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Supplies of Rare Earth Elements Exhausted By 2017
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."
Apparently Gallium isn't a Rare Earth Element.
Actually, neither is Hafnium, Indium, Zinc or Copper. Does the article have any connection to the rare earth elements at all?
Looks like asteroid mining is about to take off.
Of course someone is about to shoot me down for this as I don't know the concentrations of gallium, Indium and other metals in the average asteroid.
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.
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.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Pennies are zinc.
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.
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!
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Copper is in no danger of being depleted, and probably none of the other elements listed. About 3 years ago, copper was barely $1 per pound, and most copper mines around here (S. Arizona) could operate at that price. In fact they could operate at about $0.40 per pound, albeit they would just be hanging on financially. Today, the price of copper is about $3.50 to $4.00 per pound, and they can't pull the stuff out of the ground fast enough. This has cause a couple of things to happen: Old mines are expanding, and new mines are opening up or being proposed. Eventually, this will probably lead to the price of copper to go back down as supply will catch up to demand.
T'ain't necessarily so. Are we running out of Aluminium? Al works just fine as a sacrifical anode.
Have a look here for starters...
Political language
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.
That's extremely short-sighted for a number of reasons.
1. Who creates the biggest food shortages in the world? Your governments do. They subsidize production of the wrong products (subsidizing means going against the market's forces), causing price increases for the wrong reason. They restrict growing of certain crops in certain areas, or monopolize which crops can be grown.
2. If you're living in poverty and are hungry, doesn't it make sense to cut back on producing offspring? Yet when I've traveled the world for work, I always tend to try to seek out the poverished areas. They're spending more time on replicating DNA than they are on devising new ways to grow food. Sad. Usually they're living under a fascist or communist regime, which means revolution is their only probably solution. I know that Professor Popkin (University of North Carolina) said in 2005 or 2006 that the world's obese are growing in number while the malnourished are shrinking.
3. Market economic theory may be predicated on supply and demand, but many people are ignorant of those who hamper both (again, usually governments). To me, the people who best stabilize markets are the speculators, who can often times stabilize pricing enough for farmers to weather bad seasons or deal with oversupply. If it wasn't for the speculators, pricing would be much more peak-and-valley, causing more hardship for those on relatively fixed or declining incomes.
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
Speaking of retards...
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).
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
First, gallium and indium are not rare earth elements. I don't know what the heck these guys are talking about. Second, there is plenty of gallium around-- it's found anywhere you can refine aluminum from. It's not usually recovered because it isn't economical to, but if it were in fact running out, it could be easily produced as a byproduct of aluminum production.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
You missed the point of this thread. "gbjbaanb" was asking if this is a problem in regards to the fact that we need zinc as part of our diet. Vectronic responded that it is not a problem in that regard, and that the depletion is only problematic in terms of industrial uses. Vectronic is therefore not contradicting him/herself.
Life is short: void the warranty.
Very insightful. It's just like "Who Moved My Cheese?".
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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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You know cornflakes were originally designed to stop you wanking, don't you?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
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.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Don't forget about magnesium as well. All 3 work well as sacrificial anodes. But these are only forms of cathodic protection and are only a small part of defeating a corrosion cell. As an alternate form of cathodic protection (called impressed current) provides an electrical current to oppose the current of the corrosion cell. Along with Barrier and Inhibitive coatings.
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.
Kevin Smith on Prince
there is another problem with using aluminum, and it is not at all related to corrosion:
Aluminum is very soft. The effect of that is if you put it in some kind of clamping system that over time the contact becomes less solid, increasing the resistance.
This can lead to fires:
http://www.heimer.com/information/aluminum_wiring.html
and that is the main reason you won't see it in domestic use any more.
In HV transmission lines it is used very extensively.
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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.
>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.)
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
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 about garbage myths that it looks like William Ruthje of the Tucson Garbage Project 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.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Excellent point. However you missed one crucial point: If you are taking the time and effort to recycle all the trace elements, why would you NOT also go ahead and recycle as many other things out of the material as possible?
They do this NOW with regular recycling. If you have ever seen the Discovery Channel programs on recycling you would see this in action. They take a complex item, such as a car, for example, and break it down into it's constituent elements via various processes such as grinding, magnetic separation, water washing, tank settling, heating, and vaporizing. (just to name a few) Once the elements are broken down as much as possible, the resulting raw materials are sold to manufacturing companies for re-use in new products. Obviously this is an energy-intensive process, usually requiring large amounts of Electricity.
Of course, if we listen to (and Elect) McCain and get a crapload of Nuke plants set up like the French have, Electrical supply won't really be an issue for a long time. So powering the recycling operations should be reasonably trivial.
