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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.
...
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.
They are Zinc, at least that is the predominant ingredient in their composition
When I was in the supply installation side of IT consulting, the company that I co-owned ran network cables (and phone cord and work with electrical contractors that laid electrical wire). Copper price could KILL us if we bid a project and then the price of copper went up. In fact, on the largest projects we actually took advantage of futures-style market provisions to pre-buy our copper at a set price (even if it fell, we still paid a certain price).
To say that copper is scarce is not really accurate -- the price of copper has gone up but not in the way you'd expect if a needed item was about to run out. I blog (and publish a print newsletter) about gold -- I do about 90% of my research trying to find the manipulators in the gold market. One of the "worst" manipulators is the mining industry itself, but I believe hiding trade facts is very important for a free market. If copper was truly disappearing, you'd see the market react by the price hyperinflating, not just steadily growing. Mining companies spend 10-15 years just opening a mine. If they knew they were running out, they wouldn't sell it so cheaply.
I believe the steady growth in the price of copper is more of an effect of fiat currency inflation causing all consumer goods and salaries to go up (basically devaluing everyone's labor even if they feel they're earning more). When copper goes up 1000% in a week, there will be a problem. 1% fluctuations is nothing.
Just as I don't believe we're anywhere near to running out of oil in the next 1000 years, I don't believe we'll be running out of copper. I study 5-10 mining reports a day and all I see is more and more oil, gold, carbon and copper being found. As we innovate and are able to drill deeper and deeper, we're finding that MOST of what geophysicists warned us about 10 years ago isn't true -- we keep finding more to consumer, not less. I think we will be able to say the same thing 10 years from now and 100 years from now -- we're amazed and what we're finding as we dig deeper.
All these "fear the scarcity" news reports on vital materials are bunk -- you'll know when there is a shortage when the price skyrockets (supply and demand is very hard to manipulate in the long run). And when the price skyrockets, it will give innovators reason to find new ways to recycle more efficiently, dig deeper or find other ways to provide the same service with a different product.
The day that copper is gone for good is the day that we take clay out of the ground and find a way to offer room temperature superconductivity. Serendipity doesn't end, and higher copper prices give innovators more reason to find new solutions to yesterday's problems. One of the reasons I formulated my anarcho-capitalist belief system is based on finding that supply and demand really does set prices in the long haul, even if government and industry tries to manipulate prices in the short run.
Is this Peak Copper?
What I say does not represent the views of my employers, my friends, my cats, or myself.
The oil and natural gas we use to generate electricity to power devices that require copper will become too expensive to use long before we run out of the copper we use in the construction of these devices.
I urge everyone to see Stephen Gaghan's: Copperica, about the global reach, power structures and conspiracy of the copper elite. People die everyday over Cat5e.
...a copper gap!
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"
So anyone know any good asteroids that are rich in copper? ;-)
More realistically, I imagine that we'll move to other materials. Data lines don't need to use copper, but they do so because it's common and inexpensive. If the price of copper goes up, you might see fiber optics come down in price.
Same with power transmission lines. There's nothing stopping them from using Aluminum if copper becomes too expensive.
My guess, however, is that more emphasis will be placed on recycling copper. The price will rise some, pushing out the uses where it isn't needed. The remaining uses will continue to use copper supplied heavily by the recycling centers.
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One solution is to stop using copper for pennies, this would save tons of copper for other uses.
"The largest known Copper ore deposits in the world are in Chuquicamata in the Chilean Andes, and the largest deposit of native copper is in Michigan's Upper Peninsula."
This is an interesting article about Copper. Apparently Copper is also released as pollution during the mining and refining process, possibly more could be saved if there were more efficient ways of extracting and refining the metal.
One other solution is to go wireless.
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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.
If this shortage is going to be as they say in the article, I could just see the ads for Monster Cable... "Our newest premium cable! New! Gold cable with copper connectors, just $199.99!"
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Gas, lubricants, untold miles of plastics - they tie up a lot of oil. Unlike abundant iron and aluminum, oil is relatively scarce. But it's vital to electricity generation/transmission, transportation, and other uses central to a modern standard of living....More reclamation and use of solar, wind, and other fossil fuels helps - but won't be enough to cover the billions of people who don't yet live in highly developed/mechanized societies.
Thought that sounded familiar.
ed
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.
Yet another reason to get rid of this useless coin. Add this to:
Nobody uses them.
They are dangerous to children when swallowed, due to the zinc (unlike all other US coins)
And let's face it, Lincoln already has his picture in enough places!
(Ok, done ranting now...)
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
Economics is all about how we deal with scarcity. Prices go up, alternatives are found. If prices went up, we'd go 220V to use thinner wires, we'd prefer local sources of energy to use shorter lines, we'd go all fiber for data and voice, and so on... and we'd find new sources, alternative metals.
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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
Looks like this bitch is gonna need to be melted down. Not like it means much anymore anyway...
>Long-distance transmission lines will likely be copper
>for a long time due to the lower resistance.
Transmission lines are already often made with aluminum.
The problem with aluminum for transmission lines isn't so much the conductivity, but the mechanical strength. Aluminum is paired up with steel or some composite to solve that issue.
I thought I'd point out another resource that won't be replaced, either, but that doesn't get mentioned very often: Helium.
I wasn't partiuclarly aware that this was a consumable resource until recently, but it is. Every cubic foot of helium gas that's released up into the atmosphere is basically lost forever -- it's so light that it just keeps going up and up, and eventually escapes our atmosphere.
Although it's not as important to us as a civilization as copper, and will probably take longer to become scarce, it's not something that's partiularly easy to get. Right now we get most of our supply from the natural gas industry -- helium is present in natural gas but doesn't burn, and if not extracted from the gas prior to use just goes out the tailpipe. There are (or were) government-backed programs to extract and store the He prior to use of the natural gas, but I'm not sure if that's still going on.
We use an increasing amount of Helium in its liquid form as cooling, partiularly for MRI machines. I can only see this usage getting bigger in the future; plus, liquid He is one of the only ways to reliably get objects down to ultra-cold temperatures, which might become very important in the future. (Superconducting computers?) The point is that we really haven't exploited Helium very far, and yet we're 'burning' through it fairly quickly, along with the natural gas supply.
It's just another thing that when it's gone, it's gone. It may seem frivolous now, but when you consider the difficulty of synthesizing a hydrocarbon chain, it's not partiularly tough. Make me a mole of helium atoms cheaply on an industrial scale? Now that's difficult.
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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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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.