Archives for Commodities - Page 4
Background There are two principal types of coal: coking and thermal. Coking coal is heated in an air free oven to produce coke and various volatiles. The coke is virtually all carbon and is used as a reductant with iron ore to produce steel. Thermal coal is of a lower…
There are currently 118 elements in the periodic table, of which 33 have no stable isotopes. The first 94 occur naturally on Earth while the remaining 24 are synthetic, formed by way of nuclear reaction. View an interactive periodic table here Copper was the first element to be discovered in…
World iron ore production in 2018 was 2.5B tonnes, with the largest producers being Australia (900Mt), Brazil (460Mt), China (335Mt) and India (205Mt). The biggest importers were China (69% of all imports), Japan (7.5%), South Korea (4.8%) and Germany (2.7%). Australia Australian iron ore production has grown at a CAGR…
Magnesium is a soft light metal that easily ignites in air and burns with a bright white flame. It is used in flares, steelmaking and electrochemicals, but its main use is as an alloy with aluminium. The resultant alloy is lighter than aluminium and has improved mechanical and fabrication characteristics,…
I last posted on ASX silver stocks on 27 May 2020. Since then the post has averaged about 30 views per day, quite high for a non-promoted blog. But perhaps not surprising given the out-performance of silver since then. Silver peaked at USD29.50/oz on 6 August, it has had a…
The halogens are Fluorine (F), Chlorine (Cl), Bromine (Br), Iodine (I) and Astatine (At). The halogens, group 17 in the periodic table, have some interesting properties. They have a high nuclear charge and are therefore highly reactive. They are also unusual in that they exist in all three states; fluorine…