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Earth's Copper Supply Inadequate For Development?
ScentCone writes "Pennies, pipes, untold miles of CAT5 - they tie up a lot of copper. Unlike abundant iron and aluminum, copper is relatively scarce. But it's vital to electricity generation/transmission, plumbing, and other uses central to a modern standard of living. Scientific American is providing a quick overview of the situation. They report the conclusion that there simply isn't enough available. Canada, Mexico and the US average 170kg of copper use per person, and the most generous estimates suggest that only 1.6 billion unused metric tons exist. More reclamation and use of fiber, wireless, and PVC helps - but won't be enough to cover the billions of people who don't yet live in highly wired/mechanized societies."
When I was a kid, my dad made me spend hour after hour knocking the cores out of laminated transformers with a 15 lb. sledge so that the copper wire was free.
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I also had to sit and cut the plastic off of foot after foot of copper wire with a utility knife and leather gloves so we could recycle the copper wire for cash.
At last, I can now put these valuable skills on my résumé! I just hope my career in technology doesn't come around full circle
My work here is dung.
One of my insider mining newsletters that I subscribe to just mentioned how zinc might end up being the most rare material in the coming years. One guy said that pennies made before 1971 are worth more than 1c in copper, and that the newer pennies might soon be worth much more than 1c due to their high zinc content.
Time to horde pennies maybe.
Seems to me that at 170Kg a head, 1.6 billion tons is enough to support 9.6 billion people. At the standards to which we in North America have become accustomed. So, where exactly is the shortage?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
It is the worlds largest man made hole in the ground, and one of the few man made wonders that is visible from space.
http://www.utah.com/attractions/kennecott.htm
they actually produce 15% of the countries copper annually. But I have been hearing that the mine is basically tapped (at least the current mine) And that they will be starting a new mine a little futher back in the Oquirr mountains in order the meet the needs of the country.
Interestingly enough, they also produce a significant portion of the countries Uranium, Iron, and other precious metals. But i can see how we could eventually run out of resources. Hence them being natural resources. Luckily, since copper is a natually occuring element, it should be more abundant at deeper sub-terrain.
There's a fair amount of landfills out there that probably have useful amounts of copper. That'll probably be the first place to dig. The hard part is separation and removing toxic waste from useful minerals.
Mining the asteroids is currently prohibitively expensive, but costs will eventually go down. I'd like to see some legislation to encourage such endeavors, which might be the next profitable commercial activity after space tourism.
Of course, we could always wait for them to fall to the Earth, but that requires lots of patience.
I've heard this tune before.
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If copper becomes expensive, developing countries will just use aluminum. The biggest problem with aluminum wiring is joining it to copper; this is the only thing that really inhibited aluminum wiring in this country, where there was already a ton of copper wiring everywhere. Places starting from scratch won't have that problem so much. Long-distance transmission lines will likely be copper for a long time due to the lower resistance. (Gold, BTW, is a worse conductor than copper, and is quite comparable with aluminum. Silver is slightly better than copper, if you're willing to pay.) There will be more and more transmission lines being built with superconductors, though!
Of course, the incredible energy requirements of aluminum production yields its own set of headaches. But if we don't solve that problem, the wiring dilemma will be moot anyhow.
Maybe a lot of /.ers are too young to remember the great penny hoarding of a few decades back. At the time, copper reached a price that a penny contained more than a penny worth of copper so people started hoarding them and melting them down. There was a shortage of pennies for change and some shopkeepers resorted to rounding to the nickel, others used candy for change.
The composition of the penny was changed to use copper plate. I seem to recall that the feds outlawed melting of pennies as well but that was a long time ago.
Anyway, I agree that eliminating the penny is long overdue but the feds don't seem to want to make that embarrasing admission that inflation exists and money is becoming worthless. Back in the day when Nixon imposed the (ill-considered and ineffective) wage and price freeze it was in response to runaway inflation at ~3%. Nowdays we call that rate "controlled". Hell, during the reign of the great inflation-controlling Greenspan, the dollar lost about half of its purchasing power. Time to drop the charade.
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"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
Just as I don't believe we're anywhere near to running out of oil in the next 1000 years
"I study 5-10 mining reports a day and all I see is more and more oil"
I agree with you on Copper. However, I think you may be off on Oil. I have read that it's been 2 years since any new major Oil fields have been discovered. For the past 50 years we have found at least 1 new Oil field a year. The cost of Oil has also gone from $30 a barrel to $66 a barrel. I have also read that the north sea Oils production peaked 3 years ago and is on it's decline. We will never completely run out of Oil. however, we will run out of enough Oil in the next 75-100 years to make life interesting if there are no alternatives.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/WM3NS/ 28
Late 80s M3 figure: 3000
Current M3 figure: 10,000
Price in that time: tripled.
Interesting, eh?
Also, we're not looking into the 90 other ways to create oil other than drilling. There are enough sources of oil, as far as my research goes. Unfortunately this is a hard debate for me, I pay over US$1000 a year for certain newsletters and I can't openly share some of the information. The market backs me up by keeping the price of oil consistent with the supply of money.
