Platinum: A whole new universe awaits

(Published in Deep SA, August 2012)

By Stef Terblanche

When a Hollywood movie-maker, an internet whiz kid, some space and computer scientists, a Texas billionaire, and a few other very wealthy people got together in April and told the world they were preparing to go into space to mine platinum on near-earth asteroids in quantities that would make South Africa look silly, one expected the world to take note.

And it did. Their announcement was carried in more than 2,000 news articles around the world in the days that followed.

Only, many of these took a tongue-in-cheek stance and seemed to dismiss them as a bunch of publicity-seeking crazies.

Publicity they may certainly have sought, but crazy they were not. In fact they – collectively going under the banner of a company called Planetary Resources – are dead serious in their quest to raise the necessary billions of dollars needed, develop the appropriate technology, mine the asteroids for vast quantities of platinum and create the world’s first trillionaires.

One also expected South Africa and its circle of blue-chip platinum miners to respond. After all, with them presiding over 75% of the world’s currently known platinum group reserves, the announcement by Planetary Resources potentially threatens this monopoly.

But either they shared the notion that these were crazy people, or they were busy with other far more depressing things, like simply trying to survive while preparing interim results in a very negative market. Most likely the latter.

As Northam Platinum spokesperson Memory Johnstone put it: “South African platinum companies are not really looking into that (space mining) right now, they are more concerned with just surviving at the moment. Platinum prices are down at the moment, so concerning themselves with space exploration for platinum is not really something they will consider right now.”

True, South African platinum group metals (PGM) production is down 25%, much of it due to labour unrest; the platinum price has fallen more than 16% over the past year and continues to slide; costs continue going up; executives of these mining companies have been facing something of a shakeup; and share prices have plummeted.

So when Planetary Resources made their announcement at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington, South Africa’s platinum bosses probably were far too busy to be bothered.

Nonetheless, the ambitious US-based start-up company has formidable backing, and is dead serious. In fact, they have quietly been working at their plans for over two years now. In their announcement in Seattle - aimed at attracting investors and “the best brains” out there to participate in the venture - the group said that there are 9,000 asteroids larger than 50 meters in diameter in orbit near the earth. Some of them could "contain as much platinum as is mined in an entire year on earth”, they claimed.

And Planetary Resources is in a hurry to get to that vast orbiting treasure chest. It has committed itself to having its first prospecting telescopes in space within 24 months.

The players

Planetary Resources boasts a formidable A-list team of founders and funders, among them –

•     James Cameron, the Canadian film director-producer and deep-sea explorer who made the box-office hit “Titanic”;

•     Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the billionaire computer scientists who founded Google;

•     Eric Schmidt, an American businessman,  software engineer and the current executive chairman of Google;

•     Peter Diamandis, the founder and chairman of the X Prize Foundation who is widely held to be a key figure in the development of the personal or private spaceflight industry and who has created many space-related businesses and organisations;

•     Eric Anderson, a leading space industry entrepreneur who has led the development of commercial human spaceflight and the space tourism industry, selling more than $250 million in spaceflights including South African software billionaire Mark Shuttleworth’s space trip;

•     Chris Lewicki, a former National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Mars mission manager;

•     Tom Jones, a planetary scientist and veteran NASA astronaut;

•     Charles Simonyi, the chairman of Intentional Software Corporation and Microsoft's former chief software architect;

•     K. Ram Shriram, the founder of Sherpalo and a founding director of Google; and

•     Ross Perot Jnr, Texas billionaire and chairman of Hillwood and The Perot Group, whose father once ran for president.

One could hardly ask for more “heavyweight” than that, which is why sane and influential people everywhere should be taking serious note of their announcement.

In an interview with Space.com, Anderson said, "We are going to the source. ...The platinum group metals are many orders of magnitude easier to access in the high-concentration platinum asteroids than they are in the Earth's Crust."

It may be mere ironic coincidence, or a case of Hollywood-meets-reality, but it was co-founder and funder Cameron who wrote and directed the 2009 hit movie “Avatar” in which a fictitious precious metal called "unobtainium" is mined on Pandora, a fictional, lush habitable moon in the Alpha Centauri star system.

The technology

In developing the required technology, the group certainly has the right credentials with several of its members being aeronautical and computer scientists and engineers. Some of them previously worked on space programmes of NASA.

