Scientists Turn Harmful Methane Into Methanol at Room Temperature

AUGUST 9, 2021

An illustration of the cage structures of two iron-based zeolites used in the study. The red and gold spheres (representing oxygen and iron, respectively) make up the active site. The cage structure, in gray, is formed of silicon, aluminum and oxygen. The blue sphere quantifies the size of the largest molecule that can diffuse freely in and out of the active site cage (the diameter of methane is ~4.2 Å). Credit: Benjamin Snyder

A “tantalizing” ” principle borrowed from nature turns harmful methane into useful methanol at room temperature. A team of researchers from Stanford University and the University of Leuven in Belgium has further elucidated the process in a new study in a recent edition of Science.

The discovery may be an important step toward a methanol fuel economy with abundant methane as the feedstock, an advance that could fundamentally change how the world uses natural gas. Methanol – the simplest alcohol ­­– is used to make various products, like paints and plastics, and as an additive to gasoline. Rich in hydrogen, methanol can drive new-age fuel cells that could yield significant environmental benefits.

If natural gas, of which methane is the primary component, could be converted economically into methanol, the resulting liquid fuel would be much more easily stored and transported than natural gas and pure hydrogen. That also would greatly reduce the emissions of methane from natural gas processing plants and pipelines. Today, escaped methane, a greenhouse gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide, nearly negates the environmental advantages of natural gas over oil and coal. The team’s new study is their latest to advance a low-energy way to produce methanol from methane.

Benjamin Snyder (right) and his former PhD adviser, Edward Solomon, a professor of chemistry at Stanford and of photon science at SLAC. Credit: Linda A. Cicero

“This process uses common crystals known as iron zeolites that are known to convert natural gas to methanol at room temperature,” explains Benjamin Snyder, who earned his doctorate at Stanford studying catalysts to address key facets of this challenge. “But, this is extremely challenging chemistry to achieve on a practical level, as methane is stubbornly chemically inert.”

When methane is infused into porous iron zeolites, methanol is rapidly produced at room temperature with no additional heat or energy required. By comparison, the conventional industrial process for making methanol from methane requires temperatures of 1000°C (1832°F) and extreme high pressure.

“That’s an economically tantalizing process, but it’s not that easy. Significant barriers prevent scaling up this process to industrial levels,” said Edward Solomon, Stanford professor of chemistry in the School of Humanities and Sciences, and of photon science at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Solomon is the senior author of the new study.

Keeping the zeolites on

Unfortunately, most iron zeolites deactivate quickly. Unable to process more methane, the process peters out. Scientists have been keen to study ways to improve iron zeolite performance. The new study, co-authored by Hannah Rhoda, a Stanford doctoral candidate in inorganic chemistry, uses advanced spectroscopy to explore the physical structure of the most promising zeolites for methane-to-methanol production.

“A key question here is how to get the methanol out without destroying the catalyst,” Rhoda said.

Choosing two attractive iron zeolites, the team studied the physical structure of the lattices around the iron. They discovered that the reactivity varies dramatically according to the size of the pores in the surrounding crystal structure. The team refers to it as the “cage effect,” as encapsulating lattice resembles a cage.

Hannah Rhoda with the resonance Raman spectroscopy equipment, which shoots a laser into a sample to obtain vibrational information from the exact site being studied. Researchers in the current study used this technique to help assign the Fe(III)-OH and the Fe(III)OCH3 poisoned sites, which illuminated the mechanism. Credit: Courtesy of Hannah Rhoda

If the pores in the cages are too big, the active site deactivates after just one reaction cycle and never reactivates again.  When the pore apertures are smaller, however, they coordinate a precise molecular dance between the reactants and the iron active sites – one that directly produces methanol and regenerates the active site. Leveraging this so-called ‘cage effect,’ the team was able to reactivate 40 percent of the deactivated sites repeatedly – a significant conceptual advance toward an industrial-scale catalytic process.

“Catalytic cycling – the continual reactivation of regenerated sites – could someday lead to continual, economical methanol production from natural gas,” said Snyder, now a postdoctoral fellow at UC-Berkeley in the Department of Chemistry under Jeffrey R. Long.

This fundamental step forward in basic science will help elucidate for chemists and chemical engineers the process iron zeolites use to produce methanol at room temperature, but much work remains before such a process might be industrialized.

Next up on Snyder’s list: tackling achieving the process not only at room temperature but using ambient air rather than some other source of oxygen, such as the nitrous oxide used in these experiments. Dealing with a powerful oxidizing agent like oxygen, which is notoriously hard to control in chemical reactions, will be another considerable hurdle along the path.

For now, Snyder was both pleased and amazed by the illustrative powers of the sophisticated spectroscopic instrumentation in the Solomon labs that were leveraged for this study. These were invaluable to his understanding of the chemistry and the chemical structures involved in the methane-to-methanol process.

