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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.
MP3 Search Engine
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
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?
Guess what, humans are using up precious resources in their inventive quest for more tools/toys/and other environmental "improvements". No sh*t we are going to run out of some of the more unique elements. But as usual, when something gets scarce, it gets expensive and we find other materials as a substitute.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
We still haven't even begun to use our Upsidasium supply.
Surely it will last us forever.
I just pooped your party.
*Tries to shoot self but fails due to gun not functioning without Zinc*
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Had the transistor not come along, doubtless by now the computer industry would have run out of the molybdenum for vacuum tubes.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
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...
NOOOOOOO!!!!!!!! Come back, zinc, come back!
*Whew*, it was just a dream. Thank goodness I still live in a world of telephones, car batteries, handguns [*bang*!] and many things made of zinc.
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.
It's called "trace" in the diet for a reason. But I assume this is talking about easily exploitable ore deposits. And flat-panels dying off is bad, but no zinc removes a very nice battery-type from electric vehicle research...
You're making me think. You won't like me when I'm thinking.
The article states Indium is used in LCD displays, but would it also be used in LED displays?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
At some point and it seems that point is soon, we are going to have to crack open all those old landfills. Think of how much has been tossed in there before we really started to pay attention to reuse.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Sounds like it's about time to invest more money into molecular nanotechnology. It's still decades off, but most resources on this planet won't last forever. It's never too early to start planning for the future.
One has to wonder how many of the world's problems could be solved if we'd just invest the money for the Iraq war into R&D instead. The research will still take time, but at least it'll get done.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
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!)
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.
apparently the metal dealers, the guys whose livelyhood depends on knowing what's up with metals, they don't know that these elements are kaput.
a little googling shows that Hafnium you can buy on the internet, no sweat, at about $12 a gram. Many times cheaper than HP printer ink.
and without more Illudium how will we make moreQ-36 Explosive Space Modulators
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?
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!
Both sides should get a grip! While it is clear that economy does not magically conjure materials in demand it is merely a human made factor that creates incentives for use of not so easy to extract sources of the materials as well as research into possible alternative. TRue it is a human invention but so what, it works.
there's work underway to replace the light emitting components of flat panel displays with carbon nanotubes. Carbon nanotubes are much better conductors of electricity than copper. Graphene (flat carbon) could potentially replace silicon. the nanotubes are also incredibly strong, potentially replacing steel and concrete as a building material. Seeing as carbon is so good for making tubes, it could replace the entire internet AS WELL!!!!!!
prepare the survey weasels.
So that's it then: we HAVE to go discover Rare Moon elements, Rare Mars elements, Rare Ganymede elements, ad infinitum...
It's all a cunning plan by NASA to stay employed!
(do I really NEED to put a '/sarc' after this?)
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)
The real question isn't when we'll run out of oil (or other non-replenishable goods), but if we'll be forced to use horses and carts before we reach the point where the alternatives are preferable over oil.
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
Lets face it, we're just going to have to wait for us to be in some serious shit before anything significantly changes. Necessity might be the mother of invention, but despiration is the mother of success.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
Assuming we have enough resources to create the solution when the market gets 'desperate' enough to register a serious problem at all.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
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.
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
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.)
Everyone else will be ok because we didn't put an expiration date on our time recording devices.
I wouldn't be too sure about that.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Food is becoming extinct as well. We're starting to burn everything we grow.
Most of the stuff on
It's called the myth of sufficient plenty.
The thought that we can just keep on using more and more of something at an increasing rate and other countries can increase their rate of consumption without any problems because we can always dig up and refine more oil/copper/zinc/or whatever. Don't worry, there will always be gas in your pump, someone will find a new oil field.
People need to change. Consumers should be demanding 100+mpg cars, fully recycled products, whole life cycle design. Engineers and scientists need to step up and provide these solutions.
The glass is either half empty and we are all doomed or half full and we are just waiting for these great strides.
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.
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
Sure there's a cycle, it just takes millions of years.
