Asteroids may knock the wind out of platinum producers’ sails
A METALLIC asteroid with a diameter of about 1,000m could contain more than 100,000 tonnes of platinum, enough to "induce some night sweats", Afriforesight’s head of energy and precious metals, Charles Kieck, said on Tuesday.If it were cost-competitive with existing production, the discovery of huge new accessible platinum resources could be bad news for platinum miners because it would bring down prices, but would be welcomed by manufacturers of vehicle autocatalysts.Kieck, who will be presenting a paper at Afriforesight’s Commodities Conference in Sandton on Friday on asteroid mining and how it would affect platinum producers, said there were countless asteroids circling the sun, mostly grouped between Mars and Jupiter. Many strayed into earth-crossing orbits, making them relatively accessible.There are millions of near-Earth asteroids bigger than 10m and billions larger than 2m. Apart from precious metals, of which platinum group metals are the most abundant, asteroids contain wa...
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