Cooking oils can help recover silver
In families across the world, silver is used as a precious metal, next to gold. Happy occasions in most families are celebrated with gold and silver garlands and rings. Silver is, of course, less expensive than gold.
But when it comes to use in industry and energy production, silver beats gold flat. Silver is used to capture sunlight through rooftop solar panels across India, generating about 108 GW of clean and green electricity yearly across the nation (about 10% of what is generated from coal). In addition, mobile phones used by about 1.4 billion people across India use silver for electricity conduction and storage. Each mobile phone uses 100-200 mg of silver. Likewise, a typical laptop computer uses 350 mg of silver, and we have about 50 million laptops in India.
If these are the numbers in India, one can imagine what the number across the world might be. It is estimated that about 7,275 metric tonnes of silver are used across the world for these purposes, but barely 15% is recuperated. And when a phone or a computer is damaged or discarded, the silver content is lost. If only we can get back this silver from these waste electrical and electronic equipment…
Clearly, silver plays a critical role in clean energy transition. Maria Smirnova writes in the 2025 'Sprott Silver Report' that as more and more countries generate renewable power using solar panels, the demand for silver in the coming years will steadily increase. She points out that while some groups have considered using other metals (including lithium, cobalt, and nickel), it is still silver that plays a fundamental role in cleaner and greener energy production. And demand for silver is expected to increase by about 170% by the year. In addition, cars, buses and trains have started using solar power rather than petrol as fuel. Ms. Smirnova further points out that the International Energy Agency predicts that by 2035, every other car sold worldwide will be electric. That would mean the need for more silver.
It is against this background that a paper by Anze Zupanc, Prof. Timo Repo, and colleagues from Finland has come up with an efficient chemical method to recycle silver: using organic fatty acids, such as linolenic or oleic acids, which are found in seeds, nuts, and vegetable oils (such as olive oil or groundnut oil), which in turn are used in our daily cuisine.
Recovering silver from electronic waste is not simple: it may generate toxic substances from the use of strong acids and cyanide. Rather than use traditional methods of isolating silver from other metals and alloys, the group has come up with a method to separate and recover silver using the chemical method of using common unsaturated fatty acids, abundant in sunflower, groundnut, and other oils. The group found that these are recyclable and thus better than organic solvents and water media.
The researchers also found this method applicable to 'urban mining', where silver retrieval from waste electrical and electronic wastes (WEEE) from discarded computer motherboard pieces becomes possible. The research team concludes, 'fatty acids may, therefore, become the next generation of media for treating precious multi-metal waste substrates'.
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The Hindu
16 hours ago
- The Hindu
Cooking oils can help recover silver
In families across the world, silver is used as a precious metal, next to gold. Happy occasions in most families are celebrated with gold and silver garlands and rings. Silver is, of course, less expensive than gold. But when it comes to use in industry and energy production, silver beats gold flat. Silver is used to capture sunlight through rooftop solar panels across India, generating about 108 GW of clean and green electricity yearly across the nation (about 10% of what is generated from coal). In addition, mobile phones used by about 1.4 billion people across India use silver for electricity conduction and storage. Each mobile phone uses 100-200 mg of silver. Likewise, a typical laptop computer uses 350 mg of silver, and we have about 50 million laptops in India. If these are the numbers in India, one can imagine what the number across the world might be. It is estimated that about 7,275 metric tonnes of silver are used across the world for these purposes, but barely 15% is recuperated. And when a phone or a computer is damaged or discarded, the silver content is lost. If only we can get back this silver from these waste electrical and electronic equipment… Clearly, silver plays a critical role in clean energy transition. Maria Smirnova writes in the 2025 'Sprott Silver Report' that as more and more countries generate renewable power using solar panels, the demand for silver in the coming years will steadily increase. She points out that while some groups have considered using other metals (including lithium, cobalt, and nickel), it is still silver that plays a fundamental role in cleaner and greener energy production. And demand for silver is expected to increase by about 170% by the year. In addition, cars, buses and trains have started using solar power rather than petrol as fuel. Ms. Smirnova further points out that the International Energy Agency predicts that by 2035, every other car sold worldwide will be electric. That would mean the need for more silver. It is against this background that a paper by Anze Zupanc, Prof. Timo Repo, and colleagues from Finland has come up with an efficient chemical method to recycle silver: using organic fatty acids, such as linolenic or oleic acids, which are found in seeds, nuts, and vegetable oils (such as olive oil or groundnut oil), which in turn are used in our daily cuisine. Recovering silver from electronic waste is not simple: it may generate toxic substances from the use of strong acids and cyanide. Rather than use traditional methods of isolating silver from other metals and alloys, the group has come up with a method to separate and recover silver using the chemical method of using common unsaturated fatty acids, abundant in sunflower, groundnut, and other oils. The group found that these are recyclable and thus better than organic solvents and water media. The researchers also found this method applicable to 'urban mining', where silver retrieval from waste electrical and electronic wastes (WEEE) from discarded computer motherboard pieces becomes possible. The research team concludes, 'fatty acids may, therefore, become the next generation of media for treating precious multi-metal waste substrates'.
