Rare: The High-Stakes Race to Satisfy Our Need for the Scarcest Metals on Earth
280
Rare: The High-Stakes Race to Satisfy Our Need for the Scarcest Metals on Earth
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781616149727 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Prometheus Books |
| Publication date: | 01/06/2015 |
| Pages: | 280 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d) |
About the Author
Keith Veronese holds a PhD in Chemistry and has written for Gawker Media extensively, particularly for their science site io9. He has also written for Alpha Brand Media's family of websites and in magazines published by TwoMorrows Publishing. He is the author of Plugged In: Comic Book Professionals Working in the Video Game Industry.
Read an Excerpt
Rare
The High-Stakes Race to Satisfy Our Need for the Scarcest Metals on Earth
By Keith Veronese
Prometheus Books
Copyright © 2015 Keith VeroneseAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61614-973-4
CHAPTER 1
MAN AND METAL
MAN AND METAL
We are surrounded by a cacophony of metals. Aluminum cans store sweet, caffeine-filled beverages that give an afternoon boost. Iron support structures weave throughout every modern building, and our pockets jingle with nickel and copper coins. The rare metals gold and platinum may be a little less common in our day-to-day lives, but they play important roles in electronics, internal combustion engines, and, of course, jewelry. In the past three decades, industrial needs have led to the use of a number of lesser known, rare metals to advance consumer electronics, health care, communications, and the defense industry.
These "new" metals are often fugitives from the bottom rows of the periodic table—metals with names like niobium, tantalum, and rhodium. These elements were likely overlooked in your high school or college chemistry class, but they play a litany of roles in the technological growth of society, as engineers, chemists, and physicists push the boundaries of the exciting and possible.
Humankind's past is littered with methods of using metals to fashion weapons and tools, with the earliest notations appearing six thousand years ago. While metals may vary in scarcity, this brotherhood shares a number of basic characteristics: they are overwhelmingly malleable and act as superb-quality conductors of electrons, for example. Our word metal derives from the Greek word metallon. The word loosely translates to "quarry" or "mine" and was often used in reference to bustling gold- and silver mining operations in ancient Greece. This is quite the adequate name, one defined by its source, with metals often requiring a phenomenal amount of work to pry from Earth's grip.
Scientifically, metals are known for a common set of properties. Almost all metals have the ability to transmit electricity and heat—very useful properties in the world of electronics. Most metals can be easily bent and molded into intricate shapes. As a nice bonus, most metals are resistant to all but the most extreme chemical reactions in the outside environment, with the added stability increasing their usefulness. A very apparent exception to this stability, however, is the rusting of iron, a natural process that occurs as iron is exposed to oxygen and water over time in junkyards, barns, and elsewhere.
Is a particular metal hard to find because there is a limited amount, is it simply difficult to retrieve, or does technological demand outpace supply? The acquisition difficulty is likely due to a combination of all these reasons with a dash of nostalgic value to top things off for good measure, particularly for rare metals like gold and platinum that have served as status symbols for thousands of years.
ONE IN A BILLION
Determining a definitive amount of an individual element is a tricky endeavor. If you dive into a physics textbook, you are greeted with estimates of percentage makeup of the universe, solar system, and galaxy by element. If humankind has yet to set foot on Mars, how do we have any idea what percentage of elements make up other galaxies? These estimates are made through a combination of techniques and theories taken from physics, chemistry, and astronomy, relying on high-tech instrumentation to obtain data—after all, several-hundred-million-dollar telescopes are not just for pretty pictures. By looking for fluctuations in the way light bounces back based on what is known regarding how individual atoms of a given element reflect light, rudimentary abundance estimates are made.
Measuring the amount of a given metal on Earth is bit easier but is still an astounding feat. The abundance of metals within the planet's crust is often reported in arcane "parts per" notation. These parts-per-million (and often parts-per-billion) values are attained through painstaking analysis of large amounts of rocks taken from the earth's crust. Ideally, they represent an average amount should all the metals be uniformly distributed throughout the planet—which, as we know, they are not.
Parts per million (or billion), when used without any context, is a horribly obscure measurement that plagued my afternoons spent in Analytical Chemistry Lab. A notation traditionally used to communicate the amount of a contaminant within water or air, parts per million takes a very tiny amount and casts it against a reasonable background. Due to its nature, "parts per" is a dimensionless measurement—it lacks units. These measurements describe a quantity, but not in relation to a known commodity as measurements like fifty miles per hour, ten feet, or one hundred kilometers do.
Thanks to its analytical anonymity, a "parts per" measurement can be used to describe just about anything. By the time you finish the end of this sentence, you have used about two parts per billion of your life—about four and a half seconds of the average human life-span. This sort of measurement is a great way to obscure the facts—a local newscast might state there are three parts per billion of a toxic chemical like lead in the water supply. This is also the way the amount of rare earth metals is often reported. For example, platinum, a scarce, precious metal, exists in four parts per billion of Earth's crust—only four out of a billion atoms within the crust are platinum. This is an extremely small amount. To put the amount of platinum on Earth in an easier-to-visualize light, imagine if one took all the platinum mined in the past several decades and melted it down; the amount of molten platinum would barely fill the average home swimming pool.
