Educational writing on the metallurgy, markets, land, and logistics of iron ore. Technical, not a pitch.
Two minerals supply almost all of the world's iron. They end in the same metal, but they behave differently from the drill core to the furnace.
Read →A cargo of iron ore is sold on a specification, not a photograph. Every line on the assay table moves money.
Read →Iron ore does not trade at one price. It trades at a benchmark plus a stack of adjustments, settled cargo by cargo.
Read →A mineral deposit is only half of a project. The other half is the ground it sits under, and what that setting allows.
Read →Bulk commodity economics are the economics of moving heavy things cheaply. Where a deposit sits relative to its buyers is structural.
Read →On hundreds of millions of acres of federal land, the right to extract hard-rock minerals runs through a system that is a century and a half old.
Read →Green mining deserves a technical definition. The largest environmental risk in conventional mining is specific and well understood.
Read →A pre-production project is a set of claims about the ground and a plan to develop it. Evaluating one separates what is demonstrated from what is asserted.
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