High-Tech can’t last: there are limited essential elements

http://energyskeptic.com/2019/high-tech-cannot-last-rare-earth-metals/

by dredmorbius • 7 years ago

82 80 7 years ago

spzb• 7 years ago

Google cache as the site is having a little lie-down at the moment https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http:/...

Pyxl101• 7 years ago

Isn't it amazing that all of these elements have so many distinct industrial uses? How did people figure all of this stuff out? Real life is sometimes stranger than fiction.

Also, related: I read an article in WaPo about the only rare earths mine in the United States:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/2019/06/07/8...

This is Mountain Pass, the only mine in the United States that harvests rare-earth elements, the raw ingredients used to produce high-tech products such as smartphones, wind turbines, electric vehicles and fighter jets.

pjc506• 7 years ago

People essentially spent entire careers trying stuff, until comparatively recently when materials science theoretical modelling became good enough.

The classic Ignition! is well worth reading to see the process from the inside. The basic figure of merit for rocket fuels, specific impulse, could be calculated on paper. All sorts of other critical properties like detonation resistance had to be found experimentally. As well as the trick to storing red fuming nitric acid without eating through stainless steel.

dredmorbius7• 7 years ago

Chemistry and materials science.

See also the Harbord List and dawning awareness of strategic minerals during WWI.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0260982786...

https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/agency/dod/dnsc.htm

codeGreene2• 7 years ago

Thank you, this stuff interests the hell out of me. I'll never be at MIT, but I can read it in my spare time!

imtringued• 7 years ago

I don't see the problem. They aren't limited in a meaningful sense. It's just that the global race to the bottom makes the vast majority of deposits unprofitable.

codedokode• 7 years ago

As I remember, rare earth elements are not that rare. And China is not the only place having them. But extracting them is not very profitable in Western countries because they have too strict ecological requirements.

pjc506• 7 years ago

"Shortfall of dysprosium are expected before 2015." - so how's that going? I don't see news reports of DYSPROSIUM CRISIS. I did find one on a new mine opening in Australia.

Articles like this belong in a "manufactured crisis" category. Very little in it is false per se, but the overall impression it creates is misleading, and is likely to be driven by either nationalism trying to upsell conflict with China, or miners trying to sell investments outside of China that are currently uncompetitive.

voqv• 7 years ago

Same author in 2012: "Batteries are too heavy to ever be used by trucks or other large vehicles, and require a revolutionary breakthrough to power electric cars." And China now [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-14/china-is-...]

Still, even the thought of a collapse for chips is scary. I wonder if we can at least fallback to 80-s chips production in case of a supply chain collapse.

Tade0• 7 years ago

There's something better on the horizon:

https://www.sciencealert.com/vintage-vacuum-tube-tech-could-...

Also regular vacuum tubes are still pretty competent for power applications.

Making a switching power supply might be a challenge though - we would have to return to using Thyratrons which contain mercury vapour.

pjc506• 7 years ago

Chip shortages happen every now and again. I remember at least two due to shortages of a particular kind of epoxy resin:

2011 https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1258963 " "This is an unfortunate coincidence where 90-100 percent of the world's supply of bismaleimide triazine is made in northeastern Japan,"

1993 https://apnews.com/8fe2925b68d34d33f19a53e4892c74a2 "epoxy resin has been the talk of the computer chip business for the past month after an explosion destroyed a Japanese factory that made 60 percent of the world’s supply."

if we can at least fallback to 80-s chips production in case of a supply chain collapse.

Not literally, most of the 80s US chip manufacturing sites are Superfund sites now.

diydsp• 7 years ago

comapnies stockpiled the materials to delay crisis. prices are now going up.

https://news.metal.com/newscontent/100885469/Supply-shortage...

https://news.metal.com/newscontent/100937313/medium-heavy-ra...

marcus_holmes5• 7 years ago

Someone pointed out the differences between "ecological" and "economical" thinking years ago, and I wish I could find the blog article again.

The basis was that "ecological" thinking assumes that things will stay the same until they dramatically collapse, and that systems cannot adapt to changes in circumstances.

While "economical" thinking assumes that there is a constant tension between supply and demand, and that as something becomes rare its price goes up and the system adapts to it.

