Elements
The Metals Hunter Scavenging the Globe for Nature’s Rarest Elements
Anthony Lipmann wants what most people can’t find, and he’ll go anywhere to get it.
Lipmann at a rhenium processing plant in Chile.
Photographer: Cristobal Olivares for Bloomberg Businessweek
Imagine a closet stuffed with a billion envelopes. One has a check for $100,000 inside. Do you go hunting?
Anthony Lipmann does. One in a billion is the concentration in the Earth’s crust of an element named rhenium, part of a group of so-called minor metals notable for two reasons: They’re exceedingly difficult to obtain, and they’re spectacularly important for certain industries. That’s why Lipmann loves them—the more technology frees us from our earthly bonds, the more we discover how linked we are to forms of nature we didn’t know existed.