Bill: A lot of catalysts in Europe and Japan use Palladium (since it costs half as much as Pt), but Pd is not as good as Pt since it suffers from sulphur poisoning, so you could actually double the catalysts use at $150/oz pt. There other new products, such as in cities, home catalysts to remove CO from air, or the car grill catalysts that ford and Engelhardt were developing but abandoned, which could become cost effective at $150/ oz. At $100/oz, lining for chemical reactors, glass reactors come into play. If platinum were not that expensive, many additional applications could become cost effective. Of course, one would not get $350/ounce but I think that if they can extract the stuff for under $100/ oz, there will be growth in demand.
The main question is really, what will the extraction cost be. If we are to believe Twiford's post of last september, and theycan leach 20% of the goodies and these 20% are about 3 equivalent ounces, they will do fine. My only problem is that if last September they had these results, why now in February they have not processed few thousand tons by leaching (since they have 100 ton day leaching facility "ready to run" and got into positive cahs flow. This puzzles me.
Zeev |