Once our trash enters a magma pool the elements will sort themselves out under extreme heat and pressure, and then be spewed back out, as they always do.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Sticking one's head in the sand is just as bad as crying wolf. We haven't hit peak oil yet. We haven't even explored all of the oil fields in the oceans, under the two polar caps....etc. We're depleting the known fields yes, but we haven't even tapped the unknown fields yet.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Zinc anodes are a CHEAP solution for corrosion. they are not the ONLY solution.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
Once the prawn industry realizes that without the rare earth elements they won't be able to push Brazilian flatulence prawn on the 22" flat screen monitors it'll only take them a few minutes to come up with a solution. For that matter, tell them they can't take ANY more pictures of Japanese naked squid sumo girls until they find a way to produce cheap gas (not the B.F.P. kind) and the problem will be solved.
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
ad infinitum
It's a good thing we have plenty of infinitum.
It looks like we will have enough to get through Dec 21, 2012. That's all we need.
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?
Indeed. Will you sign up to be a slave rower?
I hate printers.
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?
Bringing up salt water - there are a lot of minerals dissolved in the ocean.
There are also a ton of minerals contained in our trash dumps.
As others have pointed out, the solution is alternative elements or recycling. Once again almost all of humanity's current problems could be solved with a cheap enough energy. Energy would obviously be solved, water would be solved (desalinization), and if that was practical enough, food would be solved (since water is a key issue with not being able to produce crops. If the new source was comparatively clean (compared to the new demands for energy), pollution would also be solved.
I am not an expert. If I am misled in something, please correct me.
The Belgian company Umicore specialises in this. They extract all the rare stuff. For some of it there is only one cubic meter available on the entire earth!
linky: link
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
so you HAVE had my wife's cooking!
Some people are like slinkys. They're useless, but it puts a smile on your face to push them down the stairs.
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
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?
Don't worry, there is plenty of zinc, etc in the planet.
Whenever you see a scare-monger story like this, remember: economics is designed to fix stuff like this. As zinc becomes harder to get, zinc becomes more expensive. That drives technological growth in zinc extraction, bringing the price back down. Alternately, it drives some of the existing buyers to alternatives, leaving only those that really need it. Alternately, it also makes currently uneconomical mines (such as current waste dumps) economical, increasing supply at the higher price.
This is the type of problem a free market is best at solving. The danger is government involvement - since you bring up oil, much of the current cost of oil is due to anti-oil lobbying preventing the "new" oil technologies being implemented. The Democrats are essentially preventing oil-shale (and, of course, offshore drilling) in the US.
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
This is talked about as if we were "using up" the materials, instead of just using them.
Do flat panel TVs destroy the Gallium, Indium, Hafnium or whatever else is used in them?
We use zinc instead of copper to make pennies, so, when we run out of zinc and copper, we just search in everyone's couches and junk drawers and under their car seats for however much we need.
Problem solved. Where's my Nobel Peace Prize?
Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean that they're not out to get you.
The coming global depletion of supplies of Illudium Phosdex, the shaving cream atom, makes me angry, very angry. Without it, we cannot manufacture the Illudium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator and civilization will crash. Damn you, Al Gore.
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.'"
Well, given that we were talking about a future drained of resources, diesel powered doesn't exactly seem like a good alternative. Sail power is "free" energy to move things around.
Although, after I posted I did think that rather than wood, we could probably make sailing vessels similar in size to the old wooden ships out of fiberglass instead, which might prove a little more useful.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
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
You are making the malthusian mistake of treating technology as static and people solely as consumers. We will never completely run out of raw material. We will, at most, asymptotically approach running out some particular raw material. At some point, dumps may become cost effective as mines for some of these materials, other materials will be found, other sources will be found, more efficient methods of utilization will be found, or completely alternate products will be found to displace demand for them.
Basically, usage patterns and needs are NOT some constant C times the size of the population. C is itself a function of time and population. Almost invariably doomsday scenarios assume that doubling the population will double demand, which is not what actually happens. If you examine general human wealth rather than some particular item, then things are consistently improving on average. As a particular resource becomes harder and harder to get, prices will rise, making it economical to switch.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
"Thank goodness I still live in a world of telephones, car batteries, handguns and many things made of zinc."
Technically speaking, EVERYTHING is a finite resource. We'll run out of sunlight in a few billion years. What do we do then?
As the parent pointed out, we haven't even tapped much of the available oil. Current estimates of "peak oil" are based on oil which is easily accessible with current methods - it does NOT take into account the various oil sands and shales which exist around the world. When you factor in those deposits it becomes obvious that oil will still last us for a long, LONG time. I'd be very surprised if we haven't switched entirely to alternate fuels by the time we start to run low on oil.
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
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.