Ultimately, the solution to our problems lies in our own ingenuity and market forces. If there is a profit to be made, it WILL be done. No need for Government interference with burdensome regulation or laws that just serve to slow the whole process down. Let us put our minds and wallets to it and watch us fly.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Do you know what Peak Oil is?
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.
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.
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,
That's completely false.
The problem with aluminum wiring is that it has a way larger coefficient of thermal expansion than copper does. That expansion would loosen screw connections, which would increase resistance, which would make the wire hotter, so the screw connection gets looser, and then you'd get fires.
Or, it would heat up, try to expand, but the portion under the screw head or clamp couldn't get larger, so it would bulge out from the fitting. Then, later on when there's not as much load, it contracts, but now a portion of it is lying outside the connector, so you've a bit of a gap. Sparking, heating, later rinse repeat, and then you'd get fires.
"Peak Oil" is when we cannot increase production of oil at all. When we drain the existing fields, and their production falls off faster than we can produce oil from Shale, Sand, Deep Sea Drilling, the Arctic, or wherever.
You are correct when you say "Peak Oil" does not mean that we're out of oil. And that the dramatic increase in price given no serious disruptions in supply and only modest and predictable increases in demand suggest that "Peak Oil" is now, or at least close. Producers may believe that a barrel of oil may fetch $200 or more shortly, so there is no great incentive for them to pour billions of $ (or Euros, or the equivalent in Yuan or Rupees) into increasing supply now and missing out on even greater profits later.
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?
Although I generally agree with your points, let's just clarify there's no relation between sugar cane plantation (ethanol production) and amazon deforestation in Brazil.
Simply because there was other tropical forest ("Mata Atlantica", in portuguese) where sugar cane is grow now. This forest has been decimated a long long time ago (there's small drops of it, at a place or two, but it's mostly gone). That's not good, but mostly happened at colonial times (1500/1600) when people were looking for Brazil Wood - hence the country name.
Sugar is grown in Southwestern and Northwestern states, none in the Amazon ecosystem.
Brazil is just a big place.
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
No one is plumbing potable systems in copper anymore except in Mass and a couple of other states that have been extremely slow to adopt it. The rest of us have had PEX in the codes for more than a decade.
The industry had a problem with PolyButylene years ago, and the problems were primarily related to the fittings, not the pipe itself. Polybutylene itself is still around.
Also, freeze protection is a reason to use pex. it expands, and reforms to its original shape when heated (assuming the use of PEX-A). making it 'freeze resistant'; no water damage unless it's a really severe freeze and bursts anyway. Copper doesn't expand too well and burst pipes are a major source of water problems. But the long and the short of it is, your pipes should NEVER be in an outside wall, EVER, that's just poor practice, and if you're building houses in which the pipes freeze, your plumbing is substandard.
Finally, PEX has been around for decades and in heating systems for more than 30 years here in the US now. We are pretty clear that it's here to last.
Google "Julian Simon wager". Very on topic.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
I'm still waiting for the oil to run out like my third grade teacher in 1975 promised would happen by the year 1990.
"Green Revolution" in agriculture has a specific meaning that has nothing to do with the various "Green" political parties, nor "Green" environmental initiatives and marketing campaigns. It basically refers to high-yield industrialized agriculture. Wiki it (although the article isn't very clear about defining the term up-front, you get a pretty good idea by reading the whole thing).
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, ethanol.
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
I don't know where you are getting your information. The mines around here have been operating for more than 100 years, and as time goes on they are able to process ore that contains less and less copper content. I think that they are able to process ore with about 0.25% copper content, and probably less than that with newer techniques. As a matter of fact, many mines are reprocessing their "depleted" tailings because newer techniques make economic recovery of the copper possible. Many mines around here have an estimated life of about 40 years remaining (at current technology) and who knows the life of the newly open mines. Also, around the world there are HUGE mines just waiting to be open. My company was involved in a project with a mine in Mongolia that has copper concentrations in about the 20% range! You don't even need a concentrator to process ore that rich in copper. Current bureaucratic fumbling is keeping the mine from opening currently, but when it does, look for copper supplies to increase significantly.
First they came for the oil companies, no one spoke out because oil companies were unpopular - then they came for me.
You are using a quote historically linked to the Holocaust in a discussion about a windfall profits tax on the oil companies? Do you not realize how absurd that sounds? You've clearly lost any sense of perspective that you might have had at the beginning of this conversation.
This is an EXTREMELY dangerous precedent - it would most likely (and I kid you not) totally destroy our economy
Actually it's been tried before (there was a windfall profits tax in the 80s) and somehow it didn't "totally destroy" our economy.
if a congressman can steal money from anyone unpopular
They already do that -- tried buying a pack of smokes in New York State these days?
Don't get me wrong -- I'm not convinced that a windfall profits tax on big oil is sound policy -- but you've used so much hyperbole in this conversation that it's becoming harder and harder to take you seriously.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.