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mining-obsessed · 6 months ago

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mining facts day 2 (aka a detour into commodity economics)

Alright so I'm slowly and steadily going through a book on precious metals smelting for my little trip and came across this lightly unhinged paper (the book is a collection of papers) on the economics of mining.

The paper first introduces a bunch of classifications of different models in mining economics. One of those categories is of "behavioural models", which tries to predict how a mining company behaves in the context of other (either competing or colluding) mining companies and any governmental regulations.

They then start talking about the ways that these models can be created. One of those ways is "The Guess Method", which (and I quote) "uses a combination of experience, chutzpah, and pressure on the modeler for an answer". I had to do a double take at that sentence, because I cannot for the life of me convey how dry every single paper in this book has been.

The paper then goes on to talk about which economic models get paired up with which ways of making them: econometric methods (math in economics) are used to create optimization models, engineering methods are used to create models that simulate (from what I can tell) prospecting scenarios. Makes complete sense. But then the paper goes and checks off "The Guess Method" for every. single. model.

And I was like, Oh. Whoever wrote this paper has had some tough experiences. Then I reread that part, and saw that the only method they had listed for behavioural models was guessing.

... And after dropping this insane diss, the author went on to change the topic completely and go off about another one of their methods for the remainder of the paper.

Paper source: The Use Of Cyclical Analysis As A Forecasting Tool For Precious Metals by Henry J. Sandri

Book source: Precious Metals: Mining, Extraction, and Processing by Kudryk, Corrigan, and Liang

#educational #mining #economics #chaotic academia

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mining-obsessed · 6 months ago

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mining facts day 1

Main source: Precious Metals: Mining, Extraction, and Processing by Kudryk, Corrigan, and Liang

Some ways you can extract gold from ores:

Chlorination (also used for a lot of other metals): combining moistened gold with chlorine, leaching out the gold from the water, and then precipitating with ferrous sulphate

Cyanidation (also used for Cu, Ni, Co, Mo extraction): crushing up gold ore, adding some sort of cyanide (not pure cyanide, but a metallic cyanide like KCN or NaCN) to make a gold-cyanide solution like AuKCN, which trickles out of the ore to then be separated by some other method (Ex. using Zinc via redox reaction, Carbon-In-Pulp). There's two ways of doing this: heap leaching (spraying the cyanide on) and vat leaching (mixing the ore and cyanide in a big tank. Vat leaching isn't really used anymore, while heap leaching can cause some pretty bad environmental disasters.

Platinum Group Metals (PGM) facts:

We use an insane amount of platinum group metals (platinum, palladium, ruthenium, rhodium, osmium, iridium), mostly in catalytic converters.

PGMs are really inert, heat-resistant, and are good for catalysis.

Over 96% of PGM reserves are in South Africa (88.8%) and Russia (7.8%). If you include Zimbabwe, the US, and Canada on that list, you'd have that (rounded) 100% of PGM reserves are located in 5 countries. The book I was reading on PGMs was actually fearmongering on how this gave South Africa a lot of diplomatic leverage against the US, kinda like how OPEC had a significant amount of leverage because of their oil.

Other sources:

Chlorination: https://www.911metallurgist.com/blog/gold-chlorination-processes-methods

Cyanidation: https://earthworks.org/issues/cyanide/

PGMS: https://natural-resources.canada.ca/minerals-mining/mining-data-statistics-and-analysis/minerals-metals-facts/platinum-facts/20520

#mining #educational #science #geology

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