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 Freelander while it was standing in a car park near her workplace in Wolverhampton. She said: “When I got back to my car, the police had left a note on the windscreen telling me not to turn the car on but to call them as soon as possible. I did and was told a witness had seen a man with a drill around my car.”

Green’s catalytic converter had been removed with a saw and drill, causing damage that cost £900 to repair.

I’m a bit out of touch with the current value but it’s certainly tens of pounds for the scrap value of something from a larger engined car. Decent set of powered shears and a couple of blokes could make off with a couple of hundred quid in an hour or two from a street or car park of more expensive cars.

I’m just surprised that this is the first reference I’ve seen to it of it actually happening.

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 conclude therefore that mercury isn’t quite as poisonous as some would have us believe?

Lots of it does kill of course but a little bit spread through the environment not so much?

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 pile is 50% very fine material. I’m pretty sure what I want is in the fine stuff, so that’s easy enough.

In there I know I’ve got mica, some scheelite, remains of cassiterite and wolframite. Almost certainly some zircon (umm, zirconite)? Plus lots of other rubbish.

All of these have my target metal to some useful degree, 500 ppm to 3,000 ppm. The granite doesn’t, but most of the other minerals do.

The question is, which way around to try and approach this?

a) Try to separate out the various minerals then put them through traditional techniques? Not worth it for the tin, tungsten etc values, but it is for getting my target metal or

b) Just dissolve (or heap leach, vat leach, whatever) the whole lot and just extract my target metal from the liquor? Then maybe others if it’s worthwhile?

Not that I expect anyone to actually know the answer, but what’s the right way to approach finding the answer?

I’ll have access to a top notch mining university 20 km from the site but I want to try and walk through the right questions to ask before they all laugh at my ignorance…..

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.

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 may well find me traipsing around the area where he got his scandium from. Looking for scandium, of course.

Update, this paper has been sent to me, thank you v much Andrew!

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 Telegraph and there are others as well.

Their list of “metals” which might become in short supply are:

Among the minerals & metals on the ‘critical’ list are:

• Beryllium: used as a lightweight component in military equipment and in the aerospace industry. it is used in high-speed aircraft, missiles, space vehicles and communication satellites.
• Cobalt: a material used in industrial manufacturing. Used in jet turbine engines and automotive rechargeable batteries.
• Tantalum: used in mobile phones, computers and automotive electronics
• Flurospar: used in construction, cement, glass, iron and steel castings.
• Lithium: used in wind turbines and lithium-ion batteries in hybrid cars

None of these are rare earths.

So, once he’s paid me to sub his report and PR pieces properly for him he can then pay me again to point out where vast quantities of all of these materials can be found (except perhaps fluorspar, which is indeed a toughie, but it’s not even a damn metal).

This blog has enough readers in The City that someone must know him and be able to point him my way.

Update: And I’ve managed to find his contact form on the pwc site. Does me good to sneer at someone first thing in the morning I must say.

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 business leaders in sectors including automotive, chemicals, and energy fear they will be the hardest hit as commodities such as Beryllium, Cobalt and Flurospar become scarcer. The metals are are used as components in items ranging from military equipment to automotive rechargeable batteries.

Those aren’t rare earths and Flurospar isn’t even a metal. Indeed, Flurospar is a proprietary coating technology, the mineral is in fact fluorspar.

Useful in steel making, the important use is as a source of fluorine to make hydrofluoric acid and no, none of those are metals either: fluorine is a halide.

Is it really too much to ask that reporters should have at least a vague grasp of the beats they cover?

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 name for columbo-tantalite. Which is an ore. So “coltan ore” is stupid right from the start.

Secondly, the Congo doesn’t have anything like 80% of the world’s reserves. This is simply a myth which has been repeated so often the idiots actually believe it. It’s more like 8 or 9% (although to be sure, no one’s ever really done a complete geological survey of the country’s minerals).

Thirdly, what the buggery is this $24 trillion number?

Well, what that actually is is the value of all of the minerals after they’ve been dug up, processed and then sold. At current prices and entirely ignoring the fact that if you dumped 9% of global tantalum reserves onto a 1,000 tonne a year global market then tantalum would be worth 3 cents a tonne.

And it’s ignoring the costs of digging it all up and processing it as well.

On which basis I declare the North Sea to be worth $240 billion for the gold in it: ignoring the $1.2 trillion cost of processing it out of the seawater.

Oh, silly me, it’s by Greg Palast.

That’s where they get the bollocks from.

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 mix your Li, H and O as lithium metal and water you’ll get a much more vigorous reaction than if you mixed them as lithium oxide plus hydrogen) various differently explosive things might or could happen, but the end result is going to be, umm, dirt.

