Despite how cool it is, there seems to be a a divide between profs who think it’s great and profs who don’t. The most common argument against it is that it makes it easy for students to justify not coming to class because they can just watch the lecture online. My response to that is that if you do nothing to make your lectures engaging enough that people want to come to class, then you’re doing it wrong. There are many ways to build incentives to actually come to class - encourage more questions and have discussions on the lecture material, use demonstrations, and give students who show up more input on how the class proceeds. The world is changing. If everything you are can be replaced by a video screen, then you need to step up your game.

I was talking with one of my other profs that really likes using Lectopia about the future of this system, and we agreed that it ought to be expanded and made mandatory for all classes. He also suggested that certain lectures for each course should be made available to all students, as having a sample of a course to see what it is about and what the lecturer is like would help students choose courses and get the most bang for their buck.

I’d go a few steps further and say that these lectures should all be made available at a very reduced rate compared to actual tuition, like say a couple hundred bucks a year for access to the entire course catalogue. MIT has their opencourseware, but this only goes part way. Combining it with a system like Lectopia to publicize everything would be immensely powerful. Any university that bit the bullet and publicized their courses in this way would lose some control of the material, but they would almost certainly gain a huge amount of publicity and esteem around the world.

This is a radical idea, but as I said - the world is changing, and everyone needs to step up their game.

This statement is to chemistry what the “internet is a series of tubes” analogy was to computer science. A quarter twist of correct in a quart of nonsense. Acid and base don’t just cancel each other out - they also produce salt, which would raise the salinity of the ocean and screw things up even worse. This also ignores the ENORMOUS amount of base necessary to do this on a global scale - on the order of 3 million tonnes of NaOH per year by my back of the envelope calcs.

This astounding statement was made by Stephen Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics, a book that applies economics and statistical methods to very odd problems, like the distribution of baby names throughout generations, abortion vs crime rate, and the economics of dealing crack. It was a great book with lots of fascinating pop-stats.

The authors rightly decided to keep flogging the horse, so they wrote a followup, Superfreakonomics. I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but it’s been making a lot of headlines in science news recently with respect to their approach to global climate change. Levitt and Dubner are working with the same mold as Freakonomics by making a shocking, counteriniutive claim, and then backing it up with economic and statistical models. The claim in this case is that geoengineering is the cheap, effective, and obvious solution to all our CO₂ woes. Unfortunately, modeling is only useful if your assumptions are reasonable, and the assumptions of Levitt and Dubner are anything but.

I’m not going to go into detail of all the fallacious arguments they make - other authors have made the case well already. I hope their next book sticks to economics. They’re very good at that. On the other hand, if they decide to do another book involving science, I hope they repeat highschool chemistry first.

My supervisor at UBC while I did my masters was David Dixon, one of the world experts on heap leach modeling. We often discussed what went into the HeapSIM model he developed, so I could appreciate the difficulty of the task the undergrads had taken on.

Mineral reaction kinetics, hydrology and the disperion of fluids through the heap, the growth curves of bioleach bacteria, energy balances involving heat of reaction as well as heat losses to the environment, and a myriad of other factors, all heavily seasoned with enough non-ideality to defy simple models.

Despite the difficulty of the problem, the undergrads did a good job of presenting basic models of the system and showing that they had a grasp of the principles and fundamentals of how a heap leach works and what the important problems are. There were definitely some problems, most notably the heap that achieved an interior temperature of ~4000C because it was modeled as an adiabatic reactor, but on the whole the results were very good.

The problem was given to the students in a very open ended way. They were taught the fundamentals of how a heap leach worked and given some basic ore characteristics and reaction chemistry and then allowed to run with it. During their presentations they outlined the assumptions they made and justified why they made sense in the context of their models. They also talked about the limits of their models and how their assumptions diverged from the behavior of an actual heap.

It was this aspect of critical analysis that was the most valuable to the students. In a lot of assignments students are simply given a problem and the information they need to solve it and asked to turn the crank through the appropriate equations until they get the answer. In this assignment there was no simple shortcut to solve for X. Instead, it much more closely resembled a real engineering problem where there isn’t one clear solution, but rather a whole host of issues that must be managed and accounted for. I was happy to play a role in the project at the end as the crusty grad student asking hard questions, and I hope I can continue in this vein in the future. After all the defences and presentations I’ve done, it’s nice to be the interrogator.

Beyond that, lithium ion batteries in laptops and other handhelds are the latest scare in the ongoing kabuki theatre that is airport security. It makes sense - there’s a lot of energy stored in a battery, especially as modern manufacturing techniques cram more and more joules into smaller and smaller devices. I hadn’t heard of this before - perhaps the writers of the NY Times read the comic XKCD.

