Chapter 948 - We Found Gold (1/2)
It had been a while since the last time he saw Yang Yuan, but Yang Yuan did look a lot better compared to before.
On the one hand, it was expressed in his temperament. On the other hand, it showed through his skin color.
Although he was the CEO of the subsidiary, the nature of his work and his persistence for knowledge made it impossible for him to stay in the office as a white-collar worker. Instead, he often traveled between the mining areas in MLL and Madagascar. For this reason, his skin color was much darker than before.
His ex-girlfriend Su Fei did impact him dramatically, but now, he wasn’t crushed by her. Instead, he came back stronger and reached new heights in his career and abilities.
The old friends met, and after some small talk, Yang Yuan didn’t waste time as he immediately turned around and took a stack of reports to discuss work.
“The results of the analysis on the ore samples have come out.”
“The results are quite amazing! In addition to iron and siliceous, we also discovered a surprisingly large amount of titanium in the asteroid core! And the quality is astonishingly high!”
“We found a treasure! Mining and refining must be done by our department. We have the equipment and technology! The specific data is here—you should see it yourself!”
Yang Yuan was ecstatic when he was explaining. He waved his fist in the air with excitement. Jiang Chen could clearly feel that his current mood was even more excited than when Jiang Chen handed over the exclusive mining rights of MLL Island minerals to him.
“Rest assured. All the mining-related projects are yours.”
Jiang Chen smiled and took the report from his hand. He looked at it and he was even more astonished when he actually read through the data.
The first section was an overview of the Bennu asteroid. Some of the data were measured by Space Launch Center. The asteroid had a diameter of about 500 meters and a volume of about 36.8 million cubic meters. The average density determined by spectroscopy was about 4.5 times that of water, which was 4.5 tons per cubic meter. The mass of the asteriod reached an astounding 165 million tons.
He turned to the most critical part, the mineral reserves.
According to the verification done by Future Mining based on the ore samples, there were more than 40 million tons of asteroid iron ore reserves, and the ore grade was an astonishing 80%(1)!
It was an impossible-to-reach number on Earth because it meant it must exist as pure iron! It was impossible to form this mineral in an oxidizing environment. Almost all iron in the Earth’s crust existed in nature in the form of oxides.
But space was different.
The 40 million tons of iron ore would allow for the refining of more than 30 million tons of steel at an ultra-low smelting cost. Not only would it be enough to maintain the industrial parks in Ange and New Malaysia Special District for several years, but they could also export to international markets on a large scale to earn foreign exchange!
Although the value of iron ore was high, it still paled in comparison to the titanium ore in the core.
High-performance titanium alloys and titanium-based composite materials had a high specific strength, high corrosion resistance, high durability and low weight, which were unmatched by other metals. However, there weren’t many titanium mines held by Celestial Trade. Except for the debris recovered from the apocalypse, most of the external structures of Celestial Trade used high-strength aluminum alloys.
It was common knowledge that titanium ore still had a rich reserve. It was considered a rare metal rather than a precious metal, but titanium alloys were quite rare. There were two main difficulties that hindered the development of titanium alloy technology. One was the smelting of titanium alloys while the other was the processing of titanium alloys.