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.

Cadmium: batteries, TVs, plastics

Greenockite from Tsumeb, Namibia. 

Nobody mines cadmium. It comes from metal refineries, mostly zinc processors, where it is recovered as a trace component. It’s toxic, and not much goes a long way—only about 228 tons in the US in 2009 (down from 700 tons in 2005), with nickel-cadmium batteries (NiCd) leading the way. As lithium ion batteries, with greater energy density, take over in many small devices, NiCd batteries have declined in use, but they may return as storage batteries for on-grid solar energy systems that store electricity during the day and make it available at night.

China produces about a quarter of the world’s cadmium, and while the US is a net exporter, it ranks #9 in world cadmium production with about 4% of the total. A lot of US cadmium is exported to Asia where batteries are made.

Cadmium’s minor uses include photovoltaic devices such as photocopiers, where cadmium sulfide coats drums. Traditional uses include yellow, orange, and red pigments: yellow no-passing stripes on highways once contained cadmium. It also stabilizes plastics, makes lasers, and in phosphors gave the bluish tint to black-and-white TV sets in the 1950s. Cadmium was also once a low-melting component of solder and Wood’s metal—an alloy of bismuth, lead, tin, and cadmium sometimes used in the fusible valves found in automatic sprinkler systems. Wood’s metal melts at 158°F; when fires reach that temperature, the metal melts to open the valve, allowing water to flow.

The only noteworthy cadmium mineral is greenockite, cadmium sulfide, which forms pretty honey-colored crystals shaped like hexagonal barrels.

Photo by Christian Rewitzer, via Wikipedia under creative commons license.

Barite helps find oil

Barite roses from Kansas. R.I. Gibson photo.

Barite is a fairly common mineral, barium sulfate, frequently represented in collections. Its noticeably high specific gravity, 4.5, together with interesting crystals and occasional fluorescence make it popular with mineral collectors. Iron-bearing red sand incorporated into its crystalline aggregates makes barite roses, the state rock of Oklahoma. Gypsum crystals with sand in their matrix make similar “desert roses.”

From 2005 through 2008, the US consumed more than three million tons of barite each year. This volume fell to under two million in 2009 thanks to the recession and its impact on oil and gas consumption because 95% of all the barite used goes into drilling fluids for oil and gas wells. Barite’s density helps control high subsurface pressures.

Barite finds its way into many other uses, volumetrically smaller than oil and gas drilling but more directly pertinent to consumers. It helps protect metal in brake linings and adds gloss to automobile paint. Truck mud flaps, auto tires, home carpet backings, and playing cards include barite for weight, strength, and stiffness.

As a radiation blocker, barite shields x-ray machines and nuclear reactors, and creates the x-ray-opaque contrast medium for intestinal soft-tissue scans. A use that is declining as flat-panel technology expands is in the glass of cathode-ray tubes, where barium carbonate reduces radiation from old-style televisions and computer monitors.

About 80% of US barite is imported, virtually all of it (93%) from China, world leader with more than half the production (India is #2 with about 15%). The 20% of US consumption mined domestically is mostly from Nevada; the US industry employs about 330 workers in a $20 million business, representing about 7% of the world’s barite.

Photo: Barite roses from Kansas. Photo by Richard Gibson. 

Arsenic

Orpiment (arsenic sulfide)

Arsenic is Bad Stuff. It may have contributed to Napoleon’s death (accidentally or otherwise) and its presence in water supplies is an ongoing concern. For many years the wood treatment industry in the US consumed most of the arsenic used here, because it is an excellent preservative and insecticide. But toxicity issues led the industry to voluntarily cease using chromated copper arsenate for human-contact lumber like decks and picnic tables in 2003. Total US arsenic consumption has fallen from more than 30,000 metric tons in 1998 to 3,600 tons in 2009.

But arsenic finds its way into a lot of other critical but low-volume uses. It strengthens grids in lead-acid batteries, combines with other metals in some ammunition, and is a vital component of semiconductors in solar cells, circuit boards, and telecommunication electronics. Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) in computers, CD players, and numerous other household electronic devices contain gallium arsenide phosphide in tiny amounts. Two pounds of gallium arsenide can make 500,000 LEDs.

There are some arsenic ore minerals, mostly arsenic sulfides like lemon-yellow orpiment and red-orange realgar, but the primary ore is arsenopyrite, iron arsenic sulfide. It is also common in other minerals mined for elements like copper, and arsenic contributes significantly to environmental problems in copper-mining regions.

All US arsenic is imported. 86% of arsenic metal comes to the United States from China, which produces about half the world’s arsenic.

Orpiment photo from USGS via Wikipedia (public domain).

Sapphires

I recently completed an article on Montana sapphires for Distinctly Montana Magazine, focused on beautiful gems from Yogo Gulch. But sapphires have practical uses too.

Because rubies (red) and sapphires (famously blue, but also pink, yellow, green, purple, and even colorless) are nothing more than corundum, aluminum oxide, with some interesting trace elements (mostly titanium and iron), they are very hard—number nine on the Mohs Hardness Scale, second only to diamond. Consequently they find their way into watch and clock bearings, and those that don’t make the cut as gems are sometimes used as high-quality abrasives.

