Supplies of Rare Earth Elements Exhausted By 2017 958
tomhudson writes "While we bemoan the current oil crisis, I ran across an editorial that led me to research a more immediate threat. Ramped-up production of flat-panel displays means the material to make them will be 'extinct' by 2017. This goes for other electronics as well. Quoting: 'The element gallium is in very short supply and the world may well run out of it in just a few years. Indium is threatened too, says Armin Reller, a materials chemist at Germany's University of Augsburg. He estimates that our planet's stock of indium will last no more than another decade. All the hafnium will be gone by 2017 also, and another twenty years will see the extinction of zinc. Even copper is an endangered item, since worldwide demand for it is likely to exceed available supplies by the end of the present century.' More links at the journal entry."
Recycling (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Recycling (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed, im not sure about all these -iums, which are no doubt toxic to us anyways... but zinc and copper is pretty easy to recycle, and in a decade, we might not need the -iums we (dont really) need now...
Especially if we upgrade all the phone and cable lines to optical, and recycle those trillion miles of copper, and as we move away from coin money (another debate unto itself) there's also that (both copper and zinc), replacing copper pipes with plastic, etc, etc, etc... although, all that plastic is also another debate.
Re:Recycling (Score:5, Insightful)
I think were all right with plastic we can always 'grown' it from biofeuls once we sort out this pesky demand for oil thing.
Re:Recycling (Score:5, Insightful)
With population growth and new countries wanting to raise their standard of living, we will run out of these elements even faster.
Re:Recycling (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Recycling (Score:5, Insightful)
It is not scaremongering, it is just cry from people that the game is changing but they don't know themselves in which way. The issue boils down to investments. Plenty of alternatives, enough undiscovered country (as you said, ocean floor) and many old mines will become economically viable again. BUT, you do need investments for those, and people do need to realize the consequences.
8 to 10 years ago, you could here these same stories about the oil demand outgrowing the oil supply due to lack of investments and geopolitical issues. Now that that time is here, politicians act like they didn't see it coming and consumers are complaining they can't afford to fill up their SUV's.
Re:Recycling (Score:5, Informative)
It seems that way.
Indium, for example, is more common than silver, and the only reason for the supposed scarcity on the market is that the Chinese mining companies stopped extracting it from their zinc tailings.
I suspect a large proportion of the fear mongering derives from the way mining companies define resources and reserves. The type of exploration required to turn a mineral resource (what miners expect to find) into an ore reserve (what they have proved to be there) is expensive. It doesn't make sense to prove up more ore than is needed for the immediate continuity of the company.
Re:Recycling (Score:5, Informative)
Indium, unlike silver, does not appear in veins or lodes. That's why there are no indium mines. It's not available in concentrations that make it easy to mine and process.
Re:Recycling (Score:5, Funny)
from TFA: "But we can't exactly set up a reservation somewhere where the supply of gallium and hafnium can quietly replenish itself."
Don't we have lots of Indium reservations throughout the American southwest? Why don't we, you know, just use that?
Re:The U.S. should have abolished pennies long ago (Score:5, Insightful)
When the cost of producing a currency exceeds it's value, it's shameful to keep making it.
Off topic, but coins are circulated more than once. Much more. Coins as currency last longer than paper notes.
The U.S. mint is essentially just subsiding lazy states who refuse to round off their sale taxes to the nearest nickel.
The Mint doesn't have the authority to boss the states around. Some might say the federal government doesn't have much authority at all as to how a state will issue its own taxes within its borders.
It's embarrassing to have to throw the things in the trash because they're completely useless and (by law) can't be recycled.
Are you sure they can't be recycled? Perhaps you're thinking of the law that prohibits people OTHER than the government to recycle the materials. I find it highly unlikely the trash bins behind The Mint has a bunch of money in it.
But on the rare occasions when I end up with them, I would rather throw them in a recycle bin than the trash.
Why not just roll 'em up and deposit into your bank account? Spend them? Use the coin counters at the supermarket? Truly it is the life of excess where you can decline money and wish you could just toss it away.
copper (Score:5, Insightful)
is by far the most serious in the above list. Ok, so flat panel manufacturers and researchers would have to pay top dollar, no biggie. But copper is going to get more and more crucial as the combined crunch of oil shortage and increased electrical demands are going to combine.
Re:copper (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Then you are not reading (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact when I got a tour of Quincy Shaft #2 (the deepest hole in the U.S. at 9672 feet) the guide told us about a single, solid column of copper that's still in the mine, 50 feet across and over 20 feet high. That's about 21 million pounds of copper in a single formation on a single level of the mine. (The mine had nearly 100 levels and stretched for several miles.) That block of copper alone is about 1% of the copper usage in the U.S. annually. They never removed it, because in 1930, they didn't have the tools to tear it apart.
Maybe zinc is running short, but there's still gobs of copper around.
Copper, plumbing, thefts (Score:5, Interesting)
Copper prices are now high enough that it's worth trying to steal. Here in Boston, at least once a month there's a story about someone killed trying to steal copper from power lines that turn out to be, y'know, active.
Construction sites now have to be locked up tightly. It's not just the tools that get stolen; it's the pipes and the wire spools.
I assume this will get worse as copper gets scarcer and, thus, more expensive.
The OP mentions plumbing, but I'm not sure that plastic is a viable alternative yet. I've built a few houses, and always used copper, at least for the main plumbing. I remember in the 1990s, the industry tried using PVC, but had problems of some kind, and went back to copper. Today, you can use PEX or Hep2O flexible tubing for heating, but I don't know if it's approved for drinking yet - and we probably don't know its long term stability. Copper is still the gold standard (sorry!) for plumbing.
