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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."
How many of this stuff can be recovered by recycling? In the EU, companies now have to recycle old electronic equipment, which will surely extend the availability of these materials.
is by far the most serious in the above list. Ok, so flat panel manufacturers and researchers would have to pay top dollar, no biggie. But copper is going to get more and more crucial as the combined crunch of oil shortage and increased electrical demands are going to combine.
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It would be mighty surprising if this chicken-little themed story was correct.
Most things when in short supply, their price goes up. People notice this and they either cut back on their use of the stuff, find a substitute, or go out digging for it.
We do have a terrible shortage of celluloid shirt collars, ivory piano keys, whale oil and pyramid shims. Who cares?
We arent doomed, zinc will still exist, the amount we consume/need is fractional and exists all over the surface of the planet...
Its just not "farmable" in large amounts that way, therefore they say its "all gone" as far as electronics and such go...
And landfills will become valuable commercial property.
Something tells me that "the world's supply" of these elements isn't actually going down. Unless Ye Olde Alchemical Procefes (sorry, Mr. Stephenson) are actually transmuting, say, indium, into gold... it's just a question of where the elements are. Which is to say that I'm sure there's lots of it sitting right there in landfills, probably easier to get to than it is when bound up in 100 tons of rock and dirt in a mine. I mean, we didn't ship THAT much of the stuff to Mars yet, did we?
Or, if the point is that all of these elements are bound up in in-use devices, and always will be, then that's another matter. But I'd be a bit surprised to find that we've actually touched even close to all of the deposits available. Just the cheap ones. And recycling will probably be cheaper than, say, mining it on the moon or the ocean floor.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Every few weeks we have to endure this kind of drivel. Doom and gloom to sell news, get grant dollars, whatever. Last week's scare mongering wearing thing? Just trot out the latest manbearpig. In cases such as this, past performance IS a pretty good indicator of the future. We, mankind, make improvements, overcome shortfalls, etc. OLEDs will surpass LCDs in price/performance. Then the next. And the next. And so on. I'm damn sick of the media (ALL of the media be it online, print, radio, conservative, liberal, "Fair and Balanced", whatever) basing 95% of their reporting on sensationalism to pump up non-news.
All the hafnium will be gone by 2017 also, and another twenty years will see the extinction of zinc.
We are of course not shooting our rare Earth elements into space, they won't be gone, they will be sitting in waste dumps in China and elsewhere.
Maybe the headline should have been "We will be mining landfills by 2017 for Rare Earths."
A frew decades ago the supply of copper seemed to run out. This resulted in a large hike in copper prices that made the copper in AT&T's wires in the US more valueble than the stocks of the entire company. Then a bunch of people opened new copper mines that extracted copper ore that was not profitable to extract at the earlier lower price.
Then the price fell again, but to a higher level than it was before.
This is what happens with all kinds of raw materials. The price goes up, but the supply doesn't try out.
Oil has the same tendency, the oil that they have started digging now is much more expensive to get out of the ground than the 20$ a barrel they used to dig out a few years ago. (Ofcause the oil fields that were profitable at 20$ a barrel are now astronomically profitable at 130$ a barrel!)
Shut up, shut up, shut up.
You should be modded redundant because this is now the third time in this discussion I've had to tear down this ideological pop-economic BULLSHIT.
The market doesn't govern the physical universe. At all. The amounts of material and energy present on Earth are in no way related to the laws of supply and demand. The universe is indifferent to your over-applied, unfalsifiable theories. Applying your (almost certainly feeble) understanding of economics implies the universe responds like a rational actor, an idiotic notion that underpins most religion and superstition.
Sometimes 'cheaper alternatives' just don't exist. This is why your precious markets have never got to grips with spaceflight. The markets reaction has always been "Wait till it is cheaper" on the assumption that all technology gets cheaper - ignoring the fact that there is a physical constraint on what you must do to get into orbit. The required delta-V isn't going to change just because it would be financially efficient for it to do so.
If you are a true economist, then fuck off and play with your stock markets and leave actual science to actual scientists.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
They disappear in a usable format for electronics though. It will prove interesting to see what happens when it truly does disappear (I'm not sure if 2017 is an accurate date). Either we'll develop vastly different technologies, recycle somehow, somehow create the elements synthetically or mine the stuff from asteroids.
