Book Review: On Borrowed Time? Assessing the Threat of Mineral Depletion
Posted by Rembrandt on May 15, 2009 - 10:25am in The Oil Drum: Europe
For the last couple of weeks, I have been reading about the issue of mineral depletion, since I want to do some research on this topic. The basic question is whether we can keep relying on producing (rare) metals from the earth to (re-) build our society in the foreseeable future.
The only recent book that I could find on the topic was On Borrowed Time? Assessing the Threat of Mineral Depletion, published in 2002. It was written by John E. Tilton, who is an Emeritus Professor in Mineral Economics at the Colorado School of Mines. He has studied the topic for over 30 years.
I can recommend this book to non-experts as it gives a good concise overview on the thinking on mineral depletion. The text is less than 140 pages long and is presented in an accessible non-technical manner. This made it possible for me to read the book in less than 3 hours.
One major drawback to the book, in my opinion, is a pervasive bias regarding how impending scarcity is assessed. Because of the author's background, he believes that price change is the best way to foresee whether mineral scarcity is approaching. Nonetheless, John E. Tilton is honest in stating his views and has done his best to provide an objective text by incorporating other views critical of his own. These views include arguments raised by Ecological Economists, something which in my experience is rare in books written by economists of the traditional school.
Outline of the book
The book has six main chapters starting with a historical overview of the main scientific views over time on the threat of mineral depletion. It then covers the general geological and economic methods and their criticisms in a chapter with the fitting title Imperfect Measures. Since the author sees the traditional economic approach of using different price and cost assessment as the best approach for understanding mineral depletion, the next chapter is devoted to historic economic studies on mineral depletion. He shows several price trends of minerals over time and the different interpretation that economists have given on these trends. The underlying concept of this chapter is the idea from the economic field that a general price increase over a long duration of time would be a signal of mineral scarcity, while a price decrease over time would signal increasing availability. The chapter shows that mineral commodity prices have been declining for nearly all of the 20th century, leaving many economists (although not all described in the book) to believe that scarcity is decreasing rather than increasing. Given the boom and (temporary) bust in mineral prices that has occurred after the book was written, it would be interesting to investigate whether a change is occurring in the field of economics on this topic.
After a short discussion regarding why the past cannot be used as a reliable indicator for the future, the author continues with an assessment of several factors that need to be taken into account to understand the future of mineral depletion. He concludes without any new insights, as the author finds that there is insufficient geological and economic data on mineral deposits to give a meaningful answer. This data could probably be obtained if society were willing to invest money in doing so. But, speaking as a true economist, John E. Tilton comes to the conclusion that we value the present usage of money over future usage, and hence are not interested in assessing currently uneconomic or nearly uneconomic geological mineral deposits. Only when concerns over mineral scarcity grow high does he expect increasing investigation in geological data, so that we may better know what future awaits us.
By this time, the main conclusion of the book has already been given, but there are still two more chapters. One of these chapters is on the environmental and social costs of mineral extraction. These additional costs are sometimes called externalities in economics, as environmental costs are usually not incorporated in prices of goods. In this chapter, John E. Tilton mainly focuses on the costs of pollution due to mining.
The book ends with a chapter called Findings and Implications, which is basically a recap of Chapter 5, with an extension into topics that have previously not been dealt with in the book--namely, conservation, recycling, and policy decisions. In this chapter, the author provides a stronger concluding statement than that of Chapter 5. He sees mineral depletion as not likely to be a big problem in the next 50 to 100 years. Mineral depletion could be a threat after this period according to the author, but this depends on "the race between the cost-increasing effects of depletion and the cost-reducing effects of new technology."
Review conclusion
The nice thing about this book is its relative objectivity in most of its chapters. Although John E. Tilton does state in his conclusion that he does not think there will be a problem in the next 50 years, he does in several places acknowledge that the pessimists may be right after all, even though they have been wrong in the past. He nicely summarises this with the quote: "That the alarmists have regularly and mistakenly cried "wolf!" does not a priori imply that the woods are safe (Neumayer 2000 in Tilton 2002)."
The final concluding chapter seems to me to be a bit out of place, as there is no detailed reasoning in the book that provides significant substance to Tilton's conclusion that there is not likely to be a problem for 50 to 100 years. I can follow his reasoning, but it is not clear on what basis this time period was chosen. John E. Tilton basically believes that technology will continue to outweigh depletion costs for at least the first half of the 21st century--even while he acknowledges the uncertainty of geological data and the effects of compounding growth.
What the book lacks in my opinion is a discussion of the omissions in the theoretical framework underlying mineral depletion in economics. Three important issues involved in assessing mineral depletion are not discussed in depth in the book, which is likely a reflection of the general (economic) field. First, the geological assessment has barely been integrated with an economic approach, although the author tries to overcome this by discussing cumulative supply curves which give the number of available minerals depending on the cost of production. Second, limiting boundary factors that are likely to increase mining costs in the future such as energy are not taken into consideration. Third, the author tends to assume that technological innovation will continue in the next 50 years to 100 years at a similar scale as in the past, which i see as a doubtful assertion.
These three issues could very well lead to an outcome that contradicts the economic belief that a general price increase over a long duration of time would be a signal of mineral scarcity, while a price decrease over time would signal increasing availability. The underlying implication is that technological change as well as physically limiting production factors occur gradually over time, but these changes could also happen in a much shorter time span.
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Rembrandt,
Thanks for a very interesting post! It is more than a book review--it is more like a look inside the way conventional economists think about mineral resource depletion of all kinds. "If the price isn't high, there can't be a problem."
One issue would seem to be similar to the one Francois' raised yesterday--at some point, the price of minerals of all kinds become too high for the economy. The prices are often tied very closely to the price of oil and gas. When the price of oil and gas rise, the price of mined minerals do also. At some point, the combined price of oil, gas, and minerals becomes too high for the economy to handle.
I think all of the prices are also closely tied to the availability of debt. If there is debt is not available for buying goods with the minerals, and for financing new mines for the minerals, the price of the minerals will drop.
I didn't read this book but one thing that the free-market economists seem blind to is the fact that minerals are not widely dispersed but a usually concentrated in a few areas and totally absent from much of the rest of the world.
This is due to the geological processes that produced rich deposits.
Economically this is the receipe for an oligopoly or even a monopoly, which is the antithesis of a free market and of course over time as various deposits are consumed the situation becomes even worse.
What the economists hubristically consider self-evident 'laws' is largely a matter of timing and luck. We've only been exploiting these enormous deposits for 100 years and now they are drying up and our luck has changed.
From the review: "he does not think there will be a problem in the next 50 years."
This was enough to convince me that the poor fellow doesn't have a bleeping clue. Gail is surely right that the book's main value is the window it may provide into the feverish and labyrinthine mind of a conventional economist (the folks who largely brought us our current, insane world order).
By the way, Gail, I couldn't parse your final sentence, but is seems to be an important insight. Could you edit or clarify?
dohboi,
You are being unfair, would you be happier if he has said; "there definitely will be a problem " or 'there definitely will not be a problem"?
He seems to be keeping an open mind, no need to panic just yet, but need to keep monitoring mineral availability.
If you can demonstrate a mineral that is absolutely essential and you are convinced will be exhausted in 50 years, it's up to you to provide convincing evidence. Many elements are scarce now( gold for instance), others such as silver, we have replaced major users( photography), other such as magnesium, potassium and iron are so abundant we have billions of years supply.
Problems don't make me happy, one way or the other. And I am still waiting for someone to say what would be a good time to panic ;-)
If we are just talking about mineral availability, it is of course hard to know what of the many minerals that are now crucial to the smooth working of our complex society might be the first bottleneck.
But more broadly speaking, we are famously near or past peak oil, and natural gas is likely not far behind.
We are using a huge part of the planets living resources, mostly in ways that are permanently damaging or destroying them.
Were you aware of the collapse in fish populations?
How about the ongoing sixth great extinction event since the beginning of life on earth? Perhaps diverse life on earth is not "absolutely essential"?
How about impending loss of the Arctic icecap?
How about the loss of an atmosphere with CO2 concentrations below 300 ppm that has provided for the climate that fostered the development of our (and other) species and of civilization?...Essential??
Now problem in fifty years??? We are deep in the midst of a plethora of essentially intractable "problems"and only an economist with extremely blinkered views (I am trying to avoid reference to the anatomical orifice up which his pointy economical head seems to reside) would think otherwise. But these are the very no-so-wise men who are guiding the national and global structures that are driving us off the cliff.
Considering that earth is about 4.5 billion years old and that the earliest forms of life appeared about 3.8 billion years ago and it wasn't until aproximately 600 million years ago that we started seeing simple animals begin to evolve, I would venture to say, that without any doubt whatsoever, diverse life on earth is "absolutely *NOT* essential", except of course for our own survival?
For some reason it seems to go with the territory.
Essential is a subjective term, to a lion wilderbeast may be essential. In the grand scheme of things, nothing is essential, including human life and planet earth itself for that matter.
You'll get no disagreement from me on that.
Yes, the ghost of Simon lurks amongst these discussions.
It also reminds me of the oft repeated factual statement bruted about by the promoters of a hydrogen based economy that "hydrogen is the most common element in the universe."
They fail to point out that most of this is in vast intergalactic clouds millions of lightyears away that will never be accessible to us. But the fact that it is completely useless to us does not stop these guys from repeating it on all their brochures and promotional material.
Neil,
Your optimism knows no bounds! According to science, we have a maximum of 1 billion years left before the sun gets so hot the Earth will become incapable of supporting life. The sun has about 4 billion years to go, but will swallow Mercury, Venus and Earth long before that.
Sorry to be a partypooper.
Not that it matters; If humanity is still stuck on earth after a billion years, it deserves to fry.
That's what I meant, the supply will last longer than the earth, but is not infinite
Regarding the issue of debt, our economy is now structured in a way in which price is only one consideration. The other is the availability of financing.