(Side rant: When copper pipes freeze, you can use an arc welder to heat them back up. You can't do that with PEX, since it's plastic, not metal. So if it gets too cold, your heat stops working... which means the air can't warm up enough to melt the ice... shampoo, rinse, repeat. Make sure your PEX is in a well-insulated wall.)
Re:Copper, plumbing, thefts (Score:4, Interesting)
Hah, copper is always in risk of theft, even before the current metal boom. Whats interesting is that even steel is worth stealing now. Here in sweden, a few km of railroad was stolen in broad daylight recently.
Re:Copper, plumbing, thefts (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:copper (Score:4, Informative)
Then help support the change from copper wire in your house to copper clad aluminum or other abundant metal. the problem with aluminum wiring was the corrosion problem as aluminum corrodes fast, copper cladding solves that.
But the Govt in their infinite stupidity still has aluminum house wiring bans in place. Hell I am testing Cu clad Al cat5e wire right now. it strips the same and is working very well in stress testing. only failure point is when used as a wall to PC jumper as lots of bending and unbending and bending will crack the wires. but in the wall from wall jack to patch panel it's perfectly good.
Also It's 1/2 the price of copper Cat5e.
Re:copper (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrongo.
Aluminum and copper have different coefficients of expansion.
The "infinite wisdom" of the government, which you mock out of ignorance and stupidity, is the reason many houses are still standing. Aluminum wire and copper connections work themselves apart, similar to chip creap. That leads to sparks which leads to fires.
Re:copper (Score:4, Informative)
Copper-plated Zinc, 97.5% Zn, 2.5% Cu, according to wikipedia.
Zinc is also on the "endangered elements" list anyway, so my comment still stands.
Re:copper (Score:5, Funny)
Re:copper (Score:5, Funny)
Pennies are zinc.
Maybe that's another good reason to stop making pennies.
What can and cant be done. (Score:5, Interesting)
When an LCD display breaksdown, they won't be able to crush them into tiny bits, smelt them and recover the material? All it means is your 50" LCD monitor will have some significant residual value and you will sell the dead monitor for some money instead of throwing it in the dumpster.
Re:What can and cant be done. (Score:5, Insightful)
And landfills will become valuable commercial property.
Re:What can and cant be done. (Score:5, Insightful)
Really, I've often wondered when "landfill mining" was going to take off as a viable enterprise, as the higher cost of materials justifies the complicated means.
Re:What can and cant be done. (Score:5, Insightful)
Likewise. There's a whole world of landfill sites (a whole western world, at least) full of things we didn't recycle efficiently, either because we didn't know how or we just didn't bother. I don't know enough about the techniques involved to judge this, but it seems that if deep mining operations are commercially viable today, landfill mining could become commercially viable in the not-too-distant future.
I think the other thing that will have to change is this idea that you buy something but then "upgrade" it after only a very short period of use and throw the old one away, even though the old one still worked perfectly well or needed only routine maintenance to repair. Our culture has become terribly wasteful, because today's economics (and poor customer service when it comes to getting things repaired) practically force anyone sensible to buy a new replacement for things. That's just crazy.
Re:What can and cant be done. (Score:5, Interesting)
In Italy, before WW2, they mined iron from the slag heaps of Roman-era smelters - it had a higher iron concentration than any ore that could then be found in Italy.
*Ding* Correct Answer. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been saying this for years. We'll be exploring landfills soon after they're no longer viable for producing methane gas. Meanwhile, states that refused to bury, and opted to dump their garbage elsewhere will be kicking themselves - hard.
Such "exhausted" landfills will be packed with little more than inorganic waste, like easily harvested metals. Point at anything on the periodic table and it'll exist in a landfill at concentrations far higher than what exists in ore deposits we're mining today; so this will be ridiculously profitable. Add to that the fact that they're all close to home, and you have yourself an industry that does a brisk business in mining landfills. And since all the stinky stuff has long since decomposed, you only have heavy-metals and toxic runoff to worry about (read: just like a normal mine).
After that, companies will look to cut out the middle man and buy back everyone's e-waste after the recycling plant has sorted it out. So the landfill will dissapear, leaving a closed loop from the recovery of raw materials all the way to the consumer and back again.
"SQL Error", you have the board. Pick a category.
Re:*Ding* Correct Answer. (Score:5, Funny)
*Points at silicon*
Re:*Ding* Correct Answer. (Score:4, Informative)
Sorry, all the organic materials will not have decomposed. This is one of the many misconceptions about our waste stream. The compression of the trash generally results in an anaerobic environment, and it all mostly just.... stays there.
Here's a nice little summary [utk.edu] about garbage myths that it looks like William Ruthje of the Tucson Garbage Project [wikipedia.org] put together for high school students about misconeptions regarding trash. One of the particularly surprising and interesting things is the huge percentage of garbage that is actually just paper.
While the article seems to have been written in 1992 and I'm sure trash disposal streams have changed a bit, it gives the general idea and is quite an interesting read. The short of it is that there's a huge volume of stuff out there, and gallium, hafnium, and the like might very well turn out to still be small needles in a very large, stinky, toxic, and hazardous haystack for many years to come.
Total ignorance of economics? (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be mighty surprising if this chicken-little themed story was correct.
Most things when in short supply, their price goes up. People notice this and they either cut back on their use of the stuff, find a substitute, or go out digging for it.