Really, I've often wondered when "landfill mining" was going to take off as a viable enterprise, as the higher cost of materials justifies the complicated means.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
I've been saying this for years. We'll be exploring landfills soon after they're no longer viable for producing methane gas. Meanwhile, states that refused to bury, and opted to dump their garbage elsewhere will be kicking themselves - hard.
Such "exhausted" landfills will be packed with little more than inorganic waste, like easily harvested metals. Point at anything on the periodic table and it'll exist in a landfill at concentrations far higher than what exists in ore deposits we're mining today; so this will be ridiculously profitable. Add to that the fact that they're all close to home, and you have yourself an industry that does a brisk business in mining landfills. And since all the stinky stuff has long since decomposed, you only have heavy-metals and toxic runoff to worry about (read: just like a normal mine).
After that, companies will look to cut out the middle man and buy back everyone's e-waste after the recycling plant has sorted it out. So the landfill will dissapear, leaving a closed loop from the recovery of raw materials all the way to the consumer and back again.
"SQL Error", you have the board. Pick a category.
Likewise. There's a whole world of landfill sites (a whole western world, at least) full of things we didn't recycle efficiently, either because we didn't know how or we just didn't bother. I don't know enough about the techniques involved to judge this, but it seems that if deep mining operations are commercially viable today, landfill mining could become commercially viable in the not-too-distant future.
I think the other thing that will have to change is this idea that you buy something but then "upgrade" it after only a very short period of use and throw the old one away, even though the old one still worked perfectly well or needed only routine maintenance to repair. Our culture has become terribly wasteful, because today's economics (and poor customer service when it comes to getting things repaired) practically force anyone sensible to buy a new replacement for things. That's just crazy.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
It sounds like you just contradicted yourself there. The loss of feasibly mineable zinc deposits will spell disaster for applications that use it. We should be recycling zinc from batteries, from electronics, everything, but we arent! Will by the time we realise this is a problem will it be too late? Even with recycling, there may not be enough materials avialable for recycling to supply new demand. So it is a serious problem, and like peak oil, there it is human nature to try to avoid looking at the problem because it is too painful to look at reality, so people have to try to desperately convince themselves it doesnt exist and detach themselves from reality, like the ostrich sticking its head in the sand. But this does not make our problems go away. They say, ignorance is bliss, but only for so long.
somehow create the elements synthetically
Let me go fire up my heavy fusion reactor and get to work on that.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
Zinc anodes are a CHEAP solution for corrosion. they are not the ONLY solution.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The premise of this article, and your post as well, are both rooted in a fundamental economic misunderstanding.
It is almost impossible for a resource to suddenly go extinct. What happens is that as available stocks shrink, and the cost of mining more increases, the cost of that resource also goes up. This provides a natural economic incentive both to find alternatives, and to recycle, at the point where it is economically feasible.
Gallium and zinc will never be used up. They will simply go up in cost and end up used for more important applications while enterprising individuals and companies discover and develop alternatives, and consumers shift their buying habits to products that use less of them.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Why? It seems to me that landfills would be more concentrated and easier to mine than natural ores are!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Quite possibly... but that doesn't really address the real issue that was raised. Say we don't reach peak oil for another 10 years, 20 years, 50, 100... the point is... it's a finite resource and at some point... it won't be there when we need it. in that time we will grow even more dependent on it and when it becomes too scarce... what do we do?
It's a good thing plastic isn't made out of something that's becoming more scarce and expensive by the day. :)
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
Because those fields are harder to get to. Therefore their oil is harder - more expensive - to extract. That expense includes not just money but energy. I.e., we'll need to use more oil to get that oil out.
That's the point of the "peak oil" idea. We've plucked the low-hanging fruit. To get more fruit, we need to climb the tree. But tree-climbing is hungry work. Fortunately, we've got a food source - the fruit we've been harvesting. Unfortunately, that means there's less fruit to go into the boxes...
