Profit From Ucore’s Astonishing, “Spider Web” Technology
By Byron King | August 17, 2012
Spider Web nano-tech may become THE new technology for future metal separation applications. It goes beyond RE as well. There are surely apps here for uranium, copper, gold, silver and much more. Stand by. We’re just on the ground floor for this.
THE New Technology For Future Metal Processing…
I have fabulous news for you about Ucore Rare Metals (UCU: TSX-V). If you follow the rare earths (RE) space, then you know that Ucore has been working to develop a mineral deposit on Bokan Mountain, offshore Ketchikan, Alaska.
Good Vibe Towards Ucore
Let’s back up. I’ve been writing about Ucore for about eighteen months. As with many players in the RE space, the Ucore share price was down in the 40-cent range when I first took a look at it. Then the share price moved up to $1.20 during the exciting phase of RE euphoria last year (2011).
This year, during the small-cap resource blow-down, the Ucore share price has drifted to under 30-cents in recent days. Feel free to buy.
Why the good vibe towards Ucore? Is it because they’ve got their geology squared away, with an outstanding effort to map and define the RE ore body at Bokan? Well, that’s nice, but what have you done for me lately?
Is it because Ucore has a superb mining plan that’s coming into shape, with a novel X-ray fluorescence method of identifying and separating the useful RE-bearing ore from the junky country rock? That’s nice, too, but what else have you done for me lately?
Okay, what has Ucore done for you lately? How about funding and coming up with utterly LEAPFROG TECHNOLOGY in terms of separating the RE elements from the soup! Yes, that’s the hard part of this business. Yet that’s the serious money-maker. And wow! It’s rocket science. Really. They even have a rocket scientist who figured it out.
Rocket Science?
Meet Richard Hammen, PhD in organic chemistry. Dr. Hammen lives in his hometown of Missoula, Montana. But he used to be the Director of Chemistry for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena. Yes, that JPL. How smart do you have to be to be the Director of Chemistry at JPL? You’re about to find out.
A while back, Ucore hired Dr. Hammen to work on the problem of separating the actual RE elements. And it’s quite a problem.
Go back to that mine and mill. You mine the rock, right? Then you pull it out of the hole in the ground. Then you crush it, to separate ore-bearing minerals from the stuff you don’t want — the quartz feldspar, mica and all the other rock-forming minerals that are just useless weight and volume. So far, so good.
Now you take the ore-bearing minerals — let’s say, fluoro-apatite, a crystal structure of fluorine and RE elements all bonded together by phosphate, with a dose of calcium in the mix. Oh, and some annoying uranium and thorium. Now what?
You dissolve the ore in acid. What kind of acid? It depends on how much you want to spend. Hydrochloric acid is cheaper than, say, phosphoric acid or nitric acid. But some acids work better than others. I can’t give out trade secrets for free here.
At any rate, at the end of the day, you have a bunch of elements, molecules and ions all dissolved in acid. That’s your soup. What do you do?
First, you want to get rid of the uranium and thorium. Those elements are radioactive, and you want to eliminate that issue right up front. How? You use very small tweezers to pluck out each element. (No, I’m just kidding. No tweezers.) Ideally, you filter the uranium and thorium out. Again, how? How do you filter out uranium and thorium? Run it through a strainer or something? That’s hard science.
Spider Web
Well, you use sort of a strainer. Dr. Hammen and colleagues (including his very smart sons) have come up with a patented technology called “Spider Web.”
Outstanding Investments readers may remember a couple weeks ago, when I discussed how I witnessed an experiment using “white sand”. I was speaking in generalities then, but now I can tell you the real story at UCore.
Basically, Dr. Hammen takes angular white quartz sand — angular is better than spherical, due to adhesion issues. Then he treats the sand with proprietary polymers — and I can’t say more than that on the topic.
The end result is a nano-technology precipitation system that speeds up reaction kinetics by a factor of 100 to 1,000, or maybe more because it all happens so darned fast that it’s within the blink of an eye.
Speeds up reaction kinetics? What does that mean? Well, the conventional way of separating elements from the above-described acid soup is using things called “resins.” This term covers a series of complex substances, and I won’t take the time to detail them here. Suffice to say that with resins, your separation times are measured in terms of days and weeks, even months.