Because that’s what dirt is: the result of mixing all of the elements.

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 market a wedding ring is 5-10 grammes.

In the UK I’d start with Cambourne School of Mines, maybe the (Royal?) School of Mines at Imperial. In Germany, at Freiberg.

But where do I start in the Czech Republic? Particularly, I want to find out about the history of mining in a specific area from 1900 or so to 1990. Who dug where, who processed what where and where was the rubbish dumped?

This is all a bit too long ago for it to have really made it onto the internet so which part of the groves of academe is likely to know?

I’m highly likely to need a part time translator sometime soon. German to English and vice versa, in Germany, of course. Some investigation work on the phone, some simultaneous translation.

Absolutely does not have to be a trained translator. We’re not talking about lots of nuance here. However, a bit of industry background would be extremely useful.

Now, in the area that I need this work done, that bit of investigating, that bit of attending meetings with me, there’s a university which is packed full to the brim with students who have that bit of industry background. And of course in the modern Germany many of them have English to an entirely acceptable standard for my uses.

So the question is, what is the likely attitude of German students to the offer of a bit of part time work? Screams of horror at having academe invaded by filthy lucre? Or, yes, lovely, I’ll do 15 hours a week at (?? 15 €? €25?) an hour, thank you very much indeed.

Anyone actually know?

This is how the US government came to own ships named SS Stage Door Canteen……

This very example is something that’s running around my head at present.

Say there was a plan (entirely ephemeral, unlikely to be ever realised, but something that is at least possible in the physics of this universe) which would require putting 160 million tonnes a year of stuff through furnaces.

Currently big furnaces cost $300 tonne per year capacity (so, a 500,000 tonne a year capacity furnace is $150 million), are cheap to run (relatively) and take 2-4 years to build.

OK, so over the years you need to expand out to 320 of these furnaces (I said it was unlikely!).

Now, would it change the game entirely if you went for mass production techniques of furnaces? Let’s say we went for 50,000 tpa furnaces. We now need 3,200 to build out. If they’re all at $300 tpa then, well, we’ve got our capital requirement rather more granular, possibly easier to finance, true, but almost certainly at the expense of higher running costs.

But what if that very mass production technique took our production costs down to $200 tpa? $50 tpa?

Now, yes, obviously, if you knew what that mass production cost was then working out whether to do it or not is simple, a few numbers into a spreadsheet and bingo!

But what does anyone reckon the discount for mass production would be?

Currently our $300 tpa (umm, the world’s not mine) furnaces are built at the rate of one or two globally each year. What if we decided to build the smaller ones at a rate of one a day? Or the large ones at 3 a month? (to give an equal decade long roll out for the globe).

What does anyone think the savings on the $ per tpa number would be from proper, one design and one design only, entirely interchangeable parts etc, mass production would be?

Liberty, or Model T furnaces?

Which dropped this into my email.

With the introduction of new materials in fishing and apparel markets, Element 21 changed its name from Element 21 Golf Company to American Rare Earths and …

Ooooh, aye? Element 21? That’s scandium that is. So who was leading this soon to be bust but scandium involved company?

Dr. Nataliya Hearn, Ph.D., P.Eng. — Chairman, President and CEO

Dr. Hearn is the founder of American Rare Earths & Materials (originally named Element 21). Dr. Hearn began work on the technology transfer of Rare Earths including Scandium in the mid 1990’s as a scientist and professor of engineering at the University of Toronto. At American Rare Earths & Materials, Dr. Hearn has played a central role in developing a fully integrated path, starting with material sourcing, processing, patented material development, proprietary manufacturing, engineering and final product marketing. With a Ph. D. in Engineering from University of Cambridge, Dr. Hearn has led several technology transfer and development initiatives as a Director of Mag Industries (MAA.V), as Director of Materials Sourcing for Ashurst Technologies, as a Director of ProTech Corp. and as Director of New Product development for Link-Pipe Inc.

Ashurst, eh?

The chief executive officer and founder of Ashurst Technology Ltd., Benton H. Wilcoxon, resigned yesterday with no explanation.

Really? My word.

Ashurst has its Technology Center in Relay and its main office in Kiev, Ukraine. The company is trying to find commercial markets for former Soviet technology, and has an interest in gold and scandium mines in Ukraine.

Scandium is a metal that, when alloyed with aluminum, is said to show promise for commercial uses such as welding wire and sporting equipment. Ashurst has announced a number of partnerships this year, including for marketing scandium-alloyed baseball bats and bike frames with a California sporting goods company and lacrosse sticks with STX Inc. of Baltimore.

