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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
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.
The problem is getting them back, recycling them, thats the problem. Its not scaremongering at all. THis will reduce progress and economic growth, there is no doubt about that. Without an easy supply of thse materials manufacturing will be capped and we probably wont be able to get enough from recycling to meet demand, considering we are recycling AT ALL. We could have had recycling programs for electronics in place years ago and could have recollected electronic equipment for recycling, but our arrogant and idiotic, shortsighted governments have been too slow to do this, as they have been with renewable energy. There should be HUGE fines for throwing anything metal or electronic into the garbage, including batteries that are filled witn metals. How many people recycle their alkaline batteries I ask? How many cities have curbside recycling pickup for batteries and electronic waste, cable, etc? Now with much of these materials buried in landfills, it will be a impractical idea to try to recover them. Duh! How could we be so stupid.
Given even with recycling we still will not get enough metals to meet demand, this is a HUGE problem. Given depleation of other resources such as iron and copper, oil, phosphorus (fertilizer, CRT displays), we are seeing serious trouble ahead. To avert this will take action now but do to the lack of action things are a lot worse than they could have been, since so many materials have already been sent to landfills.
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.)
Yes, but as we're finding out with oil - the period of adjustment can be pretty painful.
This is the government's role in the economy. It should provide the "seed research" for things which will become problems in 10 years, but aren't economically feasible to solve now.
By funding forward-looking research, the government can help ease transition shocks for the population.
Just like they should have slowly deflated the housing bubble starting in 2003, they should have been working on alternate energy back in the 90s so the new tech would be available for businesses now.
The government funding alternate energy sources now is just silly - businesses are doing that much more efficiently because it's economically feasible. The time for the government to make that pain go away was 5-10 years ago.
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.
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"