For now Planetary Resources will be focusing on robotic space exploration and getting exploration telescopes into place. In the course of the next two years the group hopes to launch between two and five space-based Arkyd-101 Space Telescopes that will be used for exploration to find the asteroids most feasible for mining.

The next phase – within five to seven years - would involve launching spacecraft with a more specific prospecting agenda to map out an asteroid in detail and identifying potential, relevant geological characteristics.

The third phase, within five to ten years, would see the company going from prospecting to actual extraction by the building small, relatively low-cost space craft to carry robots to the asteroids. These will mine them and bring back to earth the mined and refined platinum ore.

As the asteroids are believed to contain substantial quantities of water, the group intends using the water’s hydrogen and oxygen to create “fuel stations” in space to refuel the space craft to be used in the venture. This could also benefit NASA’s spacecraft involved in deep space exploration.

Planetary Resource hopes to launch its first spacecraft within 24 months.

The team says it will be making good use of technology already developed such as that used to take Cameron to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean to film the sunken wreck of the Titanic, or the robotic technology used by petroleum company Shell to access oil in some of the deepest oceans.

Planetary Resources believes its initial customers are likely to include private research institutes and agencies like NASA.

The NASA fit

In fact, Planetary Resources’ plans seem to fit quite well with NASA’s own future plans. With NASA now retiring its space shuttle fleet and shifting its focus to deep space exploration, it will increasingly rely on private companies to build transport craft for cargo and crew and transport these to the orbiting International Space Station.

General Charles Bolden, the head of NASA, told me in an interview conducted with him when he visited Cape Town late last year that “one of the important challenges that NASA has from the National Space Act that established us in 1958 was to promote commerce and industry”.

“We just recently decided on a heavy-lift launch vehicle for example. We decided that we are going to rely on industry itself to build and operate space aircraft going into low orbit, taking both cargo and crew. That is a totally new industry that will grow up, hopefully not just in the United States.”

“One of the reasons why we think it is very important for us to now allow American industry to take over owning and operating the vehicles that go into lower earth orbit because we in America have been doing that now continuously for 30 years with a couple of interruptions when we lost Columbia and Challenger.”

“The shuttle programme was an incredible thirty-year technological era that I don’t think will be matched for quite some time but at the expense of not allowing us to explore, to go beyond lower earth orbit. So President Obama decided that we should follow along with the recommendations from previous administrations and turn over access to lower earth orbit to the commercial enterprises, and let us do the (deep space) exploration,” said Bolden.

Space prospecting

Exploration and distance prospecting of this kind is not quite new. In fact already back in 2000, Brad Blair of the Colorado School of Mines’ produced a paper on near-earth asteroids having a role to play in long-term platinum supply. He followed this with a paper in 2002 entitled “Space Resource Economic Analysis Toolkit: The Case for Commercial Lunar Ice Mining.”

Blair is described by colleagues as “dedicated to opening the space frontier for human settlement and commerce”, something he has been researching for over twenty years. He is also a professional space consultant to NASA, Bechtel Nevada, Raytheon and the Canadian Space Agency.

According to Blair high-grade PGM concentrations have been identified in so-called LL Chrondrite near-earth asteroids. He argues in his paper that space-based PGM sources will become available commercially over the next few decades owing to the technology growth that allows increased human activity in near-earth space.

He further argues – in line with what Planetary Resources are saying – that PGM deposits on asteroids will be sufficient to create its own viable economy. Until now iron meteorite samples have yielded evidence of substantial platinum deposits.

“Future economic work should include econometric estimation of short- and long-term demand elasticity for platinum, and extend the above analysis to the other platinum-group metals offered by asteroids,” says Blair.

“The breakthrough for space resources will come about when a sufficiently large market is found that justifies mining from a lower cost mineral source located in space. “The most commonly cited potential market is transportation fuels for earth-orbiting vehicles.”

The market

Planetary Resources does not shy away from the anticipated cost of the scheme which it says will run into billions of dollars. But, it says, the return will be an addition of “tens of billions of dollars to the US’ GDP annually." The company nonetheless hopes to bring down substantially the hitherto cost of visiting asteroids of between $1-billion and $2-billion.

The question is whether the platinum market can afford near-space mining. At present earth still has an abundance of platinum and PGMs certainly are not part of the current resource pinch.

An article in The Economist argued that “PGMs are expensive because they are rare. Make them common, by digging them out of the heart of a shattered planet, and they will become cheap.”