Lithium isn’t something I know a whole lot about, so I started doing a bit of reading. Lithium is predominantly produced from two classes of sources - mineralized deposits made of things like spodumeme and brine sources where the lithium is dissolved in water. The largest source of the latter is in the Atacama desert in the mountains between Bolivia, Chile and Argentina. In round terms, two thirds of the world’s lithium reserves are in brine sources, one third is mineralized.

I first came across these two rather alarming articles by William Tahil. He argues that as the world demand for lithium batteries in handhelds and electric cars grow the demand will outstrip supply quite quickly. He suggests we will exchange one finite resource, oil, for another - lithium. The thing that really caught my eye in this work was the idea that mineralized lithium was unsuitable for battery production.

In searching for further information about this claim, I found this rebuttal by Keith Evans to the aforementioned reports by Tahil. In it, Evans suggests that Tahil is a nutcase, although he doesn’t use those words. First, he outlines that mineralized lithium can be made into high grade LiCO₃ for batteries, it just takes more processing than the easily recoverable brines. Second, he argues that it’s only because of a focus on “reserve base” instead of reserves that the supply and demand projections for world lithium look grim. An increase in the price of lithium would allow for vast expansions into proven resources, even with no new technology.

Regardless of the future of lithium, I hope the desert flamingoes of the Atacama are accommodated.

So firms are acting to insure their own short to medium term profitability. Fair enough. If you’re not going to survive the winter then planning for spring is a waste of energy. But how does this square with the oft professed goal of designing and running sustainable processes? Sustainable design inherently involves long term thinking and planning. The energy savings from building LEED certified structures or using GeoBulbs take a long time to pan out. Planning a mine for closure from day 1 or engaging in long term bioremediation of tailings eats up resources that could otherwise go towards producing saleable metal sooner.

Beyond that, sustainable design involves new principles, new technology, and new risks. A company with a blank slate will be inherently more willing to innovate than one with legacy costs - just look at the fits GM is going through right now. The debt load of a company and how it plans on servicing that debt will inevitably impact the type of projects that they invest in. A company that must pay 10% of their revenue to simply service debt will make very different choices about what is profitable than a company with an empty balance sheet.

Usually when people talk about sustainability they do so in the context of the environment and energy use. However, it’s equally important to discuss sustainable economics. A sustainable human race will never exist unless private enterprise gets fully on board, and in order for this to happen the economic incentives and decision making processes must be understood.

Throughout all my reading I got the sense that very few people knew what they were talking about. Everywhere I looked I saw contradictory economic “facts”, outdated conventional wisdom dressed as gospel, and self-righteous op-eds conflating “what I want” with “what ought to be”. I refrained from commenting on any of this so as to not be just another uninformed voice clamoring in the darkness.

Since then, I haven’t come up with any grand unification theory about where we are or how we got there. There is still a helluva lot that I don’t understand about modern economics. However, going part way is not the same thing as going the wrong way. After living through the last few months I now feel like I understand enough to say something intelligent.

To that end, I’d like to revisit the title of this blog. I originally came up with From the Ground Up because I was writing about my entrance into the resource industry and I like puns. Now, I think this title can apply to something new. In light of the financial crisis, I think it’s time for a re-evaluation of our basic assumptions about how value gets created in the modern economy, looking at and analyzing the situation from the ground up. To start, tomorrow I will talk about debt servicing and sustainability.

Often when I tell people I’m doing a Master’s they ask me what I’m studying. Depending on the technical knowledge of the person asking and whether I think they’re actually interested or just interested for the sake of social grace, I give them a few different answers. With non-scientists I usually just say that I’m doing, “Serious chemistry.” I find it’s very difficult to describe my project to someone with no background, because my project doesn’t make any sense without context.

If I had to answer the aforementioned question now I would say that my project is about extending our fundamental understanding of chemistry and mineral processing. As a stand alone piece of work my project is pretty useless, in the same way that one piece of a jigsaw puzzle doesn’t do anyone any good. On the other hand, when my project is set in the proper context it helps fills a few gaps in our knowledge and builds off of the work of other authors to help create a more sophisticated understanding of solution chemistry and electrochemistry.

In the short term this kind of understanding is not directly applicable to industrial practices. Arcane mathematical models don’t lend themselves well to the ground level of a plant. It’s usually easier to progress through incremental improvements via small tweaks and trial and error. However, incremental improvement and empiricism will only take an industry so far. Sooner or later it is necessary to dig deeper in order to make the next major technological shift. The first pressure oxidation reactor wasn’t invented by twiddling the knobs on a smelter - it came from someone looking at the scientific jigsaw puzzle and seeing the possibility for something new. I see my project as one more piece of the ongoing puzzle and hopefully a foundation for future studies.

