China's industrial ascent and descent will span a much shorter interval than ours, and ours won't have been that long from a historical point of view!

Dr. Diederen sent me an e-mail saying that he probably won't have time to answer questions today, but will tomorrow. So if you put questions up today, check back tomorrow for answers from Andre Diederen.

Hi Nate,

All(?) of the Chinese REE production comes from the Bayam Obo deposit in Inner Mongolia. My father(former Molycorp geologist with experience at Mountain Pass, California) worked on this for the Chinese back in the early eighties. During this period, China mined Bayum Obo as an iron deposit (very high grade specular hematite ore) and stockpiled the REE as they lacked the hardware and metallurgical expertise to process it. Processing is a bitch, as you must achieve five nines purity; .99999 - at that purity even stainless steel is too contaminative.

The deposit is very cool! It is(probably) a volcanic carbonatite...volcanoes with dolomite(like limestone but with Mg) lava. I have several specimens and a lot of translated Chinese scientific articles. One of the specimens is a flow-banded lava composed of fluorite, hematite and basnesite(a REE catch-all mineral); bands of purple, silver and white! Anyway, the deposit is huge.

There are other REE deposit which could be mined, but Bayam Obo is so big and rich and annual consumption so modest, that nothing else would be competitive...at least that is my take on it.

Processing is the principle cost, and it is very energy intensive, but the total finished production is pretty modest...the annual world supply of some of these REEs would fit in a briefcase.

Hi Nate,

The monopoly position of China regarding rare earth oxides (REO) production can be broken by countries like the US and Australia by developing exploitation of other deposits on their own territories. The question is at what cost as compared to importing REO from China (if China even exports the quantities needed by us).

I do not have information on the energy share in REO mining cost or the energy share in rare earth metals refinery, and neither on development of these cost over time. Good question. It's of the utmost importance when analyzing energy input in metals mining and refinery that ALL energy input is being taken into consideration, not just explicit use of diesel fuel, electricity and so on. To give an extreme and odd but striking example: years ago some guy gave a presentation on the US Airborne Laser (based on public information), stating that the energy content of each shot (designated to shoot down a ballistic missile in its boost phase) would cost only a couple of dollarcents worth of electricity. That's because the power is huge, but the duration of the laser shot is extremely short. Wow, how cheap! But taking into consideration that at the time of the presentation, the construction cost alone of 5 ABL's would cost 7 billion USD (lasting how many shots? maintenance cost? fuel cost of flying the Boeing 747 ABL platform?) and that with each shot the huge chemical laser would consume about one metric ton of chemicals (to be dumped in the air after each shot), you'll understand that the real implicit energy and total cost per shot is very much larger.

The danger is that singleminded proponents of renewable energy, claiming this to be a 1 to 1 solution to replace fossil fuels, make the same incomplete assumptions on energy input in metals mining and metals refinery, making a similar shorcut as in the extreme example above to "justify" that the energy share in total cost is of no real concern. In the ABL example, this logic would dictate that even an increase in electric energy cost of a factor of one million would be of no consequence to the viability of using ABL's.

Hi Gail,

I believe in the need for electrification of part of (land-based) transport, but I very much doubt that we will be able to swap from hundreds of millions of fossil fuel powered vehicles to the same extravagant amount of electric vehicles.

Batteries are expensive and lack the performance offered by liquid fuels. The metals needed for the best batteries are also the first to show cost constraints (lithium, nickel, cobalt). Just the battery pack for an electrified Volkswagen Golf costs 40,000 Euros (around twice the price of an normal Volkswagen Golf).

Hi Dude,

I'm just suggesting that exponential growth at large is nothing but a Ponzi Scheme. The graph at the right hand side of slide 3, valid for a sustained annual growth rate of 3%, is already ominous in a world with physical limits. But look what happens if you make the same graph for a growth rate in the order of 10% for a significant number of years: if you put the second largest rectangle at today (2009), the largest rectangle becomes 2016 (and the next doubling occurs in 2023).

I referred to China to show that sustained growth rates in resource consumption (including a number of metals) do happen (>10% for the last 15 years prior to the current crisis).