This paper is classic "ecological" thinking. It assumes that there are no other alternatives to the minerals used at the moment, and that therefore if the supply of (e.g.) Cerium is disrupted then the supply of iPhones will be disrupted. It doesn't allow for "Cerium was the best of three options we had, because of reasons x and y, and price z", so if Cerium becomes a problem, then the second best option will be used instead. Yes, the price will go up, but that's an adaptation not a limit.

It also doesn't allow for alternative sources of the minerals. I know there are deposits of rare earths in Australia, which aren't being mined at the moment because it's not economical to do so. But if China starts messing with their supply, it will become economical. This happens all the time (there's a rash of new Lithium and Cobalt mines in Australia because of the tech industry's need for them).

Likewise it assumes that because we currently have cheap fossil-fuel-derived energy to mine with, that mining is not possible without abundant cheap energy. If the price of energy goes up as the coal mines are shut down, then the industry will adapt and find other, more energy-efficient solutions.

Just as "life finds a way", economic systems find a way. Yes, there will be collapses and corrections, and on an individual level those can be disastrous, but as a system it endures. High tech is going to last.

throwaway13337• 7 years ago

This is the correct way of thinking to move forward.

Humanity will have a large effect on our environment. Period. A static ecosystem didn't exist without us and it certainly doesn't exist with us.

Embracing that we have an effect and choosing to improve our environment rather than to get it back to some idealized past is the only way we can have a future.

It's too bad, then, that most of ecological thinking, as you've described, is so pervasive.

Interestingly, this thinking is really embedded in our fiction. Garden of Eden type stuff is very common. Tolkien's world also follows the idealized past trope. It might be part of a sort of jungian collective unconscious. I wonder what works exist that tell a different story trope - one aligned more with the economical way of thinking.

sametmax2• 7 years ago

If you run in a straight line, toward a cliff, you can hope that when you get there, a bridge will have been built. And it may work quite often. It has for us in the past (although we are kin to forget the cost we paid for it).

But it's not a bad answer to suggest to slow down to give time for the bridge to be built, or just change course. You can also assume some of us will not die in the fall even if the bridge is not there, and part of the group will survive. But it's not bad to suggest we could choose another way.

The thing is, even if the universe is not a closed system, our Earth system can be approximated as such, once we consider social/logistical/scientific bottlenecks, education, time available, speed of consumption and reaction, inertia, and our desire to avoid a genocide.

I keep posting this video (in 8 parts):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY&feature=list_othe...

Because I wish more people would watch it.

It's a very good mathematical and political explanation of why we can't continue just thinking "growth". It addresses the usual rebukes such as "we are not in a finite system", "this is not a zero sum game", "innovation/adaptation will save us" or "we can make it sustainable/reasonable".

I particularly like the part where Albert Allen Bartlett explains how our growth affects democracy, comfort, health, and peace, not just resource consumption.

perfunctory4• 7 years ago

This is the correct way of thinking to move forward.

I guess it depends. In case of rare earth elements supply problems we will just skip the next iPhone upgrade cycle, wait until supply chain readjusts and buy the next iPhone version a couple of years later. No big deal. This cannot be said about all (eco)systems.

Just to take a random example - Aral Sea [0].

"The Aral Sea is considered an example of ecosystem collapse."

"...As a result, the land around the Aral Sea is heavily polluted, and the people living in the area are suffering from a lack of fresh water and health problems, including high rates of certain forms of cancer and lung diseases. Respiratory illnesses, including tuberculosis (most of which is drug resistant) and cancer, digestive disorders, anaemia, and infectious diseases are common ailments in the region. Liver, kidney, and eye problems can also be attributed to the toxic dust storms. All of this has resulted in an unusually high fatality rate among vulnerable parts of the population: the child mortality rate is 75 in every 1,000 newborns, and maternity death is 12 in every 1,000 women."

And these people cannot just "adapt to changes" and move to new territories, because somebody is standing on the border with a gun. Tell them that "economic" thinking is the way "to move forward".

All I am trying to say it's not so black and white.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea

Sharlin2• 7 years ago

You cannot just let the economy to find a way, not in general. The negative externalities incurred in the process are simply way too high. Or, rather, if you want economy to find a way, you have to make sure those externalities are fully paid for by those who cause them.

L_226• 7 years ago

A static ecosystem didn't exist without us and it certainly doesn't exist with us.