Financing becomes an issue in two places:
1. Mines are usually financed by debt. If loans become difficult to find, mining companies stop expanding. If the prices of minerals drop, mining companies default on their debts, and are taken over by other companies. In the current environment, this seems to be Chinese companies, who can understand the long-term need for minerals.
2. Buyers of minerals are very dependent on debt. Auto companies and housing companies cease expanding when buyers of autos and houses are not able to get debt to purchase the houses and auto, so there is less demand for the minerals. A similar situation exists for other end users (and middlemen) for minerals.
Once less debt is available, that has the indirect result of reducing demand for oil, natural gas, and all minerals. That is a big reason prices have recently been falling.
I have said that debt can only expand if the economy is growing. The fact that oil is not growing has been a major constrictor on the economy, and keeps it from growing--in a way, a Liebig's Law of the Minimum impact. When oil can't grow, debt can't grow, and other minerals can't grow. Everything ceases to grow together, and in fact start contracting as debt contracts.
Thanks for the clarification Gail. Debt does seem to make the economic world go round.
This is a similar conclusion to what I sorted out recently:
The main difference between the "economists" and the "geologists" is probably not how much oil is out there but the price level consumers can afford.
The "economists" think that the oil supply will always be regulated by the market's invisible hand: e.g. if cheap conventional oil becomes unavailable we just move onto the more expensive unconventional oil.
The "geologists" agree to this logic, but doubt that at a certain point the world economy cannot afford this price any more (including the availability of credits) - and that this point is not so far away.
So I think the paramount question will be to find out what this critical price level is.
Actually, economists think that if oil gets expensive, "technology" will instantly, at no cost, and without side effects, provide us with alternatives. Julian Simon's assertion that we can (if desired) economically transmute other elements into copper, and/or recruit another solar system, are just extreme examples of this belief in the powers of "technology".
Interestingly, people who work with "technology" -- engineers, scientists -- are much less inclined to this kind of magical thinking. One might think that would give economists pause. However, most economists suffer under an extreme form of specialism blindness, in which members of a speciality devalue the learning contained in all other specialities.
@gregvp
Julian Simon is not representative for any economic school. He is an outlier. There are many economists that disagree with his view of the substitutability of elements into other elements.
Whoop! Dee! Doo!
Somehow I get the feeling that you miss the point by a unit of measure that approaches infinity.
This is *NOT* a point to be debated or agreed with! Nobody, who has even the most rudimentary scientific knowledge, would make such an absurd statement. Furthermore that someone who even pretends to believe such nonsense could possibly hold a doctorate from any university and be a respected adviser to the highest levels of leadership in our country for many years, is exactly why we are up the malodorous creek with no practical means of propulsion!
If your comment was intended as any kind of reassurance as to the competence and rationality of economists it managed to elicit the exact opposite reaction, at least in me.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-economist-has-no-cl...
Agree Gail. Availability of financing is an extremely important issue. Mining is said to be the most capital-intensive industry; that is, a new mine discovery commonly requires 20 or more years of exploration and development, and the investment of hundreds of millions to billions of dollars, before the first load of concentrate is shipped, or the first ingot is poured. This is one reason why mining executives, and their bankers, must take a very long term, fiscally conservative view if they are to be successful. Virtually all of the oil companies that invested their windfall profits in mining companies in the 1970's shortly dumped mining as being insufficiently profitable compared to petroleum. None repeated this type of investment the last time around, although their investments in tar sands and the deep ocean probably are proving similarly disappointing.
Agree also that contraction of debt, caused by contraction of the economy, might well prove far more damaging to the mining industry than any real or imagined scarcity of a particular metal. The biggest, most profitable mining companies have long been buying up the reserves of other, smaller companies, rather than exploring for their own. Currently China appears to be in a position to outbid them.
Do you have evidence for this assertion? The first mineral I looked at - copper - shows a very different 5-year price pattern from oil.
In fact, none of the 5-year metal prices I can find look like the 5-year oil prices. Consider zinc and nickel, which were falling in price all through the huge run up in oil prices in 2007/2008.
It may make intuitive sense that mineral prices should track oil prices, but that intuition is wrong. This is another example of why it's so important to check the evidence before running with one's intuition.
My intuition tells me that the cost of everything from cat food to oil is down to the cost human labour and nowt else.
This is a hypothesis based on the idea that if we all worked for nothing everything would be free. Animals survive and they don't have money so their food has to be free.
Unfortunately, your intuition is probably wrong, as it does little to explain the movements of metal prices.
See the links above - zinc prices fell by 50% while copper prices stayed high in 2007, but then copper prices fell much faster than zinc in 2008. The amount of human labour required to produce those metals wouldn't have changed appreciably between 2007 and 2008, so changes in labour costs cannot reasonably account for those price changes.
Intuition is great for suggesting which evidence to look at, but it doesn't remove the need to actually look at that evidence.
My intuition is probably correct. You obviously don't appreciate the difference between transient and steady state conditions within a dynamic system. Quoting figures that are modified by transient market conditions do not indicate general trends. It is obvious to a school child (and manufacturing companies) that the cost of everything is correlated to the cost labour.
"It is obvious to a schoolchild" is neither a sound nor a persuasive argument. Indeed, it's nothing more than a patronizing way of stating your personal opinion. Unfortunately, this is not a topic where one's personal opinions are of value, so it's not clear what you're intending to contribute here.
I'm trying to get you to grasp (but failing) that the cost of everything is down to labour, direct or indirect. If we all worked for zero wage everyting would be free. Oil and minerals are free. People (bankers welders geologists etc etc) want wages to extract them. I can't understand your lack of understanding here its so simple.
Thats a bit simplistic. The costs of everything come down to scarcity in part; Certainly the relative scarcity of labour plays a role in determining prices. Another determinant is the relative scarcity of capital.
Probably, but even the cost of capital is down to wage demand in the end, even if the wage is in the form of dividends.
Money is just a way of keeping track of labor, don't tell me you think family members on a farm "work for free", they expect something in return. Animals have to work for their food, just like us.
Correct. The cost of everything is down to the cost of labour, just as I said.
Post Keynesian economists (at least of the European variety) have long contested the idea that prices are related to scarcity, except perhaps in the short-run, when production cannot adjust (think of the rush for Nintendo Wiis a few years ago). Their models of price systems are related both to technology (represented by various choices of Leontief production coefficients) and the notion that the rate of profit (loosely interchangeable with the interest rate) is largely dictated by social forces. In a loose sense, this means that commodity prices are related to the cost of producing goods. Issues relating to the price implications of declining grades of minerals and so forth can be dealt with in this framework in a fairly straight-forward manner.
My own training is mainstream, but I'm sympathetic to both the claim by ecological economists that mainstream economists overstate the potential for substitution, and the Post-Keynesian position that prices do not represent a scarcity index. My problem with TOD is that there doesn't seem to be anything like a coherent economic model here. Prices apparently materialize out of thin air, money must mysteriously be created to pay debt, and basic concepts like GDP are routinely misunderstood. It's almost surreal to see John Tierney chastised for misunderstanding Environmental Kuznets curves one day and then see Francois Cellier's misuse of a curve plotting GDP against energy use the next.
Jolly,
Douglas Reynolds has done some interesting work on the mineral economy on why he believes prices can falsely signal decreasing scarcity. Do you think he is on to something? Where would you say the holes in his argument are?
@Jolly
Which economists are you referring to specifically? Any book suggestions?
Names like Luigi Pasinetti, Joan Robinson, and Ian Steadman come to mind. Unfortunately I'm only familiar with a handful of journal articles, mostly related to capital theory, and mostly critical of the neoclassical theory of income distribution. They've largely been marginalized by the "mainstream" economics academic community.
The annual mineral yearbooks from the USGS offer both historical and current information.
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/myb.html
Data from the 30's
http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/EcoNatRes/EcoNatRes-idx?id=EcoN...
Looking for some other tomes on Amazon I see these titles:
The mineral economy: a model for the shape of oil production curves [An article from: Energy Policy], by someone named "U Bardi"
Sustaining Development in Mineral Economies: The Resource Curse Thesis
Scarcity and Growth Revisited : Natural Resources and the Environment in the New Millennium (Resources for the Future)
Investing for Sustainability: The Management of Mineral Wealth
&c. Anybody familiar with these titles? Should we shell out $25 to investigate, or be content with articles here and elsewhere?
On a distressing note for us scarcity proponents, I recently discovered that Trouble with Lithium author William Tahil also thinks the World Trade Centers were brought down by, uh, nuclear reactors... (both PDF). Which makes him a sort of PHEV Mike Ruppert I guess.
@The Dude
These titles are not related directly (only indirectly) to mineral depletion. The exception being the workd of Ugo Bardi which has been covered here on the oil drum. I have ordered a different book on mineral depletion from a geological point of view from the 1960s that may be covered here if it is interesting.
In my opinion the only mineral we should really worry about is phosphate and even that is widely dispersed. With the current global slowdown there has been less demand for metal ores and presumably less demand for coking coal and coal fired electricity. So I guess we are saving some for later.
Just as horizontal drilling and hydro-fracturing brought to light more shale gas modern techniques have discovered hundreds of new ore deposits or ways to process them more cheaply. For example near home there is talking of moving new types of concentrate in slurry pipes rather than trucks or rail cars. Rather than physical shortages of minerals I think we should worry more about the water and energy needed to excavate, refine and distribute the products. Examples
- some aluminium smelting and most steel making under severe coal restrictions
- spreading phosphate on fields when diesel for machinery has gone
- making silicon wafers or wind turbines when only renewable energy is available
- washing of concentrates when rivers and ground water have dried up.
I think ancillary inputs will cause bottlenecks long before mineral shortages.
IMO all the competing economic theories contain some truth; the difficulty is assessing their relative significance, and the timescales over which they operate. However, the COST of minerals IS closely related to the price of energy. Minerals are 'free' in the ground and the cost of getting them to where they will be of some value, in a useable form, is largely the cost of the energy required to do it. The price will not remain below the cost for long, but how high the price rises will be largely governed by supply vs. demand.