The "Forget electrification of transport" hinges on neodymium, an essential component of the best permanent magnets. Neodymium magnets make smaller and lighter electric motors and generators possible. These in turn make electric cars (and hybrid cars) practical.

Electrification of transport is still quite practical in some ways: electric trains, etc. were used long before neodymium magnets were invented.

Hi JonFreise,

I believe in the need for electrification of part of (land-based) transport, but I very much doubt that we will be able to swap from hundreds of millions of fossil fuel powered vehicles to the same extravagant amount of electric vehicles. We will simply lack cheap abundant metals to make huge amounts of affordable batteries, catalysts, fuel cells, permant-magnet motors and so on.

I like your suggestion to free up materials from other applications. In this way we can save critical materials to be used for essential applications. Only part of transportation is essential, And then there are the many other sectors which are vital for our society and need resources as well (food, shelter, energy, healthcare, education, safety and so on).

I think it is not just global communication we need, but our knowledge that we have developed over the years. If electricity starts to go, electronic files will be lost. Paper books are helpful, but are limited to those who are physically close to them, so can read them. They also deteriorate with age. I wonder how many will be left 100 years from now.

How do we do that without the metals and energy we have now?

It could be that we don't.

I strongly agree with the comments in your post here.

It's hard for me to feel any sympathy for the current yeastlike growth, but I do feel sorry for any subsequent societies which might try to arise. It'd be nice if some rare elements were socked away for them rather than the locust-like dispersion of all useful concentrations of anything.

If people were able to focus on more of a thousand-year horizon, which is still brief in any reasonable terms, it would make sense to spend energy and time now learning sophisticated stuff like how to synthesize spider silk without a global extractive infrastructure. Can't be impossible if a bug's butt can do it.

Spiderwebs, glass, cellulose and the common metals: it'd be interesting to explore in advance what could be done with them working with very low energy inputs.

If you put this with the view that we need to stop use of fossil fuels as soon as possible, it really does come out dreadfully. I have to think that there has to be some indirect favorable impact on CO2--perhaps indirect impacts will limit fossil fuel use over the longer term, so artificially limiting such fuels now may be less important.

If this is the case, using fossil fuels now to produce the more common minerals, substitution, and recycling might still be reasonable partial solutions.

I don't know about denying the validity, but would like to add that modeling the depletion of resources such as mineral ores is quite a bit different than the depletion of oil. Although oil has an analogue to grades of ore, enough of the oil has been of a homogeneous nature that we can distinguish the discovery and production of the better "grades" of oil from the poorer quality (tar sands and oil shale).

The fact that grades of minerals follow more of a continuum makes it more difficult to model as a homogeneous fixed-volume quantity. The reason for the continuum in minerals is easy to explain. Minerals have been around much longer than fossil fuels and have been able to disperse via tectonic shifts and other slow global processes, and essentially form a Pareto distribution as demonstrated by the quote

"300 times more ore as you lower the ore grade with a factor of 10."

Oil also follows a dispersion but the geological time frame is short enough that the distribution shows up in sizes of reservoirs, instead of "richness" of deposits.

Bottom-line, I have shown that dispersive discovery of oil shows the fat-tail phenomena, but that fat-tail behavior is dwarfed by the fat-tails of graded mineral deposits. The caveat, I agree, is that any refining of these minerals is obviously limited by available energy, so we will have excess resources (either unmined, undiscovered, or un-recycled), but without energy to do anything with it.

Here is a little bit of hope.

The majority of the energy usage in mineral extraction and refining is not oil based. Following is a typical breakup of the energy inputs:
- Explosives - gas based but could be derived through electric only
- Overburden Removal - Electric draglines
- Mining - Electric shovels
- Mine transport - Diesel trucks but could be replaced by electric conveyor systems
- Ore raw processing - Electric base
- Stockpiling and handling - Electric base
- Transport to port - diesel trains but could/is replaced by electric trains
- Shipping - oil based
- Unloading/handling - electric based
- Processing and refining - predominantly electric but gas and coal is used depending on the mineral.