I completely agree. Round to the nearest nickel and call it a day. You can't buy anything with a penny so its existence pointless.
While we're at it, get rid of the dollar bill. Most people don't realise this, but the government could save over $400 million per year by elliminating it. There's several reasons for this but the big one is that dollar bills have a short life span (about 13 months) and people would switch to dollar coins ($2 useage might increase a little but probably not much). Paper money should only be printed in denominations that have actualy buying power. You can't even buy a cup of coffee anymore with a dollar bill.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
Is it possible for a one cent piece to be worth more than one cent?
No, I think that's right. A penny (the coin) may be worth more than its face value (1 cent, US$ 0.01.) This is already true of older pennies among coin collectors. You can pull, say, a "wheat" penny out of ordinary circulation and get several cents for it, if it's in good condition.
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
The reason that pennies exist is so that taxes can be collected on small purchases. The government gets billions over dollars in revenue--and we get pennies...
And yet there are numerous scientists who are starting to think that it may not be dead dinosaurs and dead trees. And these people are essentially cranks, though some of them, like the late Thomas Gold of Cornell, have university positions. Not one person actually engaged in the business of finding oil believes any of this to be true, as a recent dustup at Rigzone showed. The abiotic oil people have yet to make their case in commercial terms. The gold standard of scientific questions, "What is your proof?", remains unanswered. We're not familiar with the process as we haven't been able to duplicate it in the lab -- so its theory. Tell that to these folks, who have been converting turkey guts into petroleum.
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Being a curious mind and a teacher, a decade ago I remember cutting a penny in half, seeing the zinc inside, and calling the Bank of Canada to inquire. When I asked what the metal inside was, and since when they started using it, the woman on the phone said very firmly, something along the lines of "Are you aware sir that it is illegal to destroy Canadian currency, it is a federal crime and could result in jail time." She refused to answer my question.
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Er, no. Nobody in oil geology thinks that. The most optimistic projections are that peak oil is about 25 year away. The pessimistic projection is that the peak was reached last year. The consensus is that the peak is somewhere between now and 2015.
Classical economists tend to mis-analyze oil. The price is related to cost of extraction, which is low. Until demand exceeds supply. But throwing more money at search and extraction doesn't yield much more supply. Oil discovery rates peaked in the 1960s. Economists tend to assume that if demand exceeds supply, new sources will emerge. But the geology doesn't work that way. Four specific geological conditions have to be present for an oil field, and almost all the areas on the planet that meet those conditions have been explored. About 90% of the world's oil lies in 30 known major petroleum systems.
Right now, we're just about at the point where demand will exceed capacity. Demand is still climbing, mostly due to China's industrialization. All the OPEC countries except Saudi Arabia are producing flat-out. (Kuwait, incidentally, peaked a few months ago. The US peaked in 1970.) There's general suspicion that the world's biggest oil field, Gawar in Saudi Arabia, is at peak production.
The decisive moment will be when the Gawar field peaks. That will probably be the peak of worldwide oil production. Some people think Gawar has already peaked.
They still exist. The last place I saw them was in several rest stations on the Maine and Massachusetts Turnpikes. You'd put in a penny (and several quarters) and turn a big wheel and it would squish out the penny into any one of several designs. The Maine ones have lobsters, the Massachusetts ones have Ted Kennedy. (Okay probably not.)
You used to occasionally see them in McDonalds, but that was a while (>10 years) ago.
When I was a kid we used to put pennies on the railroad tracks and wait for a freight train to go by; depending on the type of locomotive you could get ones that were squished out as much as a few inches long.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
This is the same way in Connecticut and Maine. If you sell a particular brand, you need to take those bottles back. Conversely, you're not required to take back any brands that you don't sell.
The problem is if you buy a bunch of bottles of some weirdo brand, they're a pain in the butt to get rid of later, because no local place will take them. At my parents house there is a flat of glass root beer bottles that have been sitting around for almost a decade, because we can't figure out where they should go.
(And you can't put deposit bottles into the curbside recycling bin -- for reasons I don't quite understand, the guys on the truck will actually pick through the crap in your bin, and reject deposit bottles. I guess they really want you to get your 5 cents back.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Price of materials measures the rate of extraction, not the availability of the total supply. Think of it this way.
If god told GW to cut all the trees tomorrow the price of wood would drop to zero but that doesn't mean the supply of trees is increasing worldwide.
Economists don't measure the sustainibility or the global supply, they only measure the rate of extraction and processing. Yet another reason why economics is a junk science.
evil is as evil does
All the Californians I know (and I live here) recycle bunches.
"They" make it pretty easy, and "they" take pretty much everything for recycling so you can recycle just about everything that comes in the house.
To the point where if I don't take my recycling out every week, it backs up in the house, whereas I only need to take the trash out every three weeks or so. For reference, that's two people (not so much trash), and I get a newspaper (more paper).
