2019-09-02 Bloomberg Businessweek

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I

maginea closet stuffed with a billion envelopes. One has

a check for $100,000 inside. Do you go hunting?

Anthony Lipmann does. One in a billion is the concen-

tration in the Earth’s crust of an element named rhenium, part

of a group of so-called minor metals notable for two reasons:

They’re exceedingly difficult to obtain, and they’re spectac-

ularly important for certain industries. That’s why Lipmann

loves them—the more technology frees us from our earthly

bonds, the more we discover how linked we are to forms of

nature we didn’t know existed.

Lipmann is a scavenger. Based just outside London, he

makes his living in the hinterlands of commodities, finding

the stuff most can’t and picking up what others discard. His

businessmodelis deceptivelysimple:Identifysomethingrare

thatmanufacturersneed,figureouthowtogetit,thenstepin

whengapsinthesupplychainappear.Mostofhisinventory—

whichincludesgermanium,zirconium,ruthenium,indium,

tellurium,hafnium,tantalum, and tungsten, to name a few—

is stored in warehouses in the U.K. and other European coun-

tries, ready to go at a moment’s notice. “My guiding principle

is demand,” he says. “If someone wants something to put in

a product, even if it’s toxic or radioactive, if it’s genuinely

needed for an industrial purpose and not a weapon, I think

that’s a legitimate reason to get involved.”

Thallium is a good example, though it’s not something

Lipmann stores because it’s not nice stuff. Once a rat poison,

it’s found new uses in the technological age, including in the

lenses of high-end document scanners. But it’s strictly con-

trolled in many countries due to its extreme toxicity. So when

Nippon Sheet Glass Co. realized it needed some, executives at

the Japanese company reached out to Lipmann Walton & Co.

It took two years to track down a trove of thallium that had

been produced in Kazakhstan in the early 1980s, then some-

how found its way to a warehouse in Rotterdam. European

Union regulations meant it couldn’t be moved, but after about

a year of jostling and a nighttime mission to repackage the

goods, it started making its way to Japan. The cargo traveled

in batches, but each ton went a long way, so the Japanese

were happy. “I get a huge kick now out of scanning a piece of

paper,” says Lipmann, who was paid $9 million for his trou-

bles. “There might be a bit of thallium we supplied in it.”

The end of July found him in northern Chile. Standing on

the edge of Chuquicamata, one of the world’s largest open-pit

copper mines, Lipmann watched massive trucks hauling hun-

dreds of tons of rock across the floor below. From that height,

theylookedlikesandboxtoys.

Tracemetalsareoftenfoundalongsidemoreabundant

oneslikecopper.ChileclaimstheNo.1 spotintherhenium

league tables, with Codelco supplying about 7% of the world’s

output last year, most of it from its Chuquicamata mine.

Rhenium is silvery-gray, extremely dense, and heat-resistant.

A small quantity combined with nickel produces a superal-

loy that enables blades in jet engines to withstand very high

temperatures without stretching. This makes turbines more

efficient, which is why demand for the metal has been rising.

Prices were 12 times higher about a decade ago, so companies

Lipmannata rheniumprocessingplantinChile

72

Hf

Hafnium

73

Ta

Tantalum

74

W

Tungsten

75

Re

Rhenium

◼ Hafnium $775/ kg Hafnium,unwrought

◼ Tantalum $245/ kg 99.95% tantalummetal f.o.b.,China market

◼ Tungsten $200/ MTU* 88.5%tungsten APT, Rotterdam

◼ Rhenium $2,844 / kg Engelhard spot

The

Rhenium Bug

By Eddie van der Walt, Mark Burton,

and Laura Millan Lombraña

Anthony Lipmann is majorly into minor

metals, and he’ll go anywhere to find them

Photographs by Cristóbal Olivares *METRIC TON UNIT