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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."
When an LCD display breaksdown, they won't be able to crush them into tiny bits, smelt them and recover the material? All it means is your 50" LCD monitor will have some significant residual value and you will sell the dead monitor for some money instead of throwing it in the dumpster.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
mining our landfills will begin...
;)
It was going to have to happen eventually. One thing i've always thought to myself is, that if the earth is here 50,000 years from now and some cognitive being starts exploring, everything will be told in our landfills... They may not be able to know what we did at this time, but they will know the materials we used - at least Styrofoam
Yep, clueless, check this story
The authors apparently do not realize that the available amount of Gallium depend on the price:
Its impending scarcity could already be reflected in its price: in January 2003 the metal sold for around $60 per kilogram; by August 2006 the price had shot up to over $1000 per kilogram
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.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Indeed, im not sure about all these -iums, which are no doubt toxic to us anyways... but zinc and copper is pretty easy to recycle, and in a decade, we might not need the -iums we (dont really) need now...
Especially if we upgrade all the phone and cable lines to optical, and recycle those trillion miles of copper, and as we move away from coin money (another debate unto itself) there's also that (both copper and zinc), replacing copper pipes with plastic, etc, etc, etc... although, all that plastic is also another debate.
Stop treating economics like its a theory of everything.
The problem isn't economics, it's the idiots that try to invoke it in the way we see them doing here. The fact that the price of a commodity increases when it's in short supply doesn't cure the shortage or make it less of a problem; it merely allocates what supplies remain to those who are willing to pay the most. It's a manifestation of the shortage, not an explanation of it.
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.
Copper prices are now high enough that it's worth trying to steal. Here in Boston, at least once a month there's a story about someone killed trying to steal copper from power lines that turn out to be, y'know, active.
Construction sites now have to be locked up tightly. It's not just the tools that get stolen; it's the pipes and the wire spools.
I assume this will get worse as copper gets scarcer and, thus, more expensive.
The OP mentions plumbing, but I'm not sure that plastic is a viable alternative yet. I've built a few houses, and always used copper, at least for the main plumbing. I remember in the 1990s, the industry tried using PVC, but had problems of some kind, and went back to copper. Today, you can use PEX or Hep2O flexible tubing for heating, but I don't know if it's approved for drinking yet - and we probably don't know its long term stability. Copper is still the gold standard (sorry!) for plumbing.
(Side rant: When copper pipes freeze, you can use an arc welder to heat them back up. You can't do that with PEX, since it's plastic, not metal. So if it gets too cold, your heat stops working... which means the air can't warm up enough to melt the ice... shampoo, rinse, repeat. Make sure your PEX is in a well-insulated wall.)
We desperately need good manufacturing techniques for carbon fibre. With good techniques, just about everything we move around could be made with it, and energy costs would go down.
This ought to be as X-prize-worthy a topic as good solar or good batteries.
But how does it hold up to seawater? Will we need to coat the boats every year with something in short supply?
But that also might buy us enough time to figure out an efficient enough means of mining for minerals in other parts of the solar system. People always say that right now we "have no reason to go into space," but needing to mine minerals that are used in industry would be enough of a prompt to get us up in space that the argument would then be lost.
1. Buy cheap land.
2. Create a landfill and make people pay you for dumping their waste there.
3. Profit (for the first time)!
4. Wait until it's profitable to mine your landfill for rare elements.
5. Open a mining operation and have people pay you for things you extract from their waste.
6. Profit (for the second time)!
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
Not exactly. "Peak Oil" refers to the current economic realities of oil production. Shale, Sand, Deep Sea Drilling, the Arctic, etc all have vast reserves of petroleum, and we're pursuing those options as fast as we can. The problem is that demand is rising even faster. Peak Oil refers not to "running out of oil" but the point at which production cannot be increased faster than demand is rising. It's an inelastic commodity--we MUST have it regardless of price, as there's no readily available alternative in most cases. Net effect: skyrocketing price. Like now.
Easter Island. When they cut down the last tree (for moving those carved heads around on rollers), they couldn't build boats to go fish with, or leave. Invoking economics will not always get you out of a man-made catastrophe - global warming anyone?
IBM doesn't play chess with the Universe.
I call BS on this one. You can still go to upper Michigan (Houghton and Hancock region) and pull raw copper nuggets off the ground. And they stopped mining back in the 1930's because of the depression. There's still a huge amount of copper (and silver, gold, zinc, and half a dozen other metals) up in the basaltic flows of Upper Michigan. The copper there is in nearly pure veins.
In fact when I got a tour of Quincy Shaft #2 (the deepest hole in the U.S. at 9672 feet) the guide told us about a single, solid column of copper that's still in the mine, 50 feet across and over 20 feet high. That's about 21 million pounds of copper in a single formation on a single level of the mine. (The mine had nearly 100 levels and stretched for several miles.) That block of copper alone is about 1% of the copper usage in the U.S. annually. They never removed it, because in 1930, they didn't have the tools to tear it apart.
