Tin

 

Tin

Tantalum

Lithium

Cesium

Niobium

Rubidium

 

 

Tin is a valuable metal that makes up a small percentage of the earth’s crust and to ensure that tin is viably collected it has to be concentrated by natural processes like alluvial deposits or by geological processes.  Tin Ore is the second-easiest ore to mine.

Characteristics

Tin is a malleable, ductile, and highly crystalline silvery-white metal.  When a bar of tin is bent, a crackling sound known as the tin cry can be heard due to the twinning of the crystals.  There are grey tins and white tins each coming with its own distinct properties. Tin is created via the long S - Process in low-medium mass stars (.6 -> 10 solar masses). It requires an Indium atom to capture a neutron and then undergo Beta decay.

Occurence

Tin is the 49th most abundant element in the Earth's crust, representing 2 ppm compared with 75 ppm for zinc, 50 ppm for copper, and 14 ppm for lead. Tin does not occur naturally by itself, and must be extracted from a base compound, usually cassiterite (SnO2).  Cassiterite, a tin oxide ore mineral found on Solid's Doade-Presqueira property, is the only commercially important source of tin.  Most of the world's tin is produced from placer deposits, which may contain as little as 0.015% tin.

Demand

The demand for tin is quite steady, and is growing at about 5% a year. Let us discuss what is tin used for.

Above half of the world’s tin goes into solder and is used for joining wires to circuit boards. The cell phones that we use consume about 8 grams of tin, for example. Televisions, computers, microwave ovens; or anything from home appliance to business machine - if it’s got a circuit-board in it, be assured it contains tin.

Tin has a low melting point, which makes it ideal for this purpose and we are surrounded by tin.  There are so many uses that demand for tin can only grow many fold.

Conflict Tin (Video) http://nobloodminerals.blogspot.com/

Price

The price of tin was at $11,900 per ton as of Nov 24, 2008.  Prices reached an all-time high of over $30,000 per ton in January 2011; this is largely because of the effect of the decrease of tin production from Indonesia.  Tin production and market has been volatile because of reliance from mining in Congo-Kinshasa. Tin was one of the best performing metals of the six main London Metal Exchange metals during 2010.

 

2011 Outlook

Tin prices touched the roof and hit an all time high of over US $30,000/t during Q1 of 2011, making it the best performing industrial metal this year with a gain of 10 percent.  "Of all the base metals, tin has had the best fundamentals," said Nic Brown, head of commodities research, economics and strategy at Natixis. "Supply appears relatively constrained ... Demand remains strong. You have a deficit in the market that is gradually eroding available stockpiles and there is limited capacity for substitution into other materials."

Spain is one of the leading European Union (EU) countries in the value of its mine output of metallic and non-metallic minerals and quarry products.  It has one of the highest levels of self-sufficiency with respect to mineral raw materials among the EU members.  Spain has had a long history of base and rare metal mining and in recent years has attracted renewed interest from many of the world’s major mining companies for precious and rare metal exploration and extraction.