Science: Vanadium from Idaho

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As never before in the history of the American Chemical Society, U.S. ears were cocked toward its semiannual meeting in Buffalo last week. But if Americans expected reassuring words on synthetic rubber and other acute wartime chemical problems, they heard little.

The big news was under a bushel and was carefully kept there. The chemists talked learnedly, wordily, nebulously about synthetic rubber. Significantly, one scheduled paper on synthetic rubber was called off at the last moment. Nobody talked at all about such important new developments in gasoline as the chemicals which retard the deterioration of leaded aviation fuels in storage, or new ingredients in 100-octane gas. Many chemists were simply too busy to attend.

Startling exception to the elaborate vagueness of most reports was the description of an important new process for extracting vanadium from phosphates—as a by-product in the making of fertilizers. Vanadium is a rare metal badly needed by U.S. arms plants for hardening steel. The new method climaxes four years of research by Chemical Engineers J. Perry Morgan (of Standard Oil of New Jersey) and Arthur W. Hixson (of Columbia University).

Most vanadium used in the U.S. has been imported from Peru and Southwest Africa. Now vanadium can be extracted from Idaho phosphate deposits. Hitherto this has been impracticable because Idaho's 6,000,000,000 tons of phosphate rock contain only 500,000 tons of vanadium, a mere one-tenth to one-fourth of one per cent vanadium. This concentration would be too low for practicable extraction, were it not for the fact that Anaconda Copper Co. is already processing over 100,000 tons of phosphates a year as fertilizer. From this tonnage some 200 to 250 tons of vanadium can be extracted as a byproduct. This is enough to supply about 25% of the annual U.S. demand.

Essentials of the complicated new process for extracting the vanadium: the phosphate rock is dissolved in sulfuric acid; then nitric acid is added to precipitate the vanadium in powder, then cake form. This will be marketed to alloy-steel makers as vanadium pentoxide.