Ashurst has struggled financially as it waits for the commercial markets to develop. During the second quarter of 1997, the last period for which it has reported results, the company lost $2.9 million on revenue of $1.1 million.

Mmm, yes, it’s a wonder they got financing really. Peter Young of blessed self-castration memory was involved.

Hamilton, Bermuda, September 6 – Ashurst Technology Ltd., formerly Emtech Ltd. (the “Company”), today announced it
first became aware from a press release issued through Toronto by Morgan Grenfell Asset Management (“MGAM”)
dated September 5, 1996, that the interest of the Morgan Grenfell Group (“MGG”) in the shares of the Company, may be
as much as 49.9%. The Company is unaware of the exact number of shares held by MGG.
The Company is surprised by the extent of the holding disclosed by MGAM. All of the significant dealings in the shares
of the Company, of which the Company is aware, have been reported in press releases at the time of their occurrence.
The Company is at present unsure as to how MGAM may have acquired all of the substantial holding reported which
totals more than the number of shares which the Company is aware MGAM has subscribed or purchased. The Company
has advised MGAM, through its financial advisor in London, that the ownership of the holding reported may subject
MGAM to certain Canadian follow-up obligations which the Company is not in the position to assess.

Mmm, they went bust Ashurst did. Amazingly, several years after the bankruptcy of the company the patent to make sporting goods from scandium enhanced aluminium alloys was licenced from the bankrupt Ashurst to Element 21.

Funny how those things happen really.

Mr. Wilcoxon has been our Chief Executive Officer since November 3, 2001 and Chairman of the Board of Directors since February 2002. He also served as the Company?s acting Chief Financial Officer until January 2007. He also is Chairman of the following subsidiaries wholly-owned by the Company: CTC Cable Corporation, Transmission Technology Corporation, CTC Towers and Poles Corporation, and the former DeWind subsidiaries, Stribog Ltd and Stribog Inc. (both discontinued operations as of September 4, 2009). Since 2007, he has been a Director of Element 21 Golf Company.

My word. Given that Benton was making a cool half mil a year in cash from being CEO, what hapopened to that company then?

Composite Technology Corporation Files for
Chapter 11 Protection

Oh my. And there’s someone out there keeping track too. But that was 2005.

Ooops! Look, it’s happened again!

On April 11, 2011 Composite Technology Corporation (the “Company”) and its subsidiaries CTC Cable Corporation and Stribog, Inc. filed voluntary petitions for relief under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code (the “Bankruptcy Code”) in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California (the “Bankruptcy Court”) (Case No. SA 05-13107). The Company will continue to manage their properties and operate their business as “debtor-in-possession” under the jurisdiction of the Bankruptcy Court and in accordance with the applicable provisions of the Bankruptcy Code.

My wordy.

The strange thing is that this weird scandium aluminium technology continues to make money. For me, for people who were on the engineering side of Ashurst (several of them in different companies), for people who make those bloody windmills. Just not for the people who, umm, how to put this judiciously, were on the financial side of Ashurst.

The question I’d really like an answer to is, so, Nataliya, you still banging Benton or what?

And, err, yes, I was at school with Benton’s lawyer, as was one of our regular commenters around here.

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All recycling industries face exactly the same problem, which is that their economics are entirely the reverse of normal retail economics.

We all understand that if you’ve a container load of PCs, each PC is worth less than if you’ve got one PC sitting right in front of a customer who actually wants a PC. Wholesale stuff is cheaper than retail.

Recycling works the other way around. Good clean copper scrap might be going for £5,000 a tonne (a bit over the top but that’s the number they’re using) but this does not mean that 100 kg is worth £500. More like £250 perhaps. Nor 1 kg £5, perhaps £1, perhaps nothing.

As the amount of scrap you have rises, each piece of scrap becomes worth more. So you do need a fairly loose and limber system of collecting, attracting, those small amounts so as to end up with the large amounts that are worth sending off to the refiner.

This is as true of copper scrap as it is of iron scrap, ink jet cartridges and mobile phones. Volume raises prices, not lowers them.

Back to cable scrap theft:

Ministers will consider overhauling legislation dating back to the 1960s at a summit in Whitehall today as they come under pressure from a number of industries to tackle the trade in stolen copper.

Rail has been worst hit by the spate of thefts that has increased as the value of copper has risen on the world markets.

The phenomenon is also causing increasing concern to the telecommunication and electricity distribution industries.

Such is the scale of the problem that six Whitehall departments will be attending the meeting.