The first lasers, in 1960, used synthetic rubies to focus light into a coherent beam. Solid-state integrated circuits sometimes use sapphires formed into small thin wafers as their insulating substrate. Larger sheets built from synthetic sapphire sometimes make tough windows in armored vehicles, as well as mundane surfaces such as grocery-store barcode scanners where scratch resistance is valued. High quality watches may have sapphire crystal faces in addition to gem-like bearings inside.

Even though Auguste Verneuil invented a process for making synthetic sapphires in 1902, natural sapphires were used for non-jewel applications for decades after that. Today about 250 tons of synthetic sapphires supply the world annually with watch bearings, abrasives, and specialty uses. The US and Russia manufacture most synthetic stones, while Madagascar is the leading gem sapphire producer.

Watch for the article on Montana’s Yogo sapphires in the Summer issue of Distinctly Montana.

Image: The 182-carat Star of Bombay star sapphire, via Wikipedia.

Sandstone facades

Buildings are built of many things. What Things Are Made Of has one chapter about simple home construction and another including monuments and office buildings. I’m involved in planning for the Butte-Silver Bow Courthouse Centennial, coming up in 2012. It’s a huge Beaux-Arts creation whose cost was comparable to that of the Montana State Capitol in Helena.

The first floor façade’s rectangular panels boast uniform, fine-grained gray sandstone. A close look (or better, a careful look from a certain distance) reveals the sandstone’s beds to be angular, curved—not the expected planar laminations. The arrangement is called cross-bedding, crosscutting layering that means the sand was deposited in active rivers. The beds are essentially little sand dunes, channels, and other river-bed forms carved by flowing water.

The sand solidified into sandstone about 78 million years ago near what is now Columbus, Montana. Quarrying there began about 1890. Under the leadership of stonemason Michael Jacobs, born Jacobucci in Italy, the Montana Sandstone Company provided facing stone to numerous buildings in Butte, but it was the contract for the Montana State Capitol that put the company on the map and established Jacobs’ fame and fortune.

Today, stone decorating buildings is called dimension stone, and 78% of that used in U.S. construction is imported, with Brazil, Italy, China, and Turkey supplying nearly equal amounts. Brazil, China, and Italy provide mostly granite and Italy is also a major source of marble. Imported stone was worth $1.5 billion in 2009, compared to $377 million for domestic products. The U.S. is the largest consumer of these materials in the world.

What Things book: Update

For the three or four of you who are chomping at the bit for What Things Are Made Of to come out, here’s a quick update. It’s almost done. 92,000 words, about 320 pages laid out as a 6x9 paperback. I still have to complete the references, index, and one annoying section in Chapter 7. Then I have to evaluate print-on-demand shops and figure out e-pub formats and make some decisions. I’m anticipating January or February 2011 for an availability date.

Thanks for the interest and support!

Manganese from Gabon

And we’re back… it was a busy and complicated summer and I’ve spent a LOT of time actually working on and thinking about What Things Are Made Of. The book is now at just over 80,000 words, with 8 chapters finished (two need some expansion and tweaking, and a summary chapter yet to complete). I'm looking at print-on-demand and E-book for actual publication.

I learned an interesting tidbit about manganese, a metal the U.S. uses mostly in steel alloys and imports at a rate of 100%. Our primary supplier is little Gabon, with 57% of our manganese ore imports. Gabon’s manganese is associated with a pretty cool location – the only natural nuclear reactor known on earth.

A little over two billion years ago fissionable uranium isotope U235 was more abundant in uranium deposits, at nearly three percent, than it can be today simply because over those two billion years most of it has decayed to lead. Evidently critical mass was reached in a uranium deposit back then, and nuclear reactions happened. It’s not perfectly clear why the manganese is associated, but it’s enough to make manganese Gabon’s second most valuable export. $100,000,000 worth came to the US in 2009 – but that pales in comparison to Gabon’s oil exports to the US, valued at $2,200,000,000, twenty-two times the manganese value.

Manganese steel is critical in construction, so the late 2000s recession has taken a toll. US manganese consumption in 2009 was a third of its use in 2006, but it is still a half-billion-dollar business in the United States.

A brief introduction to fireworks

Like gunpowder, fireworks are mostly sulfur, saltpeter and carbon but with diverse agents added for color. They originated in China about 1000 years ago as a variation on black powder. April 18 commemorates the invention of firecrackers by Li Tian, a Chinese monk who lived near Liu Yang in Hunan Province, the region that supplies most of the world’s fireworks to this day.

Strontium carbonate (red) and barium chloride (green) tint modern skyrockets and other fireworks. Lighter red may come from lithium carbonate with orange provided by calcium chloride. Blues usually indicate the presence of copper compounds, which also produce purple when mixed with strontium. Rarely, rubidium generates purple. Sodium makes yellow, iron makes gold. Burning titanium, aluminum, or magnesium metal powder is the basis for intense white or silver stars. Strontium also makes red color in highway flares.

More information here.

Photo in public domain, via Wikipedia