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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?
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?
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...
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?
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.
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.
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!)
actually vacuum tubes were depleting our reserves of vacuum. By the time they went out of use, there was no vacuum left on earth! Some proposed mining vacuum from deep space, but it wasn't practical.
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.
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!
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)
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
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
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.)
Food is becoming extinct as well. We're starting to burn everything we grow.
Most of the stuff on
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
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.
ad infinitum
It's a good thing we have plenty of infinitum.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.'"
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
We'll just counter it by genetically engineering cows that fart backwards.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
Shame about Unobtainium, I can't seem to get it anywhere.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
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
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.