“It’s cool how you can get some very powerful atomic-level insight, like the cage effect, from these tools that weren’t available to previous generations of chemists,” Snyder said.

Reference: “Cage effects control the mechanism of methane hydroxylation in zeolites” by Benjamin E. R. Snyder, Max L. Bols, Hannah M. Rhoda, Dieter Plessers, Robert A. Schoonheydt, Bert F. Sels and Edward I. Solomon, 16 July 2021, Science.
DOI: 10.1126/science.abd5803

University of Leuven researchers on this study were Max Bols, Dieter Plessers, Robert  Schoonheydt and, Bert F. Sels. This research was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, a Stanford Graduate Fellowship, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Research Foundation–Flanders (FWO).

 

44.01 secures $5M to turn billions of tons of carbon dioxide to stone

Devin Coldewey@techcrunch / 1•August 10, 2021

Image Credits: Holcy / iStock / Getty Images Plus / Getty Images under a RF license.

Reducing global greenhouse gas emissions is an important goal, but another challenge awaits: lowering the levels of CO2 and other substances already in the atmosphere. One promising approach turns the gas into an ordinary mineral through entirely natural processes; 44.01 hopes to perform this process at scale using vast deposits of precursor materials and a $5 million seed round to get the ball rolling.

The process of mineralizing CO2 is well known among geologists and climate scientists. A naturally occurring stone called peridotite reacts with the gas and water to produce calcite, another common and harmless mineral. In fact this has occurred at enormous scales throughout history, as witnessed by large streaks of calcite piercing peridotite deposits.

Peridotite is normally found miles below sea level, but on the easternmost tip of the Arabian peninsula, specifically the northern coast of Oman, tectonic action has raised hundreds of square miles of the stuff to the surface.

Talal Hasan was working in Oman’s sovereign investment arm when he read about the country’s coast having the largest “dead zone” in the world, a major contributor to which was CO2 emissions being absorbed by the sea and gathering there. Hasan, born into a family of environmentalists, looked into it and found that, amazingly, the problem and the solution were literally right next to each other: the country’s mountains of peridotite, which theoretically could hold billions of tons of CO2.

Around that time, in fact, The New York Times ran a photo essay about Oman’s potential miracle mineral, highlighting the research of Peter Kelemen and Juerg Matter into its potential. As the Times’ Henry Fountain wrote at the time:

If this natural process, called carbon mineralization, could be harnessed, accelerated and applied inexpensively on a huge scale — admittedly some very big “ifs” — it could help fight climate change.

That’s broadly speaking the plan proposed by Hasan and, actually, both Kelemen and Matter, who make up the startup’s “scientific committee.” 44.01 (the molecular weight of carbon dioxide, if you were wondering) aims to accomplish mineralization economically and safely with a few novel ideas.

First is the basic process of accelerating the natural reaction of the materials. It normally occurs over years as CO2 and water vapor interact with the rock — no energy needs to be applied to make the change, since the reaction actually results in a lower energy state.

“We’re speeding it up by injecting a higher CO2 content than you would get in the atmosphere,” said Hasan. “We have to drill an engineered borehole that’s targeted for mineralization and injection.”

Image Credits: 44.01

The holes would maximize surface area, and highly carbonated water would be pumped in cyclically until the drilled peridotite is saturated. Importantly, there’s no catalyst or toxic additive, it’s just fizzy water, and if some were to leak or escape, it’s just a puff of CO2, like what you get when you open a bottle of soda.

Second is achieving this without negating the entire endeavor by having giant trucks and heavy machinery pumping out new CO2 as fast as they can pump in the old stuff. To that end Hasan said the company is working hard at the logistics side to create a biodiesel-based supply line (with Wakud) to truck in the raw material and power the machines at night, while solar would offset that fuel cost at night.

It sounds like a lot to build up, but Hasan points out that a lot of this is already done by the oil industry, which as you might guess is fairly ubiquitous in the region. “It’s similar to how they drill and explore, so there’s a lot of existing infrastructure for this,” he said, “but rather than pulling the hydrocarbon out, we’re pumping it back in.” Other mineralization efforts have broken ground on the concept, so to speak, such as a basalt-injection scheme up in Iceland, so it isn’t without precedent.

Third is sourcing the CO2 itself. The atmosphere is full of it, sure, but it’s not trivial to capture and compress enough to mineralize at industrial scales. So 44.01 is partnering with Climeworks and other carbon capture companies to provide an end point for their CO2 sequestration efforts.

Plenty of companies are working on direct capture of emissions, be they at the point of emission or elsewhere, but once they have a couple million tons of CO2, it’s not obvious what to do next. “We want to facilitate carbon capture companies, so we’re building the CO2 sinks here and operating a plug and play model. They come to our site, plug in, and using power on site, we can start taking it,” said Hasan.

