Water is a Critical Material for a Thirsty Man
July 22, 2011
In recent years the terms Critical Minerals, Strategic Minerals and even Vital Minerals have been coined and presumably coin has been turned on their basis.
These divisions have resulted in endless lists and explanations of which minerals are which, who thinks so and why. Indeed I was been party to this in the early days, however you know things have got silly when an article arrives that lists every element as critical and only excepts two. If it were written ironically I would let it pass.
What must be recognised is that ‘criticality’ is completely relative. It depends on the technology, who you are in the technology cycle and where (geographically and economically) you are speaking from. In fact as I argued in a short note to the UK’s Energy Research Council Network just before Parliament took representations from our learned societies on this topic, what you define as critical defines you.
Maybe these terms have use in policy-making circles, but having spoken to academics and NGOs on the topic I don’t think that’s true. They are generally more confused by the use of these terms than they were before. They can cope with specifics. They are not dumb.
We, in the mining industry, should not be complicit in confusing investors or legislators by wanton rebranding with meaningless jargon. It is difficult enough to persuade the non-mining world that mines are a necessary evil without obsfucation.
This trend appears to have started with the USA pre-occupation with energy independence and its false hope of controlling all elements of its energy cycle. It is a false hope because energy is global cycle not a national one. The separation of supply chains using national security as justification is the basest form of resource nationalism and not one becoming of the world’s biggest economy. It is not surprising that China reacts to this kind of posturing with a robust economic response. It knows that any comment from the WTO on this topic is bluster, at best.
Mining is an exercise in coping with living on a planet whose resources are not distributed evenly. Always has been. Always will be. The sudden realisation, from outside the industry, that the technological world would grind to a halt for the want of a iron nail should not deflect us from providing that nail and millions like it every day.
There is virtually no industrial metals mining left in the USA and those of us who operate outside that dysfunctional legislature should not be drawn into its often bizarre internal politics. Let us concentrate on supplying those nails at the best possible price and let the US increase its own transaction costs to the point where it has no industry left. Then maybe we can call a metal a metal.
PS. the two elements omitted from the ridiculous ‘critical’ list – iron & aluminium, the two most used metals in society today.
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.
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.
