Climate change may not be our worst problem

Worrying about carbon emissions in 2050 may be moot.  Other resource limits might have knocked us out before then, according to New Scientist 2007-05-26, "Earth audit", citing research from Tom Graedel at Yale, the US Geological Survey, and others.

Uranium for power generation?  We have somewhere between 20 and 60 years worth, assuming the population doesn’t grow.

So, we go solar power, or use fuel cells?  We use LCDs rather than old TV sets?  We have computers to control more efficient usage?  Right?  Wrong!  They need materials that are also running short.

Even if the figures are only half-right, even throwing in optimism about miracles from laboratories, the report makes for depressing reading.

Look at the birth notices in today’s paper.  By the time those kids are old enough to need their own laptop or phone with an LCD screen, you might not be able to buy one.

I’ve reworked the data into a table that is easier to read.  Along with details about the assumptions, I’ll raise some sticky issues about these figures that were not raised in the New Scientist report, and the follow up with a few implications that come to my (lay) mind.

Mineral Life Expectancy

Element	Example Uses	Years at Current Consumption	Years at 50% US per cap Consumption	% Recycled
Aluminium	Structural, consumer durables	1027	510	49
Antimony	Drugs	30	13	?
Chromium	Plating, paint	143	40	25
Copper	Wire, pipes, coins	61	38	31
Gallium	LEDs, solar cells	?	?	0
Germanium	Semiconductors	?	?	35
Gold	Electronics, dental, jewellery	45	36	43
Hafnium	Semiconductors, power stations	?	?? 10 ??	?
Indium	LCDs, solar cells	13	4	0
Lead	Batteries, pipes	42	8	72
Nickel	Batteries, turbines	90	57	35
Phosphorus	Feed, fertilizers	345	142	0
Platinum	Catalyst, fuel cells	360	42	0
Rhodium	Cat converters, X-rays	?	?	?
Silver	Cat converters, jewellery	29	9	16
Tantalum	Cellphones, lenses	116	20	20
Tin	Cans, solder	40	17	26
Uranium	Power, weapons	59	19	0
Zinc	Galvanizing	46	34	26

Reading the figures…

The data should be treated as indicative only, but do highlight a problem that has as yet received scant attention.

The figures do not take into account population growth (which would make the figures more depressing) or changing usage patterns with new technologies (again more depressing as the rarer elements are needed for the gizmos we are turning to).

The figures do not take into account unknown reserves, but as we’ve found with oil, the planet has been pretty well mapped.  The possibility of "mining" seawater has not been factored in.

The column "Years at Current Consumption" is based on known reserves (whether or not extraction is currently economic) and current production/consumption.

The column "Years at 50% US per cap Consumption" is based on known reserves (whether or not extraction is currently economic) and what would happen if the average person used half that of the average 2006 US citizen.  This helps indicate what would happen if people in poorer countries start adopting modern technology.

The "% Recycled" column is not the percentage of product recycled, but the percentage of consumption met by recycled materials.

Question marks indicate guessed or unknown data because the data is unavailable, often because the industry is keeping the amounts secret.

Rare Earths

Some elements (like Hafnium) are included in the table even with little data, because they are rare, and critical for the advanced technologies we are hoping to save the planet with.  It is possible that miners are not publishing reserves information, because if they did, we might look for other solutions that could be viable over a period of 50 years?

While it is relatively easy to reclaim lead or copper from batteries or pipes, it’s pretty hard to extract rare earths out of the matrix of the crystals they have doped.

These metals are RARE.  There’s only about 6000 tonnes of Indium and 1200 tonnes of Hafnium still in the ground across the entire world.  The trucks and four-wheel-drives in one provincial town might almost carry the lot.

Questions not raised in the New Scientist report.

1.  What right do companies have to keep resource availability and consumption data on critical materials hidden from policy-makers, especially if we depend on them to address climate change?  (If all cars had fuel cells, operating losses would mean we only had 15 years supply of platinum left.)

2.  Can we ban silver use in jewellery if we need it for catalytic converters?  Can we ban LCD screens in mobile phones and laptops so indium is available for solar cells?  Can we ban nuclear weapons if we need uranium to keep power stations operating?

3.  Should governments say "Unless you have a practical reclamation scheme in place, you cannot sell devices that use critically short materials"?  What thresholds might justify such government action?

4.  Should a nation be able to hold the world to ransom for a resource needed to address climate change?  (Australia has over half the world’s hafnium, for example)

6.  What are the criteria for overthrow and occupation of a recalcitrant nation state by the international community?

Implications

It seems the OECD will forming a committee to address some of these issues in the next few but I can only find information on the launch of StEP a few weeks ago which only addresses E-Waste recycling (Press Announcement).  Either way this implies governments have known of the matter and its weight for some time, but I’m unaware of any government opening up a discussion with the public on what seems an urgent issue.  If there is no such committee, we need one.

I’m far from expert in this, so what follows rests merely on my intuition:

The OECD panel should have at least the scientific brainpower of the IPCC that investigated climate change, but without the political interference, and without the political procrastination when the scientists make recommendations.  I don’t think we can afford to muck about.

Technologies that look to help with climate change seem dependent on rare minerals.  Recycling, reclamation, and more aggressive extraction methods might well be very energy intensive.  We seem caught between a rock and a hard place, but there is an urgent need for research into, and rollout of, reclamation programs for a wide range of materials, not just expansion of existing programs for paper, plastic and glass.  Indeed other papers with Graedel as contributor (Environ. Sci. Technol., 41 (5), 1759 -1765, 2007 Dining at the Periodic Table: Metals Concentrations as They Relate to Recycling) suggest that some items (such as circuit boards) have concentrations of most metals currently targetted for recycling have metal concentrations that are more enriched than minimum profitable ore grades.

Without a dramatic population drop, our culture and living standards will plummet.  Even one child per woman might be too many.  Can democratic governments achieve this without an alarmed population, when even draconian governments find fertility control difficult?

The USA imports 90% of its rare earths from China alone, 90% of the world’s platinum is in South Africa, and there are an awful lot of people on those two continents that, over the next couple of decades, want their fair share of mobile phones and all the other gizmos made of materials in short supply.  I hope I’m wrong, but a belligerent superpower with a lot of dumb nukes, pursuing "national interest" might feel justified in killing two birds with one stone.

But of course, no superpower has ever been accused of going to war for resources, so I must be mistaken.

It’s time to start learning how to use an abacus.

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See Also:

• Metal Stocks and Sustainability, R. B. Gordon, M. Bertram, and T. E. Graedel Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (USA) 2006;103;1209-1214; – Concentrates on modelling copper, but also includes discussion of nickel, platinum, tin, zinc
• Patterns of Mineral Resource Extraction – UCDavis Geology lecture based on the above paper, but with more graphs and price modelling, and discussion of other metals on pp36, 37 including gallium, germanium, mercury, palladium.
• Industrial ecology: Concepts and approaches L. W. JELINSKI, T. E. GRAEDEL, R. A. LAUDISE, D. W. MCCALL, AND C. K. N. PATEL, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (USA) Vol. 89, pp. 793-797, February 1992 – Discusses the modelling of usage and waste that was used in the above UCDavis papers.

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