This article by Amanda Kay incorrectly quotes the USGS report that it references.
It says
“the global scandium market is “small relative to most other metals.” This is best exemplified by global production and consumption of the metal, which is estimated at between just
10 to 15 MT annually.”
The USGS report says on page 145,
“The global supply and consumption of scandium was estimated to be about
10 tons to 15 tons per year.”
https://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/scandium/mcs-2018-scand.pdf
There is a world of difference betwen 10 to 15 million tons and 10 to 15 tons. This was a glaring error when I read the article as the world’s annual production of copper is about 18 million metric tons. It makes you wonder about the quality of information you get from the internet. In the old days reporters would have editors and glaringly obvious mistakes which are central to the theme of the article they are writing about would be picked-up before publication.
Scandium is a very interesting metal that seems to have some great potential in the avaiation and other industries but given the current apparent almost non-existent market and the difficulty of the extraction process it’s hard to understand how the industry will get its kick-start. If the US and the West are serious about developing technologies and products that use scandium, Australia would be an obvious destination for a mine given our close political and milatary links. The problem is that the downstream commercial applications need to grow in tandem with mine supply, more so than any other metal that we know about, meaning the aviation (and other industries) need to commercialise the metals major applications, but how do they do that without a guaranteed supply of the metal. The CapEx for this project seems to be a big barrier considering the companies developing applications for the metal aren’t at scalable commercialisation stages yet. It’s a real chicken and egg problem. You really need the aviation industry to subsidise the mining of the metal to give the whole industry a kick start but that would be more likely to happen in places like China with central government control, not in market economies where private and public companies need to work on the basis of being commercially viable. Esh
(20min delay)