Quote from: Dalhousie on 04/26/2012 10:55 amRemember Fritz Haber? Brilliant chemist, engineer and innovator. Thoughts that extracting gold from seawater would be a great way to pay of German debt. The $$$ value of gold in seawater is immense and there was a proven market and a need to generate national income. Great idea, came unstuck because of the process issues. This might be a good analogy for PR. Seawater contains about 1 ppm of gold, whereas an asteroid might have 100 ppm of Platinum; on the other hand, it might 100 times more difficult to extract the platinum from an asteroid than extracting gold from seawater.And yes, in both cases, there are other valuable materials that would be extracted as by-products.
Remember Fritz Haber? Brilliant chemist, engineer and innovator. Thoughts that extracting gold from seawater would be a great way to pay of German debt. The $$$ value of gold in seawater is immense and there was a proven market and a need to generate national income. Great idea, came unstuck because of the process issues.
Anyone know if Planetary Resources, or its predicessor, are involved with the DARPA System F9 program? F9 describes itself this way:... efforts at designing an approach to building swarms of satellites flying in formation to coordinate actions, share resources, and adapt to changing populations (swarm members come and go), this gives an interesting insight.
given what we know/speculate, this looks like a good candidate to be the next "Project Azorian".
Quote from: Dalhousie on 04/26/2012 10:55 amRemember Fritz Haber? Brilliant chemist, engineer and innovator. Thoughts that extracting gold from seawater would be a great way to pay of German debt. The $$$ value of gold in seawater is immense and there was a proven market and a need to generate national income. Great idea, came unstuck because of the process issues. This might be a good analogy for PR. Seawater contains about 1 ppm of gold, whereas an asteroid might have 100 ppm of Platinum; on the other hand, it might 100 times more difficult to extract the platinum from an asteroid than extracting gold from seawater.
Quote from: Eer on 04/26/2012 03:26 pmAnyone know if Planetary Resources, or its predicessor, are involved with the DARPA System F9 program? F9 describes itself this way:... efforts at designing an approach to building swarms of satellites flying in formation to coordinate actions, share resources, and adapt to changing populations (swarm members come and go), this gives an interesting insight.I'll say it again. Well, quote it anyways:Quote from: go4mars on 04/23/2012 04:35 pmgiven what we know/speculate, this looks like a good candidate to be the next "Project Azorian". For those who don't know, Project Azorian was "a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) project to recover the sunken Soviet submarine K-129 from the Pacific Ocean floor in the summer of 1974, using the purpose-built ship Hughes Glomar Explorer...The recovery operation commenced covertly (in international waters) about 6 years later with a supposed commercial purpose: mining the sea floor for manganese nodules under the cover of Howard Hughes and the Hughes Glomar Explorer." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian
Quote from: Danderman on 04/26/2012 05:09 pmQuote from: Dalhousie on 04/26/2012 10:55 amRemember Fritz Haber? Brilliant chemist, engineer and innovator. Thoughts that extracting gold from seawater would be a great way to pay of German debt. The $$$ value of gold in seawater is immense and there was a proven market and a need to generate national income. Great idea, came unstuck because of the process issues. This might be a good analogy for PR. Seawater contains about 1 ppm of gold, whereas an asteroid might have 100 ppm of Platinum; on the other hand, it might 100 times more difficult to extract the platinum from an asteroid than extracting gold from seawater.According to the wikipedia article about gold, the concentration of gold in seawater is 0.004 ppb (that's b as in billion). If there was 1ppm of gold in seawater it would be trivial to extract. An asteroid with a concentration of 100 ppm would be a huge discovery.
Remember the various schemes to mine Mn nodules on the seafloor? Great in situ value, they are also rich in Ni and Co, the processing of the nodules poses no real challenges metallurgically, it is just the cost of mining them under 5 km of ocean makes them unattractive compared to on-land accumulations.
If you are going to engage in conspiracy theories, you might want to consider that the swarm of small telescopes to be launched into orbit might instead be a 24 hour monitoring system for Homeland Security to watch you day and night.
