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From the same article: "Supplies of pure titanium are rare", and at $9/lb, it is over 10x the price of Aluminum. http://www.metalprices.com/p/TitaniumFreeChart

Relative value for strength (weight of an aluminum frame vs weight of an equivalently strong titanium frame) is left as an exercise for the bored...

Only $200/pound? Really? I was looking a few months ago and the price was still up around $800/kilo. If you can get a bead on that price and put it on the market you'd be doing pretty well. The ore value is much more difficult, because it depends on "what" it's coming from, and how much you need to work to get it a non-ore state. Just like you said. It's actually cheaper to get it during mining/refining production than it is to get it from recycling from everything I've learned the last few years. Getting it from recycling is just too bloody expensive, and would probably drive the price up around $2-4k/kilo.

To be honest, Indium isn't considered a rare earth in the metal markets, it's considered a minor metal with low demand(you don't need much of it, and when you do use it a little bit goes a long way), though I am a metal market newbie(only been playing it off and on for the last two years, I make my bread and butter in currencies). It's plentiful, and large amounts of are available in storage and on demand. But really, where there's iron or zinc mining, you can get indium. And two of the worlds largest sources of it are in Canada.

Nickle costs about four times as much per pound as copper.
http://www.metalprices.com/FreeSite/metals/nickelalloy/nickelalloy.asp
http://www.metalprices.com/FreeSite/metals/cu/cu.asp

Nickle costs about four times as much per pound as copper.
http://www.metalprices.com/FreeSite/metals/nickelalloy/nickelalloy.asp
http://www.metalprices.com/FreeSite/metals/cu/cu.asp

Price of copper: $2.90/lb
Price of silver: $16.50/oz

Silver's traded between $15 and $20/oz for most of this year and last.

http://www.metalprices.com/FreeSite/metals/cu/cu.asp

We dealt with several outages last year and early this year due to copper thefts in Dallas where they broke fiber while stealing the copper. They've stopped. Railroads were having problems because the brake piping on some cars and traction motor cables on locomotives are copper and brass, reports suggest they've almost come to to a halt.

Yep. Copper prices have dropped considerably in the past few months:

http://www.metalprices.com/FreeSite/metals/cu/cu.asp

reminds me of stuff like this :

http://shop.ebay.com/items/?_nkw=copper+bullion&_fromfsb=0&_trksid=m270.l1313

some of them are ridiculously priced imho, especially if you compare them to :

http://www.metalprices.com/FreeSite/metals/cu/cu.asp#

and to go a bit further off-topic : yes, there's even "lead bullion" =P

http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-12-av-oz-999-Pure-Lead-Bullion-Bar-Ingot_W0QQitemZ380056862549QQcmdZViewItem?_trksid=p3286.m20.l1116

... As I read through the replies to this article it occurred to me I should investigate the possibility of purchasing large quantities of metal futures. So I headed over to http://www.metalprices.com/ and realized it was a good time to buy aluminum and tin.

Thanks again!!

Rhenium costs £6.50 per gram if you want to buy it on ebay; boron is £13.50 a gram on ebay because the one seller there is selling an exotic crystalline form. [ebay search for 'rhenium metal' or 'boron element']

So making ReB2 using source materials bought in small quantities on ebay would be about ten pounds (about twenty dollars) a gram; probably the cost of the electricity to run the furnace would be more than that, and the depreciation on the furnace more still.

I paid ten Euros (about fifteen dollars) for the diamond sample I have, which is two milligrams, and various diamond-industry sites give prices on the order of a hundred thousand dollars per gram; of course, rather like microchips, diamond pricing is exponential in the size because you have to find one big diamond rather than gluing two small ones together.

But ReB2 will be competing with diamond abrasive, and http://www.diamondtech.com/products/categories/dia mond_powder_price_list.html will sell you twenty grams (a hundred carats) of half-micron diamond dust for fifty dollars which is a lot cheaper than either the rhenium or the boron.

http://www.metalprices.com/FreeSite/metals/re/re.a sp suggests that bulk rhenium is $3000 per pound, which is a bit over half the ebay price above; some sites, I think mostly run by gold bugs, suggest $6000 per troy ounce, so either there's an opportunity for arbitrage, or they've confused rhenium and rhodium.

The not-so-trustworthy-looking http://biotsavart.tripod.com/bmt.htm has boron at about $5000 per kilogram, so $2200 per pound; still these are orders of magnitude cheaper than diamond.

100kg of aluminum costs around $200 at ~$2/kg. Looking at the graph on this page for Aluminum manufacturing costs, about 75% of the cost is raw materials and supplies (mostly the aluminum). So that's at least $50 net to fill up your "tank" assuming perfect effeciency in converting that aluminum.

Neglecting the costs of taking the recycled aluminum oxide out of your car and turning it back into Al rods, the maintaince costs for the fuel station, infrastructure costs to build all this, and so forth. Shipping costs will of course astronomically climb since metal can only be transfered in by train, truck or ship unlike cheap pipelines and is also no longer an easily moveable liquid. Nevermind the cost of your aluminum powered car itself, or the engineering difficulties inherent in moving a 100kg metal coil into your engine, this "upgrade" is already going to break the bank.

I think I'll leave the hydrogen production outside of the vehicle, thank you. Nice try, but no dice.

Don't be so sure. The thing is, asteroids are valuable.

Check out this page and read some of the value of asteroids.

There are around one million asteroids with diameters of 1km. On average, it'll contain (among other metals), 30 million tons of nickel (for example, picked randomly).

According to metalprices.com, the market price for nickel per metric tonne is $8950 USD on the London Metal Exchange as of 2/28/2003. A little math suggests that the value of one of our average asteroids purely for the nickel would be $268 billion. According to the first page, the platinum contained would be worth more than $150 billion. Not to mention the cobalt, iron, etc in an asteroid.

So what will it cost to mine? $100 billion? $200 billion? $300 billion can go far, and you're still far less than the current market value of just ONE ASTEROID. Of course, there's dangers of flooding the market, but you can manipulate the market (DeBeers diamonds, anyone?).

As for the moon, you have helium-3, which is damned good for fusion.

It's definately worth mining in space. The asteroids are worth an incredible fortune, and the moon is a great place to put a base.

I hope we do try. If we try, we'll do it. Only time will tell if it was worth it, but we must make the first step. We'll never get there or get the tech to get there if we don't try.

The average metal concentration of sea water is:

Cu: 150 ng/kg = mg/tonne

Au: 0.02 ng/kg = mg/tonne

Pd: 0.04 ng/kg = mg/tonne

Rh: 0.08 ng/kg = mg/tonne

Metal prices, in rough numbers:

Cu: 0.64 us$/lb = 1.410 us$/kg

Au: 278 us$/oz = 8.90 us$/g

Pd: 360 us$/oz = 11.60 us$/g

Rh: 1600 us$/oz = 51.50 us$/g

So the in-situ value of these four metals are:

Cu: 1.3*10^18 t * 150 mg/t / 10^6 * 1.4 $/kg = 2.73*10^14 us$

Au: 1.3*10^18 t * 0.02 mg/t / 1000 * 8.9 $/g = 2.31*10^14 us$

Pd: 1.3*10^18 t * 0.04 mg/t / 1000 * 11.6 $/g = 6.03*10^14 us$

Rh: 1.3*10^18 t * 0.08 mg/t / 1000 * 51.5 $/g = 53.56*10^14 us$

So the insitu value of these 4 metals exceeds US$64,000 Trillion! Who needs a freaking space program to supply metals to earth?

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