Member Info for JackoDLad

Thx for that clear response Ian.

Hold my nerve til explosive RNS then so....

I've tried to follow the threads and all of the research provided here but it's complex.
It seems to me that EUA is a metal exploration company in the first instance, with some very minor actual mining potential.
If we did decide to move from being an exploration company to a full blown mining company, does the Russian state have any first call on either our assets or our profits?
thx

Would it be fair to say these valuations are based on current metal prices? Would it also be fair to say that these current metal prices are controlled by supply and demand, and by a the few industry players that mine these metals? Would a glut of these metals have any impact on the prices?
Does anyone have any view on the above, or am I reaching too much here? I'm a lth-ish (last November) and just can't believe my luck to being in this golden goose :)

It says 28p close on Eurasia's own website!! I'm a believer....

Thanks for that Wolster. It's more a post for myself, to be honest. Trying to remain calm here :)

With a 5% drop yesterday will the mms and derampers try another attack on the faint hearted?
Keep your tokens peoples....

Will there be tree shakes and more bot flies on our ship today and until the big one. Maybe to help those of a delicate disposition, I wonder would it help to have a daily "Guess the closing price" competition, with the winners spending time with Lil and the crew?
I say today we just about tread water @ .2275

Just my opinion

Seems like MMs are about to tree shake. Beware anyone with stop losses

Can someone ping when there is some real news.

Apart from Tully, this constant flow of predictive nonsense and negativity is pointless and unbearable.

Velo, I like your posts, keep em up....

Anyone know if there is any grey market trading in this stock currently?

gla

Dividend

Part 9:

However, a comparison of platinum-group metals with other metals shows that the former are hard to beat when it comes to carbon monoxide and hydrocarbon oxidation activity, particularly in the presence of sulfur at temperatures under 500°C (Kummer, 1980). In the early 1990s, researchers at Ford tested a variety of copper and copper-chromium combinations in catalytic converters installed in an actual car exhaust system. For NOx conversion, a catalyst comprising 4 weight-percent copper and 2 weight-percent chromium performed the best, but only when operated under rich conditions, which reduced carbon monoxide and hydrocarbon conversion and fuel economy. This study showed, too, that copper catalysts needed to be close-coupled to the engine in order to avoid sulfur poisoning (Theis and Labarge, 1992).

After more than 30 years of research, Lambert concluded, there still are no good options for creating catalysts to treat gasoline engine exhaust that do not use platinum-group metals. The only real advance, she said, was the transition to palladium-rhodium and palladium-only catalysts enabled by the elimination of lead from gasoline.

END

Part 8:

Supply and Demand
The automotive catalyst market is not isolated but sits within a supply chain that serves industrial catalyst manufacturers, jewelry makers, and electrical equipment manufacturers. The catalytic converter supply chain starts with the substrate manufacturers, who send their product to the catalyst coaters who purchase the metals. From there, the coated ceramic goes to the canners, who assemble the finished catalytic converter and ship it to the auto manufacturer. Currently, the automotive catalytic converter market consumes more platinum-group metals than it recycles, a situation that needs to be improved, according to Lambert. Unlike the industrial catalyst market, there is no well-developed internal recycling infrastructure in the automotive market.

Most of the world’s platinum comes from South Africa, which supplied over 75 percent of the 6.06 million ounces produced in 2010. Russia supplied just under 14 percent of the total, with the rest coming from other countries. Total demand for platinum in 2010 was 7.88 million ounces, with automobile catalysts requiring 3.125 million ounces, or 40 percent of the total. Recycling was able to make up for the difference between supply and demand.

Russia is the biggest supplier of palladium, producing 3.72 million ounces in 2010, while South Africa produced 2.575 million ounces. Other countries added just under 1 million ounces to the world’s available stores of palladium. Recycling added another 1.845 million ounces, but taken together, the world’s demand for palladium—some 9.625 million ounces—outstripped supplies by nearly a half million ounces. Automotive catalysts accounted for 57 percent of the demand for palladium (JM, 2011). Lambert added that the automotive catalyst market accounts for most of the world demand for rhodium.

Because the automotive industry is a major user, if not the major user, of these metals, the industry is impacted significantly by the price volatility for these metals. Since 1992, platinum, palladium, and rhodium have all seen one or more price spikes. As a result, catalyst manufacturers have developed several designs that use varying amounts of these three metals in an attempt to mitigate dramatic shifts in costs.

Price volatility also has contributed to the drive to develop catalysts based on less expensive metals such as copper. Though copper prices can spike as well, prices may go from $1 per pound to $4 per pound, compared to a spike from $1,000 per ounce to as high as $12,000 per ounce for rhodium (Kitco, 2011).

Part 7:

Summarizing the 30-plus-year history of gasoline catalyst development, Lambert explained that early fundamental research focused on identifying which elements could be good candidates for further development. Gold and silver were eliminated as candidates because of their limited durability and activity. Ruthenium, iridium, and osmium had suitable activity profiles, but they form volatile oxides at elevated temperatures, ruling them out as automotive catalysts. “At that point, the choices boiled down to platinum and palladium,” said Lambert.

