Tim Worstall

Others are looking further ahead. Braisch said the US DoE is focusing its new research on future generations of CCS, including using fossil fuels to power plants full of fuel cells. That would result in a pure stream of CO2, he said, avoiding the two-thirds of CCS’s cost, which is incurred in separating the gas. [...]

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I’ve been tipped off to something that I’m absolutely certain is a scam. But I have a feeling that it’s a legal scam. Not as in a scam about the law, but as in a scam that is legal. There’s some blokes out there advertising for phone salesmen to sell rare earth metals to the [...]

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Demand for rare earth elements has undergone a sharp rise in recent years. The price of lanthanum oxide has risen from US$5 per kilogram in early 2010 to US$140 per kilogram in June 2011 (DOE 2011). Please tell me they’re joking? They’re using a price rise stemming from the Chinese imposition of quotas and restrictions [...]

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Metals exotica: How Planetary Resources can make a profit. Without even doing any mining! Link may or may not work at present….be patient.

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Certain newspapers need to catch up on the technical details: contain as much gold, platinum and rare earth metals – such as rhodium Rhodium isn’t a rare earth metal. It’s a platinum group metal.

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The company, which was founded earlier this year and has just 20 employees, said it would combine space exploration with mining to develop a method to extract gold, platinum and other precious metals and minerals from asteroids in orbit around the Earth. It suggested that this could “add trillions of dollars to the global GDP”. [...]

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Not for a very long time, anyway: Through submarine volcanic vents along the mid-ocean ridge, it delivers fresh basalt to resurface the planet’s oceans every 200m years, and to drive the moving pavements on which the continents ride at a few centimetres a year, occasionally colliding to throw up features such as the Alps and [...]

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Well, yeah, sorta. Only ultra-scarce yttrium, which is used in precision lasers and to stabilise rockets, may present a problem. It’s not actually that rare. And it’s also a hell of a lot easier to find and refine than the lanthanides are. If you seriously wanted a few tens of tonnes, hundreds of tonnes, on [...]

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A problem in fact about transfer pricing. A problem that perhaps the internationally reknowned expert on matters taxation could help with. No it’s all a bit ethereal at present. I don’t know whether it’s going to happen, I don’t know whether it will happen in any volume if it does and don’t know if it [...]

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There’s this organisation: Allianz zur Rohstoffsicherung Newly formed, early this year. Alliance of big German companies to secure raw materials. My German isn’t good enough to Google through to actually find them. I can find reports about them, but not actually them. Anyone with better German able to track them down? Update: Thanks for your [...]

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Catalytic converters are stolen because they contain precious metals – platinum, palladium and rhodium – which can be recycled. The AA says it has seen an increase in thefts since the beginning of the credit crunch in 2008, when prices for precious metals started spiralling. The catalytic converter was stolen from Jane Green’s Land Rover [...]

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Via, this: Stray showers of mercury getting into food chain Poisonous metal released as a vapour by burning fuel, then falls back to Earth and gets absorbed by the aquatic ecosystem Given that this has been happening for a century or two and we’re not all murdered in our beds by the pollution, should we [...]

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No, I’m not looking for someone to come and design a system for me. Rather, I’m just looking for a pointer to how I ought to be thinking about things. OK, so what I’ve got (conceptually this is) is a tailings/gangue pile. From a granitic greisen. Originally mined for Sn/W I know that this tailings [...]

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Mikhail Prokhorov, Russia’s third richest man, to challenge Putin Nickel magnate appeals to angry middle class for presidency – but some claim he is merely a Kremlin stooge For sale only to close friends of V Putin.

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A full copy of this paper would be much appreciated. http://www.jstor.org/pss/93028 “On Scandium” by Sir William Crookes, 1908. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. I’ve read bits and pieces of this. Would like to read the whole thing though. From what I’ve read so far it holds up remarkably well. And the New Year [...]

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If so, could you get him to contact me? For somewhere in the PWC system there is a gremlin conspiring to make him look like an idiot. Rare earth metals scarcity: A ‘ticking timebomb’ for the world, asks PwC? This has gone out over the wires, as the previous post shows picked up by the [...]

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Rare earth metal shortage a ‘ticking time-bomb’ A “ticking time-bomb” looms over several core manufacturing industries, experts have warned, due to a growing shortage of “rare earth” metals. Hmm, that’s strange, given that there are several large rare earth mines due to come online in the next couple of years. What shortage? Accounts PricewaterhouseCoopers said [...]

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The DRC should be one of Africa‘s richest countries. It has a mineral wealth estimated to be around $24 trillion (£15tn). There are huge deposits of cobalt, diamonds, gold, copper, oil and 80% of the world’s supplies of coltan ore – a valuable mineral used in computers and mobile phones. So, “coltan” is the NGO [...]

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That’s the answer to this: Others, for example the entrant who asked: “What happens if you mix together all of the substances from the periodic table”, appeared more keen to satisfy a burning curiosity. You get dirt. Depending upon how you mix them, in what quantities, what the original state was (for example, if you [...]

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It takes one tonne of rock to produce enough gold particles to fashion a wedding ring. Blimey, that’s a rich mine, no wonder they’re so keen to get digging in a national park. A more normal gold mine would be 1 gramme per tonne rock. And unless you’re at the very cheap end of the [...]

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