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Brazil has used methanol as fuel for about 20yrs now, and there is NO food shortage here. Actually, there is so much food here that we export it to USA, Europe, China... And this having the greatest number of cars using biofuel in the world.
Brazil has a rainforest shortage - the Amazon is on the verge of collapse.
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?
Topsoil-based fuels are basically wrongheaded because as your energy consumption rises you need more acres of land which you would rather use for something else. "Green Revolution" architecture is horribly destructive to the land and the soil.
And what are they fertilizing with?
Anyway, you have an incredibly simplistic view of the situation. Although there is no "food shortage" in the US (you can walk into any supermarket and buy the necessities) we have shortages of corn and barley right now because we are making ethanol from them. The former has seriously harmed the average Mexican and the latter has driven up the price of beer. (Especially on top of the hops shortage.) Clearly you don't understand the concept of shortages. Incidentally, though, world food supplies are in trouble. Meat is doing pretty well, but plants are having problems all over. This last season's weather was troublesome all over the world. Year before last the grape vines on the front porch were just covered in grapes; this year it got warm early and the grapes leafed out and prepared to put on a big fruit set, then got frozen hard. This happened over much of the world, and it happened to the grape and nut crops this year in particular. Most vineyards around my area - did I mention that the next county to the south is Napa, and Mendocino is to the West? - aren't even going to bother to harvest anything this year. It's not worth the trouble.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The reality of it is that as we run low on various elements, the price will go up due to factors of supply and demand. This will help drive efforts to find alternatives, reduce the amount needed, and where feasible, recover/recycle those elements. We will never actually run out, but it may simply become too expensive to build TV's out of. Then we'll have to find another way to do it. If there's enough need and the price is worth it, we might end up prospecting asteroids to get the minerals we need.
As for peak oil, we don't know if we've hit it yet because there's historically been an incentive for many oil producers to keep their reserve numbers a secret. We don't know if they've artificially inflated or deflated their numbers for a variety of reasons. Being at peak oil does not mean we aren't going to discover more oil. What it means is that in the future, the oil we discover will be harder to get to, harder to produce, and will not sufficiently replace all the easy to drill oil we have had in the past. It will become impossible to increase oil production and we'll see a decline that will lead to drastic price increases, a switch to alternatives, and overall a decline in demand for it.
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When the cost of producing a currency exceeds it's value, it's shameful to keep making it.
Off topic, but coins are circulated more than once. Much more. Coins as currency last longer than paper notes.
The U.S. mint is essentially just subsiding lazy states who refuse to round off their sale taxes to the nearest nickel.
The Mint doesn't have the authority to boss the states around. Some might say the federal government doesn't have much authority at all as to how a state will issue its own taxes within its borders.
It's embarrassing to have to throw the things in the trash because they're completely useless and (by law) can't be recycled.
Are you sure they can't be recycled? Perhaps you're thinking of the law that prohibits people OTHER than the government to recycle the materials. I find it highly unlikely the trash bins behind The Mint has a bunch of money in it.
But on the rare occasions when I end up with them, I would rather throw them in a recycle bin than the trash.
Why not just roll 'em up and deposit into your bank account? Spend them? Use the coin counters at the supermarket? Truly it is the life of excess where you can decline money and wish you could just toss it away.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Two things about this kind of argument always make me laugh. First, the market will be helpless if there really is no alternative. And second, when there is an alternative, it may be something so drastically different than our current standard of living that most people who claim to be hardline capitalists will clamor for government intervention to save them from their horrible fate the second they comprehend what "the market's" solution entails.
Invoking the "free market" is just another way to say "humans will find a way to survive". It's probably true, but look at our level of survival in between great civilizations, or in areas of the world where these limited resources are not being exploited, and see if you think that's a solution you'd be happy to adopt. Because that's a completely viable direction for the market to take. Only we may be able to get around that if we as an intelligent group use some of these resources BEFORE they're too scarce to help us develop alternatives, since we have the potential to be a lot less reactionary than a dumb market system.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
We haven't hit peak oil yet.
This statement is confused at best, a bald-faced lie at worst.
