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Peak Metal
electricitylikesme
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Registered User regular
A most interesting post over at Slashdot led me to this
An extract of the, well, meatier part:
tl;dr Thanks to the growing economy, gallium might be gone by 2017. Gallium is an important semiconductor used in pretty much all modern electronics - cell phones, TVs, LCDs etc etc. It's a basic requirement for building high speed transistors, amongst other things.
These are fairly accurate numbers - I've seen similar before.
There are some other interesting ones - Ruthenium for example, is used as a catalyst in manufacturing acetic acid, and there's basically none of it left in the world (according to one of my old inorganic lecturers he reckons we could open maybe one more factory if we really wanted to).
Advanced technology has very much only recently focussed on the properties of the heavier transition metals but we can actually ill-afford to use too many of them due to their occurrence rate and yet we can probably not actually afford to use them in an exceptional number of capacities due to their scarcity. The situation is even grimmer if you factor in the increasing industrialization of nations like China, or a notion of equality where everyone is brought up to the same living standard - how much mass total of every metal in the world do we all get to have?
If you ever wanted to make a "mining in space" argument, it should really always focus on the rare elements on Earth. But hell - zinc is not considered rare and if we run out of that we'd really be fucked in an entertaining number of ways.
An extract of the, well, meatier part:
Gallium’s atomic number is 31. It’s a blue-white metal first discovered in 1831, and has certain unusual properties, like a very low melting point and an unwillingness to oxidize, that make it useful as a coating for optical mirrors, a liquid seal in strongly heated apparatus, and a substitute for mercury in ultraviolet lamps. It’s also quite important in making the liquid-crystal displays used in flat-screen television sets and computer monitors.
As it happens, we are building a lot of flat-screen TV sets and computer monitors these days. Gallium is thought to make up 0.0015 percent of the Earth’s crust and there are no concentrated supplies of it. We get it by extracting it from zinc or aluminum ore or by smelting the dust of furnace flues. Dr. Reller says that by 2017 or so there’ll be none left to use. Indium, another endangered element—number 49 in the periodic table—is similar to gallium in many ways, has many of the same uses (plus some others—it’s a gasoline additive, for example, and a component of the control rods used in nuclear reactors) and is being consumed much faster than we are finding it. Dr. Reller gives it about another decade. Hafnium, element 72, is in only slightly better shape. There aren’t any hafnium mines around; it lurks hidden in minute quantities in minerals that contain zirconium, from which it is extracted by a complicated process that would take me three or four pages to explain. We use a lot of it in computer chips and, like indium, in the control rods of nuclear reactors, but the problem is that we don’t have a lot of it. Dr. Reller thinks it’ll be gone somewhere around 2017. Even zinc, commonplace old zinc that is alloyed with copper to make brass, and which the United States used for ordinary one-cent coins when copper was in short supply in World War II, has a Reller extinction date of 2037. (How does a novel called The Death of Brass grab you?)
Zinc was never rare. We mine millions of tons a year of it. But the supply is finite and the demand is infinite, and that’s bad news. Even copper, as I noted above, is deemed to be at risk. We humans move to and fro upon the earth, gobbling up everything in sight, and some things aren’t replaceable.
Solutions will be needed, if we want to go on having things like television screens and solar panels and computer chips. Synthesizing the necessary elements, or finding workable substitutes for them, is one obvious idea. Recycling these vanishing elements from discarded equipment is another. We can always try to make our high-tech devices more efficient, at least so far as their need for these substances goes. And discovering better ways of separating the rare elements from the matrices in which they exist as bare traces would help—the furnace-flue solution. (Platinum, for example, always in short supply, constitutes 1.5 parts per million of urban dust and grime, which is ever-abundant.)
But the sobering truth is that we still have millions of years to go before our own extinction date, or so we hope, and at our present rate of consumption we are likely to deplete most of the natural resources this planet has handed us. We have set up breeding and conservation programs to guard the few remaining whooping cranes, Indian rhinoceroses, and Siberian tigers. But we can’t exactly set up a reservation somewhere where the supply of gallium and hafnium can quietly replenish itself. And once the scientists have started talking about our chances of running out of copper, we know that the future is rapidly moving in on us and big changes lie ahead.
tl;dr Thanks to the growing economy, gallium might be gone by 2017. Gallium is an important semiconductor used in pretty much all modern electronics - cell phones, TVs, LCDs etc etc. It's a basic requirement for building high speed transistors, amongst other things.
These are fairly accurate numbers - I've seen similar before.
There are some other interesting ones - Ruthenium for example, is used as a catalyst in manufacturing acetic acid, and there's basically none of it left in the world (according to one of my old inorganic lecturers he reckons we could open maybe one more factory if we really wanted to).
