Laptops, cars, smartphones, TVs, MRI
scanners, LCD displays, light bulbs, optical networks, jet engines,
cameras, headphones, nuclear reactors. It might seem like a random
selection of high-tech gizmos, but every single object on that list has
one very important thing in common: Their manufacture requires one or
more rare earth metals.
Rare earths —
a block of seventeen elements in the middle of the Periodic Table —
aren’t actually all that rare, but they tend to be very hard to obtain
commercially. Generally, rare earth elements are only found in minute
quantities in mineral deposits of clay, sand, and rock (earths!), which
must then be processed to extract the rare metals — an expensive
process, and also costly for the environment as billions of tons of ore
must be mined and refined to yield just a few tons of usable rare
earths.
Many rare earths are also
geochemically rare — they can only be mined in a handful of countries.
This is simply down to Mother Nature being a tempestuous so-and-so: Some
countries have deposits of rare earths, and some don’t. This results in
massively skewed production (China famously produces 97% of the world’s
rare earth metals), and, as you can imagine, a lot of national security
and geopolitical troubles, too.
It
doesn’t stop with rare earths, either: Many other important elements,
such as platinum, are only available from one or two mines in the entire
world. If South Africa sustained a huge earthquake — or was on the
receiving end of a thermonuclear bomb, perhaps — the world’s supply of
platinum would literally dry up over night. The continued existence of
technologies that rely on platinum, like car exhaust catalytic
converters and fuel cells, would be unlikely.
If
geochemistry and politics weren’t enough, though, we even have to
factor in ethical concerns: Just like blood/conflict diamonds — diamonds
that originate from war-torn African nations, where forced labor is
used and the proceeds go towards buying more weapons for the warlord —
some rare metals could be considered “blood metals.” Tantalum,
an element that’s used to make the capacitors found in almost every
modern computer, is extracted from coltan — and the world’s second
largest producer of coltan is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the
home of the bloodiest wars since World War II. Not only do the proceeds
from coltan exports get spent on weapons, but the main focus of the wars
were the stretches of land rich in diamonds and coltan.
Also
along the same humanist vein, it’s important to note that extracting
these rare elements is usually a very expensive and disruptive activity.
Indium, probably the single most important element for the manufacture
of LCDs and touchscreens, is recovered in minute quantities as a
byproduct of zinc extraction. You can’t just set up an indium
plant; you have to produce zinc in huge quantities, find buyers and
arrange transport for that zinc, and then go to town on producing
indium. In short, extracting rare elements is generally a very intensive
task that is likely to disrupt or destroy existing settlements and
businesses.
The rare earth apocalypse
The
doomsday event that everyone is praying will never come to pass, but
which every Western nation is currently planning for, is the eventual
cut-off of Chinese rare earth exports. Last year, 97% of the world’s
rare earth metals were produced in China — but over the last few years,
the Chinese government has been shutting down mines, ostensibly to save
what resources it has, and also reducing the amount of rare earth that
can be exported. Last year, China produced some 130,000 tons of rare
earths, but export restrictions meant that only 35,000 tons were sent to
other countries. As a result, demand outside China now outstrips supply
by some 40,000 tons per year, and — as expected — many countries are
now stockpiling the reserves that they have.
Almost
every Western country is now digging around in their backyard for rare
earth-rich mud and sand, but it’ll probably be too little too late — and
anyway, due to geochemistry, there’s no guarantee that explorers and
assayers will find what they’re looking for. The price of rare earths
are already going up, and so are the non-Chinese-made gadgets and gizmos
that use them. Exacerbating the issue yet further, as technology grows
more advanced, our reliance on the strange and magical properties of
rare earths increases — and China, with the world’s largest workforce
and a fire hose of rare earths, is perfectly poised to become the only
real producer of solar power photovoltaic cells, computer chips, and
more.
In short, China has the world
by the short hairs, and when combined with a hotting-up cyber front,
it’s not hard to see how this situation might devolve into World War
III. The alternate, ecological point of view, is that we’re simply
living beyond the planet’s means. Either way, strategic and logistic
planning to make the most of scarce metals and minerals is now one of
the most important tasks that face governments and corporations. Even if
large rare earth deposits are found soon, or we start recycling our
gadgets in a big way, the only real solution is to somehow lessen our
reliance on a finite resource. Just like oil and energy, this will
probably require drastic technological leaps. Instead of reducing the
amount of tantalum used in capacitors, or indium in LCD displays, we
will probably have to discover completely different ways of storing
energy or displaying images. My money’s on graphene.
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