Of course this is just typical and will vary depending on the country, mine type and mineral but, most (All ??) mineral extraction could be performed with relative ease using only electric power. Refining is a little more difficult with the big problem being iron.

While we can easily convert the mining and refining operations away from a dependance on oil, unfortunately, this just puts off the problem for a few more years unless we establish sustainable power generation.

SOME of the "rare earth" elements are not that rare when compared to the more common metals we associate with eg cadmium, chromium, tugsten and vanadium. Unfortunately I have lent out my book that gives relative abundance, so working from memory. The first 10 most abundant elements eg, Oxygen (50%), silicon (25%), aluminium (8%), iron (7%), sodium, potassium, titanium, magnesium (can't remember the other 3) make up 99% (ish) of the earth's crust.

We could probably do an entire post on the fascinating subject of the rare earth elements (REE or lanthanides). Two main groups are commonly distinguished: 1) the so-called light rare earths (LREE; lanthanum- or cerium-group; ions of larger ionic radius) typically concentrated in mineral deposits related to carbonatites and 2) the heavy rare earths (HREE; yttrium-group; ions of smaller ionic radius) typically concentrated in very different mineral deposits related to granites. For various reasons, partly related to labor and environmental costs, China currently leads in production of both.

Typical by-products or co-products of the LREE in carbonatites might include thorium, niobium (a.k.a. columbium), titanium, barium, and strontium, among others (including iron in China). Typical co-products of the HREE might include a completely different suite of elements including tungsten, tin, and many others. During mining of the HREE, some co-production of LREE may occur from the accessory phosphate mineral monazite.

The main point is that even for this extremely coherent group of elements, complexity abounds, and trying to lump them together can lead to confusion. Each rare earth element, in general, has a specific use or uses, and their geochemical abundance varies all over the map (in an interesting, coherent way related to atomic number). Yet many REE occur concentrated together (i.e., in solid solution) in common carbonate, phosphate, and silicate ore minerals. As Bryant mentions above, separating them from each other in ores is a highly technology- and energy-intensive task.

The REE group might therefore be a poster child for the concept that once energy becomes scarce and expensive, so potentially will every element whose mining depends heavily on energy. Not because we are necessarily running short (many REE are geochemically rather abundant), but simply because we will no longer be able to afford to process them.

"If we had infinite energy, then it would not be a problem mining the lower mineral grades to gain the metal resources we need."

There would be if you're really talking on a massive scale; you'd have huge areas of land/crust completely depleted of minerals needed for life.

Wouldn't you? If you're pulling up hundreds of thousands of tonnes, extracting all the metals and returning the result, well, as mud (?) not stones, that's a pretty big impact on the area. If any random part of the crust will be mined in this way, mining operations would cover enormous areas, and the social and environmental impacts would be far greater than they are at present.

I'm not sure a descent/crash is inevitable.

It is very difficult to visualize radical change. How many people visualized the current economic crash despite the ominous rise in debt over the last decade and the numerous warnings by many economic analysts. Bill Bonner wrote two books explaining why the crash was inevitable:

http://www.amazon.com/Financial-Reckoning-Day-Surviving-Depression/dp/04...

Not only is a crash inevitable, but it has begun, starting with the economy. The problem is that we are at the end of the “growth model” economy and are in transition to the sustainable. This is not by choice but by necessity because the developed countries have exhausted their economic potential energy in that we have done such a good job of innovation that we have reduced production costs to the point that human labor for many goods is below the cost of energy and materials. The increasing scarcity of energy and materials will dramatically increase cost of goods. We have also nearly exhausted the thermodynamic potential to convert energy to work, having increased efficiency 10 fold in the past century and are now approaching theoretical limits.

The end of the “growth model” is the end of the ability of governments to raise taxes. Therefore we may be only a few years away from the sort of social collapse as in the former Soviet Union. The federal government is on course to run out of money as states like CA already have. There is a danger that police, fire and EMT jobs will cut just when we are facing skyrocketing crime and social unrest.

The only way we will recover is for the developed countries to recognize that the growth model is dead and to plan the transition. Instead of trying to salvage the US auto industry we should be implementing progressively increasing fuel taxes. We also need to declare automobile free zones in central business districts and start building streetcar lines.