Demand destruction can be significant when the price rises too high, as seen last year in oil prices.
Substitution need not be directly by another material, but by a different technology. We used to say back in the 70's that the Chinese could never have a telephone network like the USA because there isn't enough copper, but they didn't have to because of the introduction of the mobile 'phone.
It's a very complex, and probably chaotic, hence unpredictable, subject.
Roger,
"Minerals are 'free' in the ground and the cost of getting them to where they will be of some value, in a useable form, is largely the cost of the energy required to do it"
I guess you have never invested any money in mining companies, exploration is definitely not free. Major costs include exploration, drilling out a resource, digging a shaft or an open pit, building a processing factory, building a railway or port and building ships to transport ore or refined metal and yes the fuel to operate these. Capital costs are the big costs, operating costs include fuel, labor, electricity, water, explosives, mine rehabilitation.
Yes, the startup costs are significant, but these are largely 'sunk', are borne by someone else's debt, and can not be recovered unless the price exceeds the cost of production. You can't charge more than the world price for your copper just because someone invested heavily in the mine.
Exploration and the whole construction process are hugely energy dependent. The manufacture of steel and concrete is very energy intensive.
It is often claimed that the labour component of operating costs is not energy dependent, but the costs of food, heating/cooling, and transport to the site all are.
Hello Neil1947,
IMO, you disagree with Roger because you are both looking at the problem from differing perspectives or boundary limitations, whereby Roger's boundary is larger and more eco-inclusive than yours.
Take [N]itrogen for example: this Element is Truly Free and Ubiquitous. Consider how much you inhale with every breath; we are swimming in atmospheric Element N.
The trick is all the energy and infrastructure required to get it in a usable, finished form such as nitrates, ammonia, or carbamide [urea] for plant ferts and animal feed. Us humans too--we would starve to death if our only source of N was what we could inhale, as we are not evolved to process N in this manner. Thus, the astounding sums sunk into Haber-Bosch chemical plants and the natgas infrastructure to feed biota, and the finally the Human Overshoot.
Recall my earlier posted weblink:
http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2009/05/06/06climatewire-cap-and-trade-wont...
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"We've reached the theoretical maximum in terms of what our industry can do with energy efficiency," said Kathy Mathers of the Fertilizer Institute about the industry's worries about additional carbon-cutting measures. "At this point, we're limited by the laws of chemistry."
--------------------------
..And things will only get worse as we go postPeak, IMO. Recall that the UN FAO has stated that one out of seven worldwide is now malnourished or starving. Don't think Price==> it is rising I-NPK UN-AFFORDABILITY [plus water shortages and other problems] that is driving these people into desperate conditions.
A mountain of NPK at a chem factory is worthless--it only has value when it is moved to the global farmgates, then effectively applied to each and every one of the countless squares of topsoil square foots, or square meters.
totoneila,
When it comes to nitrogen fertilizer you seem to be forgetting 3 facts:
1) ammonia synthesis uses less than 5% of Natural gas and this can be replaced by electricity from renewable energy.
2) using half the nitrogen on a crop doesn't halve the yield, because farmers have been saturating crops with nitrogen to where they get no further yield response.
3) nitrogen fixing legume crops are effective replacements for much of the nitrogen at the expense of lower cereal production(but more legumes).
When the "The Limits to Growth " came out in 1972, one half of the worlds population was either starving or malnourished, especially in India and China.
Some of the malnourishment today is due to poor balance, leading to iron, iodine, vitamin A deficiencies, not necessarily calorie deficiency. This is partly due to the great gains in rice productivity and affordability relative to legumes. Wars and political turmoil are responsible for a lot of the remaining starvation situations.
Hello Neil1947,
1) Yep, and I have been an early and strong advocate for SCT's Stranded Wind Initiative to use windturbines to make local N-products for farmers/gardeners. I fear govts are not moving fast enough to make this happen. Recall from an earlier weblink from Africa: that if the postPeak roads & vehicles get real bad: the I-NPK transport cost to the far-flung farmgate can rise up to 6X the I-NPK seaport cost.
2) No disagreement here: We need much more farmer education on soil sample testing plus extensive topsoil science research to optimize I-NPK timed-released chem-formulations so that plant uptake rates [topsoil microbiotic health is maximized], and leaching and out-gassing is minimized.
3)Yep, and I have been a strong proponent of crop rotation for N-fixation plus the legume crop residue makes additional mulch to slowly rebuild topsoil. Full-on urban-to-rural O-NPK recycling can help too.
Your Quote: "When the "The Limits to Growth " came out in 1972, one half of the worlds population was either starving or malnourished, especially in India and China."
I'm afraid we not that far away from returning to that same situation of 1/2 being hungry, except instead of 500 million [1972 WAG] it will be more like 3.5 billion [2012 WAG?]. Bill Doyle, POT's Topdog, had a warning that I posted in Leanan's DB.
What minerals are most prone to economic depletion effects ... I would say to focus on phosphates, sulfur, helium, and not minerals that can get recycled and don't disperse upon use.
Hello WHT,
My belief [could be wrong] is the key to this situation is the nexus of depleting FF-energy & PK flowrates to the final topsoil square foot, since food surpluses allow job specialization, thus civilization. IF too many people are being trampled by the Four Horsemen and severe water shortages: very few will be interested in going after the other needed Elements because they will be preoccupied with merely surviving.
Think of all the mined Easter Island stoneheads, with each one being one Element from the Periodic Table. The biggest stoneheads should be for P & K when they had plenty of food [cheap energy, high ERoEI].
Some true genius, much brighter than feeble me, needs to statistically weld together Nate's Energy Cliff graphic with a Mineral Cliff graphic. I have no idea how to accomplish this--Do you?
Hey WHT, Rembrandt, and other TOD statistical gurus:
I just had a Wild & Crazy brainstorm from way too much coffee and way too little sleep!
Maybe a way to weld together these two graphics is to go back to Asimov's Foundations of Predicted Collapse and Directed Decline plus Human Elemental Intensity Factors.
http://www.backyardnature.net/phosphor.htm
------------------------------------
A Bottleneck in Nature
Which of the above mineral elements do organisms stand the greatest chance of running out of?
The answer is: Phosphorus.
In fact, Isaac Asimov, an important science writer, has defined phosphorus as "life's bottleneck." This is true even though phosphorus is by no means the rarest mineral element. If you have a miniscule amount of something but only need a tiny, tiny bit of it, then that's less critical than if you have a fair amount of something, but you need a lot of it...
Asimov noticed that some mineral elements are more common in organism bodies than in the surrounding environment. Obviously that organism has needed to concentrate that element in itself. The degree of concentration of that element in the organism's body, then, becomes a good indication of these two things:
how much organisms need that element
how available it is in the environment
Asimov noted that phosphorus composes about 0.12% of an average soil, yet a much greater percentage of an alfalfa plant's body, about 0.7%, is phosphorus. Therefore, the "concentration factor" for phosphorus is about 5.8 (0.7/0.12).
No other mineral element even comes close to having a concentration factor as great as phosphorus's. The closest is sulfur with 2.0, then chlorine with 1.5. All the rest have less than a factor of 1.
Therefore, if there are more and more organisms needing mineral elements, or if the living ecosystem is more and more depleted of its resources, which mineral element will come into short supply first?
Phosphorus.
And since phosphorus is a mineral element that organisms absolutely must have to stay alive, it doesn't much matter whether there is enough of all the other elements...
--------------------------------
In Dana Cordell's audio link on P:
http://energybulletin.net/node/48898
[going on feeble memory now] I think she mentioned that annually/person that 120 kilograms of P must be extracted from many metric tons of raw ore to grow the food and animals to result in annually/person the 1 gram of P they need to minimally survive.
Seems to me like some sort of energy/mining equation could be derived from these concepts to create a Mineral Cliff flowrate graphic where P/energy intensity would be the largest component, then maybe S/energy intensity would be the next, and so on down through the Elements. Remember that sulphur and sulphuric acid is probably the key Element for chem-activating phosphorus plus most industrial processes, so this could be further extended into the economic productivity domain-field, too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur
----------------------
..Elemental sulfur is mainly used as a precursor to other chemicals. Approximately 85% (1989) is converted to sulfuric acid (H2SO4), which is of such prime importance to the world's economies that the production and consumption of sulfuric acid is an indicator of a nation's industrial development.[18]
For example, more sulfuric acid is produced in the United States every year than any other industrial chemical.[citation needed] The principal use for the acid is the extraction of phosphate ores for the production of fertilizer manufacturing. Other applications of sulfuric acid include oil refining, wastewater processing, and mineral extraction.[17]
-------------------------
Okay, I'm toast--off to get some shuteye.
I can almost visualize a flow-graph where the flow of energy obeys conservation laws. It will flow heavily down graph-edges that require lots of energy or huge demand, and less on those edges that require less energy or less demand. (Maybe this is no different that thinking of an electrical utility's distribution grid)
It's one of those problems that you can either analytically describe or pictorially describe. The benefit of the latter is that it can certainly help people's intuition. In my own pedantic way, that's what I think you are driving for? Please, correct me if I am wrong on my interpretation.
Hello WHT,
I think you are a lot more advanced than me as I don't have the math/statistical/analytical 'chops' that you have learned. Please keep thinking!
I was thinking more along the lines of some long, involved equation, but I have no idea if it is correct or how a 2d or 3d graph might look.
For just Element P, intensity requirement, energy requirement,depletion requirement, other factors:
{[topsoil P-content 0.12% x global hectares] x [some declination factor for erosion to ocean] x [some inclination factor for P-addition] x [5.8 intensity X pop.] x [[ore-tonnage mined]/[joules/ton]]}
---------------------------
{[Some constant that is energy related] x [de-rating factor for declining FF-EROEI] x [de-rating factor for P-depletion] x [other factors?]}
Then a similar equation for sulfur, but change the respective factors, then next, chlorine,..and so on down through the periodic table. Then these Elemental ratios would be summed? multiplied for the respective energy interactions?