How it would be paid for is a bit of an open question in the exact particulars, but what’s clear is a global corporate appetite for carbon offsetting. There’s a large voluntary market for carbon credits beyond the traditional and rather outdated carbon credits. 44.01 can sell large quantities of verified carbon removal, which is a step up from temporary sequestration or capture — though the financial instruments to do so are still being worked out. (DroneSeed is another company offering a service beyond offsets that hopes to take advantage of a new generation of emissions futures and other systems. It’s an evolving and highly complex overlapping area of international regulations, taxes and corporate policy.)

For now, however, the goal is simply to prove that the system works as expected at the scales hoped for. The seed money is nowhere near what would be needed to build the operation necessary, just a step in that direction to get the permits, studies and equipment necessary to properly perform demonstrations.

“We tried to get like-minded investors on board, people genuinely doing this for climate change,” said Hasan. “It makes things a lot easier on us when we’re measured on impact rather than financials.” (No doubt all startups hope for such understanding backers.)

Apollo Projects, a early-stage investment fund from Max and Sam Altman, led the round, and Breakthrough Energy Ventures participated. (Not listed in the press release but important to note, Hasan said, were small investments from families in Oman and environmental organizations in Europe.)

Oman may be the starting point, but Hasan hinted that another location would host the first commercial operations. While he declined to be specific, one glance at a map shows that the peridotite deposits spill over the northern border of Oman and into the eastern tip of the UAE, which no doubt is also interested in this budding industry and, of course, has more than enough money to finance it. We’ll know more once 44.01 completes its pilot work.

THE VISUAL  CAPITALIST
Mapped: Visualizing U.S. Oil Production by State

on August 10, 2021
ByAnshool Deshmukh
Graphics/Design:
Christina Kostandi
ENERGY

‘

▼ Use This Visualization

Mapped: Visualizing U.S. Oil Production by State

In 2018, the United States became the world’s top crude oil producer. It has strongly held this position ever since.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), the country accounted for nearly 15% of the world’s total oil production in 2020, churning out close to 13 million barrels of crude oil per day—more than Russia or Saudi Arabia.

Although total U.S. oil production declined between 1985 and 2008, annual production increased nearly every year from 2009 through 2019, reaching the highest amount on record in 2019.
The Dominant Oil Producing States

Impressively, 71% of total U.S. oil production came from just five states. An additional 14.6% came from the Gulf of Mexico, which is a federal jurisdiction.

Here are the five states that produce the largest amount of crude oil:

RankStateOil Production
(billion barrels)Share of Total Production1 Texas 1.78 43.0%
2 North Dakota 0.43 10.4%
3 New Mexico 0.37 9.2%
4 Oklahoma 0.17 4.1%
5 Colorado 0.16 4.0%


Rounding the top 10 are states like Alaska, California, Wyoming, Louisiana, and Utah.

Texas is undoubtedly the largest oil-producing state in the United States. In 2020, Texas produced a total of 1.78 billion barrels of oil. Texas is home to the most productive U.S. oil basin, the Permian, routinely accounting for at least 50% of total onshore production. A distant second is North Dakota, which produced about 431.2 million barrels of oil in 2020.
Regional Distribution of U.S. Oil Production

A total of 32 of the 50 U.S. states produce oil. They are divided among five regional divisions for oil production in the U.S., known as the Petroleum Administration for Defense Districts (PADD).

These five regional divisions of the allocation of fuels were established in the U.S. during the Second World War and are still used today for data collection purposes.



Given that Texas is the largest U.S. oil-producing state, PADD 3 (Gulf Coast) is also the largest oil-producing PADD. PADD 3 also includes the federal offshore region in the Gulf of Mexico. There are around 400 operational oil and gas rigs in the country.
Impact of U.S. Oil Production on Employment

Rapid growth in oil production using advanced drilling methods has created high-paying jobs in states like North Dakota and Texas.

Thanks to the rapid development in the Bakken Shale formation, North Dakota boasts the nation’s lowest unemployment rate. The state has also grown personal income and state economic output at a fast rate, due to oil and gas industry growth.

Oil production from the Eagle Ford Shale has transformed a relatively poor region of South Texas into one of the nation’s most significant economic development zones. In fact, due largely to the oil and natural gas industry, the Texas Comptroller estimates that Texas has recovered 100% of the jobs lost during the Great Recession.
Looking to the Future

The U.S. slashed its oil production forecast through next year just as OPEC and its allies begin to roll back their production cuts in the coming months.

U.S. oil output will drop to 11.04 million barrels a day this year, down from a forecasted 11.15 million. This was a result of the deep freeze that shut down the oil industry in Texas. The EIA also lowered its output forecast for 2022 by 100,000 barrels a day.