According to The Rise and Fall of Infrastructures there was a 55 year transition period between canals/railroads/roads/airlines:

http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Research/TNT/WEB/Publications/The_Rise_and_Fall_o...

This is illustrated graphically with S curves in:

http://www.amazon.com/Predictions-Societys-Telltale-Signature-Forcasts/d...

The post I originally wrote got eaten -- here's the gist of it.
1,2) increase in energy cost may make specific activities uneconomic, even if they only use a small percent of energy.
4) see Ruth (1995) -- modelling of extraction limits from a thermodynamics pov, Roma, Pirinoc (2009) --- overall economic analysis framework no significant conclusions.

RE: The final comments on Al, Fe, Mg, Si -- even the author of the article agrees -- those elements are among the "hope elements" (slide 21) with no significant extraction limits in the medium term future.

Agree with you about zirconium. It is geochemically abundant in the accessory mineral zircon. If its production peaked this probably represented a peak in demand and not supply. This apparent error was discussed for a previous exposition of this thesis on TOD; I was somewhat surprised to see it repeated here. Not a good example!

Agree also that use of percentage of world production as an indicator of decline is potentially confusing if world production has been greatly increasing. Nevertheless, probably no industry professional would argue that EU and US mineral production hasn't been declining, in general owing more to unfavorable domestic cost structures and foreign competition than to incipient depletion.

I understand that the highest grade deposits of silicon dioxide (quartz), those most suitable for high purity silicon manufacture, are actually relatively rare. They require a second step of purification, one generally provided by the natural process of metamorphic recrystallization (aqueous dissolution and reprecipitation under high temperatures and pressures). This purification step could be carried out in the laboratory, but at very much greater cost than letting nature do it for free.

This natural beneficiation step for silicon is somewhat analogous to sufficient burial (heating and squeezing) having changed oil shale into oil, or the natural surficial weathering that over millions of years changed low grade siliceous iron formations into high grade iron oxide ores (a form of rust), or granites into aluminum hydroxide ores (bauxite). Nature can make very good ores, even of silicon, but the correct sequence of events, and preservation of the results, can be rare.

Boof,
It's the scale of energy use, even though Australia exports large amounts of metal ores and processes some such as Al, mining only uses 5% of the national energy budget and processing another 10%(steel and aluminium). Steel production uses less than 10% of world coal production. Does the world produce enough wind power(40GW average) to refine all the steel, copper, neodymium, and aluminium and cement to continue growing wind power at 30% per year? I am sure it does, with lots left over.

Realistically I don't see aluminium smelters running on heavily wind and solar based grids.

Why not electricity is the same, what ever the source, solar and wind variations can be balanced by EV recharging, pumped hydro. When we have replaced all coal based electrical generation we can worry about the small amount used for steel production.

The thesis of this article is circular ;"energy shortages give rise to metals shortages that prevent alternative energy resources being developed"

If neodymium was as rare as Ag or Au, and the only resources were in China, and neodymium was essential for electric cars and wind turbines, nuclear and solar power, and a high proportion of the worlds energy was used to extract and refine metals then we would have a problem. But since NONE of these assumptions apply to generating non FF energy it's hard to go beyond "ENERGY SHORTAGES", let alone metal shortages.

I've never heard of carbon fibers being used for electrical conductors, with the exceptions of carbon electrodes and Thomas Edison’s early light bulbs that used charred bamboo filaments.

I did however work for a company that had a carbon fiber web making machine and know that the product was very expensive. It is a very good material for aircraft where high strength to weight ratio is important, but I do not see it being used to replace copper wiring in motors for instance.

Aluminum is a good substitute for copper in conductor applications and is used in high voltage transmission. It caused fires in household wiring because of improper connections. It is also rather brittle as opposed to copper being malleable and this could contribute to fire hazard in residences if the wire is damaged.

Carbon fibers are being produced that weigh less than 1% of copper but conduct electricity 10 times better.

Just being an EE jerk here, but the most famous carbon conductor has been around for ages and it is called the resistor. In typical usage it serves the purpose of reducing the conduction of electricity.