We do have a terrible shortage of celluloid shirt collars, ivory piano keys, whale oil and pyramid shims. Who cares?
Re:Total ignorance of economics? (Score:5, Funny)
find a substitute
I hear Quake 5 for the abacus is going to be awesome!
Re:Total ignorance of economics? (Score:5, Interesting)
The authors apparently do not realize that the available amount of Gallium depend on the price:
Its impending scarcity could already be reflected in its price: in January 2003 the metal sold for around $60 per kilogram; by August 2006 the price had shot up to over $1000 per kilogram
Re:Total ignorance of economics? (Score:5, Insightful)
But the price of gallium will affect the availability of gallium in a form that humans find easily useable.
An increase in price means an increase in resources that can be devoted to extracting gallium and still leave the extractor with a profit.
An increase in price also means that alternatives that used to be more expensive could be less expensive now, which lowers demand for gallium.
Economics isn't a perfect science, and it often heavily relies on imperfect data from a biased world. But I wouldn't put it in the same realm as reading tea leaves.
Re:Total ignorance of economics? (Score:5, Interesting)
Stop treating economics like its a theory of everything.
The problem isn't economics, it's the idiots that try to invoke it in the way we see them doing here. The fact that the price of a commodity increases when it's in short supply doesn't cure the shortage or make it less of a problem; it merely allocates what supplies remain to those who are willing to pay the most. It's a manifestation of the shortage, not an explanation of it.
In a severe food shortage, yes, the price of food shoots up. People who can afford it continue to eat well (albeit at the expense of other things), but others starve. As far as your typical affluent conservative is concerned, the market has efficiently "solved" the problem.
Re:Total ignorance of economics? (Score:4, Informative)
That's extremely short-sighted for a number of reasons.
No, I'm afraid it is you who is being short-sighted here, and it's only out of politeness that I don't use a different word. You have elevated the notion of "free markets" to a religion, a kind of God-substitute that ensures everything will be peachy if we just stay out of the way. If you read past Chapter 2 of your Econ 101 textbook, though, you'll find that this is fallacy.
First, even if a "free" idealized market exists, it only guarantees that markets will clear in the short term. Your God makes no promises that His solution will be optimal in any other respect, or that everybody - or anybody - will be happy with it. Starvation is, after all, just another way that the market responds to a food shortage.
Second, your idealization of free markets and their ability to exist and persist in the absence of government "interference" is rather childish and poorly thought out. Ideal free markets depend on a lot of things, among the most important being that no participant - or cartel - have the power to manipulate supplies or prices. But left alone, markets almost always evolve such that one or more participants accumulate market power until monopoly or oligopoly conditions are achieved, and at that point your arguments are moot.
That last point is my main beef with Libertarians. Market power tends to concentrate over time, simply because it's always more profitable to combine in order to dominate a market than to continue struggling in a state of pure competition and commodity pricing. So you can do away with anti-trust laws and regulation and such, but what you'll end up with isn't "free-market capitalism"; it'll be more like corporate feudalism.
Re:Total ignorance of economics? (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Most food shortages are not caused by governments. At least not in the way you are suggesting. Poverty stricken countries that cannot feed their population have food shortages for a number of reasons and blaming everything on government is very simplistic. The causes are as diverse as first world market manipulation through subsidy to civil wars.
As an example consider post war Europe. Before subsidies Europe did not have enough food to feed itself. If there was shortage people went hungry, perhaps even malnourished. Subsidies manipulated the market so that farmers over produced food. This is bad in good years, but in bad years it ensured food was still available. It is a simple calculation to perform. If the price of food in a good year was $10 per acre (supply exceeds demand), $20 per acre in a normal year, and $50 per acre in a bad year and almost all years are normal, then no farmer is going to develop much land that costs more than $20 dollars an acre to operate.
Problem comes when you have a nice big market like we have today where farmers around the world are trying to compete with heavily subsidies first world farmers. Subsidies have made even cheap viable land in the third world unprofitable. So even in stable countries it is not desirable to grow much excess food. Even worse shipping over food aid for anything other than a crisis actually makes matters worse.
2. If you are living in poverty it makes perfect sense to have lots of offspring. After all, some might die, and you will need them to take care of you. Even more are going to die if you are malnourished. It is in the interest of the collective good to control population growth, but no in the interest of the individual. It is a giant game of prisoners dilemma. The poverty + western medicine and aid causes the population boom which causes yet more poverty. And we again make the situation worse by making it more desirable to rely on the west rather than fix problems. We also prop up the very fascists you mention which help cause all the poverty.
3. The bottom line is that both you and the GP appear to me to be ideologues. You think that government in all it's forms are bad, the GP thinks that simplistic government intervention and feel good economics are the way forward. The truth is much more complicated than either of you are presenting. You cant just take a situation with moral hazards or natural monopolies and pretend that the market will fix them, and you cant point at the markets insurance brokers (speculators) and assume that because sometimes they incorrectly allocate resources our best bet is to put them all up against the wall and let daddy government fix it all.