But with Spider Web nano-tech, the element separation occurs in a matter of seconds or less. Super-fast. That’s the speeded-up reaction kinetics.
Ligand Chemistry
So as a practical matter, what happens? First, take the acid soup, filled with “good” elements like REs, which you want, and other stuff that you don’t want, like uranium and thorium. Run it through the Spider Web and filter out the uranium and thorium. Now you can deal with the uranium and thorium on your own terms. It’s not part of the RE mix, and you have a “clean” acid soup after one pass.
Next, take the residual material and run it through another Spider Web that’s specifically designed to separate RE elements. In fact, you can separate specific RE elements, one-by-one — dysprosium, erbium, terbium, lutetium, etc., all through the Lanthanide Series of the Periodic Table.
More colloquially, here’s an example. It’s like reaching into a bowl of M&Ms, and your sticky fingers have the ability just to pull out the yellow ones. Then reach in and pull out the red ones. Then the green ones. Etc.
What’s the scientific basis here? Ligand chemistry — the science of using organic molecules to bind metals. Two common examples of ligand chemistry that come to mind are hemoglobin in your blood — iron bound organically, to transport oxygen. Or chlorophyll, in which a magnesium ion is the basis for photosynthesis.
One practical example of ligand chemistry at work is a medical treatment called chelation therapy, used in clinical toxicology. Let’s say you’re exposed to poison or heavy metals, like lead. The doctor infuses your blood with organic chelating agents — synthetic amino acids — that scavenge the lead or poison out of your system.
That is, in chelation therapy, great big organic molecules (“big” by molecular standards) swim around, and find the bad elements or molecules, and attach to them. Then your body can filter the organic molecules through your liver, and expel the bad material in the usual manner.
The Hammen Spider Web technology uses this kind of ligand and chelation science. The polymer-bound white sand acts as a filter. You pass the acid soup, with the RE elements, through the Spider Web. There’s a fast — very fast — takedown of the elements that you want. Then you reverse the flow to recover the exact material that you just filtered. It’s kind of like your liver filtering out the chelating agents with the heavy metal attached.
Afterwards, you can precipitate out the RE elements. What do you want? An oxide? A dioxide? A salt? That all depends on the downstream use for the material. More of that rocket science.
Ucore’s Breakthrough
So where does Ucore go with this? Well, the technology works on the lab bench. I’ve seen it. To my knowledge and understanding, there’s no chemical reason why it should not scale-up. In fact, from an industrial standpoint, you could probably just build modular units of modest size, and add them up in series to match the available volumes of input.
Still, this technology will require more engineering and testing. So I expect to see an announcement from Ucore, in the not-too-distant future, about building a pilot scale plant to refine the ideas.
In my view, this Spider Web technical development vaults Ucore into a front-running position in the RE race. It’s a very positive development for Ucore. Again, as I said above, feel free to buy Ucore shares. This is a critical breakthrough.
Indeed, I should say that Ucore management took a huge gamble with funding this kind of leading-edge research by Dr. Hammen. Dr. Hammen has taken two decades’ worth of modern research in organic chemistry and biochemistry — and many techniques used in the pharmaceuticals industry — and aplied this level of science to the mining biz.
I don’t believe that the resin-makers of the world (Dow Chemical, among them) know what’s about to hit them. It’s sort of like how Kodak invented digital photography, but didn’t market the concept because they were making too much money off old-fashioned film. Kodak is now in bankruptcy, selling off parts to pay creditors. Dow Chemical has a lot more up its sleeve than resin sales, but you get the point.
Ucore’s sponsorship of Spider Web nano-tech may become THE new technology for future metal separation applications. It goes beyond RE as well. There are surely apps here for uranium, copper, gold, silver and much more. Stand by. We’re just on the ground floor for this.
Spider Web is leapfrog tech. It’s revolutionary. And as the late Chinese leader Chou en Lai once remarked to Henry Kissinger, when asked about the significance of the French Revolution, “Henry, it’s still too early to say.”
There’s much more to say about Spider Web and Ucore. But I’ll save it for later, because now I want you to know what’s going on.
That’s all for now. Thanks for subscribing to ESI.
Have a great weekend. Best wishes,
Byron W. King
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