Please fill me in -- are these some exotic bucky-ball-like configurations or are they coated or impregnated with some other conductor such as nickel? I suppose carbon nanotubes may also undergo some superconducting transition, but that is aided by low-temperature so you don't get much payback there. I am not aware of any high-Tc or room temperature carbon based superconductors.
I found instances of the use of a carbon fiber matrix which holds a high-Tc superconductor.

Open your brain or at least open your eyes.

I would like to open my eyes, but you should probably give some references.

Did you ever hear of Thomas Malthus?

Didn't he talk about overpopulation, overconsumption, famine and collapse? Yeah, we've heard of him. As for Adam Smith:

“Every individual...generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”

-- http://thinkexist.com/quotation/every_individual-generally-indeed-neithe...
(original work not cited at the link!)

So, the idea is that the public good emerges as a side-effect of personal self-interest; according to one quote from one man. Firstly I don't agree that the effect is strong enough to justify the widespread adoption of the practice, and secondly I'd point out that "By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry" is only going to work if the people are educated enough to care to choose domestic industry, and if there is one to choose, which often there isn't. The absence of so many public goods in the USA today should somewhat refute the idea that pure market forces are the best way to structure society.

The guy is only talking about the effect of the invisible hand on the behaviour of a company in the market to maximise the pleasure reward of the buyer, and even then it only applies where the consumer has a choice of products, or is willing to forgo the purchase. All this has very little to do with genuine public good, and absolutely nothing to do with mitigating resource depletion.

Carbon fibers are being produced that weigh less than 1% of copper but conduct electricity 10 times better. Turned the other way, these fibers weigh less than 1% of silicon but insulate better.

Amazing! Can we have 3.8 thousand tonnes a year please?
-- http://www.copper.org/resources/market_data/copper1990s.html

At about the same price of course. And compatible with exisitng plugs and linkages, or there's a large additional cost there to refit a great number of things. Can we solder directly on to this stuff?

How much water and power is used in production? more? less? or does it not matter?

How much do they cost compared with copper? Does that include the cleanup costs?

A new analysis of by-products discharged to the environment during production of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) -- expected to become the basis of multibillion-dollar industries in the 21st Century -- has identified cancer-causing compounds, air pollutants, and other substances of concern

-- http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070821081446.htm

But we are used to toxic waste from industrial processes, right? Shame that even the desired product is dangerous:

Although further research is required, results presented today clearly demonstrate that, under certain conditions, especially those involving chronic exposure, carbon nanotubes can pose a serious risk to human health.

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_nanotube#Toxicity
(yuk, wikipedia!)

Superior airplanes, cars, and buildings are being made out of stronger lighter weight non-metal components. Open your brain or at least open your eyes.

... and in every single case, I assert without a citation, they require greater energy, water and rare element compounds in their manufacture. That's why they cost more.

I'll leave you to refute my assertion with a citation, the way I have (hopefully) refuted some of yours.

CNTs are very cool and I get the point, despite my tone. My argument is that with every step like this you're replacing a problem of size x we have now with a problem of size x-squared to deal with in twenty or fifty years. The core inputs remain the same anyway, eg oil, phosphorous, iron, water etc. There is no way you're going to be building a carbon nanotube plant from carbon nanotubes, shipping the stuff on carbon nanotube trucks and so on. The core inputs to so many things don't change, so the law of substitution only buys you time.

How long do we scale it? Suppose you're right, and we really can move into space, harvest asteroids, swallow whole new worlds for their resources. Why do it? It's not as though even half our consumption goes into making us healthier, or happier, or wiser, so even if you are right and we can skip from one technology to the next, why should we do so?

The message of the competition/efficiency/marketplace Trinity seems to be that we should drop the idea of ourselves developed over two and a half millennia. We are no longer beings distinguished by our ability to think and to act consciously in order to affect our circumstances. Instead we should passively submit ourselves and our whole civilization -- our public structures, social forms and cultural creativity -- to the abstract forces of unregulated commerce.

-- http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/4392.John_Ralston_Saul

With an open brain we can choose our own direction, our own fate, our own public good, instead of pretending that the distorted interpretation of a flawed theory from over TWO HUNDERED years ago somehow is applicable to the current situation.