I just completed a spreadsheet on which I entered the measured elemental abundances of seven elements (Gold, Platinum, Rhodium, Iridium, Palladium, Osmium and Ruthenium -- I would have liked to include other metals in the same price range, such as Rhodium, but my source does not list them) for 120 iron meteorites of all types. I then calculated the current values of all seven elements, and their totals, in dollars per tonne (= megadollars per megatonne).These measurements, from The Platinum Group Metals in Iron Meteorites, are rather old (report published 1990) and hence might be underestimating the elemental abundances due to some of each element being missed.In terms of total value per tonne at today's spot prices for these seven elements, the top six meteorites are:Iquique (IVB) : $6,032.48Hoba (IVB) : $5,807.44Butler (Anomalous) : $4,068.73Tlacotepec (IVB) : $4,020.45Forsyth County (IIA) : $3,489.76Skookum Gulch (IVB) : $3,298.30and the bottom six meteorites are:Lonaconing (Anomalous) : $374.46Buenaventura (IIIB) : $370.79Santa Luzia (IIB) : $262.90Sao Juliao de Moreira (IIB) : $248.04De Hoek (Anomalous) : $182.45Bellsbank (Anomalous) : $138.42A huge difference! Proper prospecting is clearly a must.For Platinum (currently $1570.50 per Troy ounce), the greatest concentration amongst these 120 meteorites is 86.4 ppm in the Iquique meteorite, closely followed by the 80.6 ppm of the Hoba meteorite.For Gold (currently $1659.13 per Troy ounce), the greatest concentration is 6.3 ppm in the Butler meteorite, and for Rhodium (currently $1385.00 per Troy ounce), it's 17.4 ppm also in the Butler meteorite.There are several meteorites with high concentrations of Iridium (currently $1085.00 per Troy ounce). The highest concentrations are 28.9 ppm in the Forsyth County meteorite, 28.2 ppm in the Sierra Gorda (IIA) meteorite, and 26.4 ppm in the Tlacotepec meteorite.I have created links to the ODS file and the XLS file of the speadsheet. (First time using this service, I hope they work!)
I only bring that up to say that we don't know the upper limit of what sort of mineral riches lie in the asteroids, even if we have a rough idea of some of the individual asteroids' elemental composition (and even that is woefully incomplete).
Nickel-based superalloys for use in jet engines contain up to 6% rhenium, making jet engine construction the largest use for the element, with chemical industry catalytic uses being next-most important. Because of the low availability relative to demand, rhenium is among the most expensive metals, with an average price of approximately US$4,575 per kilogram (August 2011).
Rhenium improves the properties of tungsten. Tungsten-rhenium alloys are more ductile at low temperature, allowing them to be more easily machined. The high-temperature stability is also improved. The effect increases with the rhenium concentration, and therefore tungsten alloys are produced with up to 27% of Re, which is the solubility limit.
Rhenium in the form of rhenium-platinum alloy is used as catalyst for catalytic reforming, which is a chemical process to convert petroleum refinery naphthas with low octane ratings into high-octane liquid products. Worldwide, 30% of catalysts used for this process contain rhenium. The olefin metathesis is the other reaction for which rhenium is used as catalyst. Normally Re2O7 on alumina is used for this process. Rhenium catalysts are very resistant to chemical poisoning from nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus, and so are used in certain kinds of hydrogenation reactions.
There's probably no use in separating platinum from the other valuable platinum-group metals before you get it to Earth, so that saves you a step or two.
Quote from: Robotbeat on 04/26/2012 09:19 pmThere's probably no use in separating platinum from the other valuable platinum-group metals before you get it to Earth, so that saves you a step or two.+1Once the PGM is separated from the iron/nickel, just bring home the alloy and finish the process on earth, since the alloy has very high value.
Quote from: BrightLight on 04/26/2012 09:25 pmQuote from: Robotbeat on 04/26/2012 09:19 pmThere's probably no use in separating platinum from the other valuable platinum-group metals before you get it to Earth, so that saves you a step or two.+1Once the PGM is separated from the iron/nickel, just bring home the alloy and finish the process on earth, since the alloy has very high value.What is the degree of difficulty in separating the PGM from the nickel/iron? Is there any way to use magnetism to separate such metals?