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Business Standard
2 days ago
- Business Standard
Oil's lost decade is about to be repeated amid rising clean energy bets
For as long as most of us can remember, a rule of thumb has held true: Every year, the world's production of oil goes up by one million barrels a day. In 1983, the figure stood at 56.6 million barrels. In 2023, 40 years later, it was 40 million barrels more: 96.3 million. Annual figures may jump around thanks to wars, recessions, and the rise and fall of economies, but averaged over the longer term, every decade we've added an extra 10 million daily barrels to the headline total. But you have to look closer than that. Much of what's labeled 'oil production' isn't oil at all, but gases such as ethane, propane and butane as well as biofuels. If you consider only crude oil — the stuff subject to OPEC's quota policies, with prices quoted on the nightly news — production is barely increasing at all. Global output this year will be just 360,000 daily barrels greater than in 2015, according to the latest outlook from the US government's Energy Information Administration. Even looking forward to 2026, crude output is likely to remain below the production peak the world hit in 2018. This will be the first time the industry hit a lost decade since the 1980s, when it was buffeted by the aftermath of the 1970s oil crises and decline of the Soviet bloc. As electric vehicles take more market share and climate damage grows, subsequent decades will be even worse. That's certainly what you'd expect from the way the oil industry is investing. Upstream oilfield spending will fall 6 per cent this year to $420 billion, the International Energy Agency wrote last week, less than the $450 billion going to solar. Fossil fuels as a whole will receive $1.1 trillion of investment, just half the $2.2 trillion for clean energy. Those figures suggest reports of the death of ESG have been greatly exaggerated. Spending on new supplies of oil and gas did indeed increase after Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, but only slightly. The growth wasn't enough to lift investment even to the levels seen in the late 2010s, let alone the fat years in the early part of that decade. Inflation makes the picture even more stark. Clean technology is getting cheaper, with the price of the best standard solar modules falling 20 per cent over the past year to 9 cents per watt, according to BloombergNEF. That means each dollar spent is buying more energy than in the past. The opposite is happening in the oil patch — particularly in the US, where President Donald Trump's 50 per cent steel tariffs are making it far more expensive to buy pipes and machinery. After adjusting for costs, activity levels in the upstream oil and gas sector are set to fall globally by about 8 per cent this year, according to the IEA, the first drop since 2020. That's being felt most sharply by US shale players, some of the highest-cost and most price-sensitive producers out there. They're retrenching rapidly as the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries pumps extra barrels into an oversupplied market. The signs are showing up throughout the chain, from exploration to development. Since the end of March alone, about 5.6 per cent of all operating drill rigs in the US have been pulled from the fields, according to global energy technology company Baker Hughes, leaving the drill fleet almost a third smaller than at its last peak in late 2022. That suggests companies are spending less on exploration. The number of wells being actively fracked is also the lowest since 2021, in the teeth of Covid-19, evidence that they're not rushing to get production out of the fields they've already discovered, either. In previous eras, slumps in those measures were often justified by the large backlog of developed wells being kept in reserve until prices recovered, but even this so-called fracklog is shrinking. The number of such drilled but uncompleted wells now stands at 5,332, about half the level in early 2020. December's figure was the lowest on record. If you thought the Gulf would come to the rescue, don't hold your breath. These days, Saudi Arabian Oil Co. is spending more on gas than on crude. Its largest development project is the Jafurah gas field, due to start production later this year. Riyadh's decision last year to cut Aramco's maximum oil capacity target only makes sense if prospects for crude demand are dimming. Look to China, and you can see why. Apparent oil consumption has been falling ever since September 2023, based on government data. Even the more granular estimates by state-owned China National Petroleum Corp. suggest demand will hit its ceiling this year, five years earlier than expected. Consumption of gasoline and diesel will be 400,000 barrels a day lower than in 2021, according to the IEA, as EVs, more-efficient vehicles, and shifts to public transport cause usage to evaporate. The situation in India, as my colleague Javier Blas has written, may be even worse. As we've argued, the oil industry is already past its peak. The decades to come will only be worse.