It is possible that our species is creating a static ecosystem - one without biodiversity and blandly homogenous in its design to sustain our current way of life, with no room for "inefficiencies" (i.e. everything else on the planet that competes for resources).

est31• 7 years ago

We got to this ecological thinking not by random chance. Think of DDT or of nuclear tests that polluted the biosphere until a degree that traces were found in children's milk teeth close to the test areas.

Will climate change be the end of humanity? Likely it won't. Probably some areas will even become usable for farming that previously weren't. But the homes of significant populations will become inhospitable, leading to them wanting to leave those places. This can and will cause tremendous wars of fighting about resources. Think of the war in Syria, here droughts have contributed to destabilizing the country.

erikpukinskis2• 7 years ago

choosing to improve our environment rather than to get it back to some idealized past

There’s a third way, FWIW, which is a “cycle mindset”.

That this has happened before, and we will inevitably return to the past. That things won’t be the same, but they will be.

codeGreene2• 7 years ago

Thank you for putting so eloquently what I was feeling while reading that. Half way through, I remembered that I had read that article years ago, and it had me worried at the time. Since then, we've seen no drop in iPhone sales, that's for sure.

mcv• 7 years ago

I'd also expect many of these elements to exist in asteroids. Wouldn't it be better to mine those instead?

raxxorrax• 7 years ago

Rare earth is everywhere, there just needs to be an economic incentive to mine them. Which is still low and you cannot get to an industrial scale in a few days.

Sharlin2• 7 years ago

I’m sure someone will, the moment it becomes more economical than exploiting what we have on Earth (including recycling—it’s not like the rare earths are consumed, they’re just discarded because extracting the pristine stuff is still too cheap!) I’m not going to hold my breath.

opencl• 7 years ago

Maybe after the price of rockets drops by several orders of magnitude and the price of obtaining the elements on Earth also increases by several orders of magnitude.

perfunctory4• 7 years ago

"ecological" seems to be an unfortunate choice of term in this context.

UweSchmidt• 7 years ago

Besides markets adapting and finding new equilibriums, there may still be ressources that run out and ultimately can't be replaced, similarly how the Easter Islands were deforested and life got permanently worse [1].

Maybe rare earths can be substituted in phones, and other technological progress makes up for the loss. Either way, the same market forces itself do nothing to stop the coming climate catastrophy and would happily find a new equilibrium with large parts of the planet not being livable. That's why "ecological thinking" is important.

[1] https://rainforests.mongabay.com/09easter_island.htm

jacques_chester• 7 years ago

That's a fairly unfair characterisation of ecology as a science.

In any case, while it's true that market systems can adapt to changing circumstances via the price system, it's important to note that the shifts can be abrupt and that technological progress needn't be monotonic.

Certain physical limits will exist whether or not they are approached economically, just as certain economic limits exists whether or not they are approached physically.

devoply• 7 years ago

Yes as long as there is a way to make positive NPV that's true. Take that away and the whole system does ground to a halt.

DennisP• 7 years ago

The main reason we don't have rare earth mines in the U.S. is that we don't want to deal with the uranium and thorium. Of course there are productive things we could do with those elements, which would also go a long way towards reducing our carbon emissions.

If we do run low on rare earths or platinum group metals, there's plenty in the asteroids. Once we have reusable rockets and can harvest fuel from the asteroids or the moon, mining the asteroids for high-value metals could actually be fairly economical, and would remove the environmental impact of the mining it replaces on Earth.

dredmorbius7• 7 years ago

An argument has been made that one of China's key exports has been its willingness to absorb massive environmental contamination. A practice which seems to be changing, though there may be new marker entrants. Not necessarilly fully voluntary on the part of all participants, most especially those not yet born.

piterdevries• 7 years ago

Space mining?

dkobia• 7 years ago

Asteroids!

dredmorbius7• 7 years ago

Unlikely.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/10/why-not-space/

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...

$15,000/kg, to the Moon.

Animats• 7 years ago

The USGS produces annual reports for each mineral the US uses.[1] This is a lot of material, but it's all online. The rare earths report shows prices declining since 2014.[2] The rare earths aren't really that rare, just found at low concentrations.

Helium, though...

On the scale of a century, though, the reserves don't look that good. Some metals used in bulk, like copper and zinc, don't look so great. Remember that really high volume mining is less than a century old.

[1] https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/commodity-statistics-and-i...

