CRITICAL METALS: BERYLLIUM

NAME: Robinson Mejía Mendieta

COURSE: Prospección y Exploración Minera
Semester 2019-1
 Introduction

 Beryllium (Be) is the fourth element

in the Periodic Table. It is a
constituent element in various
gemstones, including emerald,
chrysoberyl and aquamarine.
 It has been traded in Egypt about
100 BC
Background

 Discovered in 1797 by the French chemist

Vauquelin.
 It was named glucina by Vauquelin in 1798 after
its sweet-tasting salt.
 The name beryllium was formally adopted by the
International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry
(IUPAC) in 1949.
 Its commercial use began in 1926 and, by 2006,
the most recent year for which figures are
available, grew to become a $700 million dollar a
year business
Main properties

 Density of 1846 kg/m3

 High charge / ionic radius ratio.
 Remarkable stiffness.
 Virtually transparent to X-rays.
 Sound travels through beryllium faster than any other
metal is also important in certain applications.
 When added to other metals as an alloying element,
beryllium provides controllable strengthening
mechanisms, good electrical and thermal conductivity
and very low friction against most bearing surfaces.
 The beryllium nucleus also contains an extra neutron
which can be easily dislodged by gamma radiation.
 Use of beryllium

Beryllium applications can be

categorized into five areas:
 Consumer electronics and
telecommunications
 Industrial components and
commercial aerospace
 Defense and military
 Medical
 Other
 Is beryllium hazardous?
 It is actually one of the most toxic known. It is
a metal that can be very harmful when it is
breathed by humans, because it can damage
the lungs and cause pneumonia.
 The most commonly known effect of beryllium
is called berylliosis, a dangerous and persistent
disease of the lungs that can even damage
other organs, such as the heart.
 Beryllium can also cause allergic reactions in
people who are hypersensitive to chemicals.
These reactions can be very acute and can
make the person fall heavily ill, a condition
known as chronic beryllium disease.
 Beryllium can also increase the chances of
developing cancer and DNA damage.
Forms of beryllium used commercially

Thesare the e followings:

 Alloys containing small amounts of

beryllium, especially copper-
beryllium

 Pure beryllium metal

 Beryllia (BeO) ceramics

Beryllium resources worlwide

Investor Intels, 2016

Beryllium reserves and production
worlwide

Statista, 2018
 Prices

 Beryl is not traded on international commodity exchanges. Instead, prices are

negotiated between buyers and sellers and the few posted prices for beryl containing
an average of 11% BeO have remained unchanged for at least 35 years at US $1600 per
metric tonne.

 The significant increase in prices over the period 2005–11 was driven by several key
mining and refining cost factors. These include increases in the price of refining
process chemicals, especially sulfuric acid and ammonia, the increase in the price of
diesel fuel used in mining.
Distribution
 Minerallogy
• Beryllium can behave as a lithophile,
chalcophile and siderophile element.

• It is an “essential ingredient in approximately

45 minerals” and as an “occasional constituent
in approximately 50 other minerals”. Mineral Formula Crystal System
Be3Al2(Si6O18)
Beryl Hexagonal
• The most important minerals from an economic Be4(Si2O7)(OH)2
Bertrandite Orthornhombic
standpoint are bertrandite and beryl. Be2SiO4
Phenakite Trigonal
• Beryllium is not a very abundant element Chrysoberyl BeAl2O4 Orthornhombic
in the Earth, but, being an incompatible
element in common rock-forming silicate
minerals, it is susceptible to concentration via
fractionation in geochemical processes.
 Minerallogy

 Beryl Sources
The mineral beryl is the main source of beryllium mined outside the United States.
Beryl is most often found in veins or pegmatites, which are rocks that contain the last
minerals to crystallize from a large igneous intrusion.

 Bertrandite Sources
A complex series of events must take place to concentrate beryllium into bertrandite.
First, a magma that is rich in fluorine, beryllium, and silica must erupt in an area
where there are carbonate rocks (limestone or dolomite).
Mineralogy

Chemography of the
principal solid phases
in the BeO-Al2O3-SiO2-
 Deposits

 Commercial production of beryllium has

been derived from two principal types of
deposit: granitic pegmatite deposits and
hydrothermal metasomatic deposits.
 Historically, beryllium has been extracted
from pegmatitic deposits of all ages and
distributed widely around the globe.
 Since 1962 most of the world’s beryllium
production has been derived from one
large hydrothermal deposit of Tertiary
age located at Spor Mountain, Utah, USA.
 Pegmatitic deposits

 Pegmatites are defined as very coarse-grained, crystalline rocks commonly of

granitic composition.
 Pegmatites have long been exploited as sources of mica, feldspar, quartz,
gemstock and the elements tin, tantalum, niobium, lithium, rubidium,
caesium and beryllium.
 Rare-metal pegmatites that contain relatively abundant beryl include those of
the rare element class.
 Most pegmatite deposits consist of a few thousand tons of rock.
 The Harney Peak Granite of the Black Hills, South Dakota, is an excellent
example of such a pegmatite field and was a primary source of beryl for the
US industry until 1962.
Pegmatitic deposits