Here is my take on the original point. Some of the deposits of these rare materials have not be mined yet because the sources are not economically viable at the current price. If demand increases or supply drops then the price will rise, and these sites will become viable. All well and good. But there is a finite amount of these materials available. Eventually the cost of obtaining them will so high that they are not used in some consumer goods anymore, and instead used only where no substitute exists (or where the substitute is more expensive). So far this all sounds fine, the market has fixed the problem right? The only thing is that the market hasn't fixed anything here. All it has done is find the best fit solution. The problem still exists because the problem is an overal reduction in some quantity we care about (quality of life, GDP growth, take your pick). If tomorrow food spontaneously appeared in peoples fridges then general quality of life would go up (so would GDP growth eventually, after the shock of millions of famers having no jobs wore off). This because having lots of resources is a very good thing. Shortages aren't a problem because the market cant correct for them, they are a problem because they require us to allocate larger amounts of resources to obtaining necessarily materials.
So shortages are bad even though the market can f
Re:Total ignorance of economics? (Score:5, Insightful)
Bah, We don't need "technology". We can just use Economics instead.
Can't reach that can on the top shelf? Economics can help!
Is that lump in your armpit getting bigger? Don't worry; Economics will have it out in a jiffy.
Fallen down a gully in the mountains and shattered your pelvis, hundreds of miles from help, with no ways of communicating with anyone? Just chant "Economics" three times, for a speedy and efficient rescue.
Economics is the new God of the Gaps. You don't know the answer? Silly old physical laws getting in the way? No problem; Economics dictates that someone else will be motivated to come up with a solution. It's impossible? Why, that just makes it more valuable!
Have no fear (Score:5, Funny)
We still haven't even begun to use our Upsidasium supply.
Surely it will last us forever.
Re:Have no fear (Score:5, Funny)
I'm setting up a massive stockpile of unobtanium against the day that it becomes useful.
A world without Zinc!? (Score:5, Funny)
World without zinc? (Score:4, Funny)
NOOOOOOO!!!!!!!! Come back, zinc, come back!
*Whew*, it was just a dream. Thank goodness I still live in a world of telephones, car batteries, handguns [*bang*!] and many things made of zinc.
Rare Earth Elements? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, neither is Hafnium, Indium, Zinc or Copper. Does the article have any connection to the rare earth elements at all?
Re:Rare Earth Elements? (Score:4, Informative)
Gone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, if the point is that all of these elements are bound up in in-use devices, and always will be, then that's another matter. But I'd be a bit surprised to find that we've actually touched even close to all of the deposits available. Just the cheap ones. And recycling will probably be cheaper than, say, mining it on the moon or the ocean floor.
off base ^ 99 (Score:4, Informative)
First of all, the "rare earths" are not all thst rare.
Secondly, none of the elements mentioned in the sd story are in any way even near to being a rare earth, i.e. an element in that row of the periodic table.
And of course it's unlikely we will "run out" of anything, or that it will matter. Things seem to turn up when the price goes up, or we find substitutes.
Otherwise, the story was okay.
And this is where the beginning of (Score:5, Interesting)
It was going to have to happen eventually. One thing i've always thought to myself is, that if the earth is here 50,000 years from now and some cognitive being starts exploring, everything will be told in our landfills... They may not be able to know what we did at this time, but they will know the materials we used - at least Styrofoam
OftLoG (Score:5, Insightful)
I wasn't aware we were sending Iridium into space (Score:5, Insightful)
All the hafnium will be gone by 2017 also, and another twenty years will see the extinction of zinc.
We are of course not shooting our rare Earth elements into space, they won't be gone, they will be sitting in waste dumps in China and elsewhere.
Maybe the headline should have been "We will be mining landfills by 2017 for Rare Earths."
Heard it before (Score:4, Insightful)
A frew decades ago the supply of copper seemed to run out. This resulted in a large hike in copper prices that made the copper in AT&T's wires in the US more valueble than the stocks of the entire company. Then a bunch of people opened new copper mines that extracted copper ore that was not profitable to extract at the earlier lower price.
Then the price fell again, but to a higher level than it was before.
This is what happens with all kinds of raw materials. The price goes up, but the supply doesn't try out.
Oil has the same tendency, the oil that they have started digging now is much more expensive to get out of the ground than the 20$ a barrel they used to dig out a few years ago. (Ofcause the oil fields that were profitable at 20$ a barrel are now astronomically profitable at 130$ a barrel!)
Re:Heard it before (Score:5, Informative)
What makes you think that, for practical purposes, rare elements will always be available for use? What makes you think that the definition of "supply" means all the stock of an element on the planet?
"Supply" in this sense is used to refer to the stock of a material available for use. Do you seriously think (for example) that all the gallium used in consumer electronics is recoverable? Or that it's cost-effective to do so?
Are you retarded enough to think that economics cannot be used to analyze the markets for raw materials used for production of electronics, and that the available supply of a raw material does not affect the price people will pay for that raw material, and that this will not affect the cost and availability of finished goods that use that raw material?
Or are you saying that cost of recovery of a raw material is meaningless?
Why does crap such as you wrote keep getting modded insightful? Presumably it's by the armchair logicians who equate total amount of an element on the planet with the amount available for use (the supply).
Illudium (Score:4, Insightful)
and without more Illudium how will we make moreQ-36 Explosive Space Modulators
not rare Earth, and not rare (Score:5, Informative)
Best Business Plan Ever (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Buy cheap land.
2. Create a landfill and make people pay you for dumping their waste there.
3. Profit (for the first time)!
4. Wait until it's profitable to mine your landfill for rare elements.
5. Open a mining operation and have people pay you for things you extract from their waste.
6. Profit (for the second time)!
Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:5, Insightful)
We arent doomed, zinc will still exist, the amount we consume/need is fractional and exists all over the surface of the planet...
Its just not "farmable" in large amounts that way, therefore they say its "all gone" as far as electronics and such go...
Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:5, Insightful)
It sounds like you just contradicted yourself there. The loss of feasibly mineable zinc deposits will spell disaster for applications that use it. We should be recycling zinc from batteries, from electronics, everything, but we arent! Will by the time we realise this is a problem will it be too late? Even with recycling, there may not be enough materials avialable for recycling to supply new demand. So it is a serious problem, and like peak oil, there it is human nature to try to avoid looking at the problem because it is too painful to look at reality, so people have to try to desperately convince themselves it doesnt exist and detach themselves from reality, like the ostrich sticking its head in the sand. But this does not make our problems go away. They say, ignorance is bliss, but only for so long.
Extinction of America (Score:5, Funny)
Recycling is just part of the radical agenda to destroy America by making us drive smaller cars, which means smaller families which mean birth control which means the End of Christianity. I saw it on Fox News
Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh really. Now explain to me what you think is limiting our production capacity by -- oh, let's say, coal liquefaction. Steel, with all of those steel mills shuttered across Appalachia? Unskilled labor, with huge unemployment in said regions and elsewhere? Engineers, with huge numbers in places like India and China trying to get visas? Rates of coal extraction, when China is mining through their their more-difficult-to-get reserves mostly by manual labor three times faster than we are (on a percentage basis)? Tell me, what do you think is the limiting factor?
Here's some things that should clue you in on oil prices. Oil companies aren't being valued by the market as though oil was $140+ a barrel; they're being priced as though it was $50-70 a barrel. Oil companies aren't betting on projects with expected oil prices at $140+ a barrel; the most expensive I've seen them undertake are the Bakken (~$50/barrel) and Greenland (~$50/barrel), and in the former case, it's only small oil companies, and in the latter case, it's only very preliminary work. The people who should know what they're talking about are *not* betting on these prices being sustained, or anythign close to them. Only the futures market is way up. Now, if that doesn't look like a standard commodities bubble, I don't know what does. Well, that and perhaps this: have you checked out prices of rents in oil exploration and transportation? Drilling ship rents are 3-4 times what they were a year ago. Fine, that's to be expected. Rig rents are 3-4 times what they were a year ago. Again, that's to be expected. But *tankers*, too, are renting at 3-4 times what they were a year ago. Go on, explain that one under the "scarcity" theory. If there's a scarcity, where's all of this oil coming from? Iran and Venezuela are both known to be renting tankers and just storing oil in them. In Iran's case, a slowdown in demand in India has lead a refiner there to stop buying their sour crude, only needing their more local sweet crude. They're looking for a new buyer, and in the meantime, they're stockpiling. The situation is such that a company with oil in a tanker, even with the current high prices, is paying less on the rent for the tanker than they're gaining by holding onto the oil as prices rise.
The exact same thing happened in the last oil spike. When prices collapsed, they all rushed to port to unload as fast as possible, furthering the price fall. Bubbles work that way.
The Simon-Ehlrich Wager [wikipedia.org] wasn't a fluke. For more detail, I've written a fair bit on the concept of peak oil [daughtersoftiresias.org] (w/references).
Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is exactly why "peak oil" predictions have continued to change. The original predictions had us hitting peak oil around, what, 1985?
Those predictions were for US oil fields, and they came true almost exactly on schedule. Current predictions are for world-wide supplies. These are a bit shakier, since some countries (Saudi Arabia, for one) treat oil reserve data as state secrets.
None of the predictions ever take into account new technologies. When the newest predictions were made, oil sands still weren't an economically feasible source of crude. Now they are. That makes a HUGE difference.
The cost of extraction continues to rise. Yes, it's cheaper now to extract from shale and oil sands than it was a year ago, but it's still more expensive than drilling, and I don't see anyway that it (or deep sea drilling) will ever be cheaper than land drilling. The only reason why these other avenues are being pursued now is that the easy/cheap places to drill are tapped out. We'll never completely run out of oil, but when it requires more energy to extract an amount of oil than that oil can provide, we'll stop using oil for energy. The economic consequences of even approaching that price point are staggering to contemplate.
I dunno ... that's not my understanding of the peak-oil predictions, but if you're right then it's even more idiotic than I thought.
No, the grandparent poster is wrong. Peak Oil simply refers to the point when half of an area's economically-extractable oil has been depleted. By itself, that not too bad; it took 140 years to extract one trillion barrels. But production increases over time. For example, if production increases at 5% per year, then production doubles every 14 years. And if you do the math, no matter how long it took to get to that point, once you hit peak oil, you've got 14 years until it becomes economically infeasible to extract any more oil. Unfortunately, the industrialization of China and India has driven the rate of increase even higher, closer to 7%, which means a doubling period of 10 years.
I expect that you aren't interested in reading propaganda from admitted peak oil enthusiasts, but how do you feel about the American Association of Petroleum Geologists? http://www.aapg.org/explorer/2007/05may/nehring.cfm [aapg.org]
Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because those fields are harder to get to. Therefore their oil is harder - more expensive - to extract. That expense includes not just money but energy. I.e., we'll need to use more oil to get that oil out.
That's the point of the "peak oil" idea. We've plucked the low-hanging fruit. To get more fruit, we need to climb the tree. But tree-climbing is hungry work. Fortunately, we've got a food source - the fruit we've been harvesting. Unfortunately, that means there's less fruit to go into the boxes...
