Insatiable Demand for MolybdenumThe excerpt below is from Resource Investor
Written by: By Jack Lifton
https://www.resourceinvestor.com/pebble.asp?relid=37367
If you just look at the most current U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) monthly report on molybdenum you will find some very interesting numbers. The U.S. produced 60,000 tonnes of molybdenum from domestic mining operations in 2006. Seventy five percent of the molybdenum used in this country in 2006 went into the production of specialty steels. The U.S. produced 80 million tonnes of steel in 2006. China in 2006 produced 40,000 tonnes of molybdenum from domestic mines, and it produced more than 400 million tonnes of steel.
Therefore, America used more molybdenum to produce specialty steels than China produced molybdenum in total in 2006. Its good to know that the country in which ‘stainless’ steel and high strength steels were invented, stainless steel as recently as 1919, is still leading the world in the production and the utilization for innovative purposes of the most technologically advanced steels. A great number of those innovations, moreover, are based on properties developed through the study molybdenum alloying chemistry and metallurgy.
For example, America domestically is building more pipelines for the transmission of oil and gas than any other single country on earth. True some of these pipelines originate in Canada, or Mexico, or even farther out, but I am counting them as American if they terminate in the U.S. and are financed by American companies. These pipelines are dependent for meeting their technical specifications for transporting, at a wide range of temperatures, more and more corrosive grades of oil and gas on the properties of molybdenum as an alloying element in steel, specialty welding alloys, and on molybdenum compounds used as corrosion and heat resistant lubricants.
Molybdenum alloy steels have been developed and are now also being used to retrofit America’s electric power plants which use steam or gas driven turbines, particularly nuclear plants, to resist corrosion and ‘creep,’ the permanent deformation of metal components under long term high temperature operations, as well as to resist corrosion and cracking in cooling systems which must be treated to resist microbial growth or salt water. Significantly advances in molybdenum alloying of steel have also improved, and in some cases even made possible, the use of exotic, much more efficient, coolants such as molten lead or molten salts for the design of future power plants running at efficiency-producing higher temperatures.
Flying under almost all analysts’ radars is the fact that the design of the storage vessels for nuclear waste which will be needed ultimately for presently existing waste to be placed in the national repository at Yucca Flats, Nevada, which is now scheduled to be opened, in 2017, calls for around 17,000 tonnes of molybdenum.
Now, multiply the above mostly future demand for molybdenum, for pipelines around the world; for retrofitting power plants around the world; and for storing nuclear waste from nuclear plants around the world by a factor of as much as five, because, just as an example, the new 20,000 miles of pipeline construction in the U.S., using at least one ton of molybdenum per mile, is only 20% of the world’s currently planned pipeline construction and you get what could be literally and insatiable demand for molybdenum for the foreseeable future.