Despite its forecast for a rise in supply from outside the cartel this year, OPEC said in its report that it is uncertain about the levels of investment expected to determine the non-OPEC supply outlook for the years to come.

UCP SKINFLINTS

Alberta’s financial aid for businesses went underused in first wave, report finds

CARRIE TAIT
CALGARY
PUBLISHED AUGUST 9, 2021
A review of Alberta's response to the first wave of COVID-19 conducted by KPMG concluded Alberta business owners did not access a federal-provincial rent relief program to its full potential.

JEFF MCINTOSH/THE CANADIAN PRESS

Alberta businesses, many of which believed they were on the brink of financial failure as the coronavirus tanked the economy, left millions of dollars worth of government assistance on the table in the first wave of the pandemic, according to an external report.

But support payments to small and medium-sized businesses in Alberta climbed by a factor of 10 after the province eased eligibility thresholds and increased the amount of money each firm could collect in the second and third waves, according to government figures.

Alberta, in June of last year, created a “relaunch grant” for small and medium-sized outfits that lost 50 per cent of their revenue in April or May, 2020. Over the program’s first 15 weeks, it paid out just $64.1-million of the $200-million initially earmarked for support, according to a report by KPMG LLP. The consulting firm, which Alberta paid to review the province’s response to the first wave, said the revenue threshold may have deterred companies from applying. KPMG also concluded Alberta business owners did not access a federal-provincial rent relief program to its full potential.

Small business group launches petition pressing Ottawa to maintain COVID-19 pandemic support programs

The slow start for support programs is a product of the chaos in the first leg of the pandemic for both governments and business owners. Politicians and bureaucrats rushed out programs, and some companies found the guidelines confusing or burdensome. Meanwhile, business owners had to determine whether they qualified – and whether it was worth the hassle.

“It was such an overwhelming time, with so many things being launched at the same time,” said Deborah Yedlin, the president of Calgary Chamber of Commerce. “People had to figure out what applied to them and where they should apply – and it just took a little longer for things to fall into place.”

Sharlene Massie, the founder of About Staffing, said her recruitment and employment agency was among the 13,979 successful applicants for Alberta’s relaunch grant in the first wave. Others, she said, were either ignorant to the program’s existence or stayed away because the rules were unclear.

“We found it because we were watching for absolutely every penny we could find,” she said. “A lot of companies were not aware of it.”

Many Albertans, Ms. Massie said, are also skeptical of government assistance, and worried the rules may change without notice, leaving them on the hook for money they don’t have.

Roughly 81 per cent of those who applied received the relaunch grant in the first wave, KPMG found. Payments were capped at $5,000 and the average grant totalled $3,745. The majority of applications came from the service industry, including personal care companies and food and accommodation businesses, KPMG said. The reported is dated January, 2021, but the Alberta government did not release it until Aug. 6.

The paltry participation rate skyrocketed after Alberta loosened the rules and purse strings. In the fall of 2020, eligible businesses that lost 40 per cent of their revenue in April or May could apply. In December, the revenue threshold dropped to 30 per cent and businesses affected by another round of public-health restrictions could receive a second payment of up to $15,000. Come spring 2021, the government put another $10,000 per eligible business on the table.

Alberta dropped the revenue loss threshold to 30 per cent “based on feedback from businesses,” according to Justin Brattinga, a spokesman for the Minister of Jobs, Economy and Innovation. “This provided a stronger incentive for businesses to apply and opened the program to more applicants.”

Since KPMG compiled its report, Alberta has distributed more than $700-million in grants to over 100,000 businesses, Mr. Brattinga said.

 THEY ARE AMERICAN EVANGELICAL PROTESTANTS

Why many conservatives have a difficult relationship with science

by Stephan Lewandowsky, Klaus Oberauer, The Conversation

Credit: Shutterstock

Many scientific findings continue to be disputed by politicians and parts of the public long after a scholarly consensus has been established. For example, nearly a third of Americans still do not accept that fossil fuel emissions cause climate change, even though the scientific community settled on a consensus that they do decades ago.

Research into why people reject scientific facts has identified people's political worldviews as the principal predictor variable. People with a libertarian or conservative worldview are more likely to reject climate change and evolution and are less likely to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

What explains this propensity for rejection of science by some of the political right? Are there intrinsic attributes of the scientific enterprise that are uniquely challenging to people with conservative or libertarian worldviews? Or is the association merely the result of conflicting imperatives between scientific findings and their economic implications? In the case of climate change, for example, any mitigation necessarily entails interference with current economic practice.

We recently conducted two large-scale surveys that explored the first possibility—that some intrinsic attributes of science are in tension with aspects of conservative thinking. We focused on two aspects of science: the often tacit norms and principles that guide the scientific enterprise, and the history of how scientific progress has led us to understand that human beings are not the center of the universe.