The markets... (Score:5, Insightful)
The reality of it is that as we run low on various elements, the price will go up due to factors of supply and demand. This will help drive efforts to find alternatives, reduce the amount needed, and where feasible, recover/recycle those elements. We will never actually run out, but it may simply become too expensive to build TV's out of. Then we'll have to find another way to do it. If there's enough need and the price is worth it, we might end up prospecting asteroids to get the minerals we need.
As for peak oil, we don't know if we've hit it yet because there's historically been an incentive for many oil producers to keep their reserve numbers a secret. We don't know if they've artificially inflated or deflated their numbers for a variety of reasons. Being at peak oil does not mean we aren't going to discover more oil. What it means is that in the future, the oil we discover will be harder to get to, harder to produce, and will not sufficiently replace all the easy to drill oil we have had in the past. It will become impossible to increase oil production and we'll see a decline that will lead to drastic price increases, a switch to alternatives, and overall a decline in demand for it.
Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:5, Insightful)
We haven't hit peak oil yet.
This statement is confused at best, a bald-faced lie at worst.
At any moment, there was another moment in the past at which oil production has peaked. That was peak oil. We won't know whether it was THE peak until we either exceed that past peak or until we've waited ... how long? How many years do we have to go past a peak in oil production until you people will admit that this was THE peak oil?
Crude prices have exploded over the last couple years and yet the production peak of May 2005 has never been exceeded [theoildrum.com]. If we can not increase production at $140 per barrel over that when it was $50 then I'm puzzled where anybody gets the sheer pigheaded ignorance to claim that we haven't hit peak oil yet (or mod such a claim "insightful").
There's always the chance that we haven't. There's always the possibility that something completely unforseen happens in the future -- that's why it's the future. But to look at the flat line in that graph and pretend that it is magically going to go up at some time in the future betrays a confidence born exactly out of putting one's head into the sand.
Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:5, Informative)
Peak Oil:
"Peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of production enters terminal decline."
It's not about depleting all oil reserves but the easily extracted oil reserve. There are reserves you can extract oil from but the cost of extraction will exceed revenue. Not too mention the amount of energy needed to extract the oil will be greater further driving up the cost of extracting the oil.
We've hit Peak Oil. It's a question of where we are on Hubbert's Bell-Curve.
FYI Oil companies have done vast surveys of potential oil reserves. Other than deep sea exploration - all the easily extractable reserves are known.
Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:5, Insightful)
Invoking the "free market" is just another way to say "humans will find a way to survive". It's probably true, but look at our level of survival in between great civilizations, or in areas of the world where these limited resources are not being exploited, and see if you think that's a solution you'd be happy to adopt. Because that's a completely viable direction for the market to take. Only we may be able to get around that if we as an intelligent group use some of these resources BEFORE they're too scarce to help us develop alternatives, since we have the potential to be a lot less reactionary than a dumb market system.
Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh... wrong. You know civilizations have fallen before, right? Ancient trading centers in India destroyed and abandoned when they cut down every tree in a 200 mile radius and had no fuel source left, or civilizations in Africa wiped out when the climate changed and there was literally no alternative to make up for the lack of water. Civilizations absolutely have collapsed due to lack of natural resources. Just because we're operating on a global scale with our current civilization doesn't protect us from the fact that certain problems simply do not have solutions.
Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:5, Interesting)
Easter Island. When they cut down the last tree (for moving those carved heads around on rollers), they couldn't build boats to go fish with, or leave. Invoking economics will not always get you out of a man-made catastrophe - global warming anyone?
Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:5, Funny)
And in the history of mankind this has happened: NEVER!
Reminds me of the old joke about the guy falling off a building - as he sees floor after floor flash past, he keeps thinking, "So far, so good. So far, so good."
All joking aside, there have been situations where civilizations have collapsed because of resource shortages. Look at the Maya, for example. They had a civilization comparable to Rome, with far superior agricultural technology. However, when their population exceeded their ability to grow food, the entire civilization vanished in a paroxysm of war and famine.
Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:5, Informative)
that depends how much do you rely on goods that travel by ship on salt water?
Zinc anodes are used as an corrosion point for salt water. So Instead of eating the steel hulls in the ships Zinc anodes take the damage. On salt water boats they have to be replaced annually or more.
without zinc world wide shipping will come to a halt a decade later.
Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:5, Informative)
T'ain't necessarily so. Are we running out of Aluminium? Al works just fine as a sacrifical anode.
Have a look here [offshoreanodes.com] for starters...
Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:5, Informative)
Zinc is old-tech for an anode.
The Army Corps of Engineers (at a lab I used to work at) invented a Ceramic Anode.
A 20oz Ceramic anode does the job of a 50lb Metalic one, huge-huge improvement.
Read all about it.
http://www.erdc.usace.army.mil/pls/erdcpub/docs/erdc/images/ERDCFactSheet_Product_CeramicAnodes.pdf [army.mil]
Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:5, Insightful)
Zinc anodes are a CHEAP solution for corrosion. they are not the ONLY solution.
Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:4, Insightful)
Bringing up salt water - there are a lot of minerals dissolved in the ocean.
There are also a ton of minerals contained in our trash dumps.
As others have pointed out, the solution is alternative elements or recycling. Once again almost all of humanity's current problems could be solved with a cheap enough energy. Energy would obviously be solved, water would be solved (desalinization), and if that was practical enough, food would be solved (since water is a key issue with not being able to produce crops. If the new source was comparatively clean (compared to the new demands for energy), pollution would also be solved.
Carbon Fibre (Score:4, Interesting)
We desperately need good manufacturing techniques for carbon fibre. With good techniques, just about everything we move around could be made with it, and energy costs would go down.
