Dear MMTA Members,
Welcome to the June issue of the Crucible, the magazine of the Minor Metals Trade Association.
Looking ahead to LME Week Before we dive into the news and insights about all things minor metal, with the summer upon us, a gentle reminder that the LME Week is taking place early this year, in the week beginning 30th September. The MMTA Events during the LME Week are taking place on Tuesday 1st October: the Critical Materials Forum, held in partnership with critical materials consultancy Project Blue is taking place in the afternoon, followed by the MMTA’s 51st Anniversary Dinner in the evening. Both events were sold out last year, so we would advise booking well in advance to reserve your place. The Critical Materials Forum is a Free event, but pre-registration is required to secure your place. Online bookings for the MMTA Dinner are open — or email [email protected]. We look forward to seeing you in London in LME Week 2024. In the meantime please look through this issue including the Member Benefits (login required) for other upcoming industry events and exclusive MMTA member discounts.
Dark materials
We regularly return in this magazine to metals used in space (as indeed our North America correspondent Tom Butcher does here).
But as interesting is the range of exotic materials to be found in space — as building blocks of space bodies, but also of humanity’s ladder to the stars. The highlight of June was China’s Chang’e-6 lunar probe that achieved the rare feat of landing on the dark side of the Moon and returning, in humanity’s first, with samples. The dark side of the Moon, a mystery facing away from Earth, is where space explorers hope to find lunar ice that might in become a source of hydrogen and oxygen for sustaining life on a lunar station and as fuel for voyaging beyond.
Titanium mineral ilmenite, known to occur on the Moon, as gathered from previous samples, is another potential oxygen source (as tested originally by the electrolysis process behind the Sheffield-based powdermet company Metalysis). But what the Chinese probe did bring back was something else, naturally occurring few-layer graphene.
First discovered by scientists in Manchester, UK, by pure accident as they tried to clean up graphite pencil shavings using scotch tape, graphene is a wonderfully light strong material, made up of pure carbon molecules arranged in a lattice structure. It is a superconductor, and in several technologies including supercapacitors, is a challenger to lithium-ion bat-tery technologies. This is an advanced material you would expect to take to the Moon — as Saudi Arabia’s Rashid rover did in 2022 for testing — not to bring back from it. And the finding of this naturally occluding pure carbon — turning up in conjunction with other complex minerals, could also challenge theories about how the Earth’s satellite was formed.
A spoonful of sugar
On the topic of materials turning up where you least expect them, here is one — sugar in metal chemistry.
A team at Northwestern University developing metallic organic frameworks (MOFs) for various applications has developed a way to break down CO2 gas, using a catalyst made from molybdenum and ordinary table sugar, in what offers a potential new way to approach carbon capture. At ambient pressure and 300-600°C the catalyst converted carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide (CO), with the catalyst remaining stable over time.
Sugar, an organic compound, helpfully provides a stable carbon molecule. This is not the first time it has found a metallurgical use. A decade ago, Jeya Ephraim, then working at the University of Bradford presented a paper to the International Titanium Association on titanium reduction from mineral into naturally spheridised metal powders mentioned the use of sugar in the process. Table sugar has also been used in producing a foam titanium or Ti alloy structure, by using table sugar particles as placeholder molecules that are then dissolved in water to create pores in the titanium scaffold.
The hidden powers of hydrogen
Speaking as we did earlier on hydrogen for propulsion, if the automotive and energy sectors are your end markets, you should be keeping an eye on hydrogen.
Japanese carmaker Toyota, whose original Mirai model is almost 10 years old, is aiming to become the largest producer of carbon-neutral hydrogen cells in Europe. Its Hilux hydrogel model, developed at its Derbyshire plant in the UK, recently entered demonstration stage.
Also in the UK, power engineering firm Rolls-Royce has been working to convert its MTU Series 500 and Series 4000 gas power generation engines to hydrogen. And in June it announced that it is working with a consortium of partners under the German government-funded Phoenix (Performance Hydrogen Engine for Industrial and X) to build an engine for a stationary powergen system that would generate the same electrical and thermal energy as currently available through natural gas CHP units in the higher power range of up to 2.5 MW. The partners are developing components for this first-of-a-kind hydrogen combustion engine, such as the injection system, the piston group, the ignition system, and a new lubricant.
