Measure of Metal Supply Finds Future Shortage

Pat Flannery wrote:


Shawn Wilson wrote:


Are you claiming that metals can only be recycled finitely many
times? Do you think the molecules magically disappear? Or do they
magically transmute into something else?



They do transmute into other things in a lot of cases- either oxides or
alloys.
And it takes energy to get them back into their pure forms again for
re-use.
Plus a lot of metal can't be recycled, as it's still in use as buildings
and tools, component parts of alloys that are in existing things, or
diluted into forms that are uneconomical to extract it from.
The Titanic is going to by and large vanish into rust in another hundred
years or so, and whereas the iron that made it up is still going to be
on the planet, you'd need to filter a lot of seawater to get it all back.
It's not a matter of it still being there, it's a matter of how to
economically get it back for recycling.
Now the solution is simple- we drill a hole in Tanganyika that goes down
to the molten nickel-iron of the outer core, and bring it up to the
surface in a molten form. Then we can easily and economically separate
it into its component elements and use the leftover heat to drive
electrical power plants.
Now, I'm not saying that drilling such a hole will be easy; the rock of
the lower mantle may prove tough indeed, but I am fairly sure that a
nuclear device would be able to breech the hardest rock in a completely
risk-free manner.

Dr. Stephen Sorenson
Project Inner Space

Well, since the original posting explicitly said that there is lots of
materials that are thrown away toaday and not recycled due to the fact
that it is uneconimcal *today*, but that these materials will someday
*become* economical to recylce as the supply/demand curves change, I'd
say you are in complete agreement with the original post...

Jim

In article . com,
"Sander Vesik" wrote:

Peter D. Tillman wrote:

Basically, this is the same tired old "limits to growth" political
bull****. One reason I quit subscribing to SciAm.

There are plenty of raw materials available for just about any
conceivable future economy on earth.[1] For obvious economic reasons,
mining cos. don't explore a given resource past a 10-20 year supply. And
all the historic trends of declining real metal prices continue.


Yes, but - there are too ways to running out or having insufficent
availability, possibly for extended periods of time. The first of which
is actual depletion and the second of which is chronical
underinvestment in infrastructure and production capability. The second
is already affecting the availability and pricing of oil and will
likely continue to do so and similar is starting to affect the price
and availability of several metals. Increasing mining and refining
output is often a long-lead item.


"Against stupidity, the Gods themselves rage in vain."
-- Friedrich von Schiller

In article ,
J.F. Cornwall wrote:

Well, since the original posting explicitly said that there is lots of
materials that are thrown away toaday and not recycled due to the fact
that it is uneconimcal *today*, but that these materials will someday
*become* economical to recylce as the supply/demand curves change, I'd
say you are in complete agreement with the original post...

I think the issue is that

a) It is uneconomical to recycle the material today

b) It is uneconomical to store the material in a segregated fashion
today against the moment at which it becomes economical to
recycle it

c) If the material's not stored in a segregated fashion, it will be
much more difficult to recycle it once the technology is available

This is the assumption that we won't be re-opening land-fill sites to
mine them for the discarded tin cans; I've not the engineering
background to see if it makes sense.

Tom

J.F. Cornwall,
Most recycling efforts take up more energy and therefore creates more
pollution and global warming in the total birth to grave resolve then
having provided the original product. The one item we're somewhat
short of is fossil energy, and unfortunately even nuclear energy isn't
quite picking up the slack.

We'll run ourselves out of affordable fossil and nuclear energy by
which to recycle much of anything before we've run ourselves out of the
raw metallic minerals, though many of which can be replaced by better
alternative of basalt composite fibers and microballoons, which by the
way also requires a great deal of applied process energy. Therefore,
energy (the cleaner the better) is the key, the golden egg that'll
behold the future without our having to involve further energy wars
under the pretext of there being another stealth cash of WMD.

However, there is the 25 kw/m2 footprint that's green/renewable and
thus clean energy by which a portion could be diverted into producing
the likes of H2O2. With an inventory of H2O2 we could burn the likes
of oily dirt or the lowest grades of coal as is and extremely clean.
In fact, almost anything burns clean if fed with the likes of H2O2 at
70% or better quality.

Nearly 10% of dry land plus of whatever's sufficiently nearby of open
ocean could be adapted for extracting that amount of energy via wind,
solar-stirling and solar-PV per individual tower that's simply not
going to take all that much of a foundation footprint per installation.

We have roughly 9,500,000 km2 of dry land to work with, plus another
nearby worth of shallow ocean that's good for at least another 500,000
km2. Thus 10,000,000 km2 is not unreasonable.

Applying as little as 0.1% of the land plus a little nearby ocean
that's within the US for accommodating such towers of energy isn't
rocket-science, it's 100,000 km2 of potentially accommodating 100,000
of these 2.5 MW per 100 m2 footprint. Whereas each tower
base/foundation represents it's relatively small footprint that
wouldn't be an exclusive usage of the surrounding land that's situated
under that large solar-sterling and PV energy dish with high above
being the extremely large wind turbine, whereas combined these three
methods of energy recovery are doable within existing technology, and
as such having made that tower footprint worthy of 25 kw/m2. As few as
one of these towers per square km could manage quite nicely at
contributing in a very big way to our clean energy demands of right now
and obviously of the future that going to accomplish better than 25
kw/m2 and/or by simply having a greater than 100,000 population of
these units...
-
Brad Guth

Brad Guth wrote:
J.F. Cornwall,
Most recycling efforts take up more energy and therefore creates more
pollution and global warming in the total birth to grave resolve then
having provided the original product.

