
High-Tech can’t last: there are limited essential elements - dredmorbius
http://energyskeptic.com/2019/high-tech-cannot-last-rare-earth-metals/
======
Animats
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...](https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/commodity-statistics-and-
information)

[2] [https://prd-wret.s3-us-
west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium...](https://prd-wret.s3-us-
west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/production/atoms/files/mcs-2019-raree.pdf)

~~~
pjc50
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_
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.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
And isn't it helpful of us to have concentrated the recyclable materials in a
few locations?

------
pjc50
"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
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-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-14/china-is-leading-
the-world-to-an-electric-car-future)]

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
There's something better on the horizon:

[https://www.sciencealert.com/vintage-vacuum-tube-tech-
could-...](https://www.sciencealert.com/vintage-vacuum-tube-tech-could-take-
electronics-and-solar-panels-to-the-next-level)

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.

~~~
pjc50
The nanoscale vacuum transistor is still a silicon device - part of the point
of it is that it can be produced in a conventional fab!

Power diodes are not going to be a problem, they are a comparatively crude
device from the 50s.

------
marcus_holmes
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
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.

~~~
sametmax
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...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY&feature=list_other&playnext=1&list=SP6A1FD147A45EF50D)

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.

~~~
ratel
The analogy of the cliff seems nice, until you give it some thought. a) We are
not actually running. What does stop and think about it actually mean? If
there is a cliff and if we can stop or change direction. why not on the edge
of the cliff, why way before that? b) Nobody is excepting a bridge to
miraculously appear, but we might be thinking about how to cross that cliff
when we get there and prepare. Humans are actually quite good at that. Will it
costs us more than we were expecting when we could not yet see that 'cliff'
yet. Definitely, but we were not born with foresight and have a limited time-
frame of reference even if we can predict with some certainty. The later is
why we are not investing everything for the time our sun will turn off its
light. Call it the human condition.

As for your insistence that 'growth' cannot be sustained. I suspect you mean
population growth, although nobody is actually "thinking" as in wishing for
that. I for one cannot have a meaningful conversation on that. People who
really belief that is our biggest problem are no longer here to have that
conversation with and all others tend to mean: There are too many _other_
people. That discussion has been taking place under many different guises,
none of them remotely interesting.

~~~
sametmax
Watch the video, your points are addressed.

------
gjmulhol
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.

~~~
pjc50
> 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
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.

------
DennisP
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.

~~~
dredmorbius
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.

------
Pyxl101
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...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/2019/06/07/80a06794-8649-11e9-a491-25df61c78dc4_story.html)

> 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.

~~~
dredmorbius
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.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0260982786900352)

[https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/agency/dod/dnsc.htm](https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/agency/dod/dnsc.htm)

~~~
codeGreene
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
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
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.

------
3xblah
"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."

------
ciconia
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested#Photovoltaic)

~~~
erikpukinskis
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?

------
agentultra
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
> 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.

~~~
agentultra
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.

~~~
punchagan
Zulip has a terminal client that's right now alpha software, but being
actively worked on! You might want to give it a spin.
[https://github.com/zulip/zulip-terminal](https://github.com/zulip/zulip-
terminal)

------
dredmorbius
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](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](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](https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/70191019)

(148 MB PDF)

------
spzb
Google cache as the site is having a little lie-down at the moment
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http:/...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://energyskeptic.com/2019/high-
tech-cannot-last-rare-earth-metals/)

------
cung
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.

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

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

------
piterdevries
Space mining?

~~~
dredmorbius
Unlikely.

[https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/10/why-not-
space/](https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/10/why-not-space/)

[http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/2007/06/the_high...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html)

$15,000/kg, to the Moon.

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

~~~
dredmorbius
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...](https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/recycling-statistics-and-
information)

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

[https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/materials-
flow](https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/materials-flow)