Platinum and palladium were incorporated into the first catalytic converters when regulations mandated reductions in hydrocarbon and carbon monoxide emissions. Later, when NOx standards were added to the regulations, rhodium was incorporated into the catalyst mix. Over the years, the stabilizers were added, as were ceria and zirconia as oxygen stabilizers. When lead was removed from gasoline, platinum was eliminated from the catalyst because palladium then could replace all platinum-based activity. Today’s catalytic converters still contain some rhodium because, as Lambert said, there is no acceptable substitute for rhodium when it comes to NOx reduction. Improvements in the physical design of the catalyst, with platinum-group loadings changing from the front to the back of the converter, have reduced the amount of metal needed in the converter (JM, 2011).

Part 6:

NOVEL METALS AND BASE METALS IN AUTOMOTIVE CATALYST SYSTEMS
The auto industry is a major user of both precious- and base-metal catalysts. In automotive applications, catalysts are used to reduce the amount of regulated pollutants in the exhaust from gasoline and diesel vehicles. These pollutants include hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides (NOx), and particulate matter. Catalysts convert these pollutants into nitrogen gas, carbon dioxide, and water.

The heart of the automotive catalyst system is the catalytic converter, explained Christine Lambert. The catalytic converter is essentially a ceramic honeycomb encased in a metal can attached to the vehicle’s exhaust pipe. Within the ceramic honeycomb is a supported metal catalyst that has been wash-coated onto the ceramic support.

The standard catalytic converter on a gasoline-powered vehicle uses a three-way catalyst engineered over many years to be extremely durable, said Lambert. Current versions are designed to meet emissions standards for 120,000 miles. They operate between 350°C and 650°C, the normal operating range of a gasoline engine, but they are durable to over 1000°C. The catalysts operate in near-stoichiometric exhaust gas, which means that the air and fuel fed into the engine is at the stoichiometric ratio needed to burn that fuel and that there is no excess oxygen. Contact time with the catalyst ranges from 60 to 300 milliseconds (Heck and Farrauto, 2001).

As engine control has improved over the years, the pollutant content of the exhaust has fallen into a tighter range of concentrations. As a result, catalysts are now able to handle all three gaseous pollutants simultaneously using what is called a three-way catalyst. Particulates are an issue only with diesel engines, and they are dealt with separately.

Today’s three-way catalyst is a complex, multicomponent system. The bulk of the catalyst is made of cordierite, a magnesium iron aluminum cyclosilicate that forms the ceramic honeycomb. ?-Alumina forms the support base, and cerium oxide (ceria) and zirconium oxide (zirconia) are oxygen-storage components to help the catalyst when it is in the high-efficiency stoichiometric window.

In addition to the rare earth mineral ceria, two other rare earth minerals, lanthanum oxide and neodymium oxide, maintain the alumina in its gamma form and play an important role in durability. Barium oxide and strontium oxide also serve as stabilizers and can store NOx if the engine is running lean, though that is not their primary purpose. A small amount of nickel oxide suppresses the formation of hydrogen sulfide from the relatively high amount of sulfur that is still present in gasoline. Finally, there is a small amount, about 0.5 percent, of the precious metals platinum, palladium, and rhodium (Gandhi and McCabe, 2004).

Part 5:

The inspiration for using pendant amines to design nickel hydrogenation catalysts comes from nature, which does not use rare and precious metals in its catalysts. Protein crystallography studies of the structure of an iron-iron hydrogenase enzyme revealed the presence of pendant amines in the coordination sphere surrounding the metal atoms. But rather than building structural mimics of nature’s catalyst, the PNNL team is designing functional models that re-create the electronic and energy environment of the enzyme’s catalytic center.

Bullock discussed a few early examples of the catalysts developed from this effort. As shown in Figure 4-1, adding two pendant amines to nickel’s coordination sphere produced huge positive changes in the hydrogen oxidation activity of the resulting nickel catalyst by reducing the overpotential of the system, which increases the catalyst’s energy efficiency. Taking this approach one step further, the PNNL team reduced the flexibility of the pendant amines, essentially locking them into place around the nickel atom. This cut the activation energy nearly in half and increased the turnover frequency from less than 0.5 per second to 10 per second.

Developing a clearer understanding of the mechanism involved in catalytic oxidation of hydrogen played an important role in taking these initial results and creating far superior nickel hydrogen oxidation catalysts. These studies, which relied heavily on nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, showed that moving protons onto pendant amines avoids having the reaction pass through a nickel(III) intermediate, which lowers the energy barrier considerably. Based on this mechanistic understanding, the PNNL team created a nickel-based catalyst that produces 50 turnovers per second at one atmosphere of hydrogen (Yang et al., 2010), and another one that was not as good a catalyst for hydrogen oxidation but that was able to mimic the natural hydrogenase enzyme and catalyze both hydrogen oxidation and reduction (Kilgore et al., 2011). This catalyst is the first reported to carry out both the forward and reverse reaction.

