Austrian group Plansee has increased its stake in Chilean metals company Molibdenos y Metales (Molymet) to 32% after purchasing shares sold by Chile's Matte group for approximately $149 million. Plansee, through its subsidiary Plansee Limitada, bought nearly 10% of Molymet's shares at $10,250 per share in an auction. The acquisition consolidates Plansee's position as the majority shareholder, up from its previous 22% stake. Founded in 1975, Molymet processes molybdenum and rhenium for industries including steel, aerospace, energy, medical and semiconductors. The company operates facilities in Chile, Mexico, Germany, Belgium and the United States. Austrian firm Plansee, established in 1921 and specialising in molybdenum and tungsten components, first invested in Molymet in 2011 with a 5% stake. The company operates in 28 countries with 12 production centres across the US, Europe and Asia.

How Precious Metals Are Leaking From Earth's CoreContrary to popular belief, the Earth is not very rich in metals, including rare and precious metals like gold. The problem is that most of the heavier elements sank to the core during the planet's formation from an agglomeration of asteroids.As a result, more than 99.999% of Earth’s stores of gold and other precious metals lie buried under 3,000 km of solid rock.For a long time, it was assumed that these minerals would stay locked into the Earth's core until the end of time. However, a new study reveals this might not be the case.By improving the detection method of another element, ruthenium, researchers of the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (Germany), University of Bristol (UK), University of Edinburgh (UK), and Colgate University, (USA) have proven that material from the Earth's core can leak into the mantle and up to the planet's surface.“When the first results came in, we realized that we had literally struck gold! Our data confirmed that material from the core, including gold and other precious metals, is leaking into the Earth’s mantle above.” Dr Nils Messling – Researcher at Göttingen UniversityThey published their discovery in the prestigious review Nature1, under the title “ Ru and W isotope systematics in ocean island basalts reveals core leakage ”.How Earth’s Core and Mantle FormedDuring the early days of the solar system, dust particles aggregated into countless asteroids, which themselves aggregated into bigger and bigger elements, forming the protoplanets that would later on form the 4 rocky planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars).During this process, the planets were mostly melted magma, due to the intense heat generated by the collisions. Progressively, the heavier elements fell to the core due to gravity, differentiating from the mantle. Later on, the planet kept receiving more material from space, forming more of the mantle.Crucially for the study discussed here, the mantle displayed a very different composition for some isotopes of some elements, including ruthenium, due to this later formation using different materials.How Scientists Trace Core Elements to the SurfaceRuthenium: The Isotope That Tells a Core StoryAs ruthenium is mostly locked in the core, and with ruthenium-100 more abundant in the core, detection of this isotope can prove that metal came from the core instead of the mantle, normally the source of most surface rocks due to volcanic activities.A new, more precise method to measure the presence of ruthenium-100 has previously been developed at the University of Göttingen, allowing for this study.This was confirmed when studying very ancient rock, like samples from Greenland as old as 3.7 billion years, before the definitive separation of core and mantle would change ruthenium-100 composition.More interestingly, it appears that at least some volcanic islands display rocks with a strongly skewed ruthenium-100 ratio toward rocks having received core additions.This is not true for all volcanic islands, as, for example, samples from La Reunion or the Galapagos Islands are not different from rocks originating only from the mantle.“We can now also prove that huge volumes of super-heated mantle material – several hundreds of quadrillion metric tonnes of rock – originate at the core-mantle boundary and rise to the Earth’s surface to form ocean islands like Hawaii.” Professor Matthias Willbold – Professor at Göttingen UniversityWhy Tungsten Supports the Core-Leakage HypothesisTungsten, or wolfram (hence the W sign for this element), is another heavy metal mostly located in the Earth’s core.Here the scientists studied a metric called μ182-W (parts-per-million (ppm) deviation of 182W/184W from terrestrial standard. But measuring which type of isotope of tungsten is present in the sample, clarifies how the minerals from the core mixed with the magma of the mantle to form the volcanic rocks of Hawaii islands.This isotope ratio clearly shows that the tungsten detected is not from the decomposition of hafnium, another potential source of tungsten in the mantle.New Theory Explains How Core Elements Reach the SurfaceFrom the variation of tungsten composition, the scientists deduced a previously unknown mechanism: around the Earth's core formed an oxygen-rich outer core domain.Over time, the crystallization of metal-rich oxides through secular core cooling locks in some of the tungsten.“Whether these processes that we observe today have also been operating in the past remains to be proven

Finding The Right Hydrogen CatalystHydrogen could, in theory, be a perfect fuel to store energy and power applications that are hard to electrify. This is because it presents a few almost ideal characteristics:The byproduct of its combustion is only waterAnd the same can be said when it is used to produce electricity in fuel cells.It can burn at very hot temperatures, making it a good alternative to natural gas in metallurgy, chemical processes, etc.It only requires water as a resource for its production.Hydrogen is itself non-toxic and non-polluting.However, the rise of a hydrogen-based economy has been hampered by the difficulty of producing hydrogen in a cost-effective manner. This is due to the fact that most green hydrogen (produced from green energy) is made through electrolysis, a process for now mostly based on expensive catalysts like platinum, ruthenium, or iridium, each very rare and expensive metals.So as long as no better production method for hydrogen exists, it is unlikely that we will manage to see it replacing fossil fuel at scale.Luckily, this is quickly changing. We previously covered a few of these possibilities, notably turning plastic waste into hydrogen, using nanorods of nickel as an alternative catalyst, or using titanium and nickel scrap metals (swarf) produced during the manufacturing of metal parts. Some newer options are now being added by researchers.The first is the creation of self-optimizing catalysts1 by researchers at the Johannes Gutenberg Universitat (Germany) and Technical University of Darmstadt (Germany), Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (Germany), Harbin Institute of Technology (China), and Shandong University (China). It was published in Angewandte Chemie under the title “Self-optimizing Cobalt Tungsten Oxide Electrocatalysts toward Enhanced Oxygen Evolution in Alkaline Media.”The second one is the invention of a method to turn sewage sludge into green hydrogen and animal feed2 by researchers at the Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), Monash University (Australia), and University of Hong Kong (China)