In the LCT system micas, feldspars and

quartz are ubiquitous but the rare
elements in pegmatites display a zonal
pattern of element enrichment and
mineral variation resulting from increased
fractionation with distance of the
pegmatite from its parental source

Beryllium, usually in the form of beryl,

makes an early appearance in the zoned
sequence close to the source granite
intrusion and continues to occur into the
most highly fractionated and distal
members of the pegmatite field.
Pegmatitic deposits

Geologic map shows the pegmatite

and granite-related beryllium-
bearing rare-metal mineralization
at the Hellroaring Creek prospect.
 Hydrotermal deposits
 This broad category includes deposits derived from hydrothermal processes in
various geological settings, including replacement, skarn, greisen and vein
deposits
 Hydrothermal deposits account for the world’s largest known resources of
beryllium and include the Lost River Tin deposit, the Spor Mountain deposit,
the Sierra Blanca deposit in Texas and Thor Lake.
 The high fluorine content depresses the freezing point of magmas and allows
protracted enrichment of incompatible elements, such as beryllium, into the
late hydrothermal phase.
 When the hydrothermal fluid encountered carbonate rocks fluorite was
formed, while beryllium was deposited in the host volcanic rocks.
Hydrotermal deposits

• The Spor Mountain deposits formed

from a low temperature beryllium–
uranium-fluorine-enriched
hydrothermal fluid, circulating
through Oligocene base surge
rhyolite deposits.

• The rhyolite deposits lie

unconformably on Palaeozoic
dolomites which are thought to have
been the source of calcium that
precipitated the fluorite and led to
the deposition of bertrandite.
 Beryllium geochemistry

 Because of its small ionic radius and

charge, beryllium does not easily
substitute for other elements
commonly found in rock-forming
minerals; similarly, beryllium is not
easily displaced by other elements in
crystals and tends to form distinct
minerals. Although more than 100
minerals containing beryllium are
known to occur in nature, most are
rare or found in a small number of
unique localities.
Is compatible o non-compatible?
 Mining

 Beryl ores

The small size of most granitic pegmatite deposits makes them uneconomic to
mine by mechanical methods, and so beryl extraction from pegmatites is carried
out by a manual process of simultaneous extraction, cleaning and concentration,
Beryl can be concentrated by various novel flotation processes. However, none of
these are economically attractive for the extraction of beryllium on a
commercial scale because of the relatively high cost of hydrofluoric and oleic
acids, the principal reagents
 Mining

 Bertrandite ores

Materion has been mining bertrandite ores at Spor Mountain, Utah since 1962.
Mined ore is gathered on a stockpile which is, in turn, drilled and assayed for
grade control. There is no additional concentration process. Most assaying for
grade control is carried out with beryllometers, which are hand-held, portable
instruments that use a radioactive gamma radiation source to displace an excess
loosely attached neutron in the beryllium nucleus.
Processing of beryl and
● Beryl concentrates are heated to 1700 °C and
bertrandite to beryllium hydroxide
quenched rapidly in water to form
a frit or glass. The frit is heat at 1000 °C,
ground to finer than 200 mesh (75 μm), and then
leached with a concentrated sulfuric acid solution
at 250 to 300 °C. This process extracts the
beryllium, forming a beryllium sulfate solution.

● Bertrandite ore is crushed and wet-milled to

yield a fine slurry, which is then leached with
a sulfuric acid solution at about 95 °C to extract
the beryllium, forming a beryllium sulfate
solution.

Then are combined. Solvent extraction is used to

remove additional elements that were extracted
with the beryllium. Two hydrolysis
steps at 95 °C and 165 °C, respectively,
remove the ammonia and carbon dioxide and
result in the formation of beryllium hydroxide-
Production of metal and alloys from beryllium hydroxide
Production of beryllium oxide from beryllium hydroxide
Beryllium cicle
 Recycling
 The pure beryllium metal components used in technological applications have
extremely long lifetime, and, therefore, return to the recycle stream very slowly.
Some, because of applications in space or because of their sensitive military
nature, do not return at all. When these components do finally return at end-of-
life, they can be easily recycled.
 When it can be isolated and recovered, copper– beryllium or nickel–beryllium alloy
end-of-life scrap is directly recycled to produce new alloys. A significant premium
is paid by copper–beryllium manufacturers to stimulate the return of such scrap in
order to take advantage of the energy conservation and sustainability advantages
compared to extraction from ore.
 The United Nations Environmental Program notes that most components of
electronic and electrical devices are recycled for their copper value alone and end
up in a copper smelter where the beryllium is captured in the slag and effectively
lost. As a result, the recycled beryllium content of old scrap is low and the end-of-
life recycling rate very slow, at less than one per cent.
 References
 GUS, Gunn
‘Beryllium’. Critical metals: Handbook. British Geological Survey. pp. 99-121

 USGS
2016 Beryllium-a critical mineral commodity- Resources, Production, and supply chain
https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2016/3081/fs20163081.pdf

 GREW, Edward
2014 Beryllium mineral evolution. American Mineralogist, Volume 99, pages 999-1021

 HAWTHORNE, Franck
2002 The cristal chemistry of beryllium: Mineralogy, Petrology and Geochemistry

 TELL, Berence
2018 Beryllium applications. The balance.
https://www.thebalance.com/beryllium-applications-3898138