Thursday, September 1, 2011

cobalt steel suppliers

COMMODITIES
Mining in the 21st Century
Where are our future in metals?
The author studied earth sciences and is a freelance science journalist based in Heidelberg.
Karl Urban
Although funded ores contain less and less valuable metals, the worldwide hunger for them has grown steadily. The mining industry is in a dead end?
It's been rough on the global commodities markets. Exploded in recent years, prices of almost all important industrial metals. For use not only Western countries but also China, India or Brazil are copper, zinc and rare earth elements, without which no industrial country: Copper is essential in electrical engineering, zinc as an alloying agent for stainless steel, rare earth elements for flat panel displays or the generators of wind turbines. Prices are rising but also because important export countries use their own raw materials themselves: last year, announced the Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, a geologist, studying, only to export rare earth nor under high tariffs.

Find cobalt steel suppliers on the net.
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Model for the future of the Club of Rome of 1972
The standard scenario of the future model World3 the Club of Rome of 1972: It shows how non-renewable resources such as metals (red line) in the 21 Century are being exploited more and more. Critics complain, however, that technological development in the mining insufficiently eventually applied in the model.
In this raw race get the "limits to growth" of the Club of Rome of 1972, again in sight. In her newly published assessment of 2004 reaffirmed the authors, metal ores that could be similar to the fossil fuels soon completely exhausted. Especially the industrial and emerging countries would have consumed at a rapid pace of natural crude ores, which are covered by a finite number of deposits - until it no longer would continue.

Andreas Feininger / Library of Congress
Conventional mining today
If and when the metal support reaches a limit, most mining experts dare not predict. Too strong is the influence of a rising price has the technical development. For each efficient mining method increases the recoverable amount of raw material: "There are technological bridges that need to be built - and therefore to suggest there is no reason that we will soon have no mineral resources more available," says about Jens Gutzmer, Professor of Economic Geology and Petrology at the TU Bergakademie Freiberg.

Ultimately caused technical innovations have always been in the past, and falling metal prices. Just the search for new ore deposits is now much more focused than a few decades ago. Miners have always had only such deposits pursued in depth, these contained usable ore at the surface and promised such easy access. Geophysical measurements allow it today, however, even deep under the ground to detect lying deposits. For electrical or magnetic properties of the subsurface can be measured. At these ore bodies often differ greatly from what provides the first evidence for deposits. Elaborate holes must then were left with the measured data of the geophysicist and the Abbauwürdigkeit harden the wire.

The latest tools for prospector are satellites that now not only can detect mineralogical characteristics of the earth's surface. By ever more precise measurements of Earth's gravity, they can locate precisely the gravitational variations. Ore bodies often have a greater density than the surrounding rock. For several years, provided the German-American GRACE Satellitenduo and the European earth observation satellite GOCE those tasks that are also in search of raw materials.

It could not be sustained

Therefore, geologists will continue despite the growing demand for many mineral deposits, but they have a problem: they contain less and less valuable metals. The Australian geologist Gavin Mudd calculated 2007 that its metal content has decreased dramatically over the last 100 years. During the 1880s, for example, contained 30 percent lead single ore body, there are now barely three percent. Also for copper, zinc, silver, gold or uranium itself shows a comparable trend.

Gavin Mudd
Less and less metal in the ore
Since the beginning of the industrial revolution promoted the ores contain less and less metal. This affects many key commodities such as copper, gold, lead, zinc, uranium, nickel or silver.
The new mines so as to build more and more inferior ores from which they still need to create profitable metal. At the same time more and more worthless lands on the adjacent rock dumps: According to the OECD results for each finished metal from the mines in the 20-times the amount of waste - and rising. This requires more energy, because gold, copper or zinc ores milled mostly on a large scale, must be crushed and then melted - anyway, the mining industry, according to calculations by the United Nations is already responsible for 13 percent of global energy consumption.

Once mined, the ore also regenerate only in rare cases and for a long time - as at hydrothermal vents. Therefore can be difficult to integrate the mining industry in the new image of a green, environmentally friendly economy. Truly sustainable in metals could cover only about complete recycling, which is sufficient in raw material consumption is not growing well worldwide. Difficult it was done by the Study Commission of the German Bundestag "Protection of humans and the environment" to define how those resources should be used: preferably no longer than a renewable substitute exists. Until then, it too rich, easy to win the resource productivity, the tenor.

Nibble on ore

"More metal for less money" is therefore the motto of many engineers: X-graders surveyed still underground, the density of each clump of rock and decide whether its grading is sufficient to be promoted. The rest of the rock may remain under the earth and be used to backfill mined tunnels again.

More and more turn from the engineers also speak of the classical methods and their support to the forces of nature: microorganisms. Many species of subterranean rock crushing for billions of years to reach the energy-rich compounds incorporated therein. Some microbes use for their metabolism as the stored sulfur in sulfide ores. It also previously insoluble metal ions are reduced and thus water soluble. From such solutions can finally win a lot easier than metals from hard rock.

Karl Urban
CC BY-SA
Microorganisms in raw sulfur
Many microorganisms reduce the rock contained minerals, to reach that occur in the energy-rich elements, such as on this solfataras Iceland. To take advantage of this special metabolism technically, so far, only sulfur-bearing ores are processed.
This so-called bioleaching process has already been tried long ago. Already, a quarter of the copper ore, and every tenth gram gold ore that is processed. In the future, the new microbes and minerals are made more palatable, says Eberhard Janneck, the method for the engineering firm GEOS Freiberg developed. "This has to be changed and tested separately for each ore," he says. "The ore is always a complex of quite different procedures." But in the near future, the range of bioleaching are supplemented with low concentrations of zinc sulphide and lead ores. They also contain indium, which was only by the need for electronic components in recent years to become a valuable industrial metal. "The levels are very low indeed," says Janneck. "But the high market value of the metal to his collection is worth perhaps. Therefore you have to find effective methods to prepare the material and to extract all the other precious metals in the rock."

Metals from water

Further price rises could finally open up new sources of raw materials: the sea water contains about 1000 times the annual world production of gold, but also other metals such as uranium. Especially near the mid-ocean ridges could be sustained as manganese, copper or zinc gain directly from the water, because here gushing black smokers constantly secrete metal-rich solutions.

But still it is cheaper to develop the remaining ore deposits, such as in the deep sea. There worldwide store sludge, sand and erzverkrustete tubers, which are just waiting for an appropriate funding method. The environmental risks of these projects are immense, as manganese, nickel or cobalt often occur only in the uppermost soil layers, which would have to be dredged widely. It is not easy, so far poorly understood deep-sea fauna, not to harm it.

Geologists believe on the basis of such commodities relatively cheap recoverable resources that pass for many years, until the metal world hunger completely sustainable society can be satisfied from alternative sources. All the more amazing is that sustainability is not an invention of the Club of Rome, but already by the Saxon Upper Mountain Captain Hans Carl was invented by Carlo joke. He asked in 1713 to limit the rampant logging, which was necessary for supporting more new galleries. Now it might be time for this requirement to extend our metal hunger.

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