But Planetary Resources PGMs are high-priced simply because they are being used to narrowly. By expanding their application across more technology and industries because of greater supplies being available, will keep prices at viable levels, they argue.

And that is also what both the government and leaders in the mining industry in South Africa seem to think. In fact South Africa’s Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) is already thinking of creating a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) focused solely on platinum development.

The DTI’s director-general, Lionel October, has been quoted as saying that a DTI team was already engaging with various people to establish whether a central platinum hub with satellite zones would be economically viable.

PGMs have many wonderful uses. Platinum is used as a catalyst in fuel cells, and development of hydrogen fuel cells could open up a whole new world of clean energy, it is thought.

Anglo American CEO Cynthia Carroll also told the United Nations climate change convention’s seventeenth Conference of the Parties (COP 17) in Durban last December that by developing these fuel cells zero-emission electricity could be produced creating many new jobs and opening up all sorts of other opportunities.

Experts say the fuel cell technology derived from platinum can be used for a range of applications, from powering cell phones, to driving vehicles and even generating power in isolated locations, meaning there might just be a market able to absorb what Planetary Resources hopes to bring back to earth.

Anglo leads the way with fuel cell technology

Tomorrow’s power for today’s challenges

(Published in Mining, September 2012)

By Stef Terblanche

Turning challenge into opportunity may seem like a favourite cliché of motivational speakers and spin practitioners. But for South Africa’s mining industry it has become something of a survival tool, if not a way of life going all the way back to the early pioneering days of the diamond and gold rushes.

A national power crisis, rising costs, depressed market conditions, the need for jobs, regulatory and transformation issues, and switching to a greener economy are just some of the challenges faced by the mining industry.

To see how the industry responds to such pressures one need only look at the many innovative initiatives undertaken by mining companies in the wake of the 2008 power crisis.

One of these is the exciting work Anglo American Platinum (Amplats) is doing in conjunction with various partners and government in the field of platinum-based hydrogen fuel cell technology.

With just this one project issues such as stimulating demand for platinum, creating jobs, cleaner energy sources, energy self-sufficiency, environmental concerns, new technologies, mineral beneficiation, sustainable mining and more are being simultaneously addressed.

Anglo’s work in this regard started attracting wider attention when the company demonstrated a 150kw platinum-based hydrogen fuel cell power plant at the UN’s COP17 climate change conference in Durban last December. This was followed in May with Amplats announcing that it had launched the prototype of the first fuel cell powered locomotive for use in underground mining operations.

“This event marks a leap forward for fuel cells. The platinum-based hydrogen fuel cells, used to power the locomotive we are unveiling today, offer one of the most exciting opportunities for South Africa in the green economy. At Anglo American, we believe that with platinum at its heart, a South African fuel cell industry would support the country’s drive for jobs and help to meet its energy challenges,” enthused Cynthia Carroll, Chief Executive of Anglo American plc and Chairperson of Amplats at the launch.

In due course five fuel cell locomotives are to be produced and tested underground.

What are fuel cells?

Many people may be unfamiliar with this somewhat mysterious sounding “new” technology that promises to be the answer to so many things. So just what exactly is fuel cell technology?

The technology is not really that new, nor is it very complicated in theory. German scientist Christian Friedrich Schönbein first developed the principle of the fuel cell in 1838.

A year later the Welsh scientist Sir William Robert Grove published an article about it in the Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science. In 1889 two chemists, Charles Langer and Ludwig Mond first used the term “fuel cell” to describe the device they had built using air and coal gas.

Their device was developed further by Cambridge scientist Dr Francis Thomas Bacon in 1932 into what was essentially the first alkaline fuel cell. Twenty years later various scientists undertook further development of the technology and by the 1980s car manufacturers, among others, started showing an interest in it.

In 1993 the Canadian Ballard company produced the first commercially viable fuel cell-powered vehicle. In 1997, Daimler-Chrysler, Ford and Ballard Power Systems formed a consortium to build fuel cell engines and drive trains for cars. In 2004 30 fuel cell buses built by DaimlerChrysler and Ballard went into service in Europe.

Today the diverse applications for fuel cells have included purpose-built vehicles, hospitals, schools, rural electrification, back-up power for telecommunications, combined heat and power applications for residential, commercial and industrial buildings, portable power and battery charging, and even in city buses. Many large vehicle manufacturers have fuel cell research and development projects these days.

