Osmium: the precious metal you've never heard of

Ingo Wolf, director of the The Osmium Institute, discusses one of the rarest precious metals that is also one of the rarest chemical elements on our planet. Osmium is mined together with platinum ore. To obtain just 30 grams of osmium, around 10,000 tons of platinum ore are required. The extraction of the osmium from the platinum ore and the crystallisation of the osmium are both very complex and cost intensive processes. The current global production rate of crystalline osmium is just 120 kg per annum. In time, when the mining of platinum ore declines, the production rate for osmium will decline accordingly and osmium will become even more rare. Osmium is the eighth and last precious metal with atomic number 76.