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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.
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
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.
Very insightful. It's just like "Who Moved My Cheese?".
My blog
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.
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."
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
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.
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.
"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.
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