for platinum in gasoline and diesel catalytic converter applications, 2) expanding automotive production and 3) ever more stringent governmental emission regulations. These primary... emissions. However, platinum's primary advantage in diesel applications relates more to the fact that the diesel exhaust stream is a highly oxidizing environment in which palladium...-term market position due to continuing research, driven by basic cost economics. Outside of platinum, palladium and rhodium, no other primary catalyst materials have been...

price surge in the first place. Analysts have attempted to determine the size of the Russian inventory by gauging production from Norilsk, its primary source, over the 50 year... of primary mine production for 20 years, with the 110 million ounces of primary mine production augmented by up to 30 million ounces of liquidated inventory. That equates to over 25...% more palladium supplied to the market than was actually produced during that period. Put another way, on average per year over the last 20 year period, 5.5 million ounces of primary...