I’ve been to several other defences over the last couple years so I knew what to expect for my own. The first 25-30 minutes is your presentation of your work that hopefully leads the audience through your thesis and helps them understand how and why you did what you did. The following hour and a half is more or less a free for all for the examiners where they ask you questions on pretty much anything they want. In my case I spent a lot of time discussing electrochemistry, but the tough stuff came from gas fugacity issues that were marginally related to my thesis at best. I did a lot of preparation and studying of my past notes, but I didn’t anticipate how difficult thinking under fire for that long would be. Even if you know the material, your nerves fray. At about the hour and a half mark I was asked to consider an alcohol still for a question about vapour pressure. My mind was already there, but for different reasons.

Afterwards I spoke to the examining committee a bit more and they said that a few stumbles during the examination is par for the course and that I held up much better than most. That comment, along with an A+ on the thesis itself, took the sting away.

Now my focus is turned to what is appearing to be an even more challenging prospect than finishing my thesis - finding a job in this market.

In the first segment of the talk he defined sustainability in terms of the impact of different industry offgases on global warming. There’s more to sustainability than that, but this makes for a good starting point. Each industry/process has its own important gases aside from the ubiquitous energy borne CO₂ to CF₄ and C₂F₆ offgases from aluminum production. Calculating the CO₂ equivalence of each of these gases as a function of time gives a measure of the impact of each.

The second segment of the talk was on differentiating the various commodities by raw tonnage produced per year, the value per tonne, and where the energy sinks are for several important commodities (portland cement, aluminum, steel, and gold). With each Dr. Irons discussed the importance of recycling for metals, how recyclable each commodity is, and what the energy savings are in doing so. In this analysis the cost of collecting and centralizing the recycable materials was not included as this varies drastically from place to place.

The final segment was a set of case studies, looking at the efforts of several industries to reduce energy intensivity while maintaining high product standards. Specifically he outlined the need to reduce perfluorocarbon emissions from aluminum production and the Ultra Low CO₂ Steelmaking project involving alternative blast furnaces.

The most interesting aspect of this talk in my mind was the comparison of energy consumption for copper and nickel production by hydrometallurgical means vs pyrometallurgical means (page 33 of the talk). In both cases the energy cost of the hydromet method was significantly higher than the pyromet option. Pointing out the generally rising energy prices and yet simultaneous increase in copper/nickel production via hydromet means, I asked Dr. Irons about this afterwards via email. He suggested that it was due to the growing proportion of both metal reserves that are not able to be treated economically (or at all) via smelting, such as arsenic bearing copper minerals and nickel laterites. At the same time, he emphasized the need for hydrometallurgists to reduce energy intensivity of production by keeping temperatures and pressures low, speed up reaction kinetics to improve throughput, and improve the current efficiency of electrowinning and refining.

As a result of the vast amounts of energy and throughput used in primary resource processing, engineers in this field will and do play an important role in the reduction of CO₂ emissions. Even setting aside sustainability concerns, the problems facing process metallurgy are the same ones the industry has always faced - efficiency and doing more with less.

“Despite [negative adjective] economic times, [resource company] suggests that the long term outlook for [commodity] is [positive adjective]”

In the last week I think I’ve seen these releases for just about every major commodity metal out there. Now, I’m no financial analyst (some might be prepared to listen to me on those grounds alone, ha ha ha), but what do these confident and optimistic releases really mean? Over the last hundred years the stock market has historically always gone up. Of course, also during that time was the great depression, the oil crisis in the 70s, the other oil crisis in the 70s, the Asian market crash in the 90s, the collapse of the dot coms in 2001, and whatever nomenclature gets applied to what’s going on right now.

So forgive my skepticism and/or cynicism, but when I hear someone say that the long term forecasts of [commodity] are good I want to ask, “How long term?” I’m sure that the analysts and the finance gurus have their own good reasons for saying what they’re saying, but I still can’t help but think I’m just being told what I want to hear. In the future we’ll still be using aluminum for planes and steel for cars and copper for plumbing and palladium for catalytic convertors and all the rest of it. Great. I knew that. But it’s a long way from here to there, and I’m more concerned about what comes between.

While we’re on the subject of generically optimistic mining briefs, how much longer are we going to be hearing about China and India as some sort of economic Deus ex Machina? I appreciate the optimism but they’ve got some pretty significant problems of their own, especially now that this side of the world is on fire.