Accordingly, on May 28, the Australian Federal Foreign Investment Commission (FIRB) approved the contract to buy 100% of the shares of the Roper Valley iron ore mine project of the Australian subsidiary of Hoa Phat Group. . Roper Valley iron ore mine has estimated reserves of 320 million tons. After the transaction is completed, Hoa Phat is the owner of the Roper Valley iron ore project with an estimated reserve of 320 million tons and a mining capacity of 4 million tons/year. Hoa Phat said that the group will continue to research to invest in buying some new iron mines in Australia, in order to ensure a long-term supply of at least 50% of the Group’s iron ore demand (equivalent to 10 million tons of iron ore). /year). Besides, the raw material that constitutes up to 30% of the steel price is coking coal, which is currently imported by Hoa Phat from Australia – the world’s largest coking coal supplier market. The Group is studying to buy a few Australian coking coal mines in the future to gradually become self-sufficient in this important production material. Talking to Dat Viet, metallurgical expert – Prof. Dr. Pham Pho assessed, this step of Hoa Phat is very wise, helping businesses to proactively source raw materials in a stable and long-term way. According to him, normally Australia rarely sells the whole mine, but now, due to political and trade tensions with China, Beijing has limited the purchase of iron ore from Canberra, on condition that Australia sells the whole ore mine to Vietnam. should be easier without raising prices. Roper Valley iron ore mine has estimated reserves of 320 million tons. Photo: Hoa Phat “With this step, Hoa Phat can take the initiative in the source of raw materials, only have to worry about exploitation and transportation. Enterprises must send people to supervise and operate, along with a team of workers in your country to exploit. Most of Vietnam’s steel mills rely on scrap iron for production. However, the current scrap iron and steel is limited, the price has increased, the quality is poor, not to mention the difficulty in transportation. It can be said that enterprises producing steel by electric furnace technology, using scrap iron will face many difficulties in the future. Therefore, this step of Hoa Phat is very important,” said Professor Pho. The expert also highly appreciated Hoa Phat’s plan to buy coking coal mine. However, he also noted, buying coal mines to produce coke is very difficult, the production process of coke costs a lot of money. Therefore, it is often easier for a business to cooperate with a partner in Australia than to be completely self-sufficient. “Of course, businesses choose depending on specific conditions to produce coke. To produce coke, it is necessary to use fat coal, not coal. The carbon content in it is high and contains a certain amount of oil. When heated, , the amount of oil evaporates, leaving pores. These pores will make the air flow, not clogged and it will provide fuel continuously. If the business can buy ore mines, and at the same time associate with partners in Australia to produce coke, it is very good. This depends on the operating ability of the business, if you want to produce cups, you must have good experts, and ore is simple – just dig, treat and bring back. If the direction of the business is to buy coke mines, then transporting coke to Vietnam, coking production in Vietnam is better and also simpler, because the production process of coking coal has many other products. For example, when coking, the gas that rises contains a lot of fuel, in which CO is very high, gives high value of electricity, provides for the process of electricity production, boiler heating…”, Prof. TSKH Pham Analysis Street. He also noted that producing steel from ore has a more complicated process than producing steel from scrap (iron scrap) and is also cheaper. The quality of steel depends on the manufacturing process. Even scrap steel wants to produce good steel, it must be carefully selected and classified. Currently, scrap steel in the world is still small, with many impurities. When buying, manufacturing enterprises must carefully select and classify, which costs a lot of money. Regarding the problem of environmental pollution treatment, Professor Pho said that blast furnaces are more complicated than electric furnaces that use scrap iron and steel. When the blast furnace emits gas, it is necessary to invest in equipment to recover coal dust for reuse. Similarly, the exhaust gas contains a lot of CO, which if left to fly into the environment is very toxic, so it must be recovered to put back to burn in electric furnaces or furnaces. This does not mean that electric furnaces do not have to deal with environmental pollution. The electric furnace itself must also be equipped with equipment to capture waste gas, coal dust and filter. Because technology and equipment to deal with environmental pollution are very expensive, according to Prof. Pho, it is important whether steel factories are willing to invest or not.

