry are also important factors behind the scenes.
The flip side of the argument comes from the economists (Humphries on the program) and the materials scientists.
My own opinion is that there is no generalisation to be made here about materials running out on a global scale. Each material has a specific set of consumption pathways that it may take, each has a set of potential physical substitutes, each has a potential set of new sources, each has an availability to recycling, each technology that uses each material has its own pathway.
There is however likely to be issues over local availability as geology, politics and economics conspire to restrict efficient supply, and that really is the point. If we want to fight over ‘stuff’ we can, all we need to do is keep increasing its consumption without increasing the efficiency of its supply or recycling, human nature and politics will do the rest for us. However, since we know that conflict (physical or economic) is pretty much inevitable without concrete action to change course, do we not have an ethical responsibility to try and alter course whether it be though scientific/technological innovation or policy-led initiatives ?
The miners will mine only what they can sell, nothing other than economics is required to control that, so putting on the table products or policies that adjust consumption projections has to be the way to go.
Carbon Capture & Snorage UK
November 15, 2009
With the big nuclear announcement now out of the way for the UK the nascent UK CCS sector is hoping to get some kind of caffine jolt to wake it up.
The competition to get 4 pilot plants up and running has gone off the boil. Big players have dropped out and the anticipated cross-Europe rush to start burying CO2 has lost some momentum. Lets look at why.
Demand
The recession has hit demand. No doubt about it. UK manufacturing (what was left of it) has gone into hibernation and is not expected to get back to 2007 levels for another 2 or even 3 years. That means the forward demand curves have all been shifted by up to 5 years backwards from where they were in 2008. This really works against the shorter lead times in building new coal, compared with nuclear. The big wind projects that have already been approved, but are waiting for finance or grid connections, have been given £1.3bn in loan guarentees and a new planning regime to work under, further eroding the argument for new coal with CCS as a stop gap until the baseload new nuclear is online. DECC has ruled out any new coal without CCS.
Simply put, why try and prove up the new CCS systems to plug a supply gap that is no longer really there when the proven wind and nuclear options will provide much, if not most, of the mid-term replacement capacity ?
This is very much a UK specific situation and the case for CCS in the UK, to my mind, hinges on quick deployment. Any delays will reduce the potential for a self-sustaining CCS industry in the UK.
From this perspective it looks like new gas-powered peaking plants (or possibly biomass) will be needed to bridge the gap between baseload nuclear and intermittent wind, unless the UK can raise its efficiency substantially over the next 5 years or so.
Enhanced Oil/Gas Recovery
One of the big supporting economic arguments for developing CCS in the UK is its potential to replace the oil and gas industries as a major technology and skills exporter. I think that this is a justified argument as far as it goes. Having worked offshore myself I can see most of the skills being transferable between the two industries and there are a lot of workers looking to CCS as a way to sustain their livelihoods until oil and gas are no longer a mass market source of energy.
One of the ways that oil companies in the US and Canada have been coupling the two industries is by Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR). Pump CO2 down into the oil reservoir and the additional pressure and viscosity drop (increased runniness of the oil) increase total recovery. The amount of the increase is very dependent on the age of the reservoir and its extraction history. For example a brand new oil field that has CO2 pumped into it from its very first production could give up as much as 50% more oil than without the addition of CO2. Older fields that have had a prior history of water injection may only give up an additional 10% or so.
This is a problem for the UK. Most of the North Sea fields are old meaning that the application of CO2 for EOR is limited. That means that returns are limited in both time and amount, which in turn means that the majors don’t see the 20-30 year profit lines they need in order to support their administrative and development burdens. The mid-tier and junior oil companies were excluded from the UK’s competition by the requirement to prove that finance was available for full development of the pilot plants and allied storage sites.
So the big guys are too flabby to be able to operate CCS at a profit in UK waters and the smaller guys can’t finance it. Bit of a hitch there.
There is a slightly bigger issue with CO2-EOR. Well spacing. Where Canada and the US (and Saudi, and others) have onshore oil fields where well spacing can be very close and access is not a major issue, the North Sea is not a location that allows close well spacing. This will push EOR to the limits technically and it will not be as effective as in onshore oil fields. Developing the new technologies in this challenging environment would be worth it for a permanent industry, the way we saw North Sea oil in the 70s as providing a new frontier, but not for an industry that has only ever been seen as a stop-gap we have to question what that new frontier is for when considering CO2-EOR and CCS together. Investing in an industry that will migrate away from the UK within a generation, or possibly two at the outside, doesn’t seem like a sound long-term strategy to me.
Intellectual Property and Licensing
If CCS is to be implemented in the North Sea, with or without EOR, the current oil and gas fields are the logical place to start. That means using IP from the oil and gas companies to fast-track development. Unfortunately the mechanisms for doing this are not yet in place. Likewise licensing is only just getting beaten into shape after the recent EU directives to allow CO2 storage under the seabed. Previously it would have been considered as the dumping of waste at sea.
So while those things are eminently do-able, they take time. They will be challenged and discussed, and re-drafted. Go around that loop a couple of times and you’ve lost a year to bureaucracy. That essential quick deployment doesn’t look so achievable and the investment risk escalates. The investors get more and more nervous and we see a situation where even the syndicates left in the UK’s competition start to ask whether its worth carrying on.
So, while I’m sure we will see a demo plant or two on the east coast of the UK in 5-10 years time, I’m starting to doubt whether the North Sea will be centre of a new industry. If I were an investor looking at CCS, I’d be looking at countries that are wedded to coal and that had large onshore sedimentary basins (for example USA, Canada, China, Germany, Poland & Australia, possibly South Africa). I would not be looking at countries that have mulitple energy sources, those with a big commitment to nuclear or those without large onshore sedimentary basins (for example the UK, Norway, Japan, France, Benelux, South Korea).
Update
The new UK Energy Bill 2009 (read on the 19th Nov 2009) includes enabling legislation for CCS in the UK. It allows financial aid for CCS development, without specifying limits, and it provides for DECC to provide regulation for the industry. So either Ed Milliband reads this blog and his officials at DECC are really quick off the mark or I wasn’t the only one to notice that things had gone a bit quiet. I’m not taking bets on the former.