According to information supplied by Mpumi Sithole, Media & External Relations Manager at Amplats, a fuel cell is essentially a gas battery that produces electricity as long as it is fed with hydrogen gas. It is a device that uses hydrogen (or hydrogen-rich fuel) and oxygen to create electricity.

They are more energy-efficient than combustion engines, as they extract more energy from the same amount of fuel, says the company.

Depending on the purity of the hydrogen used as fuel, emission of air pollutants or greenhouse gases may be zero or very little. The amount of power produced by a fuel cell depends on fuel cell type, cell size, operating temperature and pressure at which the gases are supplied to the cell, among other things.

Fuel cells have been used to provide auxiliary power on spacecraft for decades. They also have a broader range of application than any other currently available power source, says Amplats. Furthermore, fuel cells provide round-the-clock availability without any need to change or recharge batteries, which means less downtime and increased productivity.

The Smithsonian Institution describes a fuel cell as generating electricity by a chemical reaction taking place in two electrodes, the positive anode and negative cathode. Every fuel cell also has an electrolyte, which carries electrically charged particles from one electrode to the other, and a catalyst, which speeds the reactions at the electrodes.

The electrical current thus produced is directed outside the cell to power a motor or illuminate a light bulb, for instance.

While basic fuel cell technology is relatively simple to illustrate, building inexpensive, efficient, and reliable fuel cells is a different matter altogether. The biggest current obstacle to fuel cell commercialisation is the high cost, says Amplats partner Johnson Matthey.

Many different types of fuel cells have been developed, with differing technical details for each, much of it centred on the choice of electrolyte.

The main electrolyte types currently being used are alkali, molten carbonate, phosphoric acid, proton exchange membrane and solid oxide. Different types of fuel used also require different designs. Platinum catalysts are used in most types of fuel cells.

Suited to Africa

According to Amplats, fuel cells are well suited to the provision of distributed power in Africa. The attractiveness of fuel cells is that their most efficient fuel source, hydrogen, is an energy carrier and can be stored. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe and any hydrogen-rich liquid or gaseous fuel can be used to provide the hydrogen for a fuel cell. Fuel cells can be deployed where they are needed, and use whatever fuels are available locally.

Amplats’ partner in the locomotive project, the US company Vehicle Projects Inc, has successfully developed a number of fuel cell vehicles in the US.

“A fuel cell locomotive incorporates the advantages of its competitors, namely catenary-electric and diesel-electric units, while avoiding their disadvantages. It possesses the environmental benefits, at the vehicle, of an electric locomotive but the higher overall efficiency and lower infrastructure costs of a diesel locomotive,” says Dr. Arnold Miller, who heads Vehicle Projects.

Miller was in South Africa in September to present a paper on the project at the Platinum conference of the Southern African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy at Sun City.

Dr Miller says the hydrogen for the locomotives would be produced on site on the surface at the mine and piped down to the underground locomotive for refuelling.

“For underground vehicles reversible metal hydride storage is the preferred type based on safety considerations. Reversible metal hydrides are low flammability, solid materials that use metal hydrogen chemical bonds to store hydrogen safely and compactly,” he says.

Amplats says fuel cells are relatively new in Africa with the complete value chain still under development and presenting significant opportunities for manufacture, assembly, installation, support, maintenance and fuel supply.

“At Anglo American, we believe that with platinum at its heart, a South African fuel cell industry would support the country’s drive for jobs and help to meet its energy challenges,” Carroll said. The company believes it will also promote knowledge transfer and export opportunities.

It stands to reason that Amplats would be focusing on new technologies involving the use of platinum, especially given the current downturn in the sector. After all, Amplats is the world’s top primary platinum producer, having contributed 42% of global supply in 2010.

The company says it is implementing its fuel cell strategy in order to drive demand for platinum group metals (PGM’s), specifically in South Africa.

“This is aligned to government’s beneficiation strategy of moving from an extractive economy to adding value where viable, and to potentially creating a new fuel cell industry,” it says.

Partners

Amplats has teamed up with various research, technology and manufacturing partners such as Vehicle Projects, Trident South Africa, Battery Electric, Johnson Matthey, Air Products, Doking, Dantherm and Clean Energy. The company has also established the Platinum Group Metals Development Fund (PGMDF) towards expanding industrialisation and beneficiation of PMGs. And it is also collaborating with the South African government.

