Certain Metal Oxides About the Metal

Now, the founders of Metalysis, a small British firm, hope to do much the same with tantalum, titanium and a host of other recherché and expensive metallic elements including neodymium, tungsten and vanadium.

I know a slightly embarrassing amount about this company. It can be used to produce scandium metal and they wanted to know whether this was a good idea: no, sadly not being the answer. The global market for Sc metal (as opposed to oxide) might be 5 kg a year which isn’t going to build anyone’s fortune.

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What annoys in this article is that they do indeed have something potentially very interesting indeed. Just not all the various things the article says they do.

What they’ve got is a quite possibly cheaper way of converting certain metallic oxides into the relevant metals. But that is all they’ve got:

The effect could be profound. Tantalum is an ingredient of the best electronic capacitors. At the moment it is so expensive ($500-2,000 a kilogram) that it is worth using only in things where size and weight matter a lot, such as mobile phones. Drop that price and it could be deployed more widely. Neodymium is used in the magnets of motors in electric cars. Vanadium and tungsten give strength to steel, but at great expense. And the strength, lightness, high melting point and ability to resist corrosion of titanium make it an ideal material for building aircraft parts, supercars and medical implants—but it can cost 50 times as much as steel.

Titanium, I agree. The oxide is very cheap indeed and the metal expensive. So a cheaper way of processing the one into the other would be very welcome indeed.

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