Archives for Commodities - Page 16
There is a common belief that London Metal Exchange (“LME”) stocks of metal reflect the underlying, physical supply/demand balance for that metal. For example, at the beginning of 2015 LME stocks of zinc plunged from 700,000 tons to 440,000 tons over a five month period. This was taken as a…
Lithium is currently one of the most popular members of the periodic table, due to enthusiasm about the growing demand for lithium ion batteries for cars and storage. There is excitement about graphite, for similar reasons. Read more on graphite here. Lithium is the third element in the periodic table,…
Copper is one of the most useful of all metals. Its most important modern property is that it is highly conductive. It has many other applications and was first used over 7,000 years ago for containers and for weapons. Its use today in electricity transmission, electronics and consumer goods makes…
Read the prologue to specialty metals and minerals here. History Antimony has been used for thousands of years. Antimony sulphide (stibnite) was used as a cosmetic, as long ago as 3,000BC, in Sumer (today’s south-central Iraq) and Egypt. The sulphide was finely ground and applied to the eyes and eyelashes.…
There are currently six liquefied natural gas (“LNG”) projects under construction in Australia. According to the International Energy Agency, all of these projects would lose money at the current oil price of USD47/barrel(“bbl”), and most would struggle even with oil at USD60/bbl. I suspect that oil would have to approach…
This is a brief summary of a post by Gail Tverberg at Our Finite World. Gail demonstrates a link between the growth in world energy usage and growth in GDP, as shown in the chart below. In essence she says that this connection is a result of the link between…