The company believes fuel cell technology as a strategic and emerging industry is well aligned with the vision of the Department of Science and Technology and the company is working together with the Departments of Mineral Resources and of Science and Technology to encourage and support greater local beneficiation of platinum.

In fact the Department of Trade and Industry is already thinking of creating a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) focused solely on platinum development.

The DTI’s director-general, Lionel October, was quoted in one report as saying that a DTI team was already engaging with various people to establish whether a central platinum hub with satellite zones would be economically viable in line with the government’s Special Economic Zone Bill gazetted in January. The government was hoping through the licensing of SEZs it could industrialise outlying rural areas, attract foreign investment and boost job creation.

More projects

The fuel cell power plant demonstrated at COP17 and the fuel cell locomotive project, are but two of Amplats’ current projects.

A stationary 200kw fuel cell power plant installed near Lephalele in Limpopo on a Coal Bed Methane (CBM) site of Anglo American’s Thermal Coal business is used to provide electricity for the exploration operations in the area.

And a 50kw platinum based fuel cell was used to power Anglo American’s recent Mining Indaba gala dinner, held at Vergelegen Wine Estate in Cape Town. In conjunction with the SA government’s Hydrogen Economy Strategy (HYSA) Amplats also supports research in fuel cell related technologies in developing competence and capability locally.

Amplats and partners use these projects to demonstrate and showcase the fuel cell technology developed to date and the opportunities it could create for mining and the South African economy in general.

Focus on mining

Amplats has also initiated a “Fuel Cells in Mining” programme to investigate, develop, and pilot technologies that could improve current mining practices and where viable, adopt the technology. In this vein, for example, the fuel cell locomotive project aims to produce a fuel cell/battery hybrid that will operate more effectively and efficiently than current lead acid batteries.

“Technology is core to our approach to carbon reduction and energy saving activities. We have invested $180 million in low carbon technology. We are investing in technologies that will enable us to run cost efficient, carbon neutral mines in 20 years' time,” said Carroll.

Another project involves the development of the Dozer, a remote driven machine that performs a variety of functions in the underground environment that enhances the productivity and safety of miners.  And the Mining Cap Lamp project aims to produce a lamp that is as efficient in lighting as current products whilst providing a lighter more durable product that has an easy refilling mechanism to reduce overall costs.

Amplats, in conjunction with Dantherm, a Ballard subsidiary, is also investigating the opportunity and viability of providing fuel cell technology to power in-house residential housing projects.

But there are also challenges to the Amplats drive to promote the wider use of platinum through fuel cell technology. Last year scientists from the US-based Los Alamos National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory published a paper claiming they had developed the use of a platinum-free catalyst in the cathode of a hydrogen fuel cell.

Having to use platinum catalysts has been singled out as one of the major factors contributing to the high cost of hydrogen fuel cells that has thwarted widespread use.

Nonetheless, it remains an exciting project and any challenges are likely to be met head on and overcome.

Some current global fuel cell technology developments

•                    Fuel cell technology is now so important that the US Senate now boasts a dedicated Senate Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Caucus with 4 co-chairs.

•                    Five hydrogen fuel cell taxis were built to transport VIPs during the recent Olympics in London.

•                    Danish car builders’ consortium ECOmove has unveiled an electric car able to travel 500 miles without refuelling.

•                    Mercedes-Benz in the US has purchased 72 fuel cell units to operate a portion of its Alabama plant’s lift truck fleet.

•                    Boeing is partnering with American Airlines and the US Federal Aviation Administration on a 737-800 airplane project as a flying test bed for environmentally progressive technologies, including fuel cell technology.

•                    South Korea’s Pyeongtaek Energy Service purchased 14 UTC Power fuel cell systems for energy supply purposes.

•                    California-based Life Technologies Corporation has installed a 1 MW Bloom Energy fuel cell system to power its company headquarters and other buildings.

•                    US company FuelCell Energy, Inc. was awarded a $3.8 million contract by the US Navy to develop and test a fuel cell power system for underwater propulsion.

•                    A major US defence supplier has ordered a 25-watt fuel cell  for testing in the use of a range of applications including soldier power, remote power stations, and unmanned underwater and aerial vehicles.

•                    NASA’s Kennedy Space Center entered a five-year Space Act Agreement with Cella Energy’s American subsidiary to make its micro-bead technology practical enough to be used as a fuel in most kinds of machinery, cars and even spacesuits and portable electronics.