Metal Without Mining(magratheametals.com) |
Metal Without Mining(magratheametals.com) |
"Magrathea sells metal using multi-year supply agreements in countries with enforceable contract law. Supply agreements allow our partners to build in magnesium with confidence. We prevent price instability from Chinese trade manipulation so the innovative products of our partners can succeed in the market."
There's absolutely no information on the site detailing their tech. Just a lot of buzzwords. Under the News section, it's the typical list headline articles cherry picked to make the company sound better.
Edit: Turns out that no, it's simpler to separate magnesium and calcium than lithium, even those existing in much smaller amounts. Those metals form many solid ionic compounds, with anions that would keep sodium and lithium soluble.
Edit: During WW2 additional production facilities around the USA were brought online. Before and after WW2, except for a moment during the Korean War, Dow's facility in Freeport, TX was the only producer of magnesium in the USA. It peaked in capacity in the 1970's. There were several other endeavors by other companies to produce magnesium over time with different technologies. Most magnesium production in the USA has been eliminated for economic reasons.
They are isolating magnesium from brine, and hope to use it as a structural material that is competitive with steel or aluminum (for certain, not all, use cases, obviously).
FYI a ChatGPT summary of their website gave me this info
If you're in the bay area, you've seen a brine mine dozens of times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Salt_Ponds
The thing I'm really curious about is this is happening on a large enough scale does it begin to affect the amount of precipitation that can occur? I'm wondering if it can be utilized to increase rainfall during times of drought
Maybe even long canals to transport the ocean water far inland in very shallow streams that are meant to be evaporated by the sun over time. This uses almost no energy on our part, produces salt, and might possibly help increase rainfall?
Also, inland is usually higher than sea level (where it's lower you get lakes / ponds / swamps, unless it's actively managed), so you would be creating ditches a hundred meters deep if not more.
I'm also not sure that local water would increase rainfall, any amount of wind would sweep moisture off immediately. The most it can do is to increase the humidity of the surrounding area when windless.
Particularly if they will then fill up with salt.
(Kind of hard to pin down exactly since they don't say a lot about how they are doing it, but a quick check suggests this is the only "new" thing in extracting magnesium recently and Magrathea is a young company[1])
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/magrathea-metals
Alternatives are being developed, but have a somewhat troubled history. Alcoa announced in the early 2000s that they are only months away from deploying inert anode technology. They're still not there (though still working on it in a project called elysis).
You'll see the occasional article about new solar that's claimed to be cheaper than gas, but they never have sufficient storage to actually stand on their own two feet.
The last one that was posted here on HN was claimed to be cheaper than gas, but it only had enough storage to output 1/2 of its daytime production overnight. In other words, it was cheaper than gas... as long as you've got redundant gas plants to provide power overnight.
Always read the fine print when folks are pitching "cheap renewables".
1) Electrolytic production from anhydrous magnesium chloride, similar to the electrolytic production of aluminum.
2) The Pidgeon process, which currently dominates Chinese (and world) magnesium production. It distills magnesium vapor under vacuum from a heated mixture of ferrosilicon and magnesium-calcium oxide (calcined dolomite).
The Pidgeon process has a high global warming potential because of the coal used to produce the ferrosilicon input and to heat the retorts. The electrolytic process has a lower global warming potential, especially if using low-carbon electricity, but historically sulfur hexafluoride has been used as a protective cover gas for the metal during electrolytic production. This gas has a staggering global warming potential 23,900 times that of CO2 [2] so incidental leakage of even small quantities can have a high climate impact.
The "without mining" part is not novel. Dow Chemical produced electrolytic magnesium from seawater without mining at Freeport, Texas from 1941-1998, until lower cost foreign magnesium made it uneconomical:
https://www.chemicalonline.com/doc/dow-to-exit-magnesium-bus...
Reading the company's rather sparse public info, it looks like this is a revival of the same basic kind of process as Dow used. But since it's focused on certifying a low GWP for its magnesium, the company will not use sulfur hexafluoride. ("We’re piloting a new generation of electrolytic production technology that is inherently carbon neutral, removing the need for coal and carbon-intense reagents like FeSi and SF6.")
They don't say it directly but they also must be using clean electricity for the electrolysis, otherwise the metal would still be fairly CO2-intensive.
Unfortunately, the latest news item from their news page is about a threat to their business:
"State of Utah denies US Magnesium’s request to extend canals into the Great Salt Lake threatening shutdown of the only American magnesium producer"
https://sltrib.pressreader.com/article/6830844853434424
[1] https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2295&conte...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_hexafluoride#Greenhouse...
Recently most magnesium comes from China. They mine ore, throw it in a coal-fired furnace along with some reducing agents, then collect pure magnesium vapor. This process is more labor and energy intensive, but has significantly less CAPEX. Works for China.
Chlor-alkali is more expensive than lime and the back-end electrolysis is more expensive than thermal reduction. So I'd be skeptical they are going to lower costs without some kind of CAPEX reducing magic for molten salt electrolysis.
My reasoning was to note that the Magrathea collateral is pushing "low energy" to make the connection. I am NOT saying I KNOW that this how they are doing it. It is because this is a "mature market" in terms of well established players who are doing this with lime and salt ponds that I was wondering "Has anything changed that would convince a VC (or Angel) to fund a new magnesium producer?" What would have to be true in order to have a value proposition that would convince someone they could succeed against the established players?
And so I go off and search various "research news" web sites to see if there is any news on Magnesium extraction. If they are not using this research then I would be skeptical of their success given the existing market is well established and making a new venture using existing techniques is pretty capital intensive.
In solid form the risk is mitigated because there isn't enough surface area for the reaction with oxygen, it's the powder/shavings that are a concern. You can actually weld magnesium parts without it igniting.