ETHANOL..Alcol is made from sugar cane which Brazil has plenty of due to climate. Ethanol from Sugar Cane is much cheaper to produce than the corn-based version made in the USA. The only reason Ethanol is "popular" in the USA is the farming lobby and the enviro-radicals. Using corn for ethaonol production is driving the price of food for animals higher thus driving food prices higher. By the time you calculate the energy needed to grow the corn (which needs high nitrogen fertlizer, fungicides and pesticides made from petrochemicals) and refine it into ethanol is is enegy NEGATIVE. We'd be wiser to import it from Brazil. Also, due to demand for corn for Ethanol animal growers have switched to other grains driving those prices up and the surplus which we used to export or give away to starving countries has dissapeared. It's a very bad cycle to be in but unless we get smart and start producing more oil domestically, or start burning coal in our cars we are heading for a crash and burn energy wise in 20 yrs.
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
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.
Whenever you see a scare-monger story like this, remember: economics is designed to fix stuff like this. As zinc becomes harder to get, zinc becomes more expensive.
Yet what you don't take into account is some fool congressman calling a hearing from the heads of the zinc industry (which will be collectively termed "Big Zinc") asking them how they can justify the high prices -- and thus high profits -- of zinc when people are having to make hard choices between food and a new flat screen television.
Big Zinc will respond that prices are high because demand is high and supply is low, but the congressmen will ignore that obviously-logical argument.
Big Zinc will say it would like to increase supply, but all attempts to open new mines are being stymied by environmentalists, bureaucrats, and tax laws but congress will ignore this as well.
In the end, congress will pass a "windfall profits tax" on Big Zinc, which will be passed along (as all corporate taxes are) to the end consumer -- that being us. Yet there will be much fanfare for the congressmen who pass this tax since they will be perceived Standing Up For The Little Guy Against Big Zinc. Many votes and campaign contributions will flow to them, and in the meantime nothing will have been done to fix the problem.
Not gonna happen, you say? It's already happened. Just replace "zinc" with "oil" and compare it with contemporary headlines.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
And in the history of mankind this has happened: NEVER!
Reminds me of the old joke about the guy falling off a building - as he sees floor after floor flash past, he keeps thinking, "So far, so good. So far, so good."
All joking aside, there have been situations where civilizations have collapsed because of resource shortages. Look at the Maya, for example. They had a civilization comparable to Rome, with far superior agricultural technology. However, when their population exceeded their ability to grow food, the entire civilization vanished in a paroxysm of war and famine.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
It's literally not worth the equivalent of my time to keep them, count them, roll them, carry them to the bank, and exchange them. The amount of time and effort I would spend creating a 50-cent roll and turning it into something useful would be worth way more than the 50 cents I would get out of it.
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It would be just as foolish for me to do this as it is for the U.S. mint to spend 1.17 cents producing a coin worth 1 cent. Money only has value if it is more an asset than a burden.
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As for the other points: No the U.S. mint cannot tell states what to set their tax rates at, but it also shouldn't be obligated to indulge them with a subsidized coin either. And by recycling, I mean that you can't just toss pennies into a recycle bin because it is illegal for a recycler to scrap them for copper.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
True, but why could they not grow more food? I believe you will find that those reasons were political, not economics. I agree that politics can kill economics and make it ineffective, but not that economics couldn't solve the problem. (In this case, starving people could have grown food themselves but chose not to due to political concerns.)
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
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.
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.
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.
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.
spend some money on recycling tech.
I think you've just hit the very reason wy it hasn't been done: Too few people want to make the effort, and no one wants to foot the bill.
As you say, separating kinds of trash before burying it would be a great investment for the future, but making an effort or spending money now for something that will be beneficial in the future doesn't get anyone elected. Promises to give you tax refunds checks NOW gets votes.
You can't take the sky from me...
By the way, it is pretty hard to argue politics are not involved in these things when the solution most politicians come up with to a shortage is to punish the suppliers - any economist (and most people with a modicum of common sense) will tell you that will have the opposite effect... see what the Democrats are doing about the oil shortage, vs the Republican response. Ignore morals - which solution will work?
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
Recycling is just part of the radical agenda to destroy America by making us drive smaller cars, which means smaller families which mean birth control which means the End of Christianity. I saw it on Fox News
nah, you've missed the boat. You would have to have a Big Zinc executive as president, going to war in the zinc regions of earth to raise price, with a vice president who was a Big Zinc Warfare profiteer. then you'd have a parallel to oil.
