The Devil’s Metal - The Geology of Nickel
[00:00:00]
What happened? I can hear you
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Oh, you can hear me now? Oh,
Chris Bolhuis: Can you hear me? Yeah.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I can hear you.
Mr. Bolhuis? Bolhuis? What's up, man?
Chris Bolhuis: Jesse Reimink. What's going on, man? It's been a long time since we've, it feels like a long time. It [00:00:30] probably hasn't been a long time, but right.
We haven't talked very much lately.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I know,
I know, it's good to see your face, I must say.
Chris Bolhuis: I
bet. It's always good to see my face. In fact, Jesse. Hey, the last time we were talking.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: That was very good reaction. you know what, if anybody was in doubt about Chris Bolhuis opinion of himself, that answered it right there. Just, hey Chris, good to see you man. Yeah, you know what, it is usually good to see me, isn't it?
Chris Bolhuis: Well, the last time we talked, Jesse, [00:01:00] you called me. I was driving in the, like sticks of Red River Gorge, Kentucky.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, I know,
Chris Bolhuis: And, uh, I said, I gave, I gave you a, I I know, I know, but I gave you fair warning. I said, Hey, listen, we can keep talking, but, I'm probably going to lose you here in a few minutes.
And all of a sudden, bam, you were gone.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: was out. Yup. I was like, Oh, okay, well, there we go. It wasn't important
anyways what
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: about.
Chris Bolhuis: How long were you talking before you figured out that I had dropped?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: at least a minute or two, you know, probably.
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah, Jenny and I laughed about that. Yeah, we're like, he's probably still [00:01:30] talking right now,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Well, there are some times when the, you know, the hamster, it's not clear if the hamster's on the wheel or not over there with you. And you know, you get slack jawed looking at me through zoom and. And then I have to say, Chris, are you frozen? You're like, Oh no, I was just listening.
Or I was just thinking.
Chris Bolhuis: I was daydreaming because you get windy uh, I just, he's not, he fell off the
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, that's true.
Chris Bolhuis: uh, it happens quite a lot.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: the wheel broke. Cause he was moving too quickly. And Chris, this episode right here, I [00:02:00] think. we could get super into weeds on this one, Definitely, we're gonna go into the weeds. Like, this, type of topic, we've been doing these, the geology of fill in the blank element, and I really like doing these ones.
I know you, you do too. and they're really interesting and important, and like, Some of the more societally relevant, just cause, like sand. We did the geology of sand. We did the geology of copper. I mean, it's just amazing how important these, these resources are to our society at the end of the day.
Chris Bolhuis: That's right, so you put the script together, and one thing that struck me is, this [00:02:30] is, I think, easily the most, how do I say this, it's easily the most complicated in terms of the geology of nickel and, and kind of the backstory on it. So I'm curious about that, cause we've done a bunch of this stuff, Jesse.
We've done lithium and we've done the platinum metals and, and then all of a sudden we get to nickel and it's, Whoa, this is at a different level. So what is
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I think, Chris, the, okay, this is just my take, [00:03:00] it has to do with the nickel is a, wouldn't say unique, but it's definitely different from things like lithium. lithium, for instance, we talked about lithium, how basically in the really high level, the, the intro level physical geology, understanding of the earth, the earth is differentiating itself.
It's partially, it's distilling, right? And lithium just gets enriched at each differentiation step. So it's kind of, at a really high level, simple. Nickel's not that. There's a couple different ways to make nickel rich deposits, and they're very, very different [00:03:30] from one another.
And so I think that's perhaps why we, it's going to be a little bit of a confusing web to kind of get into the meat of this story, perhaps. Is
Chris Bolhuis: Hmm. I don't know if I agree with, I, I appreciate your answer to this. It's just, it's more complicated. the basic geology behind nickel and how this gets concentrated into like an ore deposit is more complicated, but I think you did a good job. I mean, it flows. I, don't think we're going to have a problem with that.
We're going to go through, [00:04:00] the early How do we say this? We're going to go through the beginnings of the mining of nickel. Cause I think there's some interesting stuff in that, you know, then we're going to get into some of its uses. why has nickel been important and why is nickel going to become increasingly more important as time goes on, we're going to talk about that then we're going to end with, all right, let's get into the geology of concentrating nickel.
How does this happen? How does it form? And so it flows. It's, it's good. that's basically the [00:04:30] gist of this episode.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: And I think there's a, there's a really high level summary here that most of the Is in the core. We speak about the core being an iron nickel alloy, right? and so the core is, huge. there's two parts of the core, inner core, outer core, but it's mostly iron and some nickel, and then there's a little bit of some other light element that, geologists argue about, but iron nickel alloy.
So most of the nickel is going to be in the, the core. The rest of it is going to get enriched in various parts of the earth and then eventually form some ore deposits. And we're going to. [00:05:00] End with, with coming back. But Chris, when we talked about copper, copper has the nickname, the red metal.
And I think Jenny was giving you a hard time about this, right? Jenny was like, Chris, it's not even red. It's a copper color. Is that, wasn't that what she was saying about it?
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah, it was. It was Jenny gets a little uptight about some
Dr. Jesse Reimink: So
I'll be excited to hear what Jenny thinks about the nickname for nickel, which is the
devil's
Chris Bolhuis: it's a good one.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Isn't it?
Chris Bolhuis: It's just catchy. It's catchy right there.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: It might be the best one. It might be the best nickname for a metal that I've heard.
Chris Bolhuis: I want to back out of [00:05:30] this a second though, Jesse, because I want to talk a little bit about something that you said first, you said that most of the nickel is in the core two things. I want to say about that. We think that.