Reading up on it a little more - it seems with enough heat solid magnesium can start a self-sustaining burn without oxygen. I wish I could find a laymans explanation of the difference between oxygen fueled magnesium powder fire and self sustaining. Must take an awful lot of heat if a welding arc isn't hot enough to cause this.
Edit: Also think of steel wool and how well it burns, but a block of steel not so much.
It's a tricky metal to weld because of it. Generally you also need to preheat it so you don't get cracking, which makes it even more of an issue.
There is a passivated oxide layer that forms (similar to aluminum) which generally reduces the risk, but if it's compromised (like from cleaning the weld area)....
I discount the possibility of nuclear reactions :)
https://web.archive.org/web/20000817013818/http://simson.net...
Some aircraft historian will have to fill in the gaps in this story (what aircraft?), but back during the Korean War era, the USAF had a multi-engine piston-driven plane that was either a transport or a cargo aircraft -- not sure which, but the engine blocks were magnesium to save weight. One of the biggest brown-factor events that you could have was an engine fire, because once it got started, your day was going in a bad direction very fast. A friend's dad was pilot-in-command of a plane fresh out of maintenance. An engine caught fire on climb out. He ordered the rest of the crew to hit the silk and he tried to get back to the field. He did, but the landing was not pretty, and he suffered a nasty leg injury. No more combat rating for him, and he finished is USAF career flying transports, and later had a career as a commercial airline pilot. He was luck to survive that engine fire event.
Source: I was disappointed to buy a few lbs of magnesium to burn on the bonfire, only to find that chucking a lump of it on the bonfire doesn't even burn. Shavings did though.
Metals however, are often the most recyclable materials we use, because unlike carbon-based materials like plastics, metals often have useful properties in their elemental state, or as alloys that can be melted down and reused without the loss of those properties or of much material.
Most aluminum, for example is recycled, because the cost of recycling it is lower than the cost of mining new material.
Also, those intakes for water are going to be massive. How are we going to make them fish safe? Dolphin safe? Plankton safe? This is a major problem in hydroelectric dams.
Third, what's providing power for this process and where is it located?
Fourth, what are the second order effects of replacing a lot of steel production? Will this make all of the remaining products where steel can't be replaced a lot more expensive? I doubt you can use magnesium as a replacement for the girders used in buildings. Magnesium is only as strong as mild steel so pretty much everything that requires any tensile strength will still need to use steel.
So, no. This is not a serious concern.
Every time there's a natural resource humans want to exploit, this is almost always been an argument, and it's almost always been wrong.
"look how many fishes are in the river! You can walk across the river by standing on the fishes!"
"Look how trees are in this forest! You can't see the end!"
Not to get all Derrick Jensen on this, but a red flag has been raised in my mind, as has my left eyebrow.
Then you neutralize the magnesium hydroxide with hydrochloric acid to make Magnesium chloride and do molten salt electrolysis on it to make pure magnesium and chlorine.
In absolute terms, we couldn't hope to remove enough salt from the oceans to be even so much as detectable in the absolute sense, but in local terms water with increased salinity can cause problems. Oceans are not hives of life everywhere you look, it's really just in spots, and those spots are generally right where we want to be and to put our desalization plants.
Plus the high-salt and normal ocean water are much more resistant to mixing than our intuition would suggest. They will eventually mix, but the high-salt water can go a surprisingly long way first.
Not going to be an issue with your average desalination plant, but certainly proves the point that water masses can behave differently in big, non-trivial ways due to their salinity.
I'm unsure on the impact of costs. Maybe we just pump it into the salton sea....
Okay, so California ends its drought permanently and becomes a major supplier of magnesium and table salt.
Slightly-less-facetiously: sodium chloride has all sorts of industrial uses (on top of its culinary uses). The good uses are, in other words, already thought up in droves.
Further, most salt production already entails taking seawater and pulling out the water. Ain't too much of a stretch to, you know, actually keep the water instead of letting it evaporate into the atmosphere.
It's been a long time since my metallurgy courses, but in general there are three major ways that properties are altered at the mesoscale due to alloying:
1) a different solid phase of the dominant metal is formed due to the solid solution of the minor alloy components
2) covalently bonded compounds are formed between the base metal and minor components ("intermetallics")
3) the microstructure is changed (think e.g. alternating layers of intermetallics and metal grains)
Because the thermodynamic driving forces are basically identical regardless of the solid phase, #1 is probably not helpful here (also, it's flammable in liquid form -- I checked). But the intermetallics may not be flammable. So then your fire resistance comes from a combination of #2 and #3: if you form a lamellar structure of the non-flammable intermetallics separating the regions of the flammable majority phase, then that may produce macroscopic fire resistance.
I can't comment on how well it works, of course. But if you have some "secret sauce", maybe a sintering process or special heat treatment, you might be able to manipulate the lamellar structure in a desirable way and end up with a very fire-resistant alloy. The catch is that this might be pretty expensive.
ETA: because this fire resistance is dependent on the microstructure and presence of intermetallics, if the alloy is heated back to a temperature where those intermetallics dissolve into solid solution (or, obviously, if it melts), then it's going to be flammable again. So my educated guess is that while you can't actually light these special alloys on fire, if you were to throw some into an ongoing inferno, it would heat up and then combust. So in an otherwise flammable environment cough hydrogen airship cough, maybe not the greatest idea.
But even so, there's going to be a point where there's just too much fuel to keep the fire under control despite best efforts, and the fire-resistant magnesium could certainly contribute to reaching that threshold once you cross a certain temperature. And you cannot simply vent combusting magnesium the way you can vent combusting hydrogen (hypothetically, anyway).