Yes, that's true. However, the energy cost was not the point of the
thread, whether it might at some point become economical to mine the
landfills for recyclables was the point.

Jim

(snip)

Ben Bradley ) wrote:
: In rec.arts.sf.science,sci.space.policy, On 19 Jan 2006 04:24:29
: -0800, "Space Cadet" wrote:

: Hi All found this article on Sci-Am:
:
: http://tinyurl.com/ds6k8
:
: Basically it says that the current supply of copper, platinum and zinc
: is in short supply.
: Two Questions come to mind:
: 1. What other metals/materials that we have in abundance that we can
: sub for them?
: 2 If above is not possible, what Off world sources are there?
: AFAIK the Moon is Copper poor, Dennis Wingo of "Moon Rush" thinks there
: may be asteroid deposited platinum on the Moon, Also
: (metalic)asteroids are suspected/known? to contain platinum, what about
: copper and zinc?

: This was a story on Slashdot yesterday with hundreds of responses,
: some even thoughtful and interesting.

: OKay, you twisted my arm, here's the link:

: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article...4&threshold=-1

Yet I can't manage to get a premium on my US cents from 1982 and prior,
well other than wheatbacks that is.
Many of you may not recall or know that the US government actually changed
the composition of US cents in 1982 to mostly zinc with a copper plating.
I, like many others, started to hoard copper cents in hopes of a big
payoff like we got in 1980 after hoarding silver for 16 years (64 was the
last year of 90% silevr coinage in the US); but that was mostly due to the
Hunt brothers trying to corner the silver market. Sure silver is up (~ $9
an ounce), but nowhere near the levels of 1980, which peaked at about $52
an ounce for a part of a day.

Anyway, unless people are willing to pay me more than a cent for my cents,
I can't see how copper is "scarce".

:
: Just my $0.02

Are they made of copper?!?!?

Eric

:
: Space Cadet
:
: derwetzelsDASHspacecadetATyahooDOTcom
:
:
: Moon Society - St. Louis Chapter
:
: http://www.moonsociety.org/chapters/stlouis/
:
: The Moon Society is a non-profit educational and
: scientific foundation formed to further scientific
: study and development of the moon.

John Savard ) wrote:
: On Thu, 19 Jan 2006 14:07:36 +0000, Bernard Peek wrote,
: in part:

: Silver can be substituted for copper in many applications. But I am
: reminded that not so long ago there was a prediction that silver would
: be the first element we ran out of.

: That was before digital cameras.

I'll substitute all my copper for silver any chance I can get!

Eric

: John Savard
: http://www.quadibloc.com/index.html
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wrote:
: I read that article. It makes several assumptions which, taking into
: account past events, have a good probability of not occuring. Some of
: these assumptions are that technology will remain at current levels and
: that developing countries will develop along the same lines as
: currently developed countries.

Another point about countries is that the US is one of the last countries
to mine metals based upon price. IOW, we'll allow others to mine metals as
long as the price stays under certain thresholds. So, if the US IS mining
a particular metal, then that metal tends to be in shorter supply.

Eric

Joseph Hertzlinger m) wrote:
: On 19 Jan 2006 04:24:29 -0800, Space Cadet wrote:

: Hi All found this article on Sci-Am:
:
: http://tinyurl.com/ds6k8
:
: Basically it says that the current supply of copper, platinum and zinc
: is in short supply.

: If we take copper, for example, 13 million tons are mined per year and
: the Earth's crust is 50 parts per million of copper on the average.
: If I did the arithmetic right, the top centimeter of the Earth's crust
: contains a year's supply.

A geology friend told me that the world actually has more gold than
copper, but we tend to find copper in larger quantity desposits when we
locate it. That said, your comment about supply vs. the earth's crust
makes more sense with gold than copper.

: We probably won't have to use ordinary rock because landfills make
: better mines.

Depends on what you're looking for. Jimmy Hoffa?

Eric

: --
: http://hertzlinger.blogspot.com

Brett Paul Dunbar ) wrote:
: In message . net,
: Richard Lamb writes
: Shawn Wilson wrote:
: "Space Cadet" wrote in message
: groups.com...
:
: Hi All found this article on Sci-Am:
:
: http://tinyurl.com/ds6k8
:
: Basically it says that the current supply of copper, platinum and zinc
: is in short supply.
: What it is, sadly, is pure economic illiteracy. No, we aren't
: going to run out. Ever. The market won't let it happen. The
: scarcer it gets, the more expensive it gets, the better substitutes
: become, until the substitutes are superior and extraction stops. It
: doesn't run out, it just becomes uncompetitive.
: It is especially ridiculous to claim we'll 'run out' of metals,
: since they can be recycled infinitely many times.
:
:
: I dunno 'bout that...
:
: Seems like an awful lot of electronic devices just get thrown away.
:
: There is not a lot of gold in each, but there is a lot of then in the trash.

: The metals in landfill can be extracted and reused, it just isn't
: economically worthwhile at the moment. As the supply of easily
: accessible new ores runs out then metal prices would rise and eventually
: it would become cost effective to mine the landfill.

But your US cents from 1982 and earlier would command a premium before we
saw that happen.

Eric

: --
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