The new digital currency Chia consumes a lot of hard drives. Photo: Guardian The Guardian (UK) reported that American businessman Bram Cohen created a digital currency called Chia. Accordingly, Chia aims to be more advanced than Bitcoin and Ethereum in reducing the energy consumed to mine. Cryptocurrency mining often depends on high power consuming computers to handle complex algorithms. However, Chia requires the user to spend a large amount of control to form and store any number of numbers. Given the fact that the price of cryptocurrencies has skyrocketed in recent times, the demand for hard drives specifically for Chia mining has also skyrocketed. A type of semiconductor drive (SSD) called NVMe, which is used to generate random numbers, is also highly sought after. Over the past week, the prices of hard drives and NVMe have been on an uphill trend. One point worth noting is that SSDs are inherently limited in number. Digital currency expert David Gerard told the Guardian: “Instead of consuming power, Chia gobbles up SSDs at a special rate.” According to CoinMarketCap on May 26, in the last 24 hours, there was 50 million USD worth of Chia traded, quite modest compared to 50 billion USD of Bitcoin. However, Chia’s potential keeps the demand for hard drives still on the rise. In the past, graphics cards, which have been an important element of video games and artificial intelligence research, have also fallen into sharp shortages due to demand from Ethereum miners. In another development, on May 26, Iran issued a ban on Bitcoin mining to prevent power shortages.

The Republic of Nauru is an island nation in Micronesia in the South Pacific Ocean. With approximately 12,000 inhabitants living on an area of ​​21 square kilometers, Nauru is the smallest country in the South Pacific Ocean, and the third smallest in the world by area. However, the island nation was once rich enough to rival Saudi Arabia thanks to its abundant phosphate deposits made up of bird droppings. Bird droppings accumulated centuries ago on this island. Phosphate is an important ingredient in fertilizer production. The huge reserves of phosphate on the island of Nauru are the result of bird droppings (guano) over several thousand years. Because phosphates are located close to the ground, humans can separate them easily. Nauru’s economy peaked in 1975 thanks to revenue from phosphate mining, when the island’s GDP per capita was estimated at $50,000, ranking 2nd in the world. Nauru’s economy boomed, people lived better without having to fish or cultivate or gather. Western lifestyle is also spreading here, making the locals more and more lazy and like fast food. With a huge amount of money from mining, Nauru built an airport, even bought 7 planes to serve traffic and tourism. “Not many people care about whether the investment is profitable or not. Dollars are even used as toilet paper. Life was like an everyday party,” recalls an unnamed former president of Nauru. As resources dried up and investors withdrew, Nauru was left with heavy environmental pollution and no main source of income. The fishing and agricultural sectors have been abandoned and polluted, while the people are too used to a life of enjoyment. To get the phosphates, workers had to peel off all the topsoil and separate the phosphates from the ancient coral columns. So, after the phosphate disappeared, only tall coral reefs and depressions between them were visible—a type of terrain where humans could not live or plant trees. The value of the investment fund managing the island’s resources also decreased. The fund also made many misguided investments in Air Nauru and overseas hotels. These investments never yield returns and even stifle the domestic economy. In Nauru, visitors will have nothing to visit because this island has only 30 km of roads, no museums, cultural heritage, hotels or even rivers and mountains to explore. Every year, only about 200 visitors come to Nauru and they are mainly social activists or scientific researchers. From a rich country, using dollars to make toilet paper, Nauru fell to a poor island nation with a GDP of only about 102 million USD, the second lowest in the world after Tuvalu. About 90% of Nauruans are unemployed and corruption and money laundering are rampant. The people of Nauru instead of finding their way to economic development, they leave their fate to international aid as well as look for cheap imported food sources, which contain a lot of fat and sugar such as low nutrition, from Australia or New Zealand. Please watch the video: Beautiful natural scenery in the least populous countries in the world