Sociologist Robert Merton famously proposed norms for the conduct of science in 1942. The norm of "communism" (different from the political philosophy of communism) holds that the results of scientific research should be the common property of the scientific community. "Universalism" postulates that knowledge should transcend racial, class, national or political barriers. "Disinteredness" mandates that scientists should conduct research for the benefit of the scientific enterprise rather than for personal gain.

These norms sit uneasily with strands of standard contemporary conservative thought. Conservatism is typically associated with nationalism and patriotism, at the expense of embracing cooperative internationalism. And the notion of disinterestedness may not mesh well with conservative emphasis on property rights.

Science has enabled us to explain the world around us but that may create further tensions—especially with religious conservatism. The idea that humans are exceptional is at the core of traditional Judeo-Christian thought, which sees the human as an imago Dei, an image of God, that is clearly separate from other beings and nature itself.

Against this human exceptionalism, the over-arching outcome of centuries of research since the scientific revolution has been a diminution of the status of human beings. We now recognize our planet to be a rather small and insignificant object in a universe full of an untold number of galaxies, rather than the center of all creation.

Testing the issues

We tested how those two over-arching attributes of science—its intrinsic norms and its historical effect on how humans see themselves—might relate to conservative thought and acceptance of scientific facts in two large-scale studies. Each involved a representative sample of around 1,000 US residents.

We focused on three scientific issues; climate change, vaccinations, and the heritability of intelligence. The first two were chosen because of their known tendency to be rejected by people on the political right, allowing us to observe the potential moderating role of other predictors.

The latter was chosen because the belief that external forces such as education can improve people and their circumstances is a focus of liberalism. Conservatism, on the other hand, is skeptical of that possibility and leans more towards the idea that improvement comes from the individual—implying a lesser role for the malleability of intelligence.

The fact that individual differences in intelligence are related to genetic differences, with current estimates of heritability hovering around 50%, is therefore potentially challenging to liberals but might be endorsed by conservatives.

The two studies differed slightly in how we measured political views and people's endorsement of the norms of science, but the overall findings were quite clear. Conservatives were less likely to accept the norms of science, suggesting that the worldviews of some people on the political right may be in intrinsic conflict with the scientific enterprise.

Those people who accepted the norms of science were also more likely to endorse vaccinations and support the need to fight climate change. This suggess that people who embrace the scientific enterprise as a whole are also more likely to accept specific scientific findings.

We found limited support for the possibility that belief in human exceptionalism would predispose people to be more skeptical in their acceptance of scientific propositions. Exceptionalism had little direct effect on scientific attitudes. Therefore, our study provided no evidence for the conjecture that the long history of science in displacing humans from the center of the world contributes to conversatives' uneasiness with science.

Finally, we found no strong evidence that people on the political left are more likely to reject the genetic contribution to individual variation in intelligence. This negative result adds to the evidence that science denial is harder to find on the left, even concerning issues where basic aspects of liberal thought—in this case the belief that people can be improved—are in potential conflict with the evidence.

The two studies help explain why conservatives are more likely to reject scientific findings than liberals. This rejection is not only dictated by political interests clashing with a specific body of scientific knowledge (such as human-caused climate change), but it appears to represent a deeper tension between conservatism and the spirit in which science is commonly conducted

Examining how people think about, and respond to, climate change data

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Provided by The Conversation 

THE AIM IS NO MORE THAN 1.5 DEGREES
Steel sector carbon emissions must fall 75% under 2 degrees celsius scenario — report

MINING.com Editor | August 10, 2021 | 

Stock image.

Carbon emissions in the steel sector must fall by 75% from today’s levels to limit global warming to within 2 degree celsius, says Wood Mackenzie in its latest base case report.


This means reducing global steel emissions from over 3,000 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (Mt CO2) in 2020 to just 780 Mt CO2 by 2050.

“This is an extremely challenging target to meet. The steel industry would need to find the right balance between managing rising demand and pressure to decarbonise,” says Wood Mackenzie senior analyst Mihir Vora said. “The pathway to a 2°C world is filled with obstacles compared to our base case view.”

Steel demand is expected to rise 23% to 2,300 Mt between 2020 and 2050. Developing economies such as India, Southeast Asia and South America are expected to drive demand growth, WoodMac says, while China and Europe would pare down their consumption.

“Currently, steel is responsible for 7% of global CO2 emissions,” Vora says. “The industry needs to prioritise decarbonisation if the world is going to achieve a 2°C warming pathway aligned to the goals of the Paris climate agreement.

“Advanced economies will need to do more to curb emissions via innovative new steelmaking pathways such as hydrogen use, while developing nations will be slow adopters and small contributors to emissions reduction.”