This ought to be as X-prize-worthy a topic as good solar or good batteries.
But how does it hold up to seawater? Will we need to coat the boats every year with something in short supply?
Re:Scaremongering... (Score:5, Insightful)
They disappear in a usable format for electronics though. It will prove interesting to see what happens when it truly does disappear (I'm not sure if 2017 is an accurate date). Either we'll develop vastly different technologies, recycle somehow, somehow create the elements synthetically or mine the stuff from asteroids.
Re:Scaremongering... (Score:5, Insightful)
somehow create the elements synthetically
Let me go fire up my heavy fusion reactor and get to work on that.
Re:Scaremongering... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Scaremongering... (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is getting them back, recycling them, thats the problem. Its not scaremongering at all. THis will reduce progress and economic growth, there is no doubt about that. Without an easy supply of thse materials manufacturing will be capped and we probably wont be able to get enough from recycling to meet demand, considering we are recycling AT ALL. We could have had recycling programs for electronics in place years ago and could have recollected electronic equipment for recycling, but our arrogant and idiotic, shortsighted governments have been too slow to do this, as they have been with renewable energy. There should be HUGE fines for throwing anything metal or electronic into the garbage, including batteries that are filled witn metals. How many people recycle their alkaline batteries I ask? How many cities have curbside recycling pickup for batteries and electronic waste, cable, etc? Now with much of these materials buried in landfills, it will be a impractical idea to try to recover them. Duh! How could we be so stupid.
Given even with recycling we still will not get enough metals to meet demand, this is a HUGE problem. Given depleation of other resources such as iron and copper, oil, phosphorus (fertilizer, CRT displays), we are seeing serious trouble ahead. To avert this will take action now but do to the lack of action things are a lot worse than they could have been, since so many materials have already been sent to landfills.
Re:Scaremongering... (Score:4, Interesting)
It shouldn't be too difficult to recover metals from the landfill sites. If it is possible to turn bodies into dust using "promession [dailymail.co.uk]" or deep freezing, surely it would be possible to do the same with landfill sites?
You would take out a container load of debris, freeze to -196C, shake the contents until they disintegrate into a powder. Then you can extract the metals using electromagnets?
Re:Scaremongering... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not true - this kind of thing is done with extremely high efficiency all the time in industry. The term you are missing is "regeneration" - the idea is very simple: Take this very cold stuff and use it to pre-cool the stuff coming into the plant. As it warms up, it cools the incoming feed material lowering the energy required to get it to final temperature.
The only real limits on this is volume and time - if you can wait days, and can use space-shuttle tile class insulators, a C cell battery could power it!
Re:Scaremongering... (Score:5, Insightful)
The premise of this article, and your post as well, are both rooted in a fundamental economic misunderstanding.
It is almost impossible for a resource to suddenly go extinct. What happens is that as available stocks shrink, and the cost of mining more increases, the cost of that resource also goes up. This provides a natural economic incentive both to find alternatives, and to recycle, at the point where it is economically feasible.
Gallium and zinc will never be used up. They will simply go up in cost and end up used for more important applications while enterprising individuals and companies discover and develop alternatives, and consumers shift their buying habits to products that use less of them.
Re:Scaremongering... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, but as we're finding out with oil - the period of adjustment can be pretty painful.
This is the government's role in the economy. It should provide the "seed research" for things which will become problems in 10 years, but aren't economically feasible to solve now.
By funding forward-looking research, the government can help ease transition shocks for the population.
Just like they should have slowly deflated the housing bubble starting in 2003, they should have been working on alternate energy back in the 90s so the new tech would be available for businesses now.
The government funding alternate energy sources now is just silly - businesses are doing that much more efficiently because it's economically feasible. The time for the government to make that pain go away was 5-10 years ago.
Re:Scaremongering... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? It seems to me that landfills would be more concentrated and easier to mine than natural ores are!
Re:Scaremongering... (Score:4, Informative)
>landfills would be more concentrated and easier to mine than natural ores are!
Depends on the mineral in question.
Molybdenum is rarely (to my knowledge) found in highly concentrated veins: it occurs as a sulfide or lead ore fairly widely dispersed through rock, so removal means ripping down whole mountains. A landfill would be an excellent source for reclaiming this, as it would certainly be more concentrated.
But for many elements, like gold and silver, the ore in nature is generally extremely highly concentrated, into veins that have a million times the amount of the element per weight of rock than the rock even a meter away. I've found gold like this, where there's a big chunk of white/orange quartz that goes off into the distance, and right in the middle there's a big fat line, maybe a mm to a cm wide, coated in visible gold. When you're trying to recover stuff like that, there's no way that circuit boards in with newspapers and old clothes in a landfill could come even *close* to the natural concentrations we can find, so it's going to take a long time before landfills are a viable recovery option.
Basically what it comes down to, afaik, is that the mineral concentration in nature is usually a function of the mineral's solubility in high-temperature, high-pressure water, which in turn is often loosely coupled to its melting point. Lead, tin, zinc, gold, and silver concentrate in veins. Molybdenum, indium, osmium, don't. So, if it doesn't occur in veins, landfills will be a good way to reclaim it, since they'll be much like the stuff is recovered in the first place (except extracted from a mess of fiberglass and steel, rather than from tons of rock.)
Re:Scaremongering... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Scaremongering... (Score:4, Informative)
The elements are not "destroyed" by being put into electronics -- or anything else, that does not leave the planet. They don't disappear from Earth.