[2] https://prd-wret.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium...

pjc506• 7 years ago

Copper is highly recyclable. The risk of high copper prices is that it becomes a little too recycleable, and criminals destroy your infrastructure in order to sell it for scrap.

glaurung_• 7 years ago

I suspect that in the not too distant future (perhaps in my lifetime) there will be companies buying up landfills in order to mine them for recyclable materials.

sixhobbits• 7 years ago

Exactly this is already a major problem in South Africa.

gjmulhol• 7 years ago

One of the big questions is whether we can extract these minerals from existing devices that are out of use/have been disposed of. Ideally, that means that we are designing new devices with disassembly in mind. Everyone from Apple to Huawei is talking about doing this, but the proof will be in the pudding.

Some of the comments are slightly inaccurate. We actually don't know where all the deposits are, and there was just a large discovery of rare earth elements off the coast of Japan. Much rare earth extraction has been happening in China because of relatively lax environmental standards that have reached back decades, so the US, Australia, and many other countries with deposits can't compete due to the costs of labor and complying with environmental standards and regulations. Mountain pass is one of a few deposits in the US, and happens to be one of the larger ones that is sitting idle. There are lots of mines globally and could be more, but economically they need to be attractive.

Copper is another interesting element. It is exceedingly hard to extract from existing devices because it is buried inside the chips, boards, etc. You can recover about 25% of the copper in a device, or about 3% of the total mineral content of a device when you extract copper. Widespread copper mining has destroyed parts of the Atacama desert in Chile and is a really nasty process.

Finally, work has been going on for a long time to replace rare earth elements or dramatically reduce how much is used. In some cases, you need small amounts because you need those f-orbital electrons but you can get away with using creative coatings instead of large volumes of materials. In other cases, you can replace them by multi-layering other materials to approximate their performance. There are huge opportunities here, but we are a couple decades away from seeing any real sea change in what our devices are made of.

pjc506• 7 years ago

You can recover about 25% of the copper in a device

This is surprising to me, because it's all on the surface of the PCBs? Where does the other 75% "go"? I'd have thought if you incinerate the thing you'll get a puddle of gold-copper mix running out the bottom, and the rest of the rare elements and aluminium as oxides in the slag.

Nasrudith• 7 years ago

It goes into things that are uneconomical to extract without vastly different conditions. Technically one could breakdown and separate everything by element and isotope but that would be an incredibly inefficient way of doing so.

cung• 7 years ago

Just read about Julian Simon's book, "The Ultimate Resource 2 (1997)", in which he argues that the world will never run out of resources, as it is the human mind that drives advance, not capital or materials. In other words, just as Marcus_Holmes argued, supply and demand will make more expensive processes feasible and provide new sources if essential elements.

k__• 7 years ago

Can't recycling save us until we have good enough alternatives?

dredmorbius7• 7 years ago

Recycling has a limited recovery basis. Over generations, for a recovery fraction r over n generations, remaining material is r^n.

At a 90% recovery rate, after 2 generations, 81% of the original material remains. After 10 generations, it's a smidge under 35%.

The most heavily recycled material in the U.S. is asphalt, with rates approaching 90% recovery.

The most-recycled mineral or metal is lead, with rates of 74%. At two generations, the remaining material is 55%. After 10, it's less than 5%.

https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/recycling-statistics-and-i...

USGS also have numerous interesting publications on mineral usage and supplies:

https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/materials-flow

3xblah• 7 years ago

"Apple's parts are soldered and glued into place before being fastened together with proprietary screws which makes basic repairs like swapping out a broken screen or replacing a dead battery a headache. Which makes it difficult for anyone lacking a half dozen robotic arms to tear apart an iPhone to recycle the components. ...

For Apple, this may be a feature rather than a bug: Documents obtained by Motherboard in 2017 revealed that the company requires its recycling partners to shred iPhones and MacBooks so that their components cannot be reused, further reducing the value recyclers can get out."

dredmorbius7• 7 years ago

Similarly, from USGS:

Erin A. McCullough and Nedal Nassar, "Assessment of critical minerals: Updated application of an early-warning screening methodology", https://doi.org/10.1007/s13563-017-0119-6

Increasing reliance on non-renewable mineral resources reinforces the need for identifying potential supply constraints before they occur. The US National Science and Technology Council recently released a report that outlines a methodology for screening potentially critical minerals based on three indicators: supply risk (R), production growth (G), and market dynamics (M). This early-warning screening was initially applied to 78 minerals across the years 1996 to 2013 and identified a subset of minerals as “potentially critical” based on the geometric average of these indicators—designated as criticality potential (C)....

