In many ways you are correct. See the story of epicycles for instance.

Random good read on subject: Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He's better than me at arguing.

This is true. However, I would want to have at least a few mines operating when a crisis hits, as it's a substantial amount of time before a new mining operation can be executed in. I don't know for certain but I'd guess probably 1-2 years, if we're in a hurry. However, us Westerners would have to work like the Chinese, which is generally very very hard my friends. As they might say, we might need to learn how to "eat a little bitter" in the meantime.

I'm a chemical engineer, and part of my job is to put together physical property packages for our simulator. I have no idea if you can legally do this by adapting something from another database, but I would contribute some of the information I have if you can get through the legal stuff.

Mainly, I rely on NIST's JANAF publication for thermodynamic data (inorganics only), the DIPPR database, and the Yaw's Physical Property Handbook. For binary VLE data DECHEMA is the best references Of these, JANAF is freely available (in horrible PDF format) while the other two would require some sort of membership or purchase. These are mainly in the form of equations or data tables. From there, we simply bring it into excel or sometimes some curve refitting routines and then on to the simulator, which takes the equations directly. We're members of AIChE which gives us access to the online version of these databases.

DIPPR was the result of a major effort of a consortium of companies who needed this data. I believe most of the serious big petrochemical companies are members of DIPPR. You will be trying to recreate this work, which is doable, but I think it will be harder than you think. I agree that this data shouldn't be locked away as tightly as it is.

as I'm sure my fellow chem nerd slashdotters are saying over and over in other posts: "No, at the pressures we're talking about here the 3-phase diagram is insufficient. Check the real thing:"

http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/water/phase.html

And anybody who talks about critical temperatures and pressures in relation to whether a solid forms is wrong, you can still make a solid above the critical T/P.