Chart each year with past populations, then extend into the future with expected populations--maybe it might show degrees of Overshoot and complexity overload more clearly in lots of societal processes.
Maybe you would end up with something like the 'Limits To Growth' research, but the addition of some energy/intensity factor might show that general and specific scarcity is much closer than we think and we need to rapidly start conserving pronto.
I was thinking that as 3 million tons of P/year go to the ocean bottom while our global pop. was increasing [but bio-elemental intensity remained genetically fixed]: we might all have to be farmers and O-NPKS recyclers pretty damn quick.
Tantalum might be nice for having electronics, but P @ 5.8, and S @ 2.0 might mean that fertilizer takes a much higher importance. Again, I am no guru--I hope you or some other smart person can concieve of some method to take it to a higher level. Thxs for your reply,WHT.
Sounds a like a good test for the Newly launched Wolfram Alpha
http://www.wolframalpha.com/
Let us try it:
AI has yet to arrive
LOL!
That might actually be a sign of intelligence! It's being honest.
Seriously I tried some variations on the theme and the results were very disappointing to say the least. It didn't even recognize oil field names or know anything about oil deposits.I was able to get one chemical formula for petroleum and long term financial projections for Petrobras and Exxon.
It does ask for feedback if you are an expert so maybe it is programmed to learn from inputs.
totoneila,
I think P is the critical element that needs to be considered because of it's importance for plant and animal growth and its unusual chemistry making it only partially available.
If you are going to consider P in topsoil, also need to consider whats in sub-soil and the 0.1-0.5%P in basal( at least the first few hundred meters in agricultural regions). Of course sub-soil can be accessed directly by plants, but to access basalt, would need to dig up and break/grind into rock particles. Some tree roots go down 50 meters and do break up the subsoil but I am not sure if they access any very deep P?
How quickly is P recycled via fish from the ocean back to land?
Forget about sulfur, it's about as abundant as magnesium in sea water(molar basis), will be returned to the sea long before sea water is depleted. Similarly for potassium(although slightly less abundant) which is extracted today( India 3million tonnes) by precipitation as carnallite(MgClKCl hydrate).
Helium has become important for medical care as it is used in the growing numbers of MRI units. I believe that MRI may now be the # 1 use. At one time helium extracted from unusually helium rich natural gas was stored near Amarillo, awaiting new uses, That program was controversial due to the expense involved. I believe that it has been largely phased out.
-- Recycling is not always easy, Imagine trying to recycle the silver used for cloud seeding, burn therapy or water purification. It takes energy and material to recover silver from photographic solutions. See iron exchange systems or Faraday's Law for example.
We are not running out of sulfer. It's waste material from oil refineries that they give away for shipping costs.
The price of sulfur set a record in 2008 but has since undergone a remarkable decrease from about $329 to $41! In the distant past while surveying sulfur and other minerals used in medical practice, I was surprised at the accessibility of the USGS commodity specialists. Some even answered their own phone. I don't know if this is still true. For the record I do not necessarily trust all pronouncements of the USGS, especially those dealing with energy.
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/sulfur/mis-200901-sulfu...
Sulfer is like Gallium in that it is a byproduct of oil refinery. If there was more demand for sulfer, the refineries could produce whatever necessary since they have to get that stuff out of their oil stream anyways. But there isn't.
Every rock that isn't an oxide is a sulfide. I mean c'mon.
Crushing rocks to get fertilizer .. sounds like fun. The easy picking days are apparently over. Most of the big lodes are found and depleted according to Gompertz dynamics.
http://www.geotimes.org/july03/resources.html
Byproduct sulfur — recovered to minimize the emission of sulfur dioxide at petroleum refineries and to eliminate poisonous hydrogen sulfide from natural gas supplies — now comprises 100 percent of domestic elemental sulfur production, which totals 8.5 million tons. Sulfur resources amenable to recovery through the Frasch method still exist in the United States; but the high energy requirement and cost of the method forced the closure of the last mine in 2000. Domestic sulfur supplies are insufficient to meet current demand, so the United States imports from Canada, Mexico and Venezuela.
That is not correct. Frasch sulfur disappeared, not because of resource depletion, but because it could not economically compete with byproduct sulfur.
Hello Robert2374,
..and therein lies a 'diminishing return' problem as we will eventually be forced to use much more energy as we gradually [speedily?] are forced to reopen Frasch sulfur mining to get this vital Element.
Recall that this is #1 on the industrial chemical list [primarily for superphosphating raw P-ores into finished I-NPK], and #2 on Asimov's Human Bio-Elemental Intensity Factors [see my other posting on this thread]. The other Elements fall far below.
I am currently racking my brains trying to combine Dana Cordell's data points and Asimov's list to rough out some kind of brute force equation. I would appreciate any other TODer thoughts on this topic, pro or con. :)
Well yeah, but we aren't simply running out of sulfur. I don't know anything about helium and phosporous. But when people claim we are running out of gallium and tantalum and indium and gosh every metal there is, it is TOD's credibility that takes a hit.
I have spent much time working out the model of dispersive discovery and how it applies to sporadically and randomly occurring resource reservoirs. Certain geological and oftentimes ecological conditions (as in guano for phosphates) lead to characteristic discovery and depletion dynamics. Where reservoirs are truly dispersed, in terms of search efforts and non-localization, the decline tends to broaden out. That basically describe fossil fuels. However, when the reserves are not really dispersed at all, such as the characteristic phosphate deposits, you see the Gompertz curve which crashes pretty hard. I contend the narrow range of the sulfur deposits along the Gulf coast showed that effect as well.
Please explain why this taints TOD's credibility? Is it somehow wrong to discuss models of the dynamics ... as if teams of researchers at universities and corporations actually attempt to do any of this analysis (not).
Because when evidence is shown that we're not running out of some particular metal, it makes the "we're running out of everything!" claim - and the website making it - look ill-informed and overly alarmist. There are good arguments to be made that some important minerals are approaching supply problems, but the available evidence does not support the claim that all of them are doing so simultaneously.
If one makes a claim that is quickly proved wrong, then people are justifiably skeptical of other claims that one has made. That's how it's a problem for TOD's credibility.
I have used in research almost all the pure elemental materials mentioned so far. Gallium for semis, helium for cryo, etc. From my experience on how these materials are being used, I know what shortages will be important.
Phosphorus as used a dopant in semiconductors will not get impacted by any shortage, yet organically appropriate phosphorus used in huge quantities for agricultural applications might well be.
And, BTW, since you are such a concern troll, I understand why you took my statement completely out of context.
Gallium is a byproduct of aluminum mining that they don't bother to refine because nobody wants it. Sure it's important but it is also abundant.
Where did I ever say that gallium was the issue? I grew GaAs crystals and realize the only reason it is expensive is that if you want to use it for semiconductors you may need 7-nines purity.
I don't know why anyone would use gallium otherwise, it is liquid at room temperature and forms a eutectic with stuff like aluminum. In a semiconductor lab, it is very common to use aluminum foil as a clean surface. I discovered quickly that you should never spill gallium on said foil, as you find that it essentially burns through the foil and creates a big mess.
Now if we ever were able to make GaAs into a workable ruggedizable and cheap solar cell material, and have it cover millions of acres, we might have an issue with scarcity. But we haven't so we don't.
Read what I said. I said I know how to distinguish between what is important and what is not. Why do you concern trolls put words in my mouth?
I suspect the major use for gallium is or can become LEDs. GaN, GaP, InGaP, etc. GaAs is used for microwave power amps but how many of those do we need. Gallium is also used for neutrino detectors but there isn't a mass market for those.
Yes, the column III-V heterogeneous semiconductors have all sorts of marvelous electrical properties including a high mobility and a direct band gap which makes them suitable for optical applications. The active junctions of these devices are measured in the microns, so we all know that they will not require lots of material. I knew all this 20 years ago when I did my PhD on properties of III-V compounds.
And your point exactly is what?
That's very nice, but not what we're talking about. The original statement was:
"But when people claim we are running out of gallium and tantalum and indium and gosh every metal there is, it is TOD's credibility that takes a hit."
We've already seen how there are large amounts of several metals, such as gallium, that are thrown away because they're not considered valuable enough to refine. Accordingly, it is not true that we're running out of every metal, and so claims that we are - which do occasionally surface here - are not correct, and hence cause credibility problems.
This has nothing to do with you or your own research; you keep replying as if it did, but that keeps missing the issue at hand.
Reported as a violation of the Reader Guidelines:
4) Treat members of the community with civility and respect. If you see disrespectful behavior, report it to the staff rather than further inflaming the situation.
5) Ad hominem attacks are not acceptable. If you disagree with someone, refute their statements rather than insulting them.
That you dislike my arguments does not justify insults, and does not cover for your lack of counter-arguments.
And yet I am the biggest concern troll of them all, since I keep on trying to get non-heuristic models in our mindset. I think that no one takes us seriously unless we can formulate fundamental understanding of depletion dynamics.
I don't even know who first mentioned gallium as a constrained resource. I would model it like any other resource I came across and see what comes out.
Pitt,
You are a professional obfuscator. Maybe a barrister by trade?
You might wish to read more carefully; I was clarifying and explaining a point that WHT had misunderstood.
As a general rule of thumb, if you ever think I am attempting to obfuscate something, you can be quite sure that you have misread and misunderstood.
Sorry, I disagree, even if your intentions are otherwise.
I agree that it is hard to figure out Pitt's intentions. He claims I misunderstood something. I don't think I was confused. I acknowledged that someone slipped in gallium as some sort of depleting material, and I indicated that it is marginally used as an electronics commodity.
I don't really care to go around policing any mention of resources on this site. I look for good analogies wherever I can find them. I won't dismiss out of hand some suggestion by somebody that we look at the dynamics of a particular resource's depletion. I do think it can help us understand the bigger picture. No one else seems to do this but a few of us here on TOD.