Many countries around the world are silently deploying plans to exploit Helium-3 from the Moon. Photo: Johnson Search Group Why does America want to return to the Moon after almost half a century? Why does China’s Hang Nga ship collect land on the Moon? Why Russia shook hands with China to build a Moon research station? And why has the Moon become the indispensable spot of great powers? Some say that it is to satisfy human curiosity, there are also opinions that it is to demonstrate the power of space science and technology of a nation. All is speculation, but the most important reason can be said that the Moon itself is an invaluable natural mine. As humanity is facing an energy crisis, governments around the world are looking for alternative sources of energy. High-tech companies have been exploiting non-fossil energy sources from the wind, the sun and the waves full of rivers. But that is not enough. Many countries have begun to look for new sources of energy outside the Earth. During resource exploration on the Moon, Chinese experts have discovered that there are more than 100 types of mineral resources on the Moon, not only have dozens of essential energy sources for the Earth, but also one The perfect energy source – Helium-3. Rare gas resources on the Moon. Photo: Sohu Scientists have found radioactive substances such as helium in soil on the Moon. After further analysis and determination, they found a large amount of Helium-3. Helium-3 is a valuable fuel source, because it can generate extremely high heat through fusion fusion without emitting almost no harmful radioactive neutrons. As such, fourth generation nuclear weapons using pure Helium-3 will generate little or no radioactive dust. Why does the Moon have so much Helium-3? During internal nuclear fusion, the Sun will generate a large amount of Helium-3, and Helium-3 will fall on surrounding planets after being blown by the solar wind. Because the Earth’s surface is covered by a thick atmosphere, the solar wind cannot reach the Earth’s surface, so the natural reserve of Helium-3 on Earth is very low. The Moon has almost no atmosphere, so the solar wind can directly reach the surface of the Moon, and a large amount of Helium-3 will be deposited on the surface of the Moon. The amount of Helium-3 on Earth is very small and Chinese scientists estimate that the reserve on Earth is only about 500 kg, difficult to meet the needs of mankind. The soil on the lunar surface contains at least 1 million tons of Helium-3, 2 million times more than the Earth. Experts calculated that 100 tons of Helium-3 could meet the world’s electricity generation needs in one year, and 1 million tons would be enough for 10,000 years! If Helium-3 in lunar soil could be developed and used, the construction of a nuclear power plant on the Moon could be done on the spot. But it’s not easy to separate Helium-3 from the Moon. First, it is necessary to heat the lunar soil to more than 700 degrees C to separate Helium-3. However, there is no oxygen on the Moon and is very difficult to burn. Moreover, to extract Helium-3, it must be based on the Moon, so far no country can do it. Since Helium-3 has significant energy and reserves advantages, the future Moon is more likely to become the “Persian Gulf” energy that major powers compete in the new century. In December 2020, the Chinese ship Hang Nga 5 returned safely after a mission to explore the Moon, bringing about 2kg of rock and soil from this planet to Earth. Under former President Trump, the 2020 NASA budget allocation plan shows that Washington wants to send people to the moon again before 2028. Former US Vice President Mike Pence also declared the United States to be the first power. first put a man on the moon in the 21st century. From unmanned exploration to manned landing on the Moon, and setting up lunar bases, China and the Western nations have consumed countless manpower and materials to not only satisfy scientific achievement. Behind that is endless resource ambition.

(Source: koreaittimes)

POSCO, the world’s fifth-largest steel producer by production, said on April 14 that it would build a factory in Korea to extract lithium hydroxide, a key ingredient in electric vehicle battery (EV).

POSCO’s announcement said last week that the Board of Directors approved a plan to complete a factory in the industrial city of Gwangyang in southern Korea by 2023.

The plant, which will start construction in the first half of this year, is expected to have an annual production capacity of 43,000 tons of lithium hydroxide, enough to produce about 1 million electric vehicle batteries.

POSCO said they plan to import spodumene for the extract lithium hydroxide at the factory above from Australia.

In addition, POSCO plans to start building another plant near the Salar del Hombre Muerto salt lake in northern Argentina in the coming months. The plant is expected to have an annual capacity of 25,000 tons of lithium.

POSCO purchased lithium mining rights in Argentina from Australian mining company Galaxy Resources for $ 280 million in 2018. Currently, the steel producer has the mining rights for 22,800 hectares of the area.

According to POSCO, the site is confirmed to have lithium reserves of 13.5 million tons, enough to produce batteries for about 370 million electric cars.

The South Korean giant steel giant has stepped up its activities in the electric vehicle segment in recent years as part of its business diversification strategy.

In February 2021, POSCO Chemical, a subsidiary of POSCO, announced plans to invest 275.8 billion won ($ 248 million) to expand the production capacity of cathode, a key component for batteries. EV for a factory in Gwangyang.

In addition, POSCO Chemical also plans to set up factories in China and Europe to promptly supply cathode to EV battery manufacturers.

The EV battery market is on a strong momentum as automakers around the world are racing to convert to electric and eco-friendly vehicles.

This wave comes in the midst of tightening regulations on greenhouse gas emissions by governments – which scientists say is the cause of global warming.