Representatives from the Treasury, Home Office as well as the departments of Energy, Environment and Business will join Norman Baker, the local transport minister at the Whitehall summit.

The focus will be on the 1964 Scrap Metal Dealers Act, which many industries now believe is inadequate to deal with the problem of cable thefts.

Options under consideration include licensing scrap metal dealers, banning them from dealing in cash and giving police powers to close rogue traders down.

Other curbs could include require anyone selling scrap to provide proof of identity.

The one thing you don’t want to do is ban cash transactions.

Take, just as one example, a small garage, a mechanic who deals with three or four cars a day perhaps. He’ll occasionally have a car radiator, maybe a starter motor, possibly even a catalytic converter, that has come off a car. We would like that to get back into the recycling system, the first two for the copper content, the last for the platinum. When we’ve a few hundred of any of these together they might be worth from £10 to £50 each. But we need to collect them up in their ones and twos from these small mechanics.

The obvious way of doing so is to have a collection round and cough up a couple of quid for each as and when they become available. Bit of beer money just to make sure that they’re put aside for a fortnight until the collection takes place.

And, more importantly, we’ve seen what happens to such extant collection systems when the bureaucracy becomes involved. Used to be a company that operated just like this to collect car batteries. 50 p to the mechanic for each one. By the time the lorry loads arrived at the processing plant they were worth perhaps £5 each and they were thoroughly reprocessed (battery lead contains some antimony so they used to go to a plant at Avonmouth which made the lead antimony alloy from which new batteries were made).

In comes the bureaucracy: no, you need a movement licence for such polluting things. Said movement licence is £25 a time. Immediately, the small feeder tributaries contributing to the grand river of supply dry up.

Car battery recycling levels are still, 20 years later, lower than when we had that purely private sector system managing it.

So if we don’t do that, then what should we do about cable theft?

Well, cables are cables, you know? It’s pretty easy to look at some copper scrap and go, yup, you know, that’s a radiator, that’s a starter motor and that’s a cable.

Hmm, is that cable of the railway signalling type? Not household or PC wiring, but of the sort laid out along tracks? Of the sort that’s being nicked? Cables are covered and on that covering is printed the information about what sort of cable it is. You know “TS1354, for railway signalling purposes to ISO 3000″ sorta stuff.

Why, yes it is, you Mr. Scrap Dealer are having your collar felt on suspicion of dealing in stolen goods.

It really, really, is that simple. Precisely because of the weird economics, the way that in order to realise the value the material has to be collected into ever larger piles, there are natural choke points in the system.

For example, here is a list of all copper scrap processors in the UK. All 280 of them.

Note that these are not the people who actually melt it down again for reuse. I don’t think we’ve got even one of those in the UK at all. These are the guys who take tonne lots and bundle them up into 20 tonne lots. All you need to do to stop cable theft is to put the fear of God into these guys: you deal in nicked cable and we’ll nick you. If these guys won’t buy it then nor will the next level down, the material will be of no value and even the thickest of thieves will get the message soon enough.

And that’s it, you’re done. There’s not enough money in it to try setting up your own small furnace to disguise the source of the copper (as there allegedly was with the Brinks Mat gold).

When you can control this problem so easily, why insist that the bloke who collects the old X-Rays from the hospital in return for a drink to the radiologist (yes, we, well, not we as in me but, do recycle these, silver in them) cannot deal in cash?

David Cameron has warned Russia that corruption, bureaucracy and an inconsistent approach to the rule of law was holding back trade relations with Britain.

Rilly?

I’ve had a shipment stuck in customs for a month now. They’re wanting a bribe. And the thing is, I’d be entirely happy to pay such a bribe: if I had known about it when agreeing prices back when I ordered the material.

Just a cost of doing business, you know?

It’s the inconsistency that causes the problems. And my little jaunt away for a few days was the beginning of setting up a not from Russia supply chain for my material. A pity, because I’ve worked for 15 years with my suppliers. They’re the world experts at what they do. And now I’m struggling mightily to cut them entirely out of my supply chain because I simply cannot trust the governing authorities in Russia. Cannot trust the law, the customs, the officials of the State.

And of course it isn’t only me taking the same sort of decision. It’s getting to the point that no one at all will source an essential or time dependent input from that country, no matter how good it is or how fine the price.

Something which will, of course, entirely fuck over Russian industry and leave them dependent only upon substitutable and low value added commodity exports. Not the way you build a rich economy that.

So we’ll all agree to track what comes from where and peace will reign, kittens will gambol in the African sun and life will be better?

