Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumYale: A Scarcity of Rare Metals Is Hindering Green Technologies
With the global push to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, its ironic that several energy- or resource-saving technologies arent being used to the fullest simply because we dont have enough raw materials to make them.
For example, says Alex King, director of the new Critical Materials Institute, every wind farm has a few turbines standing idle because their fragile gearboxes have broken down. They can be fixed, of course, but that takes time and meanwhile wind power isnt being gathered. Now you can make a more reliable wind turbine that doesnt need a gearbox at all, King points out, but you need a truckload of so-called "rare earth" metals to do it, and there simply isnt the supply. Likewise, we could all be using next-generation fluorescent light bulbs that are twice as efficient as the current standard. But when the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) tried to make that switch in 2009, companies like General Electric cried foul: they wouldnt be able to get hold of enough rare earths to make the new bulbs.
The move toward new and better technologies from smart phones to electric cars means an ever-increasing demand for exotic metals that are scarce thanks to both geology and politics. Thin, cheap solar panels need tellurium, which makes up a scant 0.0000001 percent of the earths crust, making it three times rarer than gold. High-performance batteries need lithium, which is only easily extracted from briny pools in the Andes. In 2011, the average price of 'rare earth' metals shot up by as much as 750 percent. Platinum, needed as a catalyst in fuel cells that turn hydrogen into energy, comes almost exclusively from South Africa.
Researchers and industry workers alike woke with a shock to the problems caused by these dodgy supply chains in 2011, when the average price of "rare earths" including terbium and europium, used in fluorescent bulbs; and neodymium, used in the powerful magnets that help to drive wind turbines and electric engines shot up by as much as 750 percent in a year. The problem was that China, which controlled 97 percent of global rare earth production, had clamped down on trade. A solution was brokered and the price shock faded, but the threat of future supply problems for rare earths and other so-called "critical elements" still looms.
valerief
(53,235 posts)Wilms
(26,795 posts)FBaggins
(26,754 posts)Most of them aren't particularly rare (about as abundant as copper for at least one of them).
Scarcity can be a market condition - not just a question of how much is in the ground.
China may have less than 1/4th of the world's rare earths, but they represent (depending on who you listen to) 90-97% of the world production. That's not because the minerals don't exist elsewhere (the US used to be the leading producer)... but because the Chinese undercut world prices so substantially that they drove the competition out of the market. Now that they're reportedly restricting access... prices will likely rise enough to bring other players back into the marketplace. But it will take some time.
phantom power
(25,966 posts)hunter
(38,322 posts)Solar panels, wind turbines, whatever...
The only lasting robust solution is growing stuff, making stuff, and building stuff using mostly local materials.
Many animals have solved basic resource problems by migration. Birds, whales, tuna, butterflies...
...but humans are not that sort of animal. Our migration capabilities are small in spite of our modern (last 40,000 years) dispersal capacities.
If we apply our minds to the problem we may be able to keep some kind of worldwide electronic information and communication infrastructure. But the big container ships will stop coming. Flying across oceans or continents will become a rare thing for anyone who doesn't have wings.
Humans are a remarkable species but we've not yet crossed the threshold of being the engines of our own creation.
For now we are just eaters of fossil fuels and other non-renewable resources. Consumers.
Until we master telepathy and teleportation, or until smart phones grow on trees and can be disposed of in compost heaps, I'm not terribly optimistic about our future.
Odds are good we are just another one of those experiments in evolution (and there have been many these past billions of years) that won't make it down the long road.
Human exceptionalism is as silly as any nationalistic exceptionalism.
Nations don't last, and even less so, species.