Tim Worstall sent this mail to me.
Slightly edited
My name is Tim Worstall and I run a metal trading
company called TTE
Metals with our main base here in sunny Moscow. We deal in many exotics
and rare earth metals and as a result of being offered Sc in various
forms by all sorts of people, just to have it rejected or even laughed
out of court by western traders, we decided to do some real research.
The market for Sc is closely bound in with the research being done by a
number of companies into Sc Al alloys ( the metal market, and the high
purity oxides for metal halide lamps being tiny.).
For example:
- Emtech corp ( based at the Ashurst Technology Centre in Pa.)
is going into production with welding wire that is 0.2 % Sc.
- Alcoa has patented a method of making Al/Sc alloy ( rather better than
the Russian method. Here about 65 % of Sc ends up in alloy, at Alcoa, 98
% .)
- Mitsubishi and Sumitomo are both researching.
We supply a number of companies with Sc2O3 for research into this
area
but not at the type of prices commonly quoted.
We are well aware that the market is rather chicken and egg, in that
while prices are so high no one will manufacture alloy, while without
alloy manufacture there is not a market to bring the prices down. We have
attempted to leapfrog this problem by convincing the world's largst
producer ( capacity 20 MT per year ) that they must make available
material at more reasonable costs in order to create the market.
To this end, to anyone who is actively in the market for Sc2O3 (
standard
Russian metallurgical grade ) we are able to offer two " deals ":
- The first is for "sample" packs of 10 kg of material, enough to
experiment with and also to check consistency. These are priced at $
9,500 delivered.
- The second is for production run quantities. Given that a normal furnace
would take 35 Mt , and that master alloy would be about 2 % Sc, this
would imply that commercial orders would be about 1 MT of Sc2O3
per melt
of master alloy. At these quantites we would be looking for $ 500 per
kilo on an FOB basis ( costs for transport would be approx $ 5.00 per
kilo to the USA.)
We are looking at how the market develops to see whether we should also
be adding Sc extraction to our own tailings processing plant in the CIS
so that we will be able to offer consistent long term supplies.
Also, to anyone who is researching the market for Sc2O3 we can offer
a
consultancy service about who produces, who uses etc.
Yours from Sunny Moscow,
Tim Worstall.