You should tell your Californian contacts to get with the program - seriously - recycling is easy and what kind of slob are you if you can't even do that for the planet? Shameful, imho.
There's a big one in, I think, Butte, just sitting there because the price of copper is too low. It's the source for a copper gemstone called covellite. There's also copper in UP Michigan, around Houghton and Copper Harbor.
Supply and demand. Currently, the supply far exceeds the demand. When the demand grows, those mines will re-open, supplying the demand for copper as well as the small demand for gem covellite and native copper.
Don't sweat it, this is yet another phony panic.
Lemon curry?
I tend to wonder if some day, perhaps sooner than we think, it will be profitable to mine these landfills (many currently golf courses and home sites!) for that "wasted" material, for recycling purposes. Furthermore, I think about the tons of organic material (yard and landscaping waste, mostly) which is in our landfills (and more going in every day) which could be reclaimed, recycled, and then fed into thermodepolymerization plants tuned for the feedstock, allowing us to gain fuels and other useful materials from stuff that is just being thrown away.
Think about all the organic material from New Orleans which was simply bulldozed into landfills? Could that material have been run through a TDP process and used to offset, in whatever percentage, the fuel shortages caused by Katrina? Why do we throw this stuff away, when we can use it for other purposes?
Fortunately, most metals are recycled already, but there is still a lot of useful stuff in our landfills (including a lot of metals), just waiting for the day to be used again (unfortunately, in order to get at the stuff with any measure of safety, these landfills would have to be strip-mined)...
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because of the similarity (in size, color, and the scored edges) to a quarter. When they were more common (close to when they were first issued) I was the recipient of Susan B's instead of quarters as change on several occasions. If I didn't look closely, I didn't notice and someone's cash drawer was down $.75 at the end of the day. No one wanted to deal with them, because they weren't easy to distinguish from quarters and in a fast-pased retail environment, could easily be mistaken for them.
When the Sacajawea dollars were designed, they were made larger, a different color, and the edges were smoothed precisely to help avoid this confusion. This helped, some.
However, in the long run, would you rather have nine 3x6 folded sheets of paper in your pocket, or nine large coins? Most people prefer the weight and flexibility of paper.
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So then I guess they learned that the copper in the pennies was worth more then the actual penny too. I remember cutting Canadian pennies open in the late 1990's and they were still solid copper.
Not copper. There is just a thin copper plating on them. I penny weighs 2.5g, 2.5% of which is copper, or 0.0625 grams. $1M in US pennies contains approximately 2/3 cubic meter of copper, 6250kg.
Pennies aren't the problem.
However, nickels are 75% copper and weigh 5 grams, so each coin has 3.75g of copper in it. $1M in nickels has 75000kg of copper, or approximately 8.3 cubic meters of copper.
So, nickels aren't really the problem either.
1 km of AWG-14 copper wiring for a house (14/2) has 3 km of copper wire with a cross section of 2.08mm, for a total volume of 6.24E6 cubic mm, or 0.00624 cubic meters.
1 km of three-phase high tension wire, AWG-000000, has 0.51 cubic meters of copper. String a high tension wireset over 1000km, and you have 500 cubic meters of copper.
I dont think the copper issue will be a problem for much longer.
Copper pipes and whatnot are slowly but surely being replaced by pvc, copper is now only used in small pieces of pipe or where there's going to be a lot of heat going through the pipes. PVC is used for just about everything else.
Cabling in the next decade or two will be replaced by fibre, if copper prices rise, many companies will find it profitable to just go all out on fibre and rip their copper lines off the poles, out of the ground, and out of the walls. cable tv, IPTV, broadband will all do this eventually, plus fibre's cost to maintain is noticeably lower than copper's. you dont need to repeat signals as often, better transmission, etc.
Cabling in computers, minus electrical uses, will soon be fibre, at least for hard drives and cdrom drives, as it will be the best way to send data, sound cables may eventually be fibre as well, digital does have its perks in that respect.
We do have the means to make plastic (which lower end fibre can be made from), even when petroleum is gone, we still have methods of making oil for those purposes. Then there's glass.
Then the last resort too are landfills, which are the goldmines of the future. all the organics will be broken down, there will be a huge abundance of metals in them, and gasses that can be used for energy.
It seems that you may have not actually been to a strip club in Canada, because from what i hear (^H joke averted...) the women sit there and stick loonies to themselves (you'll have to guess where) and you throw loonies at those to knock them off...
There are two types of people in the world: those who divide people into two types and those who don't.
One of the semantic tricks pulled by the Science News story and perhaps by the original authors is to term consumption a "need". In other words, just because the world is consuming copper at unusually high rates due to its low cost, this consumption is "needed". My take is that once copper rises, the "need" will dissipate.
And that brings me to my final point. Why is this a problem? If copper becomes scarce then its price will rise and people will comsume less of it. My point here is that this problem is already solved. The economy will adjust for it naturally.