smirk and hydrogen/platinum/palladium and Russia

[donsu]

http://www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/2004/05/04_406.html

Why did regulators welcome a foreign takeover of the nation's only producer of two vital metals?


The Bush administration is high on hydrogen. The president's proposed 2005 budget includes $228 million to help businesses develop better hydrogen fuel cells, triple the assistance the federal government provided in 2001. What's left unsaid in his speeches about America's potential to "lead the world in developing clean, hydrogen-powered automobiles" is that the initiative holds out a massive windfall for Bush insiders and well-connected lobbyists, not to mention a Russian oligarch with a history of shady dealings and environmental destruction.

The source of this prospective fortune is the Montana-based Stillwater Mining Co., which is the only domestic producer of two platinum group metals (PGM) -- platinum and palladium. Last year Vladimir Potanin, a Russian billionaire whose empire already includes vast PGM reserves in Siberia, took control of Stillwater. Regulators from the Treasury Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) quickly approved the deal even though it gave Potanin greater power over metals that could be critical to the nation's future.

To understand what this has to do with hydrogen and why there's so much money at stake, begin with this fact: Fuel cells will use platinum or palladium as a catalyst. The metals speed the process by which hydrogen combines with oxygen, releasing energy that could power a vehicle. The metals also could be used in storing hydrogen and are already used in catalytic converters. If the market for fuel cells booms, so too will demand for palladium and platinum. There are only a few locations in the world that mine platinum metals, and the largest producer of palladium and the second largest of platinum is the Potanin-owned Norilsk Nickel Mining Co. on the Taimyr Peninsula in Siberia.

-snip-

Norilsk Nickel hired Baker Botts, the lobbying firm headed by longtime Bush family political adviser James Baker III. Baker Botts assigned a special counsel named Diana Dietrich, a former Federal Trade Commission litigator, to plead Norilsk Nickel's case before the agency where she used to work. The Russian company also put forward the group it planned to add to Stillwater's board of directors after the takeover, and four of its five nominees are neither Russians nor mining executives, but American power players. They include Craig Fuller, the former chief of staff to then Vice President George H.W. Bush; Steven Lucas, a partner at Nielsen-Merksamer, a California firm specializing in lobbying and electoral law; former Senator Donald Riegle (D-Mich.), who served as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee; and Todd Schafer, who works in Moscow for the lobbying firm Hogan & Hartson and has assisted Potanin in battling challenges to his control of Uneximbank. Stillwater vice president John Stark says that his company proposed some of these nominees to Norilsk Nickel, while others were suggested by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
-snip-
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whatever would the bushgang do without homeboys Baker Botts?

bushgang theme song: suck, suck, suck that money down

[treepig]

1. maybe this is something we agree on?

anyhow, thanks for posting the link - i was looking for documentation for the following (similar) information for which i lost the citation:

By Dave Neads

The Other Side of the Story

President George Bush has launched a hydrogen initiative as part of his administration’s Clean Air policy. Touted as the new fuel of the future because it is abundant and clean burning, hydrogen technology could be the way to solve the problems created by traditional fuels. The device that will be used for the conversion of hydrogen to energy will most likely be the fuel cell which could -- and should -- be produced in an environmentally sensitive manner. A look at the other side of the story shows how political machinations are subverting the process of fuel cell production and ultimately, the hydrogen dream. One of the essential elements in the construction of hydrogen fuel cells is a group of palladium isotopes called palladium group metals or PGMs for short. These metals speed up the hydrogen oxygen reaction inside fuel cells while decreasing the amount of corrosion that occurs.

In a deal recently brokered by presidents Bush and Putin, Norelisk Nickel, a major Russian producer of nickel, took over Stillwater Mining Co. which has major palladium mines in Nye, Montana. Immediately we’re off to a bad start -- Norelisk Nickel is known to be a notorious polluter in its home operations. Satellite imagery shows 100 mile long plumes spreading from Norelisk’s smelting operations in northern Siberia. Estimates are that two million acres of forest are affected or killed annually by the two million tons of sulphur dioxide the smelter releases into the atmosphere each year.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., Norelisk Nickel hired a law firm run by former Secretary of State and Bush family friend, James Baker, to obtain regulatory approval for the deal. With that in the bag, Norelisk named five new directors to Stillwater’s previous board. These new appointments are American and are pro-Bush friends and supporters.

Now that they control the primary production of palladium, Norelisk will be able to significantly influence the price of these precious metals. The potential for increased profits is huge. The brokering of this inside deal driven by political expediency is potentially the first of many such ‘arrangements’ to emerge under the Clean Air Policy based on the hydrogen dream.

U.S. domestic coal fields are expected to be part of the energy sources used to produce hydrogen. Big coal is expecting windfall profits from these deals. The nuclear industry has also been lining up to be involved in the hydrogen process. Coal and nuclear, both proven in the past to be very dirty and very harmful, have been the target of huge campaigns in the past decades. But now under the guise of being part of the clean, non-polluting hydrogen initiative they are receiving new life and opportunity. For example, the U.S. Senate recently passed a bill that will give an $8 billion subsidy to fossil fuel production, especially coal bed methane. This is twice the amount set aside for renewable energy sources such as wind, tidal and solar.

Forward thinking that cared about the health of the nation would use non-polluting energy sources to produce hydrogen. Instead, the push is to go back to yesterday’s fuels that have already created a plethora of unhealthy conditions from asthma to global warming. The promise of hydrogen-based energy is that these problems would be reduced; yet the reliance on traditional polluters in the implementation of these new technologies could destroy the hydrogen dream. The Clean Air Initiative may simply become another profit-making scam for the same old group of fossils.