They couldn't grow more food because the soil was exhausted. How could "politics" have prevented that?
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
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.
see what the Democrats are doing about the oil shortage, vs the Republican response
The Democrats are being idiots but "drill more!" isn't a acceptable solution to our addiction to a finite resource. If the Democrats are guilty of ignoring supply and demand then the Republicans are equally guilty of just sticking their head in the sand and ignoring the larger problems, mainly that A) Oil is a finite resource that WILL run out sooner or later, B) Using Fossil Fuels is pushing the climate over the cliff
You should also take a look at some of the reasons for Democratic opposition. Starting with the basic question of why aren't the oil and gas companies using the leases that they already have on public lands instead of trying to get rights to new land?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Shame about Unobtainium, I can't seem to get it anywhere.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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
Wouldn't it be more fair to say that it's not reasonable or economically feasible to mine metals off the moon today? It seems pretty pessimistic to assume that we won't be able to do it tomorrow, necessity being the mother of invention and all that...
It's pretty safe to assume it won't be feasible tomorrow either, with the approaching holiday and all that. Check back next week.
Did you just use the costs of getting something up off the ground to claim that dropping something down to the ground would be too expensive? Semms to me that launch costs would be needed upfront to establish space-based industry, true. But once done, launch costs would have to little to do with the per ton cost of extracting and returning rare and valuable metals.
It's like saying that because it costs a fortune upfront to dig a diamond mine, the diamonds will be too expensive, irregardless of how many there are or how cheap it is to get them back to the world. Quite wrong, because those other two things really do affect the bottom line.
Dyolf Knip
Google "Julian Simon wager". Very on topic.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
"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).
"If we can not increase production at $140 per barrel over that when it was $50...."
Can't? Or won't? The oil industry is making record profits. What real incentive do they have to do more work and sell more oil at a reduced price when they can sell what they have at record prices?
The recent moves by the Saudis tend to validate this, along with their growing realization that maybe they've gone just a bit too far this time. More and more of their end-users are buying more efficient vehicles and looking for ways (electric, hydrogen) to do without them altogether.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Wrong - to a degree:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
(no one knows how to make it)
Terra preta soils are of pre-Columbian nature and were created by man between 7000 BP[3] and 500 BP ("Before Present"). The soil's depth can reach 2 metres (6 feet). Thousands of years after its creation it is reputedly known as self-regenerating at the rate of 1 centimetre per year[4] by the local farmers and caboclos in Brazil's Amazonian basin, and they seek it out for use and for sale as valuable compost (see Pedology).
meh
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"
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.
Actually, January 2008 is the new May 2005.
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?
That and a whole lot more, thanks for asking.
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.
I heard on the radio today that the demand for gasoline in the USA has dropped by 2% over last year.
It's happening. It took a bit to find how elastic our demand for gasoline is, but we've hit it.
I see gasoline still going to go up for the next few years, mostly because it takes time to rework fleets - Hybrids and small cars are selling like hotcakes, but the average lifespan for a car is 5-10 years. We're about 2-3 years from when hybrids were mostly special purpose, sold for government fleets or for (as coined on another board) the smug factor.
Still, there's going to be substantial upward pressure in the form of China and India industrializing and developing a middle class capable of affording vehicles - like the Tata. The vehicles can sipp fuel like a moped and the sheer fact that there's more than 10X of them will swamp anything Americans, Europeans, Russians can do in the form of near-term conservation.
Darn it, can't anybody invent a battery that stores twice as much power at half the cost with a decent lifespan? ;)
I don't read AC A human right
Theoretically, the energy to get to the Moon is a one-time energy expense...
Read Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" for some interesting insights on shipping items from the moon. Think physics for the economics -- solar to electric to mass drivers. Just don't get on the wrong side of the Loonies, they'll have the high ground.
The Asteroids are another "convenient" source in the long term, too. As Dr. Pournelle kindly pointed out some years ago, say it takes 10 years to get a shipment from the Belt to LEO - send one per year, and after 10 years you'll have one per year forever. Of course this presumes the elements will even be out there, but it could turn out to be profitable to find out.
This also presumes a long-term approach to the survival of civilisation, and an assumption that humanity as a whole would find this a good thing.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear