Dumpster Day

Saturday was Dumpster Day in Butte, Montana. It’s a day for recycling, sponsored by United Way, that comes every three months. And every three months the volume of stuff I generate appalls me. I alone threw away (well, saved for this day) four huge dog-food bags full of plastic, crushed to the extent possible, which is not much. Plastic dominates the piles I’ve been saving up, because paper, glass, steel, and aluminum are easier to take to the local recycling bins, which don’t accept plastic. All this plastic isn’t much by weight, but it sure is by volume.

Plastic is the hallmark of the Convenience Society. Easy to make, cheap, recyclable. It shows up in at least a dozen major sections of What Things Are Made Of. I get messages from people wanting to eliminate plastic as a way of saving oil. A nice idea, but not really valid. Plastic’s impact on the environment is a problem, but if we eliminated every bit of the plastic production in the US, it would be only a drop in the barrel of oil consumption.

One 42-gallon barrel of crude oil makes about 44 gallons of product, because during refining volumes increase. Of that final 44 gallons, 1.2 gallons make “feedstocks,” the chemical precursors to plastics, synthetic rubber, paints, petrochemicals, and more. That’s just under 3% of the products made from crude oil. Purists will add the energy cost to manufacture and distribute plastic products, which might get the total of oil consumption related to plastics up to 7%.

The point is that it’s just not that much volume. To conserve oil, forget plastic. A lot of it (such as grocery bags) is made from natural gas anyway, not oil. To conserve oil, drive less.

Bolivia: Lithium capital?

I hope my April Fool’s Day post didn’t bother anyone! Today I thought I’d focus on one country: Bolivia. Bolivia has been in the news as the world’s largest supply of lithium, and increasing demand for lithium batteries in electric vehicles might mean the US will have to cozy up with a government that has not been exactly pro-US lately.

But wait. Bolivia doesn’t produce any lithium; the world production leaders are Chile and Australia, each with about a third of the world’s lithium, and China in third place with about 18%. Chile has half the world’s reserves and China has another quarter. Bolivia isn’t even on the list of producers or those with reserves. What’s up?

It’s the difference between resources and reserves. Reserves – what Chile and China have – are known, established deposits that can be mined economically with today’s technologies and at today’s prices. Resources are known, speculative, and possible deposits that might be producible sometime in the future. Huge lithium resources – a third of the world – are what Bolivia has (or may have).

Bolivia also has 6% of the world’s tin, 6% of the silver, 4% of the zinc, 2.5% of the lead, 2% of the antimony, 2% of tungsten, 1.5% of boron. Of all those, zinc is most valuable to Bolivians, contributing around $680 million a year to the national economy, more than silver ($610 million) and tin ($260 million). But Bolivia’s most valuable commodity is natural gas, accounting for most of the $880 million attributable to fuels.

The most important commodity imported by the US from Bolivia is tin. The US imports about 70% of its tin; the rest is not mined but is produced from recycled materials. Of 37,000 tons of tin imported by the US, 16% comes from Bolivia, placing it #2 as an import supplier after Peru, which supplies more than half the tin imported to the US.

Electrical applications use more than a quarter of our tin, well ahead of the #2 use in cans and containers.

Unobtanium comes into its own

Unobtanium, a rare organo-metallic sulfide, now exists in adequate quantities to begin to see common, everyday uses. Its geologic occurrence, near volcanic flows in organic-rich subtropical environments, has limited its use to a few research labs. New devices are beginning to make use of its special properties.

Unobtanium replaces arsenic in integrated circuits, allowing arsenic to be used in more traditional ways. In the near term, this will likely double the cost of cell phones but predictions of increased demand will drive the price down within the next 35 years. Unobtanium goes pretty far: five ounces can make 765,453 cell phones.

Even pots and pans will benefit from unobtanium coatings, because of its remarkable heat transfer properties. In nature, this quality transmits volcanic heat into groundwater, creating hot springs. Processing unobtanium with irradiated fluorspar from China enhances the heat transfer and makes it stronger.

Only a few deposits are known that are rich enough for unobtanium to be mined as a primary product. Not surprisingly, most of these deposits are in China. The Wǒ zhèngzài zuò zhè jiàn shì deposit near the Mongolian border has yielded 67% of unobtanium produced to date. A low-grade deposit on the island of Jensaiqua in French Polynesia is being evaluated for its potential.

Soon most Americans will be importing yet another commodity upon which they will rely without even knowing about it. APRIL FOOL! :)

Gallium

By Richard I. Gibson

Visit this post for a 2013 update on gallium.

Gallium, named for France, comes to the US ironically from Germany, while the biggest proportion of imported germanium comes from Belgium. Both elements are byproducts yielded by refining other metals. Bauxite (aluminum's ore) and zinc processing are the main sources for gallium.

Why care? Most Americans own some gallium. Its biggest use - more than half - is in integrated circuits as gallium arsenide or gallium nitride, and it ends up in cell phones (especially "smartphones"), computers, back-lit flat-panel devices and televisions. Gallium also helps make lasers and solar cells.

The US imports more than 99% of its gallium, from Germany first, followed by Canada, China, and Ukraine. Demand and price are surging because of increasing manufacture of smartphones and flat-panel tech and also because of another important use of gallium: light-emitting diodes, LEDs. High-intensity LEDs are growing in volume, impacting demand for gallium. Its price has gone from $450 per kilogram in 2009 to $670 in 2010, and there's no limitation in sight. 

Gallium finds its way to at least six pages in What Things Are Made Of.

State rankings

Based on the search words, a fair number of people want to know what the most valuable mineral commodity is for individual states. The following list gives the top 25 states in terms of their contribution to total US non-fuel mineral production for 2010. The percentage of each state's mineral production of the total is given, followed by the mineral commodity that is most valuable in that state. Thus Nevada is #1 in the US, with 12% of the US total, and gold is the most valuable non-fuel mineral commodity in Nevada. Data from USGS.

1 Nevada (12% of US total) gold

2 Arizona (10%) copper

3 Utah (7%) copper

4 Minnesota (6%) iron ore

5 Alaska (5%) zinc

6 California (4%) sand and gravel

7 Texas (4%) crushed stone

8 Missouri (3%) cement

9 Florida (3%) phosphate rock

10 Michigan (3%) iron ore

11 Colorado (3%) molybdenum

12 Wyoming (3%) soda ash

13 Pennsylvania (2%) crushed stone

14 Georgia (2%) clays

15 New York (2%) salt

16 Idaho (2%) molybdenum

17 Montana (2%) copper

18 Ohio (2%) crushed stone

19 Kansas (2%) helium

20 New Mexico (2%) copper

21 Alabama (2%) crushed stone

22 Virginia (1.5%) crushed stone

23 Illinois (1%) crushed stone

24 North Carolina (1%) crushed stone

25 Indiana (1%) crushed stone

I'll list the second 25 in a future post.

What Things Are Made Of

What Things Are Made Of is now available from Booklocker.com. 

312 pages. The print-on-demand version is $17.95 + $3.00 shipping; the initial e-version (PDF) is available for $9.99. Additional e-formats in the works. It will probably be cheaper for you (and faster) for you to order through the publisher's site (link above).

Thanks for your support!

It's a book!

I received the galley print from the publisher today. It looks like a book, feels like a book, smells like a book. It will probably be a few more days before it is "for sale" but of course I'll make a post about that, with links! viii + 295 pages.

A slight change

Now that the book is about to become available - the publisher uploaded it to the printer today, for a check-print for me before it is actually for sale - I'm going to change my approach to the blog a bit.

I'll try to focus on updates, connections to things in the book that supplement and expand on it, and changes and news related to the topics in the book. It's a certainty that some aspects of the book will be out of date as soon as it is printed, because of the dramatic and speedy changes related to some materials. Rare earths come to mind: the demand, diverse uses, and global distribution of rare earths are in the news weekly if not daily. And there will likely be a bit more about oil and natural gas.

The blog and my web site will also become venues for interesting tables of information that I could not reasonably include in the book. And pictures!

Thanks for your interest. The book ought to be available for purchase by the end of March or possibly sooner. I'll post the link here instantly!

Alternatives

I was going to take a break from going through the commodities list alphabetically to say something about oil, since the price surge due to worries about Libya and the wider region has tripled the visitor count to my oil pages to more than 1,600 visitors a day (up from a consistent average of about 600), but what I would have said has already been more succinctly written. It boils down to "use less," but the complete, good report can be read here.

What Things book: Another update

The book is done and has been accepted by my print-on-demand publisher of choice. It will end up about 316 pages (6x9 paperback format) and will probably cost $17.95 for the printed version, which should be available in a few weeks. Details on electronic versions to come, but it will definitely be available in the Apple iBookstore.

Thanks to all for your interest and support!

Europium

It’s a metal, not an earth, and more abundant in the earth’s crust than silver, gold, or iodine, but the rare-earth element europium is hard to come by. Like most rare earths, it forms few minerals and usually only occurs as traces within complex rare-earth carbonates and phosphates—minerals that rarely occur in economic concentrations.

Europium, discovered in 1890 and named for Europe, has been used mostly as the red phosphor in television tubes. Appropriately, paper euros include europium-based pigments as an anti-counterfeiting device. US postage stamps have used fluorescent europium as well, and it helps make some lasers and medical screening machines.

Like all the rare earths, europium comes mostly from Bayan Obo, China, the deposit that yields most of the world’s rare earths today. China’s largest rare-earth producer, Baotou Steel Rare-Earth (Group) Hi-tech Co., Ltd., had a 2008 capacity of 250,000 tons of rare earths. Only 120 tons was europium. Its price in 2008 was $1,200 per kilogram ($545 per pound), the third most expensive rare earth after lutetium and thulium.

Diamonds aren’t forever

Wait—maybe they are. Industrial uses rather than gems consume most diamonds, and it’s those industrial applications I’m addressing here. About 55 million carats of natural industrial diamonds were mined in 2010, with Russia in a small lead over Congo (Kinshasa) for production. Together Russia and Congo mined more than half the world’s industrial diamonds.

Diamond in matrix. USGS photo.

In contrast, about 74 million carats of gem diamonds came to light in 2010, with Botswana in the lead and Russia at #2. But wait again—that’s more than the volume of industrial diamonds mentioned in the first paragraph. Right. Those were natural industrial diamonds, which account for only a little more than one percent of all diamonds. Synthetic diamonds dominate the industrial scene, and China produces more than 4 billion carats each year, far and away the world leader.

And guess what? China is the leading supplier of such diamonds to the US, and the US, as expected, is among the world’s greatest consumers of industrial diamonds. The US produces only about 127 million carats of industrial diamond, which sounds like a lot, but not in comparison to that 4-billion-carat gorilla, China. The US imports more than 500 million carats, 63% from China. The few natural industrial diamonds imported come from Africa, largely Botswana, but 93% of US industrial diamonds are synthetic.

Where do they go? Tiny dies for creating thin, light-bulb-filament wires, drill bits that find oil and gas, and computer chips all use industrial diamonds. But the vast majority go to a mundane use: stone and concrete cutting, mostly in the road-building and repair industry.

So as you motor down the highway, think about those Chinese synthetic diamonds. They helped find the oil to make the gasoline in your tank, and they help make the road beds upon which you drive.

Photo: Diamond in matrix. From USGS.