At any moment, there was another moment in the past at which oil production has peaked. That was peak oil. We won't know whether it was THE peak until we either exceed that past peak or until we've waited ... how long? How many years do we have to go past a peak in oil production until you people will admit that this was THE peak oil?
Crude prices have exploded over the last couple years and yet the production peak of May 2005 has never been exceeded. If we can not increase production at $140 per barrel over that when it was $50 then I'm puzzled where anybody gets the sheer pigheaded ignorance to claim that we haven't hit peak oil yet (or mod such a claim "insightful").
There's always the chance that we haven't. There's always the possibility that something completely unforseen happens in the future -- that's why it's the future. But to look at the flat line in that graph and pretend that it is magically going to go up at some time in the future betrays a confidence born exactly out of putting one's head into the sand.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
Uh... wrong. You know civilizations have fallen before, right? Ancient trading centers in India destroyed and abandoned when they cut down every tree in a 200 mile radius and had no fuel source left, or civilizations in Africa wiped out when the climate changed and there was literally no alternative to make up for the lack of water. Civilizations absolutely have collapsed due to lack of natural resources. Just because we're operating on a global scale with our current civilization doesn't protect us from the fact that certain problems simply do not have solutions.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
Key word: "current".
"Economic realities" change on a regular basis. Do we really expect everything to stay static over the next 100 years?
This is exactly why "peak oil" predictions have continued to change. The original predictions had us hitting peak oil around, what, 1985? None of the predictions ever take into account new technologies. When the newest predictions were made, oil sands still weren't an economically feasible source of crude. Now they are. That makes a HUGE difference.
Actually, no, we're not. The US is refusing to exploit many easily accessible reservoirs due to political considerations. You're also barely touching your oil shales. Meanwhile Canada has just recently started to exploit oil sands, and we're increasing production at a staggering rate.
So what you're saying is that it's akin to fortune telling? Read my palm and tell me how much oil we're going to need?
I dunno ... that's not my understanding of the peak-oil predictions, but if you're right then it's even more idiotic than I thought.
The current rise in price has more to do with the fact that oil has been artificially under priced for the last few decades. Now we're starting to pay for the true cost. But you're right - as China and India continue to grow, we're going to see even more demand. That's why it's important that we start opening new drill sites and start investing in oil sand and shale projects. We can offset the increased demand by opening new lines of supply, as well as by developing alternate fuel technologies.
This is exactly why "peak oil" predictions have continued to change. The original predictions had us hitting peak oil around, what, 1985?
Those predictions were for US oil fields, and they came true almost exactly on schedule. Current predictions are for world-wide supplies. These are a bit shakier, since some countries (Saudi Arabia, for one) treat oil reserve data as state secrets.
None of the predictions ever take into account new technologies. When the newest predictions were made, oil sands still weren't an economically feasible source of crude. Now they are. That makes a HUGE difference.
The cost of extraction continues to rise. Yes, it's cheaper now to extract from shale and oil sands than it was a year ago, but it's still more expensive than drilling, and I don't see anyway that it (or deep sea drilling) will ever be cheaper than land drilling. The only reason why these other avenues are being pursued now is that the easy/cheap places to drill are tapped out. We'll never completely run out of oil, but when it requires more energy to extract an amount of oil than that oil can provide, we'll stop using oil for energy. The economic consequences of even approaching that price point are staggering to contemplate.
I dunno ... that's not my understanding of the peak-oil predictions, but if you're right then it's even more idiotic than I thought.
No, the grandparent poster is wrong. Peak Oil simply refers to the point when half of an area's economically-extractable oil has been depleted. By itself, that not too bad; it took 140 years to extract one trillion barrels. But production increases over time. For example, if production increases at 5% per year, then production doubles every 14 years. And if you do the math, no matter how long it took to get to that point, once you hit peak oil, you've got 14 years until it becomes economically infeasible to extract any more oil. Unfortunately, the industrialization of China and India has driven the rate of increase even higher, closer to 7%, which means a doubling period of 10 years.
I expect that you aren't interested in reading propaganda from admitted peak oil enthusiasts, but how do you feel about the American Association of Petroleum Geologists? http://www.aapg.org/explorer/2007/05may/nehring.cfm
Nothing for 6-digit uids?