“IN A 2°C WORLD, SEABORNE IMPORTS WOULD BE ALL BUT ELIMINATED DURING THE 2040S IN CHINA, LEAVING ONLY A NOMINAL VOLUME OF THE HIGHEST-QUALITY COKING COALS IMPORTED TO COASTAL MILLS 

”WoodMac’s metallurgical coal principal analyst Anthony Knutson

Wood Mackenzie outlined five main outcomes that would need to be achieved for the steel sector to achieve a 2°C warming pathway. They include doubling scrap use in steel making; tripling direct reduced iron (DRI) production and use; reducing global average electric arc furnace (EAF) emissions intensity by 70%;) reducing blast furnace – basic oxygen furnace (BF-BOF) emissions intensity by 30%, close to its theoretical minimum; and capturing and storing 45% of the residual carbon emissions (around 500 Mt per annum).

Aligning to a challenging 2°C warming pathway in the steel industry would mean disruption to the iron ore and metallurgical coal markets. It would, WoodMac notes, be a boon for hydrogen demand in steelmaking as well as carbon capture and storage.

“Steel’s potential extreme decarbonisation in a 2°C scenario would mean tripling DRI production. This presents a huge opportunity for suppliers of premium iron ore,” says Rohan Kendall, head of iron ore research. “Although the rise in scrap consumption would lead to total iron ore demand falling by 24% below our base case, the market for pellet products would expand by 35%.”

The decarbonisation of the steel sector in this scenario would boost DRI trade. Australia and Brazil could be well positioned to produce H-DRI for export. DRI using green hydrogen as the reductant can produce steel with almost zero CO2 emissions. China and Europe would be key DRI importers.

To achieve scrap use growth, scrap recycling rates would have to increase from 80%-85% to 95%, WoodMac says. India and China scrap supply chains would require substantial development which would contribute to displacement of iron ore demand, notably taking effect post 2030.

“Under a 2°C scenario, hot metal consumption is expected to decrease 667 Mtpa below our base case by 2050 to 795 Mt. This in turn leads to an almost halving of the total annual metallurgical coal demand to 622 Mt from our base case by 2050,” says WoodMac’s metallurgical coal principal analyst Anthony Knutson.

Seaborne metallurgical coal trade would fall in this scenario, although domestic coal in China would bear the brunt of declines.

“In a 2°C world, seaborne imports would be all but eliminated during the 2040s in China, leaving only a nominal volume of the highest-quality coking coals imported to coastal mills,” Knutson says. “India, on the other hand, would double its import requirement to 123 Mtpa, as its steel demand outpaces its ability to decarbonise.

“PCI demand comes under great pressure in a 2°C scenario falling by 50% or 37 Mt as hydrogen injection rates increase.”

A successful rollout of carbon capture and storage – which under this scenario could reach 500 Mt of emissions captured in 2050 – would provide an opportunity for continued use of metallurgical coal in steelmaking as emissions captured via this pathway is from BF/BOF steelmaking.

SEE 

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2021/08/global-emissions-must-peak-by-2025-to.html

US sanctions on Belarus potash leave out nation’s sole seller

Bloomberg News | August 10, 2021 | 

State-owned Belaruskali controls about a fifth of the global potash market. (Image courtesy of Belarusian Potash Company (BPC), the trading division of Belaruskali)

Potash buyers fretting over U.S. sanctions on Belarus’s state-owned producer, which controls about a fifth of the global market for the crop nutrient, might not need to panic right away.


The penalties announced on Monday target Belaruskali OAO, which ships much of its products to China, India and Latin America, along with more than a dozen companies with ties to President Alexander Lukashenko. Yet Belarusian Potash Co., in which Belaruskali owns a 48% stake and which is the sole handler all of the country’s potash exports, wasn’t included in the sanctions list.

While some buyers may turn to other suppliers following the sanctions, China and India might still feel it’s safe to purchase from BPC, the company that signs export deals, according to VTB Capital. The U.S. issued licenses allowing counterparts to wind down transactions with Belaruskali — or any entity in which it owns at least a 50% interest — by Dec. 8, giving consumers time to find alternative supplies.

“The penalties against Belaruskali add negative sentiments for the global potash market, but the fact that BPC is not the subject of the sanctions may ease the situation,” said Elena Sakhnova, an analyst at VTB Capital.

POTASH IS ONE OF BELARUS’S KEY EXPORTS AND ITS ONLY ABUNDANT MINERAL RESOURCE

BCS Global Markets analyst Kirill Chuyko also said it may be safe to continue dealings with BPC, as long as its not added to the sanctions list.

BPC is studying the situation and it’s difficult to estimate what impact the sanctions will have, the company told RIA Novosti. The trader said it will make every effort to fulfill its contractual obligations, adding that the sanctions will lead to higher potash prices and less availability on the world market.