Silver, a metal many use on a daily basis to eat with, exists at only a twenty-parts-per-billion value—twenty out of every billion atoms on the planet are silver. Remind your significant other of that fact the next time you go jewelry shopping, and you might save some cash. Osmium, rhenium, iridium, ruthenium, and even gold exist in smaller quantities, much less than one part per billion, while some are available in such small concentrations that no valid measurement exists.
On the extreme end of the scarcity spectrum is the metal promethium. The metal is named for the Greek Titan Prometheus, a mythological trickster who is known for stealing fire from the gods. Scientists first isolated promethium in 1963 after decades of speculation about the metal. Promethium is one of the rarest elements on Earth and would be very useful if available in substantial amounts. If enough existed on the planet, promethium could be used to power atomic batteries that would continue to work for decades at a time. Estimates suggest there is just over a pound of promethium (the most recent estimates suggest five hundred and eighty-six grams) within the crust of the entire planet. When the density of the metal is accounted for, this is just enough of the metal to fill the palm of a kindergartner's hand.
We all know gold and platinum have value, and several other rare metals you might not have heard of, including palladium, rhodium, and osmium, are highly sought after and traded as commodities. But what if an element is on the opposite end of oxygen in the supply-and-demand battle? Let's say there are extremely small quantities of the element, but there isn't enough for the element to be experimented with or put into mainstream use. This is the case with some rare metals, like promethium, one so rare that it lacks an established use. As we will soon learn, lacking a use for promethium is not a loss at the moment, as the total amount of the metal estimated to exist on Earth is astonishingly small.
PULLED INTO THE CORE
Why are some metals spread throughout Earth's crust in an unevenly distributed manner? There are several theories, most of them stemming from a sort of chemical attraction between metals. A number of the rare but extremely useful metals we will be talking about are siderophiles. Siderophile is an odd word, meaning "iron loving," and like metallon, it is of Greek origin. Osmium, gold, palladium, and platinum are four of the twelve metals classified by scientists as siderophiles: elements that seek out iron and bond with this common metal.
This special attraction to iron explains why so many prized metals are hard to find. Earth's molten core is estimated to be comprised of up to 90 percent iron, leading the elements to sink into the depths of Earth's crust and continually move closer to the planet's iron core over billions of years. At the same time, this drive to the core depletes the amount of the metals available in Earth's crust. The pull poses a problem to mining efforts—a pull to the core prevents the formation of concentrated deposits that would be useful to mine, leading the metals to instead reside in the crust of our planet in spread-out, sparse amounts. Theoretically, there are a lot more of these highly desired siderophiles present; we just don't have the ability to extract and refine them from the extreme depths of the crust and possibly, from the planet's core.
DIGGING DEEP
The mass of Earth is approximately 5.98 × 1024 kilograms. There is absolutely no easy (or useful) way to put a number of this magnitude into a reasonable context. I mean, it's the entire Earth. I could say something silly, like the mass of the planet is equal to sixty-five quadrillion Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, each of which weighs ninety-two million kilograms a piece. This comparison might as well be an alien number, as it lends no concept of magnitude.
The overwhelming majority of Earth's crust is made of hydrogen and oxygen. The only metals present in large amounts within the crust are aluminum and iron, with the latter also dominating the planetary core. These four elements make up about 90 percent of the mass of the crust, with silicon, nickel, magnesium, sulfur, and calcium rounding out another 9 percent of the planet's mass. Making up the remaining 1 percent are the one hundred–plus elements in the periodic table, including a number of quite useful, but very rare, metals.
What is easier to understand are reports of the percentages and proportion of metals and other elements that reside on the surface of the planet and just below. At the moment, Earth's crust is the only portion of the planet that can be easily minded by humans. Deposits of rare metals, including gold, are found under the surface of the planet's oceans, but these deposits are rarely mined for a number of reasons. These metals often lie within deposits of sulfides, solid conjugations of metal and the element sulfur that occur at the mouth of hydrothermal vents. While technology exists that allows for the mining of deep-sea sulfide deposits, extremely expensive remotely operated vehicles are often necessary to recover the metals. Additionally, oceanic mining is a politically charged issue, as the ownership of underwater deposits can be easily contested.
As technology advances, underwater mining for rare metals and other elements will become more popular, but, for the moment, due to cost and safety reasons, we are restricted to the ground beneath our feet that covers about one-third of the planet. Earth's crust varies in thickness from twenty-five to fifty kilometers along the continents, and so far, humankind has been unable to penetrate the full extent of the layer. The crust is thickest in the middle of the continent and slowly becomes thinner the closer one comes to the ocean.