One issue that arose in these studies was that protons can become trapped between two pendant amines in the same ligand, reducing catalytic activity. Switching to a ligand that had two phosphorous atoms to coordinate to the nickel core but only one nitrogen, a so-called P2N1 ligand, produced a dramatic increase in catalytic activity and resulted in turnovers of over 100,000 per second, which is more than 10 times faster than the iron-based hydrogenase that served as the inspiration for this work (Helm et al., 2011). However, this catalyst still has a high overpotential that needs to be addressed to improve its energy efficiency.

The PNNL also has used rational design principles to create the first iron-based catalyst for hydrogen oxidation. Turnover rates for this catalyst are only about two per second, but this research is still in its infancy.

Part 4:

High-Volume Applications of Cheap Metal Catalysts
Although the examples cited above show that it is possible to create potent catalysts for the production of the type of low-volume specialty chemicals used in the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries, the impact on the overall demand for expensive and rare metals is not likely to be substantial. An area where a real impact could be had is in the area of renewable energy production, which would require massive amounts of catalyst, as was discussed in the previous chapter.

“We hope that there is going to be a much higher use of solar energy and other types of renewable energy in the future,” said Bullock. “What we want to do is store that energy in the form of the chemical bonds in a fuel.” Making this conversion, he added, requires “developing electrocatalysts that will convert electrical energy to chemical bonds, largely in the form of molecular hydrogen. Then, when you need the electricity, you can run hydrogen in a fuel cell and get your electricity back.”

Research at PNNL is focusing on developing catalysts that do not require platinum for hydrogen oxidation, which releases electrons, and the reverse reaction, proton reduction, that stores electrons. This work is also germane to the broader topic of oxygen and nitrogen reduction, which are more complex reactions given that oxygen reduction to water is a four-electron and four-proton event and nitrogen reduction to ammonia is a six-proton and six-electron event.

The theoretical framework for this research is based on understanding the first and second coordination spheres of nickel, the region where the electronic properties of the ligands surrounding a metal atom have the biggest influence on the metal’s catalytic properties (Rakowski DuBois and DuBois, 2009). In particular, Bullock and his colleagues are focusing on the role that phosphine ligands bearing pendant amines play in proton relays when these ligands are built into the second coordination sphere around nickel. Research at PNNL has shown that proton transfer into or away from the metal plays a key role in accelerating intra- and inter molecular proton transfers and stabilizing binding of hydrogen to the metal. These pendant amine-facilitated proton relays also lower the barrier for heterolytic cleavage of hydrogen (DuBois and Bullock, 2011) and facilitate the coupled proton-electron transfers that are important in the reduction of oxygen and nitrogen.

Part 3:

To illustrate some of the challenges in developing cheap metal catalysts, Bullock discussed the fact that reaction mechanisms may not be universal, making the search for new catalysts difficult. For example, an important class of chemical reactions hydrogenate carbon-oxygen double bonds. These carbonyl hydrogenation reactions use ruthenium- and rhodium-based catalysts to convert ketones and aldehydes into alcohols. One such ruthenium catalyst, for which the Nobel Prize was awarded, does not operate via the traditional mechanism for ketone hydrogenation. Normally, the reacting ketone would first coordinate with the metal, after which oxygen inserts itself into a metal-hydrogen bond. With this particular ruthenium catalyst, no coordination or insertion is required. Instead, the reaction occurs through a hydride ion on the ruthenium and a proton from the ligand-attached nitrogen coordinated to the ruthenium. The end result is the same, but the mechanism is completely different than expected (Noyori et al., 2001).

“The overall point I want to make is that if you’re trying to develop a new type of catalyst with a different metal, it is going to look a lot different,” said Bullock. “You don’t want to replace platinum or palladium with iron or copper and try to use the same ligand set. The ligands will almost certainly change.” The idea, he explained, is to not try to emulate what precious metals are doing as catalysts. Instead, the intention is to look at the reactivity characteristics of the cheap metals, understand the electronics of the reactions and the energy states, and then build a catalyst around those metals from the ground up using fundamental principles.

As an example, Bullock discussed work done in his laboratory developing a molybdenum-based catalyst for hydrogenating ketones to make alcohols at low temperature and hydrogen pressure and under mild conditions (Bullock and Voges, 2000). This reaction occurs by a different mechanism, one that capitalizes on the reactivity patterns of molybdenum hydrides and involves delivering a proton to the oxygen atom in the ketone first, leaving a metal hydride that then delivers hydride to the carbon atom, creating the saturated alcohol. Fundamental research on the acidity of metal hydrides and both the kinetics and thermodynamics of metal hydride behavior made the development of this catalyst possible.

The same types of basic research studies were done by other researchers to develop an iron-based catalyst that also performs a heterolytic cleavage of hydrogen as the key step in the hydrogenation of carbon-oxygen double bonds (Casey and Guan, 2009). But equally important is the fact that the catalyst is regenerated under low-pressure hydrogen conditions. More recently, another group created an iron-based catalyst that under similarly mild conditions works at very low catalyst loadings of 0.05 mole percent (Langer et al., 2011).