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."

Comments

Indentured Childhood

[eldavojohn]

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 ...

Re:Indentured Childhood

[Lost Penguin]

strip the wire?
we had to chew the insulation off, in the snow . . .

Re:Indentured Childhood

[Anonymous Coward]

chew the insulation off?
I had to eat the wire, go work in the field, and collect the deinsulated wire from the outhouse.

Pennies are not copper anymore

[Anarke_Incarnate]

They are Zinc, at least that is the predominant ingredient in their composition

Re:Pennies are not copper anymore

[dada21]

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.

Re:Pennies are not copper anymore

[xkenny13]

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.

Oddly enough, the composition of pennies did not change between 1962 and 1982. There should be no difference between a 1971 penny and a 1981 penny, in terms of copper content.

The US Mint made 7 different variations of the penny in 1982 (counting the various different mint marks), after which they made pennies exclusively out of copper plated zinc.

More info is posted here and here.

REAL Scarcity would mean HUGE price increases

[dada21]

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.

Re:REAL Scarcity would mean HUGE price increases

[Tlosk]

"You do realize Heinlein has you beat by 50 years or more, right?"

If you worry about filtering your knowledge against all that has come before you and all that is going on right now, you will be paralyzed into inaction. There's just way too many people out there all working with essentially the same wetware for much unique thought to pop into existance. Outside of academia where novel thought is the currency of the profession, it's simply more practical to charge ahead with your own thoughts and claim them for what they are, yours. I'm perfectly willing to take it on faith that when someone says they thought something up on their own that they are bring truthful.

Anyone who has done any serious reading will know that eerie feeling of encountering someone else who has developed a similar line of thought as one of your own, especially when it comes from a source hundreds or even thousands of years old.

So what's my point? Not that you shouldn't point out the reference to Heinlein, just try not to be so condescending about it. As if it's somehow the person's fault they don't already know about someone else who has developed a similar or parallel idea. There's lots of ways of making a friendly connection to older material. If anything it's a bit of a compliment I think to mirror thought that has become recognized as important enough that people 50 years later still associate it with a particular person in history.

Re:REAL Scarcity would mean HUGE price increases

[kahei]

Just as I don't believe we're anywhere near to running out of oil in the next 1000 years,


That's a pretty unconventional view -- actually, a unique view -- in the minerals world.


One of the reasons I formulated my anarcho-capitalist belief system


Ahh :) I'm sure you derive great personal pleasure from your politics but if I were using your research, I would want it to be driven by a rational understanding that mineral resources are finite, not by your 'belief system'.

Re:REAL Scarcity would mean HUGE price increases

[winwar]

"Just as I don't believe we're anywhere near to running out of oil in the next 1000 years,

That's a pretty unconventional view -- actually, a unique view -- in the minerals world."

Actually, he is correct. We aren't going to run out of oil. There will be oil in the ground that isn't economical or technologically feasible to extract.

We are going to run out of plentiful and cheap oil (and $70 barrel is cheap). Which for all practical purposes means we are going to run out of oil.

It's not going to matter anyway...

[ThinkFr33ly]

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.

Past peak copper

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Mr. President, we must not allow...

[Yahweh Doesn't Exist]

...a copper gap!

Not Enough?

[CrimsonAvenger]

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."

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?

During the Manhattan Project...

[gardyloo]

... much of the equipment at Oak Ridge (perhaps at Hanford, too; I can't remember) had to be massively cooled. Normally one would use commoner metals to pipe things about in, but a lot of the copper in the US was bound up in important things like electrical wiring for warplanes, etc. So the Manhattan Project borrowed other things -- like silver -- from Fort Knox, and made things like pipes out of that, keeping careful track, of course, as to where it went. Fascinating stuff. Massive amounts of the wartime research depended on silver, even though it often directly involved in experiments.

A penny saved is copper earned

[digitaldc]

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.

Monster

[Bimo_Dude]

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!"

Re:Monster

[Rei]

Just to nitpick the humor: copper connectors would be bad (the connectors are made of gold so that they don't corrode, not for its conductive properties; copper corrodes readily), and a wire made of silver would be far more reasonable (silver is much cheaper than gold and a better conductor).