So what does it take to dig through the outer crust of our planet? It takes a massive budget, a long timescale, and the backing of a superpower, and even this might not be enough to reach the deepest depth. Over the course of two decades during the Cold War, the Soviet Union meticulously drilled to a depth of twelve kilometers into the crust of northwest Russia's Kola Peninsula. No, this was not part of a supervillain-inspired plan to artificially create volcanoes but was rather an engineering expedition born out of the scientific head-butting that was common during the Cold War. The goal of this bizarre plot? To carve out a part of the already thin crust north of the Arctic Circle to see just how far humans could dig along and to see exactly how the makeup of the outer layer of the planet would change. Work on the Kola Superdeep Borehole began in 1970, with three decades of drilling leaving a twelve-kilometer-deep hole in the Baltic crust, a phenomenal depth, yet it penetrated but a third of the crust's estimated thickness. As they tore through the crust in the name of science and national pride, the team repeatedly encountered problems due to high temperatures. While you may feel cooler than ground-level temperatures in a basement home theater room or during a visit to a local cavern, as we drill deep into the surface, the temperature increases fifteen degrees Fahrenheit for every one and a half kilometers. At the depths reached during the Kola Borehole expeditions, temperatures well over two hundred degrees Fahrenheit are expected. The extremely hot temperatures and increased pressure led to a series of expensive mechanical problems, and the project was abandoned.
The Kola Superdeep Borehole is the inspiration for the late 1980s and 1990s urban legend of a Soviet mission to drill a "Well to Hell," with the California-based Trinity Broadcasting Network reporting the high temperatures encountered during drilling as literal evidence for the existence of hell. The Soviet engineers failed to reach hell, and they also failed to dig deep enough to locate rare earth metal reserves.
At the moment, we simply lack the technology to breach our planet's crust. The Kola Borehole fails to reach the midpoint of the crust, with at least twenty more kilometers of drilling to go at the time the project was shut down in 1992.
Although Earth's crust holds a considerable amount of desirable metals, if the metals are not in accessible, concentrated deposits, it is usually not worth the cost it would take for a corporation to retrieve them (at least until scarcity and demand elevate desire). The composition of metals within the planet's crust is not uniform, unfortunately, further dividing the world's continents into "haves" and "have nots" when it comes to in-demand metals.
NATIVE AND BOUND
Some metals, like aluminum, are extremely applicable to modern life, with large supplies of the metal retrievable and made into a usable form with a reasonable amount of effort. Not all metals are easy to find or can be isolated in a pure form, adding increased difficulty and cost to the process of mining for rare metals.
Although the metal is abundant and has been shaped and fashioned by humans for thousands of years, copper is very hard to isolate from the crust in a pure form. Bronze, a combination of copper with tin, was sufficient for our ancestors to make weapons and tools, but purer forms of copper and other metals are necessary for the varied number of modern uses. Copper is found within the mineral chalcopyrite. To isolate pure copper from chalcopyrite calls for a work-intensive process that involves crushing a large mass of chalcopyrite, smelting the mineral, removing sulfur, a gaseous infusion, and electrolysis before 99 percent pure, usable copper is obtained. Aluminum, a metal so common it is used to make disposable containers for soft drinks, undergoes a similar process before a form that meets standards for industrial use is obtained.
Due to the difficulty in purifying aluminum found in ore, the metal became extremely prized and more valuable than silver in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thankfully, there are a variety of ways to separate a desired metal from a backdrop of other metals. In 1886, a chemist in his early twenties ended a five-year academic journey when he discovered a simple but unique process to separate aluminum from ore impurities using electricity. Charles Martin Hall, a professor at Oberlin College, would continue a career as an educator and spend several years teaching in Imperial Japan, but along the way he formed an aluminum-processing company to make use of his newfound process. In time, the company became the industrial giant Alcoa, with Hall serving as vice president. Thanks to this process, aluminum metal went from an expensive, coveted metal in its pure elemental form to a readily available and extremely useful metal akin to iron. Thanks to Hall's process, use of the metal increased exponentially. Hall's method also allowed for supply to keep up with demand, and the metal became relatively inexpensive in a matter of a few years.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Rare by Keith Veronese. Copyright © 2015 Keith Veronese. Excerpted by permission of Prometheus Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Chapter 1. Man and Metal, 9,Chapter 2. What Is Rare?, 23,
Chapter 3. Playing the Long Game, 37,
Chapter 4. Inside a Single Rock, 43,
Chapter 5. A Scientific Cold War, 51,
Chapter 6. Created in a Nuclear Reactor, 65,
Chapter 7. Counterfeiting Gold, 81,
Chapter 8. Pale Horses, 93,
Chapter 9. Golf Clubs, iPhones, and Tribal Wars, 109,
Chapter 10. The Concentration Question, 119,
Chapter 11. Dirty Recycling, 133,
Chapter 12. Afghanistan's Path to Prosperity, 153,
Chapter 13. Little Silver, 163,
Chapter 14. The Next Precious Metals, 173,
Chapter 15. When the Well Runs Dry, 191,
Chapter 16. Going the Distance, 209,
Epilogue, 229,
Acknowledgments, 231,
Notes, 233,
Index, 257,