The price of lead

by Richard I. Gibson

from Wikipedia Commons (public domain)

It will come as no surprise: the basic driver of the price of lead is automobile sales in China. Lead's price had been stable for quite a few years at about 20 cents a pound; but in 2004 it doubled to 40¢ then to 60¢ in 2005. World economy made it volatile in '08-'09 but it peaked at about $1.50 in 2007-2008. It has remained volatile since but floating around $1.00 per pound, still driven mostly by the lead-acid battery business and by China's 25%-a-year increase in auto sales (at least from 2006-10 with a small dip for the global recession in 2009).

In the US in 2011 86% of lead went to lead-acid batteries. China produces about half the world's lead but is still a net importer. U.S. production amounts to less than 8% of world total, but the US is a net exporter. Mine production totaled about 345,000 metric tons of lead in 2011, worth about $918,000,000. The vast majority of U.S. lead production comes from Missouri and the Red Dog Mine in Alaska. Consumption of lead in the United States runs to about 1,500,000 metric tons a year, five times the mine production; the apparent shortfall is made up from recycling which accounts for 83% of U.S. lead consumption.

As a consequence of the high price of lead, a friend of mine can make a good profit by making 4-ounce lead sinkers for high-end fishing expeditions.

from InfoMine.com

Oil shale is not shale oil

by Richard I. Gibson

Jargon confuses, and confusing jargon confuses more of us. Oil shale is a rock, a solid rock, that contains some solid organic material called bitumen. It is not liquid. One does not simply drill a well into oil shale and produce oil. It’s more like a mining proposition, like the tar sands in Alberta, only more so—although there are ways of heating it up below the ground, converting that solid bitumen into something that can come up a drill pipe.

There are some oil shales that are oil source rocks, and then there are some other shales that may be even better source rocks, while most people would not call them oil shales. Source rock has enough organic material in it, and has had the proper geologic history, that nature has done the converting, maturing the organic material into actual liquid oil which may (if you are lucky) then migrate into some kind of trap, where explorers may find and produce it.

Some of the best oil shale in the U.S. is in the Piceance Creek Basin of northwestern Colorado. Much of the oil shale there formed in a large, long-lived lake that occupied the area especially during Eocene time, about 50 million years ago. Some estimates suggest more than a trillion barrels of oil in the solid bitumen of these rocks. The problem is you can’t turn it into liquid oil without a lot of heat—a lot of energy, and a lot of dollars. Oil shale in the U.S. is not an economic proposition at current prices. I’ve seen some things that say sustained prices around $85-$100 per barrel could make oil shale economic, but the other stumbling block is huge up-front costs to build the processing plants. Don’t hold your breath for oil shale as some panacea any time soon.

Gravity map, Railroad Valley Nevada

Shale as source rock is another matter. Here, nature does the work. A good example is the marine Chainman Shale of Nevada, laid down during Mississippian time around 330,000,000 years ago. There are places where this rock is up to 8% total organic carbon—really remarkable, given that good source rocks may be 1% or 2%, and some of the best source rocks in Saudi Arabia are typically 5% total organic carbon. The Chainman Shale is not generally a target for exploration, but as a source rock it is critical to the complex oil systems in Nevada. Nevada? Yep. One two-well field, Grant Canyon, produced around 6,000 barrels a day for quite a few years in the 1980s, the best onshore wells in the conterminous United States. That’s an astounding number when you realize that the U.S. average is 10 barrels per day per well. (Note that there are at least some possible reservoir targets in the Chainman, thin sand beds, but none have been proven and the Chainman is probably a source rock, not a reservoir.)

“Shale oil” is the phrase often applied to unconventional oil production, and the Bakken formation of North Dakota is the best example. It’s much less “unconventional” than real oil shale, because in shale oil, the oil is liquid. It’s just trapped in rocks that are very tight—meaning they have possibly abundant but often tiny pores to contain the oil, and their permeability, the ability of the oil to flow through the rock, is limited. So the way we try to exploit such deposits is not a simple vertical punch into the oil-bearing zone; you’d get precious little that way. Horizontal drilling is the common approach: drill down some 9,000 feet, make a right turn, then navigate your drill string through a 140-foot-thick zone that has oil—for another 9,000 feet. Fracture it to make the porosity better. That’s all expensive, but very doable, and that has turned North Dakota into one of the leading oil producing states in the U.S. in only a few years. Even so, the average North Dakota well only produces around 90 or so barrels per day.

So “oil shale,” or shale source rock, or “shale oil” – they are all really different!