About 10 to 20 percent of the composition of the core is actually nickel, which is an astonishingly high amount, right? Now, I think this right away begs the question from anybody that is skeptical about nickel. Really, anything is, wait a second, how in the world would we [00:06:00] possibly know that and arrive at that number, We've never seen the core, we never will see the core, so let's address that, I think, first. How would we ever come to that realization that there's that much nickel in the core, something we've never seen and never been able to sample?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: That's a great question. And I would say there's, there's two ways we've talked about. And we talked about this in the, camp geo content, we're talking about plate tectonics and the the initial content to get into that is [00:06:30] we have to think about the interior of the earth. How do we know anything about the interior of the earth?
There's two ways. One is with physical measurements. And these are seismic, usually how seismic waves travel through the earth, how fast they travel, what they reflect off of. We can into it some things about the composition of the inner parts of the earth from that. The second one, and probably the more important, is analogs.
Analog studies. And what we mean by analog studies is we look at meteorites That come from small [00:07:00] planets or even the precursors to planets, iron meteorites, for instance. And we can look at iron meteorites and say, these meteorites, this iron, well iron and nickel stuff that's in a iron meteorite, that was probably the core of some small planetesimal.
we can determine that. It definitely was the core. And then we can look at that and say, that's an analog for earth's core
Chris Bolhuis: so you're looking at then the, the formation of our solar system basically, or the formation of any solar system for that matter, [00:07:30] this kind of solar nebula theory, right. And in terms of how, these smaller bodies started rotating all in the same direction and kind of were rubbing shoulders and, and accreting into larger bodies that were destined then to become planets and sweep out their own orbit.
So looking at the composition of these. Things that we've been able to study and we know their internal chemistry and so on leads us then to kind of what the interior of the earth has to be like, right? The only other thing that I'd add, [00:08:00] Jesse, is also what does nickel do? And we're going to get into this later on the episode.
And we've alluded to it in another episode that nickel is a siderophile. Nickel is an iron loving. element in, in terms of early formed crystals that form in this kind of magma, and then sink down toward the middle. Right? And so based upon what we know about the way nickel behaves, we can make an inference on that also.
So it's, it's really bunch of different lines of evidence that [00:08:30] point to
Dr. Jesse Reimink: that's a great way to phrase it, Chris. And I like the way to think about this is that as the core is forming, it's kind of, like a sponge. it's iron, mostly iron. And so it soaks up, it's spongy, and it soaks up all of the iron loving elements on the way down. We talked about iridium being one of those.
This goes back a year and a half, or maybe even two years now. We talked about the geology of iridium. Iridium gets soaked up. Gold is another one. Gold will get soaked up. There's a bunch of gold in the core. Way more gold in the core than there is on the [00:09:00] surface of the earth. And nickel is another one of those.
and so, you know, those elements, when earth formed, they got soaked up into the core. Not completely, though. Not completely. That's the important point.
Chris Bolhuis: All right. So let's save that for later. I just wanted to back out and address that issue. So let's move into then this kind of early part of the devil's
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, now, Chris, really quick, just before we jump into that, I just want to, there's a through line here, that nickel and iron kind of go together. They usually go together, but not always. And that's kind of, I think we're [00:09:30] going to work through this discussion saying they behave together in this intro part two.
And then there are some places where they behave differently, but remember that iron and nickel often behave together. So, interrupted. Go ahead. Where Where,
does this amazing nickname come from? The devil's metal.
Chris Bolhuis: well, it really actually goes back to Germany, right? With the early miners, and they were trying to extract copper from this dark red mineral. Okay. And that dark mineral had green coatings on it. And so they, they thought it was some form of copper or, but it turned [00:10:00] out to not be the
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Well, Chris, it makes sense, right? Like we've talked about copper, one of your favorite minerals is malachite, the bright green copper mineral. And I don't know when I'm walking around in the field and I see that, that particular kind of, it's not quite pistachio green, it's, it's almost a more vibrant, darker, deeper forest green.
You think immediately copper, right? And. You think this all the time because copper, when it's oxidized, it turns into this kind of greenish mineral, this greenish coating, right? And so I don't know. I think back in the day and sort of [00:10:30] old Saxony, uh, they would have thought, Oh, green, okay, there must be copper somewhere on there.
Let's dig around for it. So
the signal,
Chris Bolhuis: Well, they didn't really know what the mineral was. And so this is also fun to say, right. They called the mineral cup for nickel, which, which comes from it's called old Nick's, Copper. Okay. Old Nick's copper. And they called it this, because like you said, you just alluded to it, Saxon mythology, old Nick, he was an evil spirit in this Saxon mythology.
And so they now, [00:11:00] okay. So Jesse, why did, why did they think of this as an evil? Like, why did they associate it with evil?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Well, you're trying to get copper out, which you really want to make your tools out of, and It turns out that all of the miners and workers who are trying to get the copper out got really sick or even died because they're dealing with what this mineral actually is, is it doesn't have much copper in it at all.
It's a nickel arsenic mineral called nickelite, N I C C O L I T E, nickelite. And the combination of nickel and arsenic [00:11:30] is a really poisonous mixture. So they're poisonous. on their own, separately, right? Like any arsenic bearing mineral is going to be really quite dangerous to handle, let alone handle in ancient times.
Um, so this is where
Chris Bolhuis: but you're talking about handling a large quantity of
Dr. Jesse Reimink: crushing it up, mining it, really, in the
Chris Bolhuis: yes
absolutely exposed to it again and
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Oh, oh my goodness. Yeah, so this is where they got the term the devil's metal or old nix copper, that kufra nickel that you said, so that's [00:12:00] the, it's just a great story, I mean, it's not a great story, it's a sad story, but it's an amazing nickname for a metal, and that's the, sort of source of it,
Chris Bolhuis: So Jesse, let's move into then Why is nickel acidrophile? And it can also be, like you said, to a calcophile. which means that it's a sulfur loving mineral too, to form these kind of nickel sulfides that you just alluded to.