Some more brief thoughts:
Imagine some kind of horrific Sci-Fi disaster whereby phosphate ores were suddenly ejected from the planet to form a white phosphor meteor ring around the moon. We would be instantly forced to go to full-on O-NPK recycling, and the 'Numero Uno' task of global society would be to recover any incoming, screaming, blazing bright-white phosphor meteors that subsequently landed [becoming burning meteorites] so that we could extinguish the white hot flames, then move the Element P into the I-NPK chem-factories.
Besides the obvious mayhem of tens of thousands of meteors raining down fire [google images below]...
http://images.google.com/images?gbv=2&hl=en&sa=1&q=white+phosphorus+expl...
...we would be back to very, very energy efficient 'surface mining' of highly concentrated P-ores. No overburden, no super-intense beneficiation required; just more careful plucking of the nuggets like the discoverer of gold at Sutter's Mill.
I guess we should be glad that bat & birds don't drop flaming white phosphorus nuggets on our heads and vehicles, but we sure miss their guano piles built up over thousands of years.
"I guess we should be glad that bat & birds don't drop flaming white phosphorus nuggets on our heads and vehicles, but we sure miss their guano piles built up over thousands of years."
The reference to guano prompts me to link back to Aldous Huxley on phosphorus- Point Counter Point 1928. Scroll down.
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/42264
Great link! Thxs!
Phosphorus going into the sea is not being lost, its recycled by marine organisms, birds and fish and eventually returned to land as phosphorus deposits. Since 1928 2,000 million tones of phosphate rock reserves have been found in Australia, other deposits are more convenient to mine.
I think everyone has to have a sense of the scale of time. Reclamation via nature's normal recycling and aggregation would take eons in the scale of human needs.
WebHubble,
Whats your evidence that phosphorus is not being recycle quickly, I am talking about P flushed to sea via sewerage, does it dissolve, or if it is precipitated in sediments, is it accessed by marine organisms?
We know P is being removed from the sea as marine harvests(foods, bird droppings)), kelp.
New P is being released from P rock, basalt weathering, accumulation from subsoil by roots??
Up to now
Guano has high phosphate content. Birds make guano. Guano is poop. Birds poop small amounts. Birds fly over ocean. Birds find island. Birds poop on island. Poop builds up. Multiply by thousands of years. Man finds poop islands. Good poop says man. Man excavates poop. Man excavates faster. No more islands. All poop gone.
After Now
Bird decides to poop on island. Man holds spoon underneath pooping bird. Man hurries off to put on crops.
I am not really serious here, but just in case you missed the main point.
In other words you don't have a clue how many millions of tonnes of P is recycled each year from the oceans fish harvest, the 100's of millions birds along the 100's thousands of km of coast lines.
Of course it gets recycled that way. But the entropic dispersion is huge. You would have to wait thousands of years to get heavily concentrated and therefore easily extracted deposits. The guano equivalent of Cantarell, so to speak. Nauru was the Cantarell of phosphate mining. No way will that happen again, Nauru will turn into just an ordinary Pacific island.
Thanks for using the key word, entropy. We should perhaps take more consideration of the second law of thermodynamics on TOD. Then some of our discussions might not sound so fatuous. We burn energy, as individuals and as a society, to temporarily reverse the results of entropy, but entropy wins in the end.
A concentrated mineral deposit might be considered as a place where extremely fortuitous natural circumstances have temporarily reversed the entropic dispersion that dominates nature, so that we don't have to do do the mineral concentration ourselves, at a huge expenditure of energy.
Perhaps, but it may be viable to extract it directly from seawater. That's already being done for some minerals (e.g., magnesium), and searching online turns up a few papers (mostly paywalled, unfortunately) looking into phosphorus extraction, so it doesn't seem like there are a priori reasons why it couldn't be done.
That doesn't mean it can be done, of course; I'm just pointing out that we don't know enough to conclusively say that phosphorus dispersed into the ocean is "lost".
Phosphorus in nature mainly occurs as the calcium phosphate mineral apatite, the same mineral that your bones and teeth are made out of. It is nearly insoluble in sea water, and organisms are constantly extracting what little there is to make their own bones and teeth. Therefore if you are talking about extracting it from sea water, you are essentially talking about fishing.
While they are at it they can desalinate the seawater. And we know how energy intensive a proposition that is :)
Use the phosphorus extracted for fertilizer for the crops and then use the freshwater extracted to water the crops. Yea, that will work ... for a while.
What are you talking about here? Sarcasm perhaps? Did you mean to say "every ORE that isn't an oxide is a sulfide."? The majority of rocks in Earth's crust are - by far - neither oxides, nor sulfides; they're SILICATES including ALUMINOSILICATES, with feldspars (e.g. orthoclase, KAlSi3O8) , quartz (SiO2), and clays (e.g. kaolinite, Al2Si2O5(OH)4), being among the most abundant minerals that make up the rocks of the crust.
Throughout this discussion of mineral depletion, it seems to me that there is a need to recognize that what we're really talking about here is depletion of useful earth materials in a chemical form(s) that is most beneficial to modern industrial uses. A post upthread noted that dispersal after use is a problem with certain elements such as phosphorus and helium, and that is certainly true, in contrast to, for example, aluminum, titanium, copper, and nickel, which are less susceptible to chemical oxidation and can be recycled many times. Globally, many of our most important mineral resources are metal ores (most of which are in fact oxides and sulfides), and once those ores are smelted to produce the metal in its elemental form, that metal can be used and reused/recycled many times, IF the energy for alloying and remolding the elemental metal is available.
This is in great contrast to what happens chemically when fossil fuels are burned, and the chemically reduced carbon in coal, oil, and natural gas is oxidized and dispersed as oxidized carbon, i.e., CO2. In that form, the carbon can no longer be reused or recycled in the way we would like (i.e., burned for FUEL) unlike many metals in their elemental form that can be used in alloys and other forms indefinitely.
Probably the biggest BIG exception to this statement about being able to recycle metals many times is elemental iron, Fe, because of its susceptibility to oxidation (whereby elemental Fe, the principal component of steel, reacts with elemental oxygen, O2, in the presence of water to form common rust, Fe2O3). Structural engineers around the world spend a lot of time checking steel structures for corrosion (read: oxidation) damage, and a lot of methods (e.g. painting, galvanizing, cathodic protection, to name three) are used in the ongoing effort to minimize corrosion of steel.
Another comment upthread stated that there are "billions of years of supply of magnesium, potassium, and iron" or something like that. This is true if we're simply considering the Elemental abundance in Earth's crust but as with all substances in the crust, it's the CONCENTRATION of the element that matters. As the higher grade ores are mined out, the lower grade ores are - or are not - mined. Iron is indeed a very abundant element in the Earth's crust, but it's probably unlikely that we'll ever start processing pyrite, biotite, amphibole, garnet, epidote, olivine, pyroxene, or other abundant Fe-bearing minerals that nonetheless are not so Fe-rich as to be economically important sources of Fe.
Julian Simon might have been right in the short term about those mineral resources that produce usable metals in their elemental state and which - in that elemental state - are thus able to reused and recycled many times (even though he seemed to have a woefully inadequate understanding of basic chemistry and physics, if he really thought that we could make copper from "other materials"). IMHO, however, there's little to no chance that he'll be right in the long term about fossil fuels, which change their oxidation state immediately upon use (combustion), and result in a form of carbon that can no longer be used for fuel. Metals and their ores deplete slowly (e.g. Fe) or not at all (e.g. Au, Pt) via oxidation, but fossil fuels deplete immediately via oxidation.
Enough chemistry for one post.
Petrographer,
Technically SiO2 is an oxide of Si, and the other minerals are mixed oxides. More sulfur is present in sulfates, especially gypsum.
My comment about billions of years supply, for example Magnesium is presently produced from sea water, and sulfates and potassium salts can easily be extracted because of their high concentration.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundances_of_the_elements_(data_page)#Sea_water. Thus SO4 is similar concentration in sea water as Mg, and K is about one third the concentration of Mg.
Iron was very abundant in oceans 2 Billion years ago as Ferrous ion, but blue green algae precipitated it as iron oxide in very large deposits up to 100 meters thick and >100,000 sq km in area. We are not going to run out of iron oxide, but we may have to start using ores that are only 30-40% pure rather than >80% pure iron oxide, extraction and concentration costs may double or triple in the next thousand years.
The %loss of iron due to rust is trivial, and most iron oxide is recovered in electric arc furnaces. Not all iron is recycled but a good proportion could be(>90%).
Actually, the high grade iron ores you mention were used up long ago. For at least the past 40 years mined iron ores have been closer to 10% than to 80% (so-called taconite ore), but this has not been a major problem owing to iron's unusual property of magnetism (in the oxide mineral magnetite). This property makes low grade iron ores unusually cheap to concentrate using only a magnet, commonly after grinding and roasting them.
metalman,
Both Australia and Brazil have several hundred years supply of >85% hematite(non-magnetic) as well as considerable reserves of >40% magnetite.
Reference? That type of direct smelting ore hasn't been mined in North America for many decades, and was formed mainly by surficial weathering of the far more prevalent low grade taconite ores. Also, 40 years ago open pit copper mines in the US Southwest generally were mining 0.5-1% ores; some new ones now are mining 0.1-0.2% ores (mainly using acid leaching).
metalman,
this is a link to BHPB, 65% Fe is >90% pure hematite, Brazil exports slightly purer lump.
http://www.bhpbilliton.com/bbContentRepository/docs/productspecironorelu...
These deposits are not concentrated just screened and sorted as lump and fines.
The deposits in Australia were discovered in mid 1960's , Brazil's major deposits in mid 1970's. These are massive deposits up to 100 meters thick, extending for hundred of kms. Some deposits are higher in P, so not as valuable, at least until be start extracting P from blast furnace slag. Most were precipitated as Fe(OH)2 at 90C, 2.2 Billion years ago and have not been weathered to any extent(AFAIK).