Maybe zinc is running short, but there's still gobs of copper around.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
This is basisically technical sounding nonsense that just obscures the fact of what is happening. If a resource gets to the point where there is not enough to meet demand, or it is no longer economical, it doesnt matter if there is still a little left, the effect is basically that you cant use it anymore, so you can say it has run out. You are just using slippery words to try to obscure this fact.
I dont think that your idea that current ways and habits, can be sustained in their current form, or that technologies to replace these will magically appear. Furthermore, if we can be more efficient, we should eb done so now rather than just going on business as usual. If we improve our efficiecy, we can extend the life of the resources that we have now and help mitigate problems in the future. This is called planning ahead, and it is often alien to the chaos of free markets, which is not driven by foresight by immediate profits and greed. Such as oil, if we cared about the future, and we wanted to take action that would help us reduce problems in the future and avoid them, we would not be using oil now. We are using it still because of short term greed of oil companies, and the immature behaviouer of the people that keeps us from more responsible long term alternatives that could stop global warming adn supply us with clean energy. We should not keep using oil, we should leave it in the ground where it belongs and stop adding to the climate change mess. But only foresight and planning can get that done, and that means not a chaotic market driven trends but us deciding to implement goals and objectives, and a plan.
We should be pushing much more for sequestering and recycling of all electronics, conservation, renewable energy and so on, but its not happening because private industry isnt interested, and we have a conservative government that is basically a lapdog of private corporations.
Another thing that needs to be done is to educate people globally to encourage more sustainable population trends. We really need to encourage people through education amd with contraception and abstinance to engage in family planning and decide to limit themselves to two children per family, and perhaps 1 per family in many cases, and with a target of 0% and in certain cases a temporary period of negative population growth. Population growth simply adds to demand, and if we want to give ourselves the best chance of solving our problems we should hold demand at the level it is at now, this will give us a better chance of eliminating poverty and would likely save many lives. Such would actually prevent overpopulation problems, which are real since the earths resources are finite, and nothing can change that, no matter what you do eventually you will reach the point of exhausting those resources. Eventually, if population growth continued, the earth would end up covered in a 100 foot thick deep layer of human beings. Long before, environmental quality of life will be greatly degraded as food becomes more difficult to acquire and quality of life suffers as it does when population density increases (better environment for diseases, a loss of scenic beauty, supply problems get worse, sewage problems worsen, etc). If you doubt that overpopulation causes a debasement of living conditions, I suggest you visit india where families live in crowded slums of cardboard boxes and see it for yourself. The fact that overpopulation is a problem is undeniable, its a physical law. The earth isnt getting bigger, You cant magically increase the size of the earth or its finite resources but many people delude themselves into thinking that somehow we can keep reproducing like we are now. No technology can escape this problem. Technology in agriculture has only worsened the quality of food and has caused soil desertification due to intensive agricultural practices and increases pesticide exposure. None of these things are good. Those who would want us to do nothing to help educate people to help them understand the economic realities of overpopul
Oh really. Now explain to me what you think is limiting our production capacity by -- oh, let's say, coal liquefaction. Steel, with all of those steel mills shuttered across Appalachia? Unskilled labor, with huge unemployment in said regions and elsewhere? Engineers, with huge numbers in places like India and China trying to get visas? Rates of coal extraction, when China is mining through their their more-difficult-to-get reserves mostly by manual labor three times faster than we are (on a percentage basis)? Tell me, what do you think is the limiting factor?
Here's some things that should clue you in on oil prices. Oil companies aren't being valued by the market as though oil was $140+ a barrel; they're being priced as though it was $50-70 a barrel. Oil companies aren't betting on projects with expected oil prices at $140+ a barrel; the most expensive I've seen them undertake are the Bakken (~$50/barrel) and Greenland (~$50/barrel), and in the former case, it's only small oil companies, and in the latter case, it's only very preliminary work. The people who should know what they're talking about are *not* betting on these prices being sustained, or anythign close to them. Only the futures market is way up. Now, if that doesn't look like a standard commodities bubble, I don't know what does. Well, that and perhaps this: have you checked out prices of rents in oil exploration and transportation? Drilling ship rents are 3-4 times what they were a year ago. Fine, that's to be expected. Rig rents are 3-4 times what they were a year ago. Again, that's to be expected. But *tankers*, too, are renting at 3-4 times what they were a year ago. Go on, explain that one under the "scarcity" theory. If there's a scarcity, where's all of this oil coming from? Iran and Venezuela are both known to be renting tankers and just storing oil in them. In Iran's case, a slowdown in demand in India has lead a refiner there to stop buying their sour crude, only needing their more local sweet crude. They're looking for a new buyer, and in the meantime, they're stockpiling. The situation is such that a company with oil in a tanker, even with the current high prices, is paying less on the rent for the tanker than they're gaining by holding onto the oil as prices rise.
The exact same thing happened in the last oil spike. When prices collapsed, they all rushed to port to unload as fast as possible, furthering the price fall. Bubbles work that way.
The Simon-Ehlrich Wager wasn't a fluke. For more detail, I've written a fair bit on the concept of peak oil (w/references).
"That's Nietzsche. He killed my father." -- Jesus, "Jesus Christ Supercop"