Really, though, I don't understand the big panic. So copper prices rise as the easily minable deposits get exhausted - and? There are replacement materials. There's silver for when you need great conductivity (better than copper), and there's aluminum for when you don't (and you can tolerate metal fatigue). There are many other metals that could be used in between the two, and many of the metals that are common in the ground but are hard to refine show signs of significant price reduction in the future.

So the length of runs of wire that you can use become shorter. So it uses a little more power. So bandwidth capability decreases. Or, so people pay a higher price. Copper will never disappear; the shortage just means that people will have to turn to mining less rich/harder to refine deposits.

So what?

And who is to say that copper wire is going to continue to be in such demand? Optical fiber seems to be going into wider and wider use. More technology is turning to wireless communication. In short, I really don't see this as a huge issue. There have been shortages of various ores throughout all of recorded history. We'll cope just fine.

Re:Monster

[ChrisMaple]

The four best conductive metals at room temperature are (in order) silver (0.0163 ohm-meter), copper (0.0172), gold (0.0244), and alumin(i)um (0.0283). Not "many other metals in between the two". All other metals are worse than these four.

Re:Monster

[redneckHippe]

As an electrican I can tell you that you can replace all the Cat5 you want with fiber and all the audio cables with whatever; it probably won't make dent in the supply. Aluminum has been proven unsuitable for residental wiring years ago and I have never seen a motor or generator with anything other than copper wound stators. All generating stations regardless fuel used generate electricity using genertors. While transmission lines might use aluminum and steel the transformers in the substations certainly use copper windings. Not to mention all the factories around the world that have literally millions of electric motors that are constantly burning out and need to be replaced or rewound. Autos, trucks and machinery all have copper wiring for thier electrical systems. We also have how many homes and commerical buidings being built and upgraded? Not to mention the appliances(microaves,fax machines copiers, tv's ,stereo's toasters ...) that we use every day. I think we depend on copper more than we realize. RH

Just use lead-lined clay, like the ancient Romans

[csoto]

It never hurt anybody...

Mine the asteroids or junk piles?

[PIPBoy3000]

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.

Pennies must go!

[FuzzyDaddy]

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...)

Re:Pennies must go!

[taniwha]

That's what happens here (New Zealand) - we typically use 'swedish rounding' - we got rid of 1c/2c coins a while back and they're in the process of removing the 5c coin - our smallest will be 10c (about 7c US). It helps that our salestax is always included in the quoted price of an item - and when you go to the supermarket the rounding is only applied to the total price of what you buy

Re:Pennies must go!

[The Spoonman]

While we're at it, get rid of the dollar bill.

Noooo! They did that in Canada, and now I have to give the strippers either loonies or toonies! I wanna slip paper into those g-strings, dammit! :)

Re:Pennies must go!

[ozbird]

Agreed, and while you're at it replace your $1 notes (and the rare $2 notes) with coins!

In Australia, we phased out our 1c and 2c coins about 15 years ago; I think it was mainly a cost-saving measure - and nobody wanted to deal with piddly small change. (The remaining coinage contains between 75% and 92% copper, depending on the denomination, so that fact the 1c and 2c coins were copper is coincidental.)

The $1 note was replaced with a $1 coin in 1984, and the $2 note was replaced by a coin in 1988. Again, I believe it was a cost-saving measure - the low denominations had a high turnover rate from wear (like the US $1 note), coins are much more durable. There were other spin-offs e.g. use in vending machines.

Similarly, the old paper notes were replaced with polymer ones from 1992 (though the first, a commemorative $10 note, was released in 1988 for the bicentennial.) Polymer lasts longer and is much harder to counterfeit.

Re:Pennies must go!

[The Spoonman]

Ah, you never been to Canada. They don't stay on very long anyway. All nude, all alcohol, all smoking! Nekkid chicks the way they're supposed to be seen! LOL!

Economics

[leandrod]

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.

Re:Pennies

[linuxwrangler]

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.

Re:Aluminum

[nincehelser]

>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.

The red-headed stepchild of non-renewables: He.

[Kadin2048]

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.