A spokeswoman for BPC didn’t return calls or messages from Bloomberg.
Potash market

Potash is one of Belarus’s key exports and its only abundant mineral resource. Prices of the fertilizer have climbed this year as higher crop prices helped boost farmer spending on soil nutrients. The sanctions announced Monday could prompt further gains in potash prices, and could be benefit North American potash producers like Nutrien Ltd. and Russia’s Uralkali PJSC, Sakhnova said.

Nutrien can increase potash production if needed to meet global demand, Chief Executive Officer Mayo Schmidt said in a phone interview. The company is monitoring the market between the U.S. and Europe and will raise production “as necessary,” he said.

“It’s too early to tell the impact” of the sanctions, Schmidt said. “If sanctions are placed against Belarusian Potash we would expect to see the supply of, particularly granular, potash into the U.S. market tighten.”

The U.S. imports about 550,000 metric tons of potash from BPC, he said.

Nutrien shares rose as much as 6.4% to C$80.82 ($64.48) in Canadian trading on Tuesday. Mosaic Co., another major North American potash producer, saw shares rise as much as 4.5% to $34.02.

It’s not the first time the U.S. has targeted a major commodity producer key to the global market. Russian aluminum giant United Co. Rusal International PJSC spent about a year under similar sanctions in 2018, roiling the sector around the world.

Still, Rusal was able to sell metal to existing long-term clients under licenses issued by the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control, which were extended several times.

“It can’t be excluded that Belaruskali’s license will be extended too,” VTB’s Sakhnova said.

(By Yuliya Fedorinova, with assistance from Marcy Nicholson and Elizabeth Elkin)

Copper price down as BHP and workers reach tentative wage deal at Escondida

MINING.COM Staff Writer | August 10, 2021 | 

Escondida mine (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

BHP and the union at its Escondida copper mine in Chile said on Tuesday that they had reached a tentative deal for a new contract, although the union will take two more days to submit the new contract to a vote by workers.


The preliminary deal eases fears that the union will call a strike at the world’s biggest copper mine.

Escondida is expected to produce 1.01-1.06 million tonnes of copper in the 2021 financial year. The figure is equivalent to over 5% of the world’s annual mined copper output.

In 2017, a historic 44-day stoppage jolted copper markets and slowed economic growth in Chile, the world’s top copper producer.

Copper prices fell on Wednesday after the deal was announced.

Click here for an interactive chart of copper prices

Three-month copper on the London Metal Exchange eased 0.4% to $9,485.50 a tonne by 0316 GMT, while the most-traded September copper contract on the Shanghai Futures Exchange tracked overnight gains in London to rise 0.8% to 69,810 yuan ($10,770.82) a tonne

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A deal at Escondida would also ease labor tensions in Chile after workers at the Caserones mine owned by JX Nippon Mining & Metals opted to walk off the job Tuesday when their talks with management collapsed.

(With files from Reuters and Bloomberg)

BHP gets closer to wage deal at Escondida
Bloomberg News | August 10, 2021 | 

Escondida’s desalination plant. (Image courtesy of BHP.)

BHP Group and union leaders at the Escondida complex in Chile are getting closer to a wage deal that would avert a strike at the world’s biggest copper mine.


Negotiators asked labor authorities for a one-day extension in a mediation process to continue working toward an agreement that could be put to workers Tuesday. According to the union, the breakthrough came after BHP acceded to some demands. On Friday, the Melbourne-based company warned that it wouldn’t improve the offer during a strike.

“During the course of the night, conversations between the parties will continue to close an agreement that will then be presented by Union No. 1 to its members,” BHP said in a statement late Monday.

Avoiding a stoppage at a mine that accounts for about 5% of global copper production would ease tensions over tightening supplies at a time when trillions of dollars in government stimulus fuel demand for industrial metals. In 2017, the same union staged a 44-day stoppage.

A deal at Escondida would also ease labor tensions in Chile after workers at a mine owned by JX Nippon Mining & Metals opted to walk off the job Tuesday when their talks with management collapsed.

At a third copper mine in Chile, Codelco’s Andina, the two sides agreed to extend talks to allow workers to vote on a new proposal, the result of which will be known Wednesday.

Surging producer profits are emboldening mine workers, with host nations also looking at ratcheting up taxes to help resolve inequalities exacerbated by the pandemic. At the same time, companies are striving to keep labor costs in check in a cyclical business and as ore quality deteriorates and input prices start to rise.

(By James Attwood and Alejandra Salgado)

Peru’s finance chief says mining taxes can rise without affecting competitiveness
Reuters | August 10, 2021 | 

Peru’s finance minister, Pedro Francke (R) with the country’s new president,

 Pedro Castillo. (L) (Credit: Presidencia Peru)

Peru’s finance minister, Pedro Francke, told Reuters on Monday that the new leftist government is confident it can increase mining taxes without affecting private-sector competitiveness, as long as metal prices remain high.