Where do your electronics go when you are done with them? You can re-pc many things, but for the most part, they are trashed. Forget geologists, trashologists would be required, and that's presuming the stuff is buried and not burnt.
Unfortunately the only electronics recycling programs are in villages in China and Africa, and those are an ecological nightmare.
Re:I have a secret supply (Score:5, Funny)
actually vacuum tubes were depleting our reserves of vacuum. By the time they went out of use, there was no vacuum left on earth! Some proposed mining vacuum from deep space, but it wasn't practical.
Re:supply and demand - no real problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Shut up, shut up, shut up.
You should be modded redundant because this is now the third time in this discussion I've had to tear down this ideological pop-economic BULLSHIT.
The market doesn't govern the physical universe. At all. The amounts of material and energy present on Earth are in no way related to the laws of supply and demand. The universe is indifferent to your over-applied, unfalsifiable theories. Applying your (almost certainly feeble) understanding of economics implies the universe responds like a rational actor, an idiotic notion that underpins most religion and superstition.
Sometimes 'cheaper alternatives' just don't exist. This is why your precious markets have never got to grips with spaceflight. The markets reaction has always been "Wait till it is cheaper" on the assumption that all technology gets cheaper - ignoring the fact that there is a physical constraint on what you must do to get into orbit. The required delta-V isn't going to change just because it would be financially efficient for it to do so.
If you are a true economist, then fuck off and play with your stock markets and leave actual science to actual scientists.
Re:Dont believe the hype (Score:5, Informative)
no its not, there is no cycle for copper, zinc, etc they've just sat in rocks in mineral form since the earth was created and now are being used. If they are going to be recycled its got to be done by us!
Re:eek! (Score:5, Funny)
So that's it then: we HAVE to go discover Rare Moon elements, Rare Mars elements, Rare Ganymede elements, ad infinitum...
It's all a cunning plan by NASA to stay employed!
(do I really NEED to put a '/sarc' after this?)
Re:eek! (Score:5, Funny)
ad infinitum
It's a good thing we have plenty of infinitum.
Re:eek! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I'm not worried in the least because I plan to (Score:5, Funny)
Food is becoming extinct as well. We're starting to burn everything we grow.
Re:I'm not worried in the least because I plan to (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I'm not worried in the least because I plan to (Score:5, Funny)
That and a whole lot more, thanks for asking.
Re:I'm not worried in the least because I plan to (Score:5, Insightful)
Brazil has used methanol as fuel for about 20yrs now, and there is NO food shortage here. Actually, there is so much food here that we export it to USA, Europe, China... And this having the greatest number of cars using biofuel in the world.
Brazil has a rainforest shortage - the Amazon is on the verge of collapse.
This is allegedly done for grazing cattle, not for sugar. I don't believe it. I remember reading that Brazilian ethanol imports were increasing; where's it coming from?
Topsoil-based fuels are basically wrongheaded because as your energy consumption rises you need more acres of land which you would rather use for something else. "Green Revolution" architecture is horribly destructive to the land and the soil.
And what are they fertilizing with?
Anyway, you have an incredibly simplistic view of the situation. Although there is no "food shortage" in the US (you can walk into any supermarket and buy the necessities) we have shortages of corn and barley right now because we are making ethanol from them. The former has seriously harmed the average Mexican and the latter has driven up the price of beer. (Especially on top of the hops shortage.) Clearly you don't understand the concept of shortages. Incidentally, though, world food supplies are in trouble. Meat is doing pretty well, but plants are having problems all over. This last season's weather was troublesome all over the world. Year before last the grape vines on the front porch were just covered in grapes; this year it got warm early and the grapes leafed out and prepared to put on a big fruit set, then got frozen hard. This happened over much of the world, and it happened to the grape and nut crops this year in particular. Most vineyards around my area - did I mention that the next county to the south is Napa, and Mendocino is to the West? - aren't even going to bother to harvest anything this year. It's not worth the trouble.
Re:I'm not worried in the least because I plan to (Score:5, Informative)
It's not looking good here in the Midwest, either. About 80% of the counties here in Iowa have been declared disaster areas due to the floods. Driving around the state, I can tell you firsthand that the damage to this years corn and soybean crops has been absolutely devastating. I've seen many, many acres of land that are still under water, and it's now too late in the year to plant.
On top of that, the heavy rains this spring that caused the flooding kept farmers out of the fields, so a large portion of the crops that did get planted, got planted late and won't yield nearly the bushels/acre that they normally do.
Then you have the fuel prices for running the farm machinery and trucks to transport the crops....
Let's just say that this is going to be a very, very bad year for anyone who depends on cheap corn.
Re:I'm not worried in the least because I plan to (Score:5, Informative)
Please, please research a bit before mindlessly spreading FUD like this. Brazil has enough non-forest land to multiply the current cane production several times with no impact to native ecosystems. Contrariwise to what Americans apparently think, it's not like our whole country is a forest. It's not like it's even practical to plant cane in the forest in the first place. I mean, geez.
Amazon is being badly destroyed for cattle, yes. Want to stop it? Boycott the meat industry, not ethanol.
See also: wpedia on deforestation [wikipedia.org], ethanol [wikipedia.org].
Re:eek! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:eek! (Score:5, Funny)
Wouldn't it be more fair to say that it's not reasonable or economically feasible to mine metals off the moon today? It seems pretty pessimistic to assume that we won't be able to do it tomorrow, necessity being the mother of invention and all that...
It's pretty safe to assume it won't be feasible tomorrow either, with the approaching holiday and all that. Check back next week.