I grew up in a family of teachers, writers and musicians (though my mother should have been a mechanical engineer). So having a son who is obsessed with manufacturing processes (his favorite show is How It’s Made) gives me a chuckle. It’s not enough for him to know that his new Razor is made of […]

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Citicorp produced an extremely bullish report this week predicting that copper prices would be sharply higher in 2009 and 2010. Specifically they forecast copper to rise to $5lb by the end of 2008 and $5.50lb by the end of 2010. The reasons given were a tight concentrates market, slower supply growth than had originally been […]

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Nickel has fallen by more than half since April 2007 due to falling demand for stainless steel. With announcements of further cut backs in China and Korea and Steel Business Briefings recent survey suggesting 44% of European buyers expect demand to drop further in the 3rd quarter the future is not looking bright for nickel.
However, […]

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We have written recently about the price of aluminum and expressed our belief that the high stocks and current excess of production over demand should keep a cap on prices. Western world unwrought aluminum stocks rose from 1.58 million tons in April to 1.67 million tons by the end of May according to a Reuters […]

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In a 5-4 decision last Thursday, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the second amendment was not written for mere militia purposes, but instead protects “the inherent right to self-defense,” as Justice Antonin Scalia told reporters. The opposing justices fear the close decision will hurt gun control laws, arguing that this ruling has opened […]

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As a metal, molybdenum has had a funny life. For decades the price bumped along around $ 2-4/lb, largely produced as a by-product of copper production with a few pure play molybdenum mines operating as swing production if the price rose sufficiently to make them viable. Molybdenum grades are so thin, typically between 0.01 and […]

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Ever heard of Indium? Me neither. Well, not entirely true, I had heard of it but never taken much interest. According to Wikipedia it is a soft white rare metal, similar to aluminum or gallium and produced as a by-product of zinc. And therein lies the problem. Indium is the magic ingredient in making LCD […]

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Driven by high prices in 2006/7, many miners poured money into new mines or expanded existing ones. Prices rocketed as the world market moved into deficit, but galvanized and alloying demand slackened just as new mines came on stream. As a result, the market went into over supply last year and prices have come steadily […]

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Last week we read of the explosion at Apache’s massive gas handling plant at Veranus Island about 60 miles off Australia’s northwest coast. The disruption to critical gas supplies will take four weeks to bring back on stream and meanwhile deprive numerous metal processing and mining operations of energy supplies when they are all operating […]

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My favorite metals-related article this week? Let Burning Metals Lie, a piece on the risks of industrial metal fires, featured online in Popular Science this Wednesday. Firefighters, it appears, have little control over these fires, so halting the blaze is out of the question. Instead, easily ignited metals such as lithium, sodium, and magnesium, have […]

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