Peru, the world’s No. 2 copper producer, is highly dependent on mining to finance public spending and new President Pedro Castillo has promised to deliver increased spending on social programs to lift the country’s poor.

The election of Castillo, a member of a Marxist-Leninist party, as president in June has spooked markets and investors. On Monday, Peru’s Sol currency fell to a fresh record low against the dollar due to political uncertainty.

Francke, a moderate left-wing economist, told Reuters in an interview that the government is working hard to regain investor confidence.

He said the administration is committed to maintaining fiscal discipline and will reduce the deficit in 2022 by 1 percentage point compared with 2021.

Spending ceiling rules will be reinstated after they were lifted due to the pandemic, he added.

“We will keep to a declining path for the fiscal deficit over time that will keep a debt ceiling at a pretty reasonable level,” Francke said. Peru has one of Latin America’s lowest debt-to-GDP ratios.

Key to that plan is raising taxes on miners, Francke said, though he played down a suggestion by Castillo during his campaign that tax stability deals agreed with some companies would be torn up.

He declined to provide specifics but said they would move fast to come up with a proposal.

“As time passes, you are losing (tax) revenue,” he said.

Francke acknowledged that public spending will grow, but said that tax revenue would rise 24% in 2021 compared with a year earlier, driven by higher metal prices and a reopening of the economy. Those funds, he said, will allow the government to spend more as it reduces the deficit.

Rating agencies have revised Peru’s outlook to negative in recent months. Francke said they will hold meetings with them in the next two weeks in hopes that Peru’s investment-grade rating is not affected.

(By Marco Aquino and Marcelo Rochabrun; Editing by Jonathan Oatis and Matthew Lewis)

Peruvian mining sector to pay record $3bn in taxes in 2021, says industry group

Reuters | August 10, 2021

Orcopampa operation. Photo by Buenaventura.

Peruvian mining companies will pay a record 12 billion soles ($3 billion) in taxes in 2021, more than twice what they paid in 2019 before the pandemic, the industry group representing the sector said on Tuesday.


Mining is a key source of tax revenue for Peru, the world’s No. 2 copper producer. Miners have benefited this year from higher prices and a weak local currency, which boosted their revenue and increased their tax bills due to exports sold in dollars.

The National Society of Mining, Oil and Energy said in a statement that miners paid 4 billion soles in taxes in 2020, when output was hit by pandemic restrictions, and about 4.8 billion soles in 2019.

The group – whose members include Compania de Minas Buenaventura and subsidiaries of Anglo American , Hudbay Minerals, Southern Copper Corp and Barrick Gold Corp – also forecasts that the mining sector will pay 17 billion soles in taxes on average each year from 2022 through 2026.

It said this was higher than in any other five-year period.

Peru is under a new left-wing government led by President Pedro Castillo, an elementary school teacher, who is seeking to extract higher taxes from the mining sector but has not yet made any concrete proposal on the issue.

Neighbor Chile, the world’s top copper producer, is also discussing higher taxes for miners in Congress.

The mining industry group said in its statement that the current Peruvian tax system was “considered a good regime by international and national experts.”

Peru’s economy ministry said overall tax revenue in Peru will rise 24% in 2021 compared with a year earlier, and a further 8% in 2022, according to preliminary estimates.

($1 = 4.0661 soles)

(By Marco Aquino and Marcelo Rochabrun; Editing by David Holmes)

Rio Tinto mismanagement caused cost overrun at Oyu Tolgoi

Reuters | August 9, 2021 | 

Oyu Tolgoi open pit has been producing since 2012. (Image courtesy of Turquoise Hill.)

An expert group reviewing the cause of a $1.4 billion cost overrun at a Mongolian mine run by Rio Tinto said it was caused by the miner’s mismanagement, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, citing a report.


Costs to expand the Oyu Tolgoi mine, Rio’s biggest copper growth project, have ballooned up to $6.75 billion from Rio’s original budget of $5.3 billion in 2016, and this has led to friction over funding with Turquoise Hill.

Turquoise Hill, in which Rio has a 50.8% stake, owns 66% of Oyu Tolgoi, one of the world’s largest-known copper and gold deposits. The rest is held by the Mongolian government.

The report, which was commissioned by the owners of the copper project, said the cost overrun was not due to unfavorable rock conditions as blamed by the one of world’s largest miner, the WSJ reported.

“This confidential report will be considered by the OT (Oyu Tolgoi) Board and Rio Tinto will engage with the OT Board as soon as we have had the opportunity to review the report in detail,” Rio Tinto said in an emailed statement.

There was no evidence that the quality of the rock and general ground conditions were significantly different to that forecast by the miner’s owners in 2016, according to the report.

The WSJ report said the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and British regulators were looking into the matter.

Turquoise Hill Resources did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

(By Priyanshi Mandhan; Editing by Subhranshu Sahu)