From that link, I'm afraid you are confusing the grade of the concentrate (what they produce at the mine) with the much lower grade of the raw ore. All marketeable iron concentrates will have similar grades.
Metalman,
You are completely wrong, these deposits are being scooped up, crushed, run over a screen to separate fines and lump and loaded onto 2km unit trains, then strait into ships, >200Million tonnes per year. They are not concentrates. Brazil has slightly purer deposits, and as I said the other critical factor is P levels are slightly higher in some deposits.
You may be thinking of some Magnetite mines where magnetic concentration is performed.
I have visited some of the sites, these are mega mines, massive deposits like the "white cliffs of Dover " only red, high grade (50-60% Fe ) for hundreds of kms, they only mine grades above 59% Fe at present.
This link describes the process at the largest iron ore mine in the world:
http://www.bhpbilliton.com/bb/ourBusinesses/ironOre/miningAndProcessing.jsp
@Boof
The problem is not necessarily about a 'physical'shortage but an economic induced one due to price increases. Technology will not infinitely be able to reduce costs.
Hear Hear! Right on the mark there Boof-and not just because you are a fellow Aussie. With due respect to people who put in the research here. When we look at the dire immediate prognosis for energy, biodiversity, water,land, and air (in any order), citing mineral availability as an issue is barking up the wrong tree IMO.
Thanks to all you TODer's out there. Keeping me on the razor's edge.
Hear Hear! Right on the mark there Boof-and not just because you are a fellow Aussie. With due respect to people who put in the research here. When we look at the dire immediate prognosis for energy, biodiversity, water,land, and air (in any order), citing mineral availability as an issue is barking up the wrong tree IMO.
Thanks to all you TODer's out there. Keeping me on the razor's edge.
Now that the price of gas is dropping, there is some relief at the pump. However, the rest of the economy is so bad that people aren't going back to their previous gas-guzzling ways, and that is nothing but good for the country and the planet. Hell, GM may even stop making Hummers! I drive a Prius and can now fill my tank for less than $20 here in California. That gets me about 400 miles a tank and I'm happy as hell. But beyond the fuel economy, I realize that Toyota, much like other foreign car manufacturers, builds a lot of its cars here in the US and they don't seem to be going bankrupt. That means jobs for US workers making cars that outperform the USAI right here at home! Amazing. And I keep coming back to the question: why did our Auto industry fight for so long against raising CAFE standards? And why didn't our Government put the right tax relief in place to make it easy and profitable for them to use every technological advance to make the best cars on the planet? Because raising CAFE standards means using less gas, which is not good for the bottom line of "the biggest U.S. corporation this year by revenue" and their close associates. And that includes their friends in Congress. The buck may stop at the top but it passes through a lot of hands on the way. So come on, Big Oil~ bailout your "friends" at GM, Ford and Chrysler so they can save those millions of American jobs! I'd say it's the least you can do, but we've seen less from you. And in the end, we both know that Chinese cars will still run on gas and make your profits sizzle. And that is what matters most to your shareholders and your bottom line. You don't care if we think you're a big bunch of dicks as long as we still pony up at the pump and are enslaved to oil. It is my sincere hope that President Obama ushers in a new era of Small Oil so we have a choice (besides bicycles and foot power) to get off gasoline for good. Bring on alternative fuels!
Hello TODers,
As most here already know, I have a tremendous curiosity towards the nexus of energy and minerals, especially the Elements P & K for supporting agriculture. IMO, the problem of extreme mineral scarcity profoundly arises as we go postPeak.
The desired mineral or Element is basically free; it is just located somewhere in the Earth's crust. The crux of the matter is the necessary application of energy to extract it==>in some [most?] cases monumental amounts of energy to remove the overburden, excavate the raw ore, crush it to a fine powder, then dose it with various chem-train processes and/or further physical/electrical refining to separate/coalesce the undesired residue from the finished, concentrated product.
Further processes and energy should be required to ecologically rehabilitate the gaping, open mine-holes and safe handling/storage of any polluted slag piles. Easier said than done as many vital 'externalities' are already widely ignored around the planet.
The Author John Tilton's quote: "the race between the cost-increasing effects of depletion and the cost-reducing effects of new technology."
IMO, this quote doesn't contain enough useful or illustrative info [and I will further argue that it is an ERRONEOUS STATEMENT if a broad boundary energy & eco-analysis is applied].
Perhaps, it should be rewritten thusly: "The race between [the cost-increases resulting from having to go ever deeper & further for ever more quantities of always weaker ore-deposits plus ever increasing energy inputs, infrastructure processing, and expanding externalities] and [the cumulative cost-INCREASING effects of new technology and additional energy to go after these ever-diminishing returns per ton of finished product].
Consider gold, for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush
The very first ton extracted around California's Sutter Mill in 1848 probably needed no externalities or infrastructure--picking big, nearly pure nuggets by hand, or minimal gold-panning--the stream essentially ran pure for fish and the wildlife was mostly unharmed [harvest rate < natural reproduction, because of few Californions].
Each successive gold ton required ever more people and more advanced equipment causing more eco-damage until corps had to be formed to continue to inject more energy and eco-destructive infrastructure.
From the WIKI link above:
--------------------
"At its peak, technological advances reached a point where significant financing was required - increasing the proportion of corporate to individual miners. Gold, worth billions of today's dollars, was recovered, which led to great wealth for a few. However, many returned home with little more than they started with.
---------------------
If each tech advance had actually resulted in a COST-REDUCTION==> the miners would have gradually gotten much richer with each tech improvement, NOT POORER or barely equal financially. If legislation had been in place back then to account for ALL the rehabilitative 'externalities', then maybe nobody would have made a thin dime.
Cali probably first hit carrying-capacity Overshoot by the 1900s, and the subsequent discovery of oil and the massive watershed diversion programs [Colorado River, Owens Valley, etc] has only allowed this Overshoot to exponentially increase. Consider all the extinct and endangered biota in this biome today: from little Delta chubs to incredible Giant Sequoia, Condors to Bristlecone Pines. Recall that the California Black Bear is on their State Flag.
Today, 50-100 TONs of raw ore are highly processed to get just one OUNCE of gold with massive equipment, giant heap-leaching ops, and mind-boggling amounts of energy. Recall that many mines now have to pump large quantites of water out so that they can follow the ore deposit downward.
Compare the cost, time, and sheer effort of this tech-process to James W. Marshall's [original discoverer] tech-process: just eyeballing the streambed, then picking big, nearly pure nuggets out with his hands, then quickly stashing them into his rucksack! His total cost, for many gold ounces, was probably 8 hours of water-logged boots, some beef-jerky, and some strong whiskey to help contain his excitement!
Sadly, Nevada, and other mining areas, has many abandoned open pits that will now pull aquifer water, for hundreds or thousands of years, into the excavation, where it will concentrate toxics as the sun evaporates this vital fluid. What is the cost of this ignored externality to people & wildlife as surface streams disappear into the bottom sand miles and miles from the normal destination?
I have discussed this phenomena [with just-checked, still active, embedded weblinks] before back on July 3,2006:
http://www.theoildrum.com/comments/2006/7/2/184320/9021/20
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The Cost of Gold | Water Worries
Drier, Tainted Nevada May Be Legacy of Gold Rush--NYTimes
When they are gone, the vast pits they leave behind will create a deficit in the aquifer equivalent to 20 to 25 years of the total flow of Nevada's longest river, the Humboldt, according to state figures tallied by independent scientists. That is three times as much water as New York City stores in its entire upstate reservoir system...
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Thus, one could argue that the true cost of Nevada gold should include the cost of building a potable water pipeline from Wall Street back to the Humboldt!
As posted many times before here on TOD: How many men would buy gem-studded, precious metal jewelry for their prospective bride if they also had to wheelbarrow home 50-100 tons of overburden, and toxic residue?
Each successive tech advance has resulted in more cost, more eco-damage, more specifically designed infrastructure, more chemicals, more mining equipment, and especially much more energy. Isn't this intuitively, bald common sense blatantly obvious? It is to me.
A cat barely buries it feces; it doesn't dig an eight foot hole first, then refill it after taking a crap. We now dig holes thousands of feet deep, then leave our crap [overburden & toxic residue] on the surface everywhere--of course this takes mind-boggling amounts of energy, and when we get to a certain postPeak FF-flowrate==>most of this mining will stop.
Okay, let's look at another example, the Non-Substitutable Elements NPK and other trace elements [like Sulfur] required for Photosynthesis.
In the olden days: O-NPK was natural and low-tech [good-to-go directly in the topsoil]; animal manures, bones, Atacama Nitrates, and naturally super-phosphated guano. This is just easy 'surface mining' and the biggest infrastructure investment would have been in wind-powered sailing ships [not much FFs burned for a round trip from Britain to Chile or Nauru, duh!].
As posted many times before here on TOD:
http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0302hsted/030212campbell/campbell%201...
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What would the reader think, if he were asked to invest in a gold mine from which all of the ore had been taken out, and, at the end of a year, it had all replaced itself? What would he think, if he had, attached to his mercantile establishment, a warehouse in which, as fast as the goods were removed for display and sale, they would replace themselves without the expenditure on his part of one grain of energy or one cent in money!
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If one carefully examines this link's photos-- not much in energy and infrastructure required here.
Now let's compare to modern day cost of the supposed tech advance of I-NPK: billion$$ in worldwide Haber-Bosch N-factories for ammonia & urea powered by natgas; supergiant draglines and miles of conveyor belts for P-mining in Morocco, Florida; miles and miles of K-mining tunnels 1,000 meters below Saskatchewan with giant chem-factories above; plus numerous crude refineries and natgas-processing facilities extracting recovered sulfur so that it can be applied as sulfuric acid to phosphate ores to chem-create industrial superphosphated I-NPK. Is this tech advance really cheaper? I doubt it.
What happens when we get depleting FFs causing cascading blowbacks into depleting mined-minerals? Will a farmer trade food for a big screen tv or precious metals? Or do you think he will prefer to trade for a bag of NPK? Have you hugged your bag of NPK today?