https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/70191019

And:

Critical mineral resources of the United States—Economic and environmental geology and prospects for future supply

Which addresses antimony, barite (barium), beryllium, cobalt, fluorine, gallium, germanium and indium, graphite, lithium, manganese, niobium and tantalum, platinum-group elements, rare-earth elements, rhenium, selenium, tellurium, tin, titanium, vanadium, zirconium and hafnium.

https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/70191019

(148 MB PDF)

alexnewman2• 7 years ago

Rare Earth isn't rare. People just get things mixed up do the name.

alexnewman2• 7 years ago

Why was this downvoted. Seriously rare earth is a totally a non issue.

agentultra2• 7 years ago

This is one of the reasons why I think it's important we look to re-using computers, build computers with interchangeable components, and look towards designing p2p networks that replicate data around. Start designing software for newer protocols to run on low-powered machines. There are so many computers in the world it's incredible and yet they're practically built to be disposable. I don't think they can continue to increase in price forever when the network of supplies to manufacture them is so weak. And especially when climate events will be able to destroy vast quantities of them quickly.

It's surprising how much computing power is stuffed into consumer laptops these days and how people keep buying new ones when their existing ones work fine.

damasko• 7 years ago

It's surprising how much computing power is stuffed into consumer laptops these days and how people keep buying new ones when their existing ones work fine.

This is contrary to my experience. Year to year these fancy webgl responsive webpages get slower and slower to load. I need an 8650U with at least 8 GB of RAM to surf the web and load some pages under 5 sec. The development of basically a new uniform os within the existing os's is just crazy.

agentultra2• 7 years ago

Indeed. My primary machine at home right now is a 13 year old Dell laptop. It has some added RAM and an SSD drive. I can barely scroll the Twitter home page on it. I can barely use the Zulip web client (no "native" client for 32bit architectures... would be slow as molasses anyway) -- and that's just to chat with other developers working on Lean.

I've been using eww in emacs to browse the web and... surprise it's fast. And less annoying.

ciconia• 7 years ago

One thing a lot of the (skeptic) comments here don't take into account is the role of petrol in mining. Petrol is the single discovery that has made basically all of modern technology and manufacturing possible. Petrol is incredibly energy-dense and is still incredibly cheap. Without it, there's no plastic, no mining and basically no transport. It's also worth mentioning that without petrol there would be no solar panels and no large scale wind turbine installations.

Interested readers might like to read about the concept of "energy returned on energy invested" or EROEI [1], which demonstrates the limitations of renewable energies and the implications of peak petrol.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_inve...

dredmorbius7• 7 years ago

Though he's scarcely a Limits to Growth devotee, it was Daniel Yergin's The Prize (book and BBC/PBS series) which hammered home the absolutely staggering impact of petroleum on human growth and technological progress.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/prize-the-epic-quest-for-oil-...

Vaclav Smil's Energy and Civilization tells the history, and impact, of energy on humanprogress evenmore specifically, and over a far longer period, through five eras: hunter-gatherer, ag, coal, oil, and whatever it is that comes next.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-and-civilization-a-his...

EROEI is a large part of that, though it doesn't tell the whole story. EROEI of coal is often higher than petroleum, but petroleum's handling characteristics -- fluid rather than solid -- and inherent portability, over both long distances and short, make it vastly more useful and flexible, most especially in motive applications, and transport in particular.

Some of petroleum's role in mining can be replaced by electricity (see vast open-pit electrically-powered bucket excavators), so long as there's a primary energy source for that. Others not so much: global bulk liquid and ore transport is highly tied to oil-fueled marine deisel engines.

erikpukinskis2• 7 years ago

Agree EROEI is profoundly important for planning the next century.

However, your point doesn’t change the core criticism of the “skeptic” audience. Yes we use petrol for plastic but if it disappeared we could use plants. Yes we use petrol for heavy machines but if they disappeared we could use batteries.

And yes, there’s not enough petroleum available to build all the batteries and plant plastic fabrication facilities we’d need to replace the petroleum economy. So that sounds bad.

Except it’s only bad if all that happens quickly, at the same time. And it won’t. Batteries will become economical before we run out of petroleum for plastic.

I’m not saying they’re right, but the skeptic argument is that the economy will adapt to these challenges one at a time.

What’s the counter argument?

High-Tech can’t last: there are limited essential elements

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