Uranium imports at 91%

See this link.

US lacks rare earths

Just a link today, to an editorial comment by a professor of mineral and material science, Dr. Courtney Young, on US dependency on rare earths - and our lack of them.

The rare earths occupy many pages in What Things Are Made Of.

Ordovician trilobites

Today's post is from my History of the Earth Perpetual Calendar for March 4.

The diversity and abundance of trilobites during Ordovician time was similar to that of the Cambrian. Together with brachiopods, trilobites were the dominant (or most numerous) marine animals in Ordovician seas. Ordovician trilobites seem to have had better developed eyes than their Cambrian ancestors.

The trilobites here are Triarthrus becki (left) and Bumastus trentonensis (right).



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Mineral production up in 2011

To the extent that mineral production reflects the economy, it looks like things were improving in 2011. The US Geological Survey released its 2012 Mineral Commodities Summaries, covering 2011, and most metals show significant increase in value.

Gold and copper are usually the leading metals by value produced in the US. In 2008, thanks to low gold prices, the copper industry yielded ore worth half again the value of gold: $9.4 billion vs. $6.7 billion for gold. Copper depends sensitively on the building industry, and with the recession in 2009, its value fell to $6.2 billion while gold held relatively steady at $6.4 billion.

In 2010, the copper business was worth $8.4 billion and gold was at $8.9 billion, but with continuing increases in gold’s price, in 2011 gold was valued at $12.2 billion, surpassing copper’s record value of $10 billion.

Other 2011 commodity business values include iron ore at $6 billion (triple the 2009-2010 amount) and the titanium dioxide industry, at $3.8 billion, surpassing its 2008 rate of $3.7 billion for the first time.

The most valuable non-fuel mineral commodity produced in the U.S. has been crushed stone, holding steady in 2009-2011 at $11 billion, more valuable than gold, copper, or any other metal, but gold took the lead in 2011 for the first time in recent years.

Despite the surge in value for gold produced in the U.S., the nation went from a net exporter of gold to a net importer in 2010-2011, with about 38% of consumption imported. Much of this was raw ore for processing. Copper imports have been fairly steady for the past 5 years at about one-third of total consumption (35% of our copper was imported in 2011).

Tin surging

Cassiterides, north of Iberia--presumed source of early tin.

There’s quite a lot about tin in my book—it’s found on at least 10 pages, and in things as diverse as toothpaste and type metal. There have been some recent changes in some of the salient facts about tin.

Whether or not there’s a recession, according to information cited in this Bloomberg article, we’re about to see nearly 2 billion new cell phones a year. Combine that with more flat-screen TVs and computers, digital cameras, and other electronics, and consumption of tin (mostly for solder) is surging. In my book I quote recent USGS reports that 28% of all the tin used goes to electronics. The Bloomberg article indicates that that value is now more than 50%.

No more than a gram of tin per cell phone, but multiply it by two billion and it all adds up. Production increases (estimated at 0.6% for 2012) are not keeping up with demand increases, and the price of tin could climb in 2012 from around $9-$10 per pound in 2010 to as much as $13 per pound. And consumption is projected to exceed supply by more than 10,000 tons in 2012.

Where does the US get its tin? Apart from recycling and processing scrap, the US imports all its tin. There has been no primary mine production of tin in the US since 1993. Principal suppliers are Peru (more than half our imported tin), Bolivia, China, and Indonesia. China produces almost half the world’s tin, and Indonesia is #2 with almost one-fourth. In addition to electronics, there's tin in your car, in cans and containers (including glass and plastic ones--organotins reduce scratching in plastic), and in toothpaste (stannous fluoride -- stannum is Latin for tin, whose chemical symbol is Sn).

The map here shows an early map of Europe with the Cassiterides, imaginary islands that the Greeks thought to be the source of Phoenician tin. In reality, the tin came from Cornwall, in southwestern Britain. Cassiterite, tin oxide, is the primary ore of tin.

Public domain image from Wikipedia.

Soliciting input

Obviously I haven't posted here in a while; I've been focused on a new book project unrelated to the topics of What Things Are Made Of. It's a book in The History Press' "Lost" series about buildings gone from Butte, Montana: information and blog here.

For What Things Are Made Of (this blog) I'm asking for input from readers: What would you like to see here? Either reply in the comments here, or send me an email at rigibson@earthlink.net with questions or ideas that you'd like to see addressed. Anything within the realm of resources - minerals, coal, oil, etc. - is fair game: geology, distribution, imports, uses, etc.

Thanks for your help and support.