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
"What happens when we get depleting FFs"
We build more renewable wind and solar energy just as we have been doing in the last few years.
You may be right that we will run out of phosphate rock, make a convincing case, has there been much exploration in Africa and Australia for phosphate? What about the "Duchess deposits" in Australia (1300 million tonnes ) can be applied to crops without any processing. The fact that it isn't being mined but plans are for 5million tonnes per year(250 years supply) would suggest we will have some phosphate for a long while. See Notholt, Sheldon and Davidson "Phosphate deposits of the world"
Largest currently mined reserves of P are in Northwest Africa [Morocco area], but some corp is now investigating seabed dredging off Namibia [sp?] [google Namibia + phosphate]-->I'm no dredging expert, but I can't imagine what that will do the the area sealife. :(
I will have to read up on the Duchess deposits. Might be great for OZ, but the UN FAO Fert Forecast [again google] projects North America to be headed into P-deficit-->The USA better save its tall trees to make fast, postPeak Clipperships. Or will we use our Nuke aircraft carriers to ferry these goods?
Anyhow, it is not the size of the reserves, but the flowrate to the final topsoil square foot. If the energy cost/ton of OZ->USA gets too high, we will have to ramp local O-NPK because it WILL BE Cheaper, Faster, and more Convenient.
I hope we can get the wind & solar built out before TSHTF.
I believe that it is more or less accepted as a truism (or at least a sarcasm!)that new thinking can emerge in fields such as art and history only as the old bulls die off,vacating thier university chairs.Apparently economics as a field is in the same boat.The old guys locked into the old paradigms are either the guys running the banks and govt buercracys or at least the most senior advisers.There is nothing new in this comment,of course.
You would think that geologists and miners would after a lifetime of moving from one jobsite to another would take the possibility of depletion more seriously,but apparently the intellectual ruts just wear deeper every year,and they slip into the same tar pit of complacency as the economists-who after all are in this situation because the miners have PROVEN to them that we won't run out of minerals SIMPLY because we HAVE'NT run out.Still nothing new here of course.
So the question is now ,when the revolution comes,who do we kill first,the lawyers,the economists,or the bankers, and do we throw in the geologists and miners for good measure,along with the engineers and the odd bueracrat,as we ramp up the guillotines?
Just kidding of course.But future historians might not be.
True enough also of science and medicine, unfortunately. When I went to University, geologists (and that included the senior Prof) were not allowed to contemplate continental drift as science. 'Peer pressure', especially of the vested interest top-down kind is mighty powerful.
Are you running for office? I notice a conspicuous absence of the inclusion of politicians in your list there ;-) Though I guess bureaucrats are a good stand in.
Umm. As a mining geologist who knows all about depletion (it's not a possiblity, but a sure thing via simple subtraction), I feel obligated to point out that Hubbert was a geologist, as are many other well-known peak oilers (e.g., Colin Campbell, Kenneth Deffeyes). At a well-known eastern university, one of my mining geology professors was actively plotting and lecturing about Hubbert-type curves for metals (discovery peaks must be followed by production peaks) way back in the late 1960's. It's not so complicated. What makes you think that economists (modelers) and politicians (salesmen) pay any more attention to mining professionals than they do to energy professionals? The only "tar pit of complacency" for most mining geologists I know involves the timing. It's difficult to convince most of them that the time for peak is now, or very soon. Mentioning "running out of metals" raises a red flag, because it's not the issue at all.
Well he has a point! (not)
One the whole I think that energy is key. Declining ore grades for metals mean ever larger amounts need to be brought to the surface for a given amount of end product. This means escalating energy requirement AND escalating mounds of tailings, pollution, water consumption. Simply transporting ever larger amounts of unprocessed raw material becomes ever more energy expensive. All of these things will combine to drive up the cost of metals out of proportion to their depletion. Which in turn makes energy extraction more expensive. There was a very virtuous circle on the upside of the industrial era that will become very unvirtuous on the way down.
One also needs to keep on eye on minerals, there being a vast range of those that are in varying degrees also critical to industrialism. Similar remarks apply.
Rembrandt,
Davebygolly has an excellent point about energy usage per unit extracted. Does the book look at energy usage at all?
If I understand the basic fight between the geologists and the economists is this one:
The economist argue that because the price of minerals has dropped over time, that technology must be winning out over depletion.
And the geologists have argued that yes price has dropped, but that is because expensive capital and labor have been replaced with lots of cheap energy.
Now, everyone here knows that energy is going to get scarce. So the economist argument would totally hinge on technology decreasing labor, capital, AND energy fast enough to match depletion.
Does he make that case in any way?
@JonFreise
The book by Tilton does not cover the relationship of energy and mineral extraction. That case is not made.
Metal minerals scarcity: A call for managed austerity and the elements of hope
Several different, recent studies have noted the upcoming shortfall in crucial information technology metal substrates, including this one. There will not be a long term recovery, let alone growth in mindless technological consumerism.
That is the basic problem. The planet is finite. In an extractive paradigm, we will reach the peak and eventually the end of any resource that is extracted. Simple, physical fact.
A new update of the 1952 President's Materials Policy Commission (Paley Commission) is being planned. The original Paley Commission was prematurely pessimistic.
http://minerals.cr.usgs.gov/projects/nat_assess_planning/
Edit: to add:
ENERGY - as an ultimate raw material or - problems of burning the seas and burning the rocks; by Alvin M Weinberg in Physics Today Nov 1959. Weinberg emphasized the role of energy in the "Asymptotic State of Humanity" He notes that energy is required to produce materials. . He cites the work of Sir Charles Galton Darwin, Hans Thirring, and especially Harrison Brown author of The Next Hundred Years and The Challenge of Man's Future. Harrison Brown opined that eventually mankind would have to make due with only four basic raw materials: the sea, the air, the sun and rocks of average composition. Of course in 1959 Weinberg had more hope for nuclear power.
A common theme of the optimists is to rely on some unspecified new cost reducing technology. Those with physical science and engineering backgrounds can study the science and technology timeline and see the most significant entries, which total only a few hundred. These discoveries are the basis of chemistry and physics and led to all of our modern technology. Many of our scientific discoveries involved applying mathematics to observations, such as the laws of planetary motion that resulted in Newton’s formulation of the mathematics describing the interrelationship between mass, motion and gravity. Newton’s revolutionary work allowed later mathematicians and physicists to explain thermodynamics and electromagnetic theory and eventually nuclear physics. Thermodynamics originated from the study of steam engine efficiency and later evolved into physical chemistry.
Mineral extraction involves energy for moving massive quantities of earth, rock and water. The first steam engines were developed specifically for this type of work, in English coal mines. Thermodynamics sets the limits of useful work obtainable from heat energy, be it ether it be from fuel, nuclear or solar. The first steam engines were maybe two percent efficient. By the late 1800’s, steam engine powered factories were less than 4% efficient, half of the power loss being in the line-shaft and belt systems. Today with electricity we have factories with greater than 30% efficiency, or more than ten times the original steam engines and approaching the theoretical limit. The most efficient processes such as combined cycle are 60% and very large diesel engines for ships around 50%. In my wildest dreams I can’t see us improving efficiency more than another 10%.
Another factor in mineral extraction is ore processing, which is either mechanical, chemical, thermal or a combination. Some ores are crushed and separated by using a foaming agent to float either a concentrate or the waste material. Other ores can be leached with cyanide or some other reagent. All of these processes have been around for decades. The concentrates go to a smelter for final refining.
There are possibilities fro using biological techniques to concentrate minerals. It is also possible to recover more minerals as byproducts, such as sulfur from petroleum and coal and gallium from aluminum and zinc refining. It would be great if we would recover mercury and a few other pollutants from burning coal and cadmium and uranium from phosphates, uranium recovery becoming uneconomical until recently.
Modern mineral geophysical exploration technology began with electronic instruments that could detect gravity and magnetic anomalies and reflected shock waves from explosive charges. These technologies date to the late 1920’s and were efficient in finding most of our current oil and gas. We also built up a vast database of the geology of the subsurface from the drill cores and electric logs of the bore holes. In recent decades we have used satellite data to locate favorable areas for mineral deposits.
I am not saying that there will be no incremental improvements in mineral extraction. The question is whether the incremental improvements can offset the continuously lower resource quality. We certainaly will not repeat the ten fold increase in the conversion of energy work we achieved in the last century.
Declining or only slightly increasing metals prices are not big drivers of modern economies, otherwise S Africa, Australia and Canada would be the highest GDP nations on earth, and Japan would be towards the bottom.
A good example is the price of steel, $300-1000 a tonne, the price of a motor vehicle $10-50,000 /tonne. Cost of a movie, software program, almost any product consumed the cost of materials is very minor, even food items( bread).
Skilled labor and capital together provide wealth from "earth air fire and water"
Comparisons of one country with another are looking at the wrong scale. Globalization means that countries specialise (in accordance with the theory of comparative advantage), so the only appropriate scale of analysis is the global one.
When international trade was much more restricted and each country attempted to provide its own needs, this was not the case.
So nowadays comparing Canada to Japan is inappropriate. It's like comparing the farms outside your town with the industrial zones within it. That's useful for some purposes (distributional analysis), but not for analysis of the viability of the whole system.
The relative incomes of Canadians and Japanese, while interesting sociologically, don't provide us any information about global mineral depletion.
"Skilled labor and capital together provide wealth". Maybe. I prefer Frederick Soddy's observation that extraction and combustion of fossil fuels, compared to living within the limits of renewable flows of solar energy, is like spending the capital of a legacy instead of living on the interest from it.
gregvp,
I would agree that living on solar and wind energy is like living on the interest, but the interest of vast wealth, X10 more good wind power sites than all FF use, x1000 more solar power than all energy presently used. Many regions of US receive 5kWh per sq meter/day, a suburban lot has >100 sq meters!, solar PV on the car-port or garage roof could power a Chevy Volt. We are millionaire misers when it comes to spending our renewable interest, as the FF cookie jar empties we are starting drawing on that renewable interest income.