Mint
2 days ago
- Mint
Javier Blas: An Israel-Iran war may not rattle the oil market
The oil market is pushing its luck. For two years, it's weathered unthinkable events, including volleys of direct attacks and counterattacks between Israel and Iran. Yet, not a single barrel of production has been lost. With hindsight, every oil-price rally has proven to be an opportunity to sell. It required nerves of steel, but shorting crude while bombs and the missiles were flying was the winning trade. The situation appears the same today after Israel launched a wide-scale attack against Iran, including its nuclear facilities, and Tehran warned of a 'harsh" retaliation. Also Read: Counter-intuitive: Why Opec wants lower oil prices Amid the chaos, the barrels are still flowing. Everywhere in the Middle East, oilfields were buzzing and tankers were loading on Friday. If anything, there's still too much oil in the physical market, and prices, based solely on today's supply and demand fundamentals, should retreat. But familiarity breeds contempt: the threat of a major oil Middle East shock is alarmingly high. Real-time knowledge of the exact level of global supply and demand is impossible. But there's a telltale: global inventories. And, for several months, those had been rising above seasonal norms, a sure indication of oversupply. With Saudi Arabia pushing the OPEC+ cartel to boost production faster than previously expected and oil demand growth slowing, the imbalance was set to increase as the year progressed. Also Read: The war in West Asia is escalating, so why aren't oil prices shooting up? The Northern hemisphere summer, which provides a seasonal lift to demand, is the last obstacle before an oil glut becomes plainly obvious. The Israeli attack hasn't changed those supply and demand realities. Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency, spoke bluntly hours after the attacks: 'Markets are well supplied today." If anything, the oversupply could worsen. On the demand side, geopolitical chaos is bad for business, so oil demand growth could slow even further. On the supply side, the current price rally—oil rose almost 10% in the initial hours after Israel launched its assault—is handing US shale producers an unexpected opportunity to lock-in forward prices, helping them to keep drilling higher than otherwise. The biggest risk is sleepwalking into believing that just because two years of violence hasn't disrupted flows, the physical market would never be disrupted. Particularly in the Middle East, it's always the last straw that breaks the camel's back. The global oil market looked well oversupplied in late July 1990; a week later, Saddam Hussein's Iraq had invaded Kuwait, and the global economy was weathering a large oil shock. Also Read: Escalating Israel-Iran conflict to keep markets on boil in near term On Friday, the energy market reaction has split between its two-year-old sense of we-have-been-here-before-and-nothing-happened and genuine alarm. In the initial hours, Brent rallied to almost $80 a barrel as every bearish position got covered. But it later pared its gains to trade around $75 a barrel as braver traders used the rally as a sell opportunity. Still, in the options market, where traders buy and sell insurance against sharp price moves, many were buying contracts that will make money if oil prices surge past $100 a barrel. Israel hasn't yet targeted Iranian oil installations so perhaps the biggest risk of supply losses can be averted. But the important word here is 'yet." President Donald Trump is allergic to high energy prices, which will probably restrain Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who would otherwise love to blow up the oilfields that fund the Iranian nuclear programme. On Thursday, hours before the attack, Trump spoke publicly about his unhappiness with the recent move above $70 a barrel. In a public event, he rhetorically asked Secretary of Energy Chris Wright: 'Are we OK? Nothing wrong? Right? It's going to keep going down, right? Because we have inflation under control." Well, not any longer. Tehran hasn't yet threatened to return to its old playbook of showering fire over the Saudi oilfields and close the Strait of Hormuz, the shipping chokepoint for 20% of the world's oil supply. Also Read: Israel goes to war without Trump. The US may be drawn in anyway But here again, the key word is 'yet." To understand how risky the situation is, listen to everyone around Iran. Saudi Arabia and its neighbors are trying very hard not to give Tehran a pretext to attack them. Hence why Riyadh—and several others in the region—quickly condemned the Israeli attack. Don't misunderstand the Arab condemnation as sympathy toward Tehran; it's all about minimizing blowback. The two biggest risks for the oil market stem from Iranian weakness. First, if Tehran concludes that the only way to restore deterrence against Israel is to accelerate its efforts to build a nuclear bomb, sanctions are likely to follow. The Islamic Republic perhaps could withdraw from the 1968 nuclear non-proliferation treaty, but that would probably prompt United Nations sanctions that would make Chinese purchases of Iranian oil, running at more than 1.5 million barrels a day, more difficult, if not impossible. Second, as bombs rain on the Islamic Republic, the sense that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei isn't just fighting to keep his nuclear programme but to preserve his own regime is rising. If Tehran concludes it's defenseless and is fighting a war for survival, it's likely to conclude that triggering economic upheaval via the oil market is a useful card to play. So even though there's plenty of crude and oversupply is evident, it will take nerves of steel to short the oil market. ©Bloomberg The author is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy and commodities.