Um, let's get into a little bit of the chemistry on this, right?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: so, we'll, transition from, uh, the chemistry and the usage, those kind of go hand in hand here, [00:12:30] so, nickel, Ni is the element, and it has a 2 plus charge. Its oxidation state is usually 2 plus, which means it happiest when it has two electrons removed from the outer orbital, so it maintains a cation status.
Chris, and what is a cation? How do we remember a cation?
Chris Bolhuis: well, actually, actually, I want you to say it. Cause I want to see, I want to see if you get it. Correct.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: goodness, okay. It's positive.
Chris Bolhuis: You did not disappoint. [00:13:00] It's Positive.
Pah,
pah, say pah,
positive. That's
Dr. Jesse Reimink: a cat has paws. It's positive. Um, so nickel 2 plus The reason it's siderophile, the reason it is calcophile is it's got this 2 plus charge state, has an ionic radius much like iron 2 plus and magnesium 2 plus. So it's going to go, we're going to remember this.
It's going to go along with iron 2 plus and magnesium 2 plus in most geological
Chris Bolhuis: Can I give this a crack? you're getting Dr. Rihannas again. So the way I think about [00:13:30] this is in terms of why does it love, iron bearing minerals and sulfur bearing minerals is because nickel is a good substitute. For iron, it's the same size. It fits in the crystal structure of these other minerals.
So what I'm, what we're saying, right, Jesse, is that if, if there's iron and nickel around, they just use it interchangeably iron can go in. and nickel can go in and it really doesn't differentiate between the two,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: so that's a [00:14:00] really good way to phrase it because we, it allows us to think about Major elements and minor elements and nickel is not a major element. So we're not going to build minerals out of nickel The internal structure or the framework of the mineral, we're not going to build it with nickel. We're going to build it with things like iron and silica, because those are that's a major part of the recipe for the rock. And so nickel is substituting in for iron in that lattice, in that crystal lattice.
And that's the difference [00:14:30] between iron, which is a major element, and nickel, which is a minor trace element, is that. We don't build nickel minerals very frequently, we build iron minerals, and then nickel substitutes in for that, like olivine for instance. So, really like that way you phrased that there, that was really nice, that is, is the key.
Chris Bolhuis: Jesse, a thought just popped into my head that I want to run by you here then when we're talking about this, because if nickel was the wrong fit, if you're building a wall you want to put a block in the wall, it has to fit, right? You [00:15:00] can't be the wrong size. It can't be the wrong shape.
It has to fit. If nickel were the wrong size. Then nickel would concentrate in very different ways then, right? If it didn't fit in the crystal structure, nickel would have a completely different geological story because nickel would just kind of have to hang around. If you imagine nickel in this kind of magma, this primordial soup, it has no place to go because the common minerals are forming these iron and magnesium loving minerals, nickel doesn't fit in the crystal structure.
So [00:15:30] it just kind of has to hang out and then it would have a different geological story.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Exactly. So the way to visualize this, Chris, that's a, I love that one. It actually makes me think how to explain this better. And when we teach this sort of basic stuff, think of, if you have just a big old pile of building material supplies, you've got cinder blocks, you've got bricks, you've got bricks of different colors, you've got some wood beams, you know, you've got screws and all this stuff you need to build a house that's laying in a big pile and you need to build a wall.
Well, what are you going to start building the wall out of? You're going to look and you're gonna be like, well, I've got a ton of bricks. I only have a couple of cinder [00:16:00] blocks. So I'm going to build the. The wall out of brick because I have a bunch of that, right? So you're going to build a brick wall. Now those cinder blocks are not going to fit in.
To your brick wall very easily. So you're not going to use them. They're just going to hang out. That's like lithium or neodymium. We've talked about those elements. They don't fit in. Now, nickel is like a just slightly different colored brick. if the brick is iron.
So you've got your red brick, that's your iron, and you've got maybe some brown brick and that's your nickel. And that can just replace, that can go into your brick wall. So you don't really care because it fits. And so that's the really [00:16:30] important part here. so nickel behaves what's called compatibly, meaning it'll go into minerals, especially the early forming minerals like olivine, pyroxenes, and we'll come back to this later, after we sort of talk about the uses
Chris Bolhuis: Yes. All right, Jesse, then some of the properties, right? So we established that it loves iron because it fits in iron bearing minerals. It also fits in sulfide minerals. It fits in there very well. but it's also useful because it has a [00:17:00] really high melting point, upwards of close to 1500 degrees Celsius.
It's also really corrosion resistant, at least as a pure mineral, right? If you have pure nickel.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: yes. And so that. is really useful. Let's just calibrate that 1500 degrees centigrade or 1450 degrees centigrade. You know basalt melts at 1200 degrees, the rock basalt. olivine starts to crystallize at 1400 degrees. So this is, this is hot. This is really hot. And, uh, This corrosion resistance, [00:17:30] well, I think it kind of, it's easy to imagine how we would use nickel in society, is that most of it goes into stainless steel.
So you put some nickel in with your iron, and your little bit of carbon to make steel, and you have stainless steel, which is much more corrosion resistant, right? That, that's the
percent of the nickel used is used for stainless steel.
Chris Bolhuis: I think one thing I want to do to qualify that number, Jesse, you said 65%. I think that the relative percentage of the use of nickel for stainless steel is going to go down as time goes on, [00:18:00] because it's also important in making this transition to net zero carbon. And, and we'll talk about
that in a little bit.