Continuously lower resource quality is an assertion. Do you have data that we are mining lower concentration ores now then in the past?
Lower resource quality is well documented. Two books that I have read are:
Energy and Resource Quality (Charles Hall, Cutler Cleveland and Robert Kaufmann)
Geodestinies (Youngquist)
These and other references discuss the decrease in concentration of ores being mined and the barrels of oil per foot of well drilled, among other topics. There are lots of facts, figures and references in both of these books.
These books are typically out of print and rather expensive used. Perhaps someone can recommend something more recent.
Paul,
Lower resource quality has been documented for >150 years. Of course we didn't have plastics, aluminium, hydro power, electricity, wind and solar power, nuclear power then, but timber, nitrates,food production and whale oil were passing peak production.
If you think of the future ONLY in terms of peak oil, you will be making as big a mistake as the people who think oil will last for ever.
Economists will almost always assume that the market will accurately price things. A significant amount of economic theory hinges off of this. Almost all bubbles are evidence that this frequently isn't true. If the market sometimes overprices certain commodities when it should be fairly obvious that it isn't realistic. (Pricing an average home at $500,000 when the median income is $80,000 for a given area) Assuming that the market would figure out that the historical gains in oil production will not continue and will adjust the current price accordingly, I think is somewhat unrealistic. The only thing that the price of oil will tell you is what is the current state of oil supply and demand. It has little to no predictive charactaristics.
Right now we are recovering from $100+/barrel oil. I don't think the global economy works very well when oil is over $100. This could allow for a fairly long denial period for peak oil. Over the next two years we should recover sufficiently to get close to last years production peak. Oil prices will increase, the conventional wisdom will be that it was lack of investment that prevented the supply from increasing. I have already seen the seeds of this thought process being sown. High oil prices will cause another round of demand destruction. I personally think that this will probably take a few cycles of price crash/demand destruction to fully realize that oil production will never recover.
The faulty logic of our whole economy is that we assume continued productivity growth. Productivity caused chronic deflation throughout the 19th Century and up to the end of the US gold standard in 1933.
Unfortunately we are no longer replacing horses, mules and oxen with tractors, cars and trucks and the efficiency of converting energy to power has plateaued. The last productivity miracle was computerization, which was well established in large businesses before 1980 and finally reaching small business in the 1990's. For all the hype of the Internet, one day we will question the value of the electricity consumed by server centers.
We are also living longer, meaning higher costs for health care, pensions and Social Security. I'm in favor of living longer but let's not confuse that with productivity.
There are two other serious issues: 1) the USA used up 90% of its ultimately recoverable oil, and 2) deindustrialization in the US or globalization as it is called. We benefited from globalization and cheap oil and basic material imports, but there will come a time when trading partners will want gold or commodities like grains in exchange.
Oil is a problem because its not log-normal distributed. You guys know what log-normal distribution means?
It means abiotic mineral depletion is a mirage threat. This sort of alarmist nonsense is a giant stupid waste of time.
Exactly what are getting at? Oil reservoir sizes are often approximately log-normal. Yet that doesn't mean much.
Perhaps your implication is that other minerals don't have fat tails in their size distribution. I would like to know how that effects your argument.
What it means is if you halve the grade, your resource increases my much more than twice.
So you are saying that grades of resources have a log-normal distribution?
My issue with this is that 'grades' of minerals are often a subjective evaluation and a log-normal value of a subjective measure doesn't have much of a quantitative meaning. Extending this reasoning, everything we touch has some minute trace of gold, which means the distribution for gold mining involves everything. It seems we need some pragmatism here.
Perhaps true, but it would be very helpful if you could provide links to some further information on this. The most prevalent view here appears to be somewhat pessimistic, suggesting that claims which appear optimistic may need to be backed up with references before they gain much traction.
(IIRC, you've posted some material before on the distribution of uranium which would be useful to demonstrate what a log-normal distribution means.)
The most prevalent view here appears to be alarmist nonsense, so its not surprising. Everyone here seems to have invested psychological capital in the notion that collapse is inevitable and link it to overshoot, complexity, ecological crisis, global climate change, banking, or whatever boogyman is on the horizon. It creates an atmosphere where discussing real challenges is impossible because the whole debate is dominated by extremist lunatics.
Certainly.
http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/UraniuamDistribution
Shows a table of uranium distribution by ore grade based on the work of Deffeyes & MacGregor, "World Uranium resources" Scientific American, Vol 242, No 1, January 1980, pp. 66-76. Every time you drop the ore grade by 10 your resource multiplies by 300 times. This is for a fairly typical expensive metal that also happens to be an energy source.
Modelling for other minerals is similar. The only minerals that dont follow this distribution are the ones that have to exist in traps, like helium and xenon, or minerals that have biotic or unusual origins like many phosphate reserves or siedrophile deposits from a nickel-iron astroid strike. In principle all minerals behave differently, so you will have different types of high grade ores that drop off at slightly different rates, and ores that are much costlier to produce because of energetic reasons like copper sulfates compared to other copper minerals.
The hypothisis of a mineralogical barrier for ore reserves is another mirage, one of economics. Above a certain price, if another mineral becomes a more cost effective replacement, it will. Its why lead production dropped off decades ago even though there was no problem of lead depletion.
Its why phosphorous depletion is a problem worth looking at, why oil depletion is a problem worth looking at. Both of these have biological origins without the easy log normal distribution. Neither has easy substitutes. Both have solutions certainly, but you wouldn't get that from reading this doom-laden site of misanthropes.
The log-normal distribution is a heuristic, partially supported by notions that a multiplication of probabilistic events have to come together to attain an optimal measure of some sort. So this likely happens with the grade of a mineral ore. As an example, it is very likely that a mineral gets completely dispersed due to entropy consideration so that it attains background level. This essentially takes one step and is the worst grade of "ore" attainable. It is much harder for a sequence of steps to occur such that a mineral aggregates into a higher grade deposit. With some hand-wavy mathematics you can derive the log-normal.
I say this is hand-wavy because you can also derive a Pareto distribution which looks a lot like a log-normal distribution. A Pareto can occur due to random distributions which migrate through different time scales and you get a similar equal density per decade which agrees with empirical observations. In fact, the trapping-sensitive resources that you mention (like helium, or oil which you curiously don't mention) also follow the log-normal or Pareto distributions (take your pick) with regard to size.
And then you have to consider a resource such as methane. The grades of methane also follows a Pareto distribution with some interesting features. The base of the pyramid, methane hydrates, contains 10x as much much as the next layer up.
What is not shown is the constant recycling of the methane through biology, which dwarfs even the base layer in volume.
There are also grades of oil that everyone is well aware of (from light crude to tar sands to oil shale) which qualitatively follows a Pareto. And every schoolboy knows about coal grades, from anthracite to bituminous to lignite and then on to peat. Qualitatively this also follows a Pareto type of distribution in terms of amounts, with the amount of low-grade peat swamping just about everything else.
So overall, I think lots of people on TOD are very cognizant of the Pareto characteristic. I definitely want to quantify the statistics of various resources. I don't know why it is misanthropic to want to understand the math of the situation. I have been quite disappointed by the rigor of geologists in understanding their own field. Saying something doesn't follow an "easy log normal distribution" is sweeping understanding under the rug.
What has people very confused by your explanation is that log-normal (or Pareto) exists in orthogonal dimensions. It can be in a qualitative sense in terms of the "grade" of the extract, or it can also be in terms of the distribution in sizes of the reservoirs.
Hello WHT & Metalman,
I am always glad to see your postings as you both bring a lot to this discussion.
Thanks, I follow-up on these discussions because I actually want to glean every last iota of information I can.
Thanks also, although I fear that WHT and I have little in common except perhaps an open mind.
For Dezakhin, not all metals and all types of deposits of a given metal need have much larger tonnages of lower grade ores, although this behavior is rather common, especially considered globally. Grade-tonnage discussion by the US Geological Survey have always differentiated among different genetic types of deposits, even for a single metal, such as uranium, which has a rather unique chemistry (as perhaps indicated by the fact that few or no other metals can be co-produced with it) and occurs in its own unique types of deposits. So uranium is perhaps not "fairly typical".
Finally, in copper sulfate you perhaps picked a poor example of a copper ore type that would be "costlier to produce," because copper sulfate minerals are water-soluble. Sulfuric acid heap leaching produces dissolved copper sulfates as a desired intermediate product, from which copper recovery is very cheap via SX/EW (solvent extraction and electrowinning; i.e., electrolysis). On the other hand, I've always been told that the largest resource of gold in the world is that dissolved in sea water, and no one has figured out a way to recover that economically yet, even at $1000/troy ounce. Dilute dissolved chloride-complexed gold might therefore have made a better example.
Olympic dam? Phosphate coproduction with uranium? Please understand I'm only being pedantic here, but clearly uranium is coproduced with other metals/minerals. Do you mean something else?
You misread me:
and ores that are much costlier to produce because of energetic reasons like copper sulfates compared to other copper minerals.
I meant to indicate but perhaps wasn't absolutely clear, copper sulfates such as chalcopyrite are among the cheapest of copper ores in production compared to other copper minerals. They nearly burn on their own. I understand (perhaps erroneously, correct me if I'm wrong) that oxide ores are more difficult to process, as you dont get sulferic acid as a byproduct but need to aquire externally it for leeching.
There are also grades of oil that everyone is well aware of (from light crude to tar sands to oil shale) which qualitatively follows a Pareto.
These aren't grades of oil - tar sands and "oil" shale are different things entirely from oil. Tar sands aren't 50% or 100% harder to extract and turn into liquid fuels, they're 10x harder, and oil shale is 100x harder.
This comparison will mislead you. Tar sands and "oil" shale are much more like coal: coal-to-liquids can create liquid fuels as well, but coal still isn't oil.
Also, I'd note that the US has as much high quality coal as low quality, so I'm not sure about Pareto in that case.