Last week brought a shock to hydrogen aviation hopes as Los Angeles startup Universal Times went bust, after burning through $100mln raised from investors.
But the end of its hydrogen regional jet ambitions is not a death knell for hydrogen aviation. Rolls-Royce and Germany’s DLR Institute of Propulsion technology in June stepped up tests on a hydrogen combustion engine for jet propulsion. This development is securely funded by the European Union’s Cavendish Clean Aviation project.
Barriers and bridges
As the MMTA reported and our member Argus Media delved into in the last issue, the US government in May launched proposals to additionally impose or increase from August Section 301 tariffs on a range of imports from China, ranging from 25% on some critical minerals to 40% for advanced materials and 100% for electric vehicles (EVs).
The latter somewhat preempts the prospect of cheaper Chinese battery electric vehicles out-competing US producers on their home turf (in realty, China, more than its export markets, is the leaders in BEV adoption). Not to be left behind, the EU in June made its own interim proposal, as part of a subsidies review, to levy various levels of duties on Chinese EV brands (see CRM Alliance briefing). Also in this issue Benchmark Mineral Intelligence examines the background and the significance of these trade barriers in western EV markets.
The MMTA is an international association, and as such it cannot take a position on the proposed US tariffs. However, the MMTA North America committee has sought feedback from the Association’s US members and has responded to the US Trade Representative’s consultation by the deadline of 28 June.
Read the MMTA’s submission to the USTR here. What is striking about the proposals is that the tariff barriers on Chinese imports are being put in place on a number of critical minerals for which the US is yet to secure its independence by either ensuring domestic capacity or building bridges with friendly supplier nations. But the balance is complex, as addressing the flow of specific materials such as chromium, indium, tantalum and tungstates shows.
As a case study, USITC import data for chromium metal(HTS 81122100) shows Chinese metal replacing Russian in the US supply chain since 2022. The share of Chinese chromium supply in US imports jumped from around 12% in the preceding years to more than 50% in 2023, and accounted for almost two-thirds in the first four months of this year.
Since 2019 Russia (where both chromium plants, Novotroitsk and Kluchevsky had expanded their aluminothermic chromium capacity and Novotroitsk had added electrolytic production) had eaten into the UK’s leading share of the US market, in 2020-2021 pushing the UK into second place. This trend reversed sharply in 2022 after the war in Ukraine, and the UK has now regained all the market share that had been eroded. But in the meantime, China’s imports also grew, taking up a share of growth in US chromium consumption. US chromium imports in 2023 were three-fold higher than in 2013. While this rise in imports has not been steady but volatile year-on-year, the volume has increased overall in the past decade.Against this overall growth trend, in 2023, the second year of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, US chromium imports from Russia fell sharply, by 90% year-on-year.
In that same year imports from France (home to DCX Chrome) fell by 87%. This shortfall in supply from France was plugged partly by the UK (home to AMG Chrome) but far more by China — which in 2022 outstripped all other countries to become the US’s largest source of chromium metal. US imports from China in 2022 jumped from under 2,000 metric tonnes the previous year to more than 5,000 tonnes and have continued to grow since — while imports from the UK stayed at below 4,000tyr even in its peak US import years in 2018 and 2023.
In the first four months of 2024, the picture of the respective producing countries’ market share of US chromium imports looked like this. And now our watch begins.
Canada adds silicon to its CRM list
Across the border Canada has taken a look at its Critical Raw Materials list and in June added high-purity iron (a feedstock path to decarbonising steel), phosphorus (fertiliser and feed-stock for LFP batteries) and silicon metal (a raw material for semiconductors and photovoltaics). Unlike the EU, UK etc. where “critical” is defined by lack of production, in Canada criticality is “a reasonable chance of the mineral being pro-duced by Canada”. The CRM list aims to make this happen.