The “Loi Obama” or Obama Law — as the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform act of 2010 has become known in the region — includes an obscure provision that requires public companies to indicate what measures they are taking to ensure that minerals in their supply chain don’t benefit warlords in conflict-ravaged Congo. The provision came about in no small part because of the work of high-profile advocacy groups like the Enough Project and Global Witness, which have been working for an end to what they call “conflict minerals.”

Unfortunately, the Dodd-Frank law has had unintended and devastating consequences, as I saw firsthand on a trip to eastern Congo this summer. The law has brought about a de facto embargo on the minerals mined in the region, including tin, tungsten and the tantalum that is essential for making cellphones.

The smelting companies that used to buy from eastern Congo have stopped. No one wants to be tarred with financing African warlords — especially the glamorous high-tech firms like Apple and Intel that are often the ultimate buyers of these minerals. It’s easier to sidestep Congo than to sort out the complexities of Congolese politics — especially when minerals are readily available from other, safer countries.

For locals, however, the law has been a catastrophe. In South Kivu Province, I heard from scores of artisanal miners and small-scale purchasers, who used to make a few dollars a day digging ore out of mountainsides with hand tools. Paltry as it may seem, this income was a lifeline for people in a region that was devastated by 32 years of misrule under the kleptocracy of Mobutu Sese Seko (when the country was known as Zaire) and that is now just beginning to emerge from over a decade of brutal war and internal strife.

The pastor at one church told me that women were giving birth at home because they couldn’t afford the $20 or so for the maternity clinic. Children are dropping out of school because parents can’t pay the fees. Remote mining towns are virtually cut off from the outside world because the planes that once provisioned them no longer land. Most worrying, a crop disease periodically decimates the region’s staple, cassava. Villagers who relied on their mining income to buy food when harvests failed are beginning to go hungry.

Yup, dream on fuckwits.

From low incomes to no incomes, from poverty to destitution.

How very well done you screaming nonces, removing the the means of earning a living from some of the poorest people on the planet.

As Oscar Wilde didn’t say the only thing worse than being exploited by capitalism is not being exploited by the capitalist bastards.

Apologies, but these people disgust me.

But progress is being made.

You don’t have to, as in the US, file paperwork and agree to certain restrictions. You can just ask people “would you like to buy some shares in my company” and if they say yes, take their money.

You’re bound by the usual restrictions of course: doing what you said you were going to do, telling people the truth, reporting the accounts to them at the appropriate times and so on.

But there’s no need to go through a public market or anything, hire huge numbers of lawyers and accountants. You can simply explain the idea and see what people think about it.

And I’m rather wondering whether it might be possible to use this here internet thing as a way of raising that sort of funding.

I’ve an idea in the metals field. Rare earths, not directly to do with scandium.

There’s an obvious market need or niche. There’s a technology that’s well known in another part of the metals world. Lab work shows that it should work with rare earths. If it does it would cost some 10% of the current method. Global market’s around $500 million a year (ie, this is what the old technology currently costs the people who use it).

Back of the envelope stuff suggests that £300,000 or so would be needed to properly prove the concept. £1 million or so to build a working prototype.

The basic metallurgy is, as I say, well known, there are several large industrial processes that use the halides to purify ores and metal salts: it’s just that the halide metallurgy of the rare earths isn’t all that well known.

Except, one of my customers, and a company that has agreed that this is an interesting idea worth pursuing and would work with us in doing so, is the world leader in the rare earth halides.

There’s absolutely no point at all in trying to go to AIM or the TSE for this sort of sum. You’d spend that much in getting a listing. It’s all a bit off base for institutional investors. Mining investors like mines, not technologies. Technology investors don’t like mining.

So I’m wondering. What does anyone think about trying to crowd source this sort of sum of money? 1,000 people with £1,000 each? Or multiples of that per person if they desire?

30% of a new company divided among the financial investors?

There’s the obvious point that the technology might not work. Or that someone else will get there first (although I know of no one working on it). Plus of course the distinct possibility that I’ll entirely screw it up.

The thing is, I’m absolutely certain I could, with a well crafted idea (and I do have another one which is much more in this sort of range and that might be a good one to start with) raise £50,000 or so through this blog under that sort of arrangement. That smaller idea being that there are no internet sellers of prescription glasses in Portugal or Portuguese. But it’s easy enough (and I’ve already got an agreement set up) to get people to manufacture to a prescription in China. And such glasses in China cost $10 or so (I wear them myself) and prescription glasses in a store in Portugal start at €100 a pair.

But what do you think about that larger sum? Or even the smaller sum?

Both are obviously ideas that have a high risk of total failure.

But tell me what you think.