But is this relevant, how much more energy is used to extract the copper from lower grades? or any metal if all metals except Fe and Al are only using very small amounts of energy it's a non-issue even if the energy use increases X10.

Dropping average ore grades with time is a generalization, but offhand I can't think of any exceptions (the low-hanging fruit principle). Individual mines present many possibilities for exceptions, of course, because what's important is the total mining cost, and high grade ores may not have been mined earlier if they were especially remote and isolated from infrastructure, too far inland to allow cheap transport to a sea port, too deep or too small in extent to be mined cheaply, in a country previously regarded as risky for investment, or simply represent a brand new discovery.

Timing is important. Iron mines in Australia are mining much higher grades than those in North America, mainly because mining started more than 50 years later there. As I discussed with Neil1947 in a previous post on this topic, comparable high grade ores in North America were long ago exhausted. Even the Australian iron ores require beneficiation (concentration) to be marketable, though.

Hello Andrew Lee,

Your Quote:
------------------
Old landfills are already being used for power generation - In the coming years I can see them being mined for metal ores.

Perhaps once we are all poor we will waste less and reuse some of the waste we have thrown away.
-----------------------
IMO, this is no different than when they mined the Old Graveyards of Leipzig & the Crimea & the catacombs across Europe. Currently, Illinois is deeply burying vital Elements at the cost of $330,000/ton, but looking for a cheaper way:

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5551/517181

http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2009/06/23/indigents_funerals_may...
------------------------
Indigents' funerals may burden counties

..Funeral homes are declining to take death cases without a down payment, he said.

"They don't want to eat the bills," he said. "And the families don't have the money because of the economic situation the state's in. So some families are basically washing their hands.

.."People would be surprised how often people die and we have family that doesn't step up and do anything," Northrup said. "They just let it go. They've never made any plans or set any money aside."

Northrup said he's uncertain how many indigent burials the county may be asked to cover if the state suspends payments. State officials say they spend about $15 million a year on about 10,000 funerals for the poor.
-------------------------
I expect this to get magnitudes worse postPeak, but we just cannot have bodies rotting everywhere. Or are we really that dumb?

Thanks for your response, and I enjoyed your main post. Regarding the mystery of zirconium in Slide 10, a possible answer is found in the "Zirconium and hafnium" chapter of Industrial Minerals and Rocks, 7th ed., edited by J.E. Kogel et al., Society for Mining, Metallurgy, and Exploration, 2006, p. 1063-1071. Authors Philip Murphy and Louise Frick state: "All commercially produced zircon is a co-product of titanium mineral production...that typically accounts for between 15% and 35% of total revenue. Despite its increased value, zircon supply remains dependent on titanium mining." My take on this statement would be that zirconium production fell because demand for titanium fell. According to the same book, 93% of titanium is used in oxide form as the white pigment in paint, paper, and plastics, so a drop in titanium demand is a drop in the demand for white pigment.

So I probably guessed right regarding a fall in demand, but wrong regarding the metal concerned (i.e., titanium was the dog wagging its zirconium tail). The time when you show the alleged peak coincides closely with a major recession beginning in 2000. Your colored production curve completely obscures this dip, but the individual production data points seem to show it clearly, together with a rise corresponding to the later housing bubble. I therefore stand by my suggestion that zirconium is such a widely distributed element (in the mineral zircon, common in beach sands) that to use it as an example of depletion seems to be misinformed. If the supply of zirconium is limited, that seems to be because the demand for titanium is limited.

A better example might be gold, whose global mine production is said to have peaked at about the same time (2001), despite the huge increase in price that has followed. Gold is uniquely recession-proof and is always in demand, so any drop in production is unlikely to be due to a drop in demand. Bryant might want to comment further on gold.

Although I was lambasted for mentioning it on here previously, Daniel Nocera's recent work on splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen using green chemistry could turn out to be pivotal in the decades ahead.

http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/harnessing-the-sun-when-it-...

Would help if Co were one of the "elements of hope" obviously.

The American bison being a prime example on that last bit? :)