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Metal Without Mining

magratheametals.com

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Re: Metal Without Mining

#41

Post by GravitasFailure »

83 wrote: post #10
proee wrote: post #2

Isn't Magnesium highly flammable/explosive? How do you protect parts made from this metal?

Magnesium parts are already in widespread use. The covers you see on the sides of motorcycle engines/transmissions are often magnesium. In solid form the risk is mitigated because there isn't enough surface area for the reaction with oxygen, it's the powder/shavings that are a concern. You can actually weld magnesium parts without it igniting. Reading up on it a little more - it seems with enough heat solid magnesium…

Magnesium can't burn without oxygen, but it will happily rip the oxygen out of water and sand, making it exceptionally annoying to put out.

Re: Metal Without Mining

#42

Post by [deleted] »

dbcurtis wrote: post #28
proee wrote: post #2

Isn't Magnesium highly flammable/explosive? How do you protect parts made from this metal?

Magnesium metal will burn very violently once it gets going. Among the biggest trouble I got into in high school was when my chem lab partner and I decided it would be entertaining to burn a small piece of magnesium metal. It was rather spectacular, and indeed entertaining. Well worth the Very Stern Lecture. Some aircraft historian will have to fill in the gaps in this story (what aircraft?), but back during the Kore…

[deleted]

Re: Metal Without Mining

#43

Post by geuis »

This entire website and company reads like a penny pink sheets stock scam.

"Magrathea sells metal using multi-year supply agreements in countries with enforceable contract law. Supply agreements allow our partners to build in magnesium with confidence. We prevent price instability from Chinese trade manipulation so the innovative products of our partners can succeed in the market."

There's absolutely no information on the site detailing their tech. Just a lot of buzzwords. Under the News section, it's the typical list headline articles cherry picked to make the company sound better.

Re: Metal Without Mining

#44

Post by garettmd »

tekno45 wrote: post #38
ummonk wrote: post #37

It's not "impossible" to decarbonize the production of aluminum without driving up cost, as the page claims. Once green electricity and hydrogen is cheaper than CO2-emitting energy, this will be possible and even profitable.

Isn't new renewable power cheaper than new C02 power?

From what I understand, it is cheaper. However, that's just with new power. Most of the power available now is from existing installations, making existing fossil fuel power cheaper than any new installations.

Re: Metal Without Mining

#45

Post by dunham »

jacquesm wrote: post #36

If you're wondering about where the name Magrathea comes from: https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Magrathea

I knew it was from the book, but I'd forgotten exactly what Magrathea was, so I started reading the article. Halfway through I got a kernel panic (macos 12.6.2 / intel).

Re: Metal Without Mining

#46

Post by reaperducer »

klyrs wrote: post #19
proee wrote: post #2

Isn't Magnesium highly flammable/explosive? How do you protect parts made from this metal?

Old timers recall the infamous case of the NeXT Cube... https://web.archive.org/web/20000817013818/http://simson.net...

"This is so NeXT," I told Sally. "Everything works great in the tests, then when you try to make it work for real, in the field, nothing works. They build a computer out of magnesium, and it doesn't even burn!"

Re: Metal Without Mining

#47

Post by elihu »

avernon wrote: post #33
ChuckMcM wrote: post #16

If you are wondering "how" they are doing this, I believe this company is the externalization of this research: https://www.innovationnewsnetwork.com/new-method-extract-mag... (Kind of hard to pin down exactly since they don't say a lot about how they are doing it, but a quick check suggests this is the only "new" thing in extracting magnesium recently and Magrathea is a young company[1]) [1] https://www.crunchbase.c…

They mention that they are doing electrochemistry. A huge portion of historical magnesium production is from electrolysis, including the only operating plant in the US. Past methods have used lime to precipitate magnesium (Dow) or evaporation ponds to concentrate it (the current Utah plant). Probably the new thing they are doing is using something like Chlor-Alkali to make base that precipitates the magnesium instead…

Apparently US Magnesium is a major producer and they use evaporation ponds and brine from the Great Salt Lake. It's a bit of an environmental controversy because they use a lot of water and the Great Salt Lake is shrinking.

https://usmagnesium.com/

Re: Metal Without Mining

#48

Post by rlucas »

jerf wrote: post #32
IntrepidWorm wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking strictly of mineral removal this rings true. However, processing large volumes of seawater can still have a detrimental effect on the local ecosystem, because pumping large volumes of seawater is extremely stressful to all of the seawater-loving organisms that get pulled along for the ride.

See also the trouble around desalinization plants. In absolute terms, we couldn't hope to remove enough salt from the oceans to be even so much as detectable in the absolute sense, but in local terms water with increased salinity can cause problems. Oceans are not hives of life everywhere you look, it's really just in spots, and those spots are generally right where we want to be and to put our desalization plants. P…

See also, thermohaline circulation. A major factor in the global climate is the flow of water pulled north along the Atlantic's surface due to the sinking of denser, saltier water.

Not going to be an issue with your average desalination plant, but certainly proves the point that water masses can behave differently in big, non-trivial ways due to their salinity.

Re: Metal Without Mining

#49

Post by EarlKing »

geuis wrote: post #43

This entire website and company reads like a penny pink sheets stock scam. "Magrathea sells metal using multi-year supply agreements in countries with enforceable contract law. Supply agreements allow our partners to build in magnesium with confidence. We prevent price instability from Chinese trade manipulation so the innovative products of our partners can succeed in the market." There's absolutely no information o…

"Greetings to you. This is a recorded announcement as I am afraid we are all out at the moment. The commercial council of Magrathea thanks you for your esteemed visit but regrets that the entire planet is temporairly closed for business. If you would like to leave your name and the address of a planet where you can be contacted kindly speak when you hear the tone... *BEEEEEEEP*."

Re: Metal Without Mining

#50

Post by EarlKing »

UberFly wrote: post #31

That website is really lacking any worthwhile details. Are they just fishing for venture capital at this point?

Well, you must understand that they only just awoke from a few million years of sleep to discover their entire cleaning staff is dead. Who's going to pick up the bodies? That's what nobody seems to have an answer to...
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