Advanced technology has very much only recently focussed on the properties of the heavier transition metals but we can actually ill-afford to use too many of them due to their occurrence rate and yet we can probably not actually afford to use them in an exceptional number of capacities due to their scarcity. The situation is even grimmer if you factor in the increasing industrialization of nations like China, or a notion of equality where everyone is brought up to the same living standard - how much mass total of every metal in the world do we all get to have?
If you ever wanted to make a "mining in space" argument, it should really always focus on the rare elements on Earth. But hell - zinc is not considered rare and if we run out of that we'd really be fucked in an entertaining number of ways.
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I just think that these companies have to know that this stuff is getting rare to find, and the prices and abundance of electronics are not getting higher and dropping, respectively.
I hate to just put faith in science blindly, but something tells me when we run out of little metal dots to put on a motherboard we'll find a new way to make the dots.
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Also, fossil fuels, metals, overpopulation we're totally on for a post-tech futuristic dystopian society. Oh yeah.......
Wow, I hadn't realized 20,000 tonnes of zinc on average was used in the production of pennies each year.
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We should have gotten rid of pennies when the motion was on the table like a decade ago. They had this whole system where anything .01 to .02 over would be rounded down, and companies would get tax breaks, and anything .03 and .04 would be rounded up, and you would get tax breaks or the money would go to federal funding (this is where the argument caused the stop, if I remember)
regardless, pennies are useless.
synthesizing metals.... as in making one material out of another....
people have been trying to turn lead into gold for a long time now...
recycling LCDs and electronics will solve most of the problem as with technology increases, less and less is actually needed.
sorry i havent kept up on my metal science then
recycling is still the best way to get those metals back btw, its not like you make an LCD and it dissapears
indeed, I recycle lcd's all the time, for DIY projection, screens in various rooms for computers or control pannels, and I love it, the problem is that an lcd by itself is a doorstop until someone makes/programms a controller board for it, and right now that kind of service is going for a premium.
you lost me after LCD but there isnt anything to say that the new form of viewing device wont use some other material. maybe theyll make really small multicolored LEDs or something.
Spoken like a man who has never lofted a handful into the path of a roller coaster while waiting in line. That day, they were worth their weight in gold. Comic gold.
While I agree with your sentiment that total demand of in use LCDs is increasing, there aren't 2 Billion people in China. There are roughly 1.3 Billion. So your number was inflated by ~50%
currently. who can say what those extra small multi color ones will be made out of.
copper on the other hand is a pretty useful metal. recycling copper has become big business.
Wouldn't technological advances decrease the amount of these metals used per device? Copper usage could be decreased largely through technology advancements, I'd think (I'm not well versed in the other elements mentioned). But if we reduce the number of gallium needed per device and recycle the old devices we get to use the existing gallium for more devices than before. I'm not sure this is as big of a problem as its being made out to be, but its certainly worth watching.
Prices for these elements have been increasing, and as they increase I'm sure the industries using them are attempting to innovate cheaper production methods. Etc.
What about OLEDs or those fancy new butterfly wing display things? Though I'm sure those have their own rare components.
Just speaking from television, we're looking at probably 2020 before a new high definition format comes out. The standards on current high def were decided in the eighties, and they are just now an affordable resource and standard broadcast form. They've already started the process of deciding the next definition upgrade and it will be a while. So what we've got now is the best, and will be for a little while. Let's say in four years we do run out of supplies to make cheap lcd teevees, we've already got them, and the next generation of definition in picture will require new technology, which will be expensive regardless, until it's industrialized.
OLED's?
I predict that by the middle of the next decade, we'll see a spike in the price of computers and televisions as companies sink $Texas into R&D to find substitute technologies. After that we'll see some awesome breakthroughs, and I'll wind up buying a new TV because it'll be really fucking cool.
Maybe science will advance far enough to the point that they'll unlock the secrets of cephalopod camouflage and be able to recreate and advance it. Say a special cloth that could display millions of different colors when stimulated in a certain fashion.
Also, aren't there plans to replace all of the US copper pennies with nickel ones?
Yay American government!
The penny really needs to discontinue the penny altogether. Admittedly, this maycause economic issues, but nothing's perfekt!
We're hitting the point where the metal in it is worth more than $.01.
I'd say "tradition", or "propping up the American zinc and copper mining industries", but you said decent reasons.
So, uh, people hate the idea of rounding away two or three cents on their cash transactions?
Oh, I know. The "now" was for rhetoric's sake.
The obvious reason for discontinuing the penny is to save our minerals (I suppose), but it doesn't seem like that's going to happen yet.