Right. So that that's like, as of now, that's where the number stands.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: that's a great point. And, we've talked about critical minerals and critical elements before, nickel is added to the critical elements list because of this aspect, because of the future, uses, potential future uses of nickel or, you know, uses today, but these are going to be growing over time.
So, all right, Chris, what else do we as [00:18:30] society use nickel for? Why are we so interested in mining it?
Chris Bolhuis: another use for nickel is to combine it with other metals, right? We call these alloys, but with nickel, it's actually called a super alloy. So, which I think makes sense. We don't need to explain that, which it means it's got about 50 to 70 percent nickel in it though.
And these things are stable. Because they have the properties of nickel, right? They're stable at really high temperatures, which makes them really useful for [00:19:00] things like turbine blades. think of the turbines at an electric power station, right? So they'll use these nickel super alloys as a major component of these turbine blades and discs and other critical components to like jet engines.
Right.
So
Dr. Jesse Reimink: So things that need to,
kind of important things that we don't want to, we need to be able to produce and we don't want to be breaking down. Right. And the point here is that you add some nickel. Well, you take a bunch of nickel, you add some other elements to it and you get an alloy that's [00:19:30] super strong, super stiff to really hot temperatures.
exactly, just said a lot of turbines. I don't know because that was a really interesting one to me. Think about next time on an airplane, that nickel, where we're getting all this nickel is in the, in these turbine blades, which obviously you need that to be real. That's a critical piece of infrastructure right there.
let alone the power
generation.
Chris Bolhuis: That's right. But now Jesse, we're beginning to use it increasingly for other things. Um, we do make other alloys. So the last like 23 percent of the nickel that we [00:20:00] have, we use it for other alloys, but we're using it more and more in batteries. Now, which I find to be really interesting, in terms of like electric vehicles, but also, you know, I've talked about this.
I, I love, love, love my power tools that I'm converting all of them to battery. and nickel is a really important component in these lithium ion
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yes, absolutely. It works as a cathode in these. And so just adding nickel. I mean, it's, it's a, it's an essential constituent part to the lithium ion battery. So there's been [00:20:30] a lot of focus on nickel because of this. it's critical. It's a critical element, critical mineral because of this aspect, the battery part.
Chris Bolhuis: but Jesse, you spent a lot of time in Canada. Yeah. And they still use nickel as a part of their currency, right? Do you have some of this still left
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I
do. Yeah, I've got my random, like, drawer, or Ziploc bag with like, random currency from, you know, travels. You, you pick up, you know, pounds in London or whatever, and you end up with a couple left over, chuck it in the bag. So yeah, actually, I looked, and I do have some, a [00:21:00] bunch of Canadian coins.
Um, and they do,
Chris Bolhuis: So like the 10 cent, 25 cent, right? 50 cent and the, I think they have a dollar coin, right? Too. Is it all, is all of that stuff, pure
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Chris, Chris, it's not called a dollar coin, it's called a loonie, because it has a loon on the back. And then there's a two dollar coin, which is called a toonie, because it's worth two loons.
Chris Bolhuis: Okay. That, you know what? I love loons. That is,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I
know
loons are probably one of my favorite. I mean, certainly my favorite [00:21:30] waterfall.
They're just amazing. I mean, there's nothing better than hearing a loon on the lake where you're sitting there on the dock, you know, in the evening having a beer or whatever.
Chris Bolhuis: for the listener though, because I, you threw me for a loop right there. It's waterfowl, not Waterfall. Um, you know, I, I, we don't want Joyce to get confused that a loon is a waterfall.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: it's
the geologic
term for a waterfall, uh, with a sandstone cap.
Chris Bolhuis: yeah. So anyway, are they pure though? You didn't answer the question or pure nickel. Okay.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: uh, and, you know, we're
Chris Bolhuis: That seems [00:22:00] exceedingly wasteful
me
Dr. Jesse Reimink: this might be changing, Chris. I mean, you could expect this to change because the total demand for nickel is expected to double by 2040 because of this battery demand. So, you could imagine you wouldn't want to be making your coins out of nickel.
a critical element because the supply chain is really sensitive. Like there's all these factors that we've talked about before on this podcast about the critical supply chains here. You don't want to be making your currency out of stuff that's getting more valuable or more expensive over time. Right?
Chris Bolhuis: right? Right. Because then, [00:22:30] then the dime or the 10 cent piece or the loony will actually cost more to make than it's worth. And that doesn't make sense, but Jesse, here it is, right? I would be wondering, okay, well, what is it about nickel then? Right. why is it so important to use in these lithium ion batteries?
And the bottom line is, is that it has a really high. Energy density, which, basically means that it has a much higher storage capacity. So if you think about an electric vehicle, then if they employ the use of nickel in this, then you can go much [00:23:00] further on a single charge using nickel than some other substitute.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Let's introduce here, Chris, one difference between iron at the moment, because nickel and iron, we said before, they're very similar, and they can substitute for each other very frequently. Iron, however, has this multiple oxidation state. It can be a 2 it can be a 3 and it can change, and iron will oxidize.
and so, you know, we have hematite, we have magnetite. Those are different oxidation states of iron. Basically the same formula, just different [00:23:30] oxidation state. nickel is usually in most geologic settings only a 2 So that makes it really stable for the battery. You don't want this, element changing oxidation states in your battery.
And so using one that just sticks with pure 2 plus is really useful for making the batteries out of. But it also is really important geologically and helps us think about how nickel and iron behave differently in certain settings. So let's talk about That aspect, Chris, like let's move into the geologic settings.
Where do we get the nickel from? And there's going to be [00:24:00] one where it behaves very similar to iron, and then there's going to be one where it behaves differently from iron. and there are two, Chris, just like the, high level thing. These could not be more different settings on earth, really. I don't, at
least to my mind.
Chris Bolhuis: Well, I think as a way of introducing the geology of concentrating nickel, let's talk about fractional crystallization, Jesse, which is something that we, I think, are both pretty comfortable with. we've done a lot with this and we've talked about Bowen's reaction series and so on, and this really fits nicely into like a [00:24:30] Bowen's discussion, right?
Is the concentrating of nickel because, fractional crystallization is basically. Basically the high temperature minerals, minerals like, calcium, rich plagioclase, olivine, pyroxene, and so on. These high temperature minerals, they form first and they're in this primordial soup because they form first and as they grow, they sink to the bottom.
Right? And so when this happens, they essentially get removed from the [00:25:00] soup, from this magma, this residual magma, right? which changes the composition of the magma. Nickel does the same thing, because if iron is these olivine and pyroxene, these are iron rich minerals, right? Right? if there's nickel around nickel is going into that crystal structure too, and it's sinking to the bottom.
So this fractional crystallization is concentrating nickel in this way. And as time goes on, it's also depleting the [00:25:30] magma from the nickel that's left.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: a great way to phrase it, Chris. And I think we can just think about your average basalt. Look at your minerals in your basalt. Let's say we have plagioclase, olivine, clinopyroxene, maybe there's a little bit of biotite in there or something, maybe a tiny bit of quartz.
But, where are you gonna look for your nickel? You're gonna look in the olivine. The first crystallizing mineral, nickel loves going along with iron. Iron is very enriched in olivine, and so that's where your nickel is gonna be. Your olivine has most of your nickel in it. And so, nickel's [00:26:00] removed from the magma.
So you wouldn't look in a granite for nickel. You'd look in a basalt, or even better yet, an ultramafic rock, a peridotite, something that's really, really mafic or ultramafic. that's where we look for nickel in a magmatic sense, so, let me, Say the two sources of nickel deposit types for nickel, Chris, and then we'll focus on number one and then number two.
The first one is
what we call magmatic nickel sulfide deposits. Those words magmatic. Okay. It's an igneous rock, nickel sulfide deposits. So the rock [00:26:30] itself is magmatic, but it's high in nickel and sulfur. That's one thing we're mining. Igneous rocks, usually ultramafic rocks. The next one is what's called laterite deposits.
And these are, or laterite deposits. These are weathering deposits. we'll come back to those where nickel is enriched by the weathering process, but I think Chris, the first one, this magmatic nickel sulfide, this is a really interesting one because we just talked a couple of weeks ago, a month ago about a Bowen's reaction series and how, you know, it's a great teaching tool, but maybe [00:27:00] not.
You know, as widely applicable as we sort say it is in the intro classes, right? And I think this is a really good representation of that. This magmatic nickel sulfide deposit, what this is thought to be is if you take an ultramafic rock or an ultramafic magma, excuse me, and you, take that thing at high temperature, it's got a bunch of nickel, it's got some sulfur in it, it's got a whole bunch of iron and magnesium, a little bit of silica.
If you cool that down, you can get. Nickel sulfur liquids, well, really [00:27:30] iron, nickel, sulfur liquids that segregate out from the silicate liquids. Think like oil and water. They kind of separate at lower temperature. And these are really, really cool rocks. Because if you take an iron, nickel, sulfur liquid, and you crystallize that, you're going to get crazy minerals that are rich in nickel and iron and sulfur.
These are pyrrhotites, calcites, petlendites. They're really unique rocks.
They don't occur.
Chris Bolhuis: most people have not heard
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Oh, have not heard of, have not seen, unless you're like an economic geologist looking for these things, or you know, [00:28:00] some great museums have ore deposits. If you go to an ore, like a School of Mines, museum, or the Black Hills, you know, if you go to the, the, the South Dakota School of Mines Museum, you'll see these types of minerals around, but they almost always only occur in ore deposits.
that oil and water segregation, Two different liquids. You have a silicate one that's going to form all the olivine and the, and the pyroxenes and the quartz, and then you have a sulfur iron one which is going to form all these kind of crazy ore minerals in it, and they
separate [00:28:30] out from one
Chris Bolhuis: All right. Well, Jesse, I want to talk about one of the areas that can do this or where we can see this maybe. And I want to talk about this one because it's kind of, it's close to home for me if we talk about a magma chamber, uh, That fed something like a flood basalt.
Okay. Think of the Columbia river flood basalts, if you will, out in Washington and Idaho and so on. Or, in Michigan, we have this Keweenaw Rift Basin. so this is up in Michigan's copper [00:29:00] country. And this was
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Such cool geology. I mean, Northern Michigan, as boring as the lower, in my opinion, as generally boring as the lower peninsula of Michigan's geology is, the upper peninsula makes up for it because it's got
Chris Bolhuis: That's true. That's true. It hurt me a little bit to hear you say the boring geology of lower Michigan, but you're right. We don't have a lot of bedrock and and therefore to guys like us that can be a little bit boring, but basically the Precambrian, [00:29:30] billion ish years ago, the continent began to rift apart.
a narrow arm of the ocean invaded the area and up in the upper peninsula, then we get the features that you would expect to see with this, right? When you have lava erupting out onto the ocean floor, you get pillow basalts and there's just world class pillows. took you up there when you were a high school student once, uh, we, we went behind
Dr. Jesse Reimink: yeah,
Chris Bolhuis: um,
and they had these spectacularly, they're gone now, right. Did I tell [00:30:00] you that? They're gone.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: You said that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Chris Bolhuis: They got dynamited. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So anyway, that rift eventually failed, but, this is the kind of thing, this mafic and ultramafic material from deeper down into the mantle it fed it out onto the surface. And this is one of the settings where we're going to get potentially anyway, a nickel ore deposit,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: That's right?
and this
is the Duluth Complex. these are going to be the, the sort of feeder plumbing [00:30:30] system, magma chambers beneath the sort of rift basalts. So they're, you know, they're related to these rift basalts. But, this segregation, you can kind of imagine we need time, we need to be in a magmatic setting.
doesn't happen that much in lava flows. So it's the roots to the, the basalt flows that's, generating these deposit types that then the roots get uplifted and eroded and
exposed and tilted. So,
Chris Bolhuis: Because it came from deeper, right? And when it comes from deeper, it's going to be ultra mafic as opposed to mafic. It's going to be richer [00:31:00] in these minerals like olivine and pyroxene and so on that are going to be more likely to have nickel in
the chemical composition.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Chris, have you ever taken, you know, on that field trip, have you ever taken them over to the Duluth complex in Minnesota or into Iron Country, you know, kind of further west, across the border there or not?
It's kind of a trek.
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah, it is. I have not taken my geology students across state lines. but I've taken them up the Keweenaw peninsula though, all the way up to Copper
Harbor.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: right, [00:31:30] okay, so you went up the arm of the basalt flows there, yeah, gotcha. a trek to get from there, even though they are related, it kind of
Chris Bolhuis: It's long. It is so far away.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: It's a ways away. It's a ways away. up in that region is another really famous and high grade deposit type or tectonic setting that form these nickel sulfide deposits is the Sudbury Igneous Complex.
And this is a really cool one, kind of near and dear to my heart, Chris. It's a 1. 8 billion year old meteorite impact crater. And this is a very large impact [00:32:00] crater. One of the big ones that we have preserved on earth. And, uh, It's the second largest impact crater that we have preserved on earth. The impactor that hit the earth was probably 10 to 15 kilometers in diameter. So, a monster. This created a huge lava lake, and it, so it hit the Earth's crust, it hit that part of what is now North America 1. 8 billion years ago, and it created this huge lava lake that then went through all of these magmatic processes that we're describing, sort of Bowen's reaction series [00:32:30] esque type things, and we get this segregation between this nickel sulfide, iron nickel sulfide liquids that have all the platinum group elements that have all the nickel in them, and so, um, and so, These layers, you get these kind of relatively thin layers of this magmatic segregation that then crystallized into an ore, a really economic mineral deposit to mine for nickel and platinum group elements.
Chris Bolhuis: Do you have rocks from there?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I do not have rocks from here, no. uh,
Chris Bolhuis: the Sudbury Igneous
Complex
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I've got [00:33:00] ones from the, the target. rocks that are still preserved that were just shocked but not melted, I have only a couple from the melt zone and none of the iron nickel sulfide
ones. I've
Chris Bolhuis: I actually have, we, you and I have never talked about this. I've been here. several times actually. the story back, you know, Jenny's dad, Worked for a company that they owned, there's a lot of water around there, lots of lakes and lots of islands, you know, their company owned a, an island that had a, a kind of a mansion on it.
And he got to use that once a week. And so we would go [00:33:30] there and we had use of one of those flat bottom boats, you know, those skiffs and, and I would just, I would take the boat out to. These other areas. And I had my rock hammers and my chisels and I was banging around all day while everybody else was fishing, I was rock collecting.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Chris is rockhounding.
Chris Bolhuis: of this stuff.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I mean, the Sudbury is, all my grad students just went, uh, this past summer? Yeah, this past summer. They all took a trip, you know, they kind of raised some money for themselves and went up there and collected a bunch of samples and [00:34:00] it is one of the craziest places.
Geological locations. You just get to see so many different types of amazing features. You go shatter cones and you get all these crazy granite fears and weird igneous rocks that formed inside of the impact layer. it's a really cool area and it has a long history of mining up in the Sudbury area as well.
So, that's another example. There's a similar one called the Vredefort structure in South Africa. That's another impact structure that produced these like iridium rich and nickel and [00:34:30] platinum group. element enriched layers by this magmatic separation.
Chris Bolhuis: That's right. So just to be clear, before we move on to the second way that, that these things concentrated, that nickel ores concentrate the example of the Sudbury igneous complex, the meteor impact crater created a lake that allowed for fractional crystallization, right?
It allowed then these nickel bearing elements to sink to the bottom of that lake,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: yep, that's exactly right. So,
Chris Bolhuis: the gist of the story.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: a giant shallow magma chamber where all these [00:35:00] separations and Bowen's reaction series, etc. happened. So,
the, laterite deposits, Chris, these are crazy ones. And these are, I would say, I would say they're kind of like up and comers, but not really. These are like, they're the main event in the modern, mining industry.
I think right now, like this is where we get a lot of nickel from at the moment is these laterite deposits and, what
these are is,
Chris Bolhuis: Well, first of all, can I interrupt you a second, Jesse? Because I want to just say that, you said it's an up and comer, right? I kind of think about this in the [00:35:30] same context as the mining for metals in sand, right? This kind of like new, it's a new look at how might nickel.
Aggregate. How might it concentrate? Right. And, this is a really interesting one for me. I think these laterite formations, these laterite soils,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I agree. This is just one of the crazier ways to form mineral deposits. Like I think the, the, you know, magmatic processes, the magmatic separation, that kind of makes sense. That's intuitive. [00:36:00] This is not so intuitive. And what these are, these are weathering deposits. And so think of a soil profile. And we have a chapter, a couple chapters in the Camp Geo on the app that talk about soil.
And you can see beautiful graphics that we've made of a soil profile. And you get You get different layers in a soil profile, and some are leaching layers, and some are depositing layers, and some are just organic layers, but in a soil profile, minerals are getting leached by the water
passing [00:36:30] through them, basically, kind of like a coffee filter, I don't know, is that a good, do
you probably have a better
Chris Bolhuis: Uh, can I take a crack at it? I don't know. I wouldn't like, well, first of all, we're not talking about just any soil here, right? We're talking about, The soil above the rock is it's ultramafic rock, We're talking about not a common surface exposure here, right? First of all, in order to have a ladder, right?
And then need the right climate for this. weathering happens faster in a, like a warm and humid kind of climate, right? But what [00:37:00] happens then is these minerals that are high temperature minerals, because the root of this is ultramafic, they're not stable at the surface. And so the chemical weathering will leach out.
It'll take out these in separate elements like silicon and calcium and magnesium, they'll remove it from the rock, leaving the nickel behind and it's concentrating it like that. It's like, it's kind of like, we're going to take away a bunch of these minerals and get them out of the area. And we're going to leave the [00:37:30] nickel minerals behind and concentrate it that way.
That's the way I
think of this kind of laterite.
formation.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: think that's exactly right, Chris. And there's a whole bunch of, I think, really important geochemistry that goes on in these things, or that helps inform us of how nickel can get enriched in this. So, if you think about, well, Earth's carbon cycle, we've talked about the slow carbon cycle, and one of the main things about the slow carbon cycle is, Weathering calcium out of mafic rocks, taking it from pyroxene and putting it into the [00:38:00] oceans or taking it from feldspar and putting it into the oceans.
And calcium is one that gets leached out pretty quickly. Magnesium also gets leached out pretty quickly. Now, You're left behind once you leach out silica and calcium magnesium with those ones that are soluble in water, then you're left behind nickel, aluminum is another one, and iron kind of partially, and this is where we come back to the difference between nickel and iron.
Iron, remember, can have two oxidation states. It can be plus two, plus three. One of them's mobile, one of them's not. Nickel only [00:38:30] really exists in the plus two state. And so it kind of sticks there like aluminum. It sticks to mineral faces. It's not swept away. It's not dissolved in the water. That's kind of filtering through the soil as easily.
So it gets enriched, and it could get moved up and down a little bit, but it doesn't get kind of carried away in the groundwater system. So it could move from like, you know, half a meter below the surface to a meter below the surface, but it's not going to get carried away out to the Amazon river system out into the
ocean.
Chris Bolhuis: [00:39:00] right. back to your analogy of a pile of, of building bricks, right? If you have bricks of different color and you have red bricks and you have black bricks, right? And if, chemical weathering preferentially removes the red bricks, you take them and get them out of that pile. You're concentrating the black bricks and that's what's happening to the nickel.
It's getting concentrated just because everything else is getting picked out.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: That's exactly right, Chris. So what do we need for a laterite deposit? We need ultramafic rocks. We need nickel around, right? And we talked about how [00:39:30] nickel's not really present in granite. So you can leach the heck out of a granite and you're not going to form a nickel deposit. You need an ultramafic rock that has high nickel content at the surface, and you need that surface environment to be hot and humid, which means there's a lot of hot water.
around, which means that this leaching process happens more. So you need kind of tropical environments on top of ultramafic rocks. okay, that's laterite deposit. let's end with talking about some of the more interesting approaches, because we have this kind of [00:40:00] impending nickel problem on our hands.
Like we're going to need more nickel. There's demand growing, but I want to touch on this laterite deposit thing, Chris, because Indonesia is a country that has dramatically increased its nickel production. And actually it is the largest producer of nickel and the Philippines are another massive producer of nickel. Now,
Chris Bolhuis: Makes sense.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: two questions. Why does it make sense? Why does it make sense? And then I want to ask a question.
Chris Bolhuis: okay, provided then Indonesia and the Philippines have, if they [00:40:30] have ultramafic rock exposed at the surface, they're prime for, forming laterite, soils then because they're really warm and they're super, super humid. And so the, it's going to be accelerated chemical
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Exactly.
Chris Bolhuis: it's going to then concentrate that way.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: So, my question then, Chris, so that, that's exactly right. these are just huge laterite deposits. They're tectonically active areas. These are arcs, uh, volcanic arcs that have a whole bunch of magmatism going on, tectonics thrusting stuff up, so you get [00:41:00] ultramafic rocks at the surface in a humid environment.
If you were going to open a nickel mine right next door to your house, which one would you rather have, a laterite deposit or Or a magmatic iron nickel sulfide deposit. I guess what
I'm asking is, which one would you imagine is more environmentally damaging or friendly?
Chris Bolhuis: That really, really good question. So before I even attempt to answer that question, how would they go about mining, Elaterite, Nickel Deposit, then
like I need [00:41:30] to know that
Dr. Jesse Reimink: yeah, that's fair. Fair point. Fair point. it's a, uh, it's not that environmentally friendly, let's say, I mean, you think of a soil horizon, it's, it's not going to be that thick, it's going to be a couple meters, but it's over a huge wide area, right? So you have this relatively low concentration over a huge area, you're basically going to have to clear cut and either dig up soil over a huge area, or sometimes just dump acid through the [00:42:00] soil and, and leach it out that way.
So it can be really damaging.
Chris Bolhuis: So do
you just, do you want me to answer the question then? Cause I think I'm going to get it right now.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: me add one thing to it, because I think, um, mining these iron nickel sulfides not necessarily the best either,
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah, I don't think either one is going to be like environmentally really good.
sulfide and arsenic kind of thing. Those, those words just don't sound good to me.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: no, they, yeah, and there's a huge legacy, like, for [00:42:30] instance, up in Sudbury, Chris, when you go up there, I mean, saw,
area is just completely Blown apart by acid rain, like there's hardly any vegetation, now it's starting to recover, but like, there's a legacy
of environmental damage in Sudbury because of this mining, for
Chris Bolhuis: but I'm telling you too, when you crack open some of these rocks, the, it stinks. Like your hands they, they don't smell good. They've got this residue on 'em. I mean, it's just, it's not a pleasant, As soon as I collected the rocks, I bagged 'em up and, and washed my hands as quickly as I could because it just, [00:43:00] I mean, you know that you're not handling something intuitively.
You're not handling something that is probably good for you.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Totally. And so I, you know, to answer the question, it's sort of like, well, neither. I mean, I, if I had to choose, I'd probably rather have one of the iron nickel sulfide deposits, the magmatic ones, because that is more like quarrying. You can kind of contain it. You don't have to, Scrape off soil from a huge, huge area, but neither one really would be great.
And nickel has one of the highest carbon costs for mining out there. Nickel, the [00:43:30] element is just, it's carbon expensive to mine. And so there are all of these really interesting approaches that people are trying to get nickel out. And one of the most interesting is bio mining. basically, I think of it as microbes or plants to concentrate nickel
Chris Bolhuis: they'll do the same thing that happens in a ladder, right? Kind of environment like Indonesia or the Philippines, right? But they're going to use microbes to do it instead of natural chemical weather and processes.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: exactly. And you can
Chris Bolhuis: They're going to liberate, these [00:44:00] minerals out and leave the nickel behind, thereby concentrating and aggregating it
Dr. Jesse Reimink: and, and you could of do the same thing with crops. You know, there are certain crops that soak up nickel and you, they, you, it's a bioactive element, so they soak up nickel, you harvest the crops, extract the nickel from the crops,
and
then
Chris Bolhuis: weird? You're talking about taking the nickel out of the, the plant
itself. That, yeah, that's super interesting. you sent me a couple article links to read it, you know, to get ready for this and I was absolutely [00:44:30] enthralled by this, bio mining
Dr. Jesse Reimink: yeah. It's a really, really, um, it's a cool one and I think it kind of comes back to. Well, it kind of comes full circle. We're talking about the same chemical reaction a lot in a lot of our conversations, Chris, that we have about the green energy transition. We're talking about taking ultramafic rocks, putting them at the surface, and weathering those things.
And that does a couple things. It draws down CO2. We can liberate nickel from them. there's a lot of energy stored in that reaction. [00:45:00] And it produces things like hydrogen. It can produce geological hydrogen. So, There's a lot of interesting stuff about ultramafic rocks at the surface, I think here.
Chris Bolhuis: I wonder, Jesse, about, let's say that you had this kind of ultramafic magmatic ore. And you mine the nickel out of it. And what then could we do if we pulverize the rest of this ultramafic rock that seems to be really useful then in terms of like sequestering
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yes, exactly. there [00:45:30] are companies that are proposing to do just that, take that ultramafic rock and use it to store CO2. That reaction, that serpentinization reaction that stores CO2 also liberates hydrogen. So you can capture maybe the hydrogen gas. So there's kind of like one reaction to rule them all here or something uh, there's just a lot of focus on ultramafic rocks at the surface.
Because It can be really bad if it's uncontrolled, but we can do a lot with this reaction, with this, this type of rock at the surface, we can extract stuff from it, we can sequester [00:46:00] CO2 into it, it's a really interesting space, I think, to, to pay
attention to for the next several years here, I just feel like we've talked about that quite a bit, or it's kind of come up in a couple different ways, from our Earth's Climate book, um, that we
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. That's, I was just going to say that, like the last chapter in our climate book, we do a whole session on carbon sequestration. And this was one of the things that we talked about, although not in this exact context, but something very similar to
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, very similar. Exactly. Very similar. So I don't know, Chris, I think [00:46:30] this, this sort of phytomining or paying attention to, to how we're using this stuff or how we're, how people are, maybe trying to tackle a couple problems with one rock type and one reaction at the surface is cool to pay attention to.
It's a good time to be a
Chris Bolhuis: I agree. you know, that's just smart, in terms of these, the bio mining, phytomining, using plants to do that. It's, um, incredibly. I think clever. I don't, that's probably not the right word for it, but it's just, um, it's so smart, it's so out of the box,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. So completely out [00:47:00] of the box. Yes. And, and really, really, you know, interdisciplinary, it takes the biologists working together with the chemists, working together with the geologists, working together with like, the water people, the Andrew
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: the the, geo,
what
is it?
Fluvial geomorphologists. they got to
Chris Bolhuis: He's, he is
Dr. Jesse Reimink: too, right? Yeah. I
Chris Bolhuis: That's right? That's right.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: air. Oh,
Chris Bolhuis: Well, Hey, Jesse, I think that's a wrap. Do you have anything else you want to add to this to top it off? Or
Dr. Jesse Reimink: No, think, I think that's a, [00:47:30] that's a wrap on the devil's metal. I mean, just what a fun name and really,
you know, fun geology, totally fun geology in here. I loved it. So, Hey, with that, send us an email. We got a lot of, uh, really interesting questions from, from you guys and, uh, keep sending them our way.
Send us an email, planetgeocast. gmail. com. You can go to our website, planetgeocast. com. There you can subscribe. You can support us. Hey, we always appreciate it. When you go there, there's a support us link. We always appreciate it when people send us a bit to help support this podcast.
The other way you can support us is head over to our [00:48:00] Camp Geo app. You can download that in the app store, or it's the first link in your show notes. We have all of our Camp Geo content. That's. Audio discussions, Chris and I put together with images that I think are really, really useful for learning the basics, because some of this stuff is complicated and you just need the image there take a look at it and then continue listening to the discussion.
we also have several audio books on there that you can purchase as well, including the Earth's Climate book, which is there for a couple of bucks,
Chris Bolhuis: Cheers.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: peace.
[00:48:30]
