Earth's Copper Supply Inadequate For Development? 838
ScentCone writes "Pennies, pipes, untold miles of CAT5 - they tie up a lot of copper. Unlike abundant iron and aluminum, copper is relatively scarce. But it's vital to electricity generation/transmission, plumbing, and other uses central to a modern standard of living. Scientific American is providing a quick overview of the situation. They report the conclusion that there simply isn't enough available. Canada, Mexico and the US average 170kg of copper use per person, and the most generous estimates suggest that only 1.6 billion unused metric tons exist. More reclamation and use of fiber, wireless, and PVC helps - but won't be enough to cover the billions of people who don't yet live in highly wired/mechanized societies."
Pennies are not copper anymore (Score:5, Informative)
REAL Scarcity would mean HUGE price increases (Score:5, Informative)
To say that copper is scarce is not really accurate -- the price of copper has gone up but not in the way you'd expect if a needed item was about to run out. I blog [blogspot.com] (and publish a print newsletter) about gold -- I do about 90% of my research trying to find the manipulators in the gold market. One of the "worst" manipulators is the mining industry itself, but I believe hiding trade facts is very important for a free market. If copper was truly disappearing, you'd see the market react by the price hyperinflating, not just steadily growing. Mining companies spend 10-15 years just opening a mine. If they knew they were running out, they wouldn't sell it so cheaply.
I believe the steady growth in the price of copper is more of an effect of fiat currency inflation causing all consumer goods and salaries to go up (basically devaluing everyone's labor even if they feel they're earning more). When copper goes up 1000% in a week, there will be a problem. 1% fluctuations is nothing.
Just as I don't believe we're anywhere near to running out of oil in the next 1000 years, I don't believe we'll be running out of copper. I study 5-10 mining reports a day and all I see is more and more oil, gold, carbon and copper being found. As we innovate and are able to drill deeper and deeper, we're finding that MOST of what geophysicists warned us about 10 years ago isn't true -- we keep finding more to consumer, not less. I think we will be able to say the same thing 10 years from now and 100 years from now -- we're amazed and what we're finding as we dig deeper.
All these "fear the scarcity" news reports on vital materials are bunk -- you'll know when there is a shortage when the price skyrockets (supply and demand is very hard to manipulate in the long run). And when the price skyrockets, it will give innovators reason to find new ways to recycle more efficiently, dig deeper or find other ways to provide the same service with a different product.
The day that copper is gone for good is the day that we take clay out of the ground and find a way to offer room temperature superconductivity. Serendipity doesn't end, and higher copper prices give innovators more reason to find new solutions to yesterday's problems. One of the reasons I formulated my anarcho-capitalist [blogspot.com] belief system is based on finding that supply and demand really does set prices in the long haul, even if government and industry tries to manipulate prices in the short run.
A penny saved is copper earned (Score:5, Informative)
"The largest known Copper ore deposits in the world are in Chuquicamata in the Chilean Andes, and the largest deposit of native copper is in Michigan's Upper Peninsula."
This [dartmouth.edu] is an interesting article about Copper. Apparently Copper is also released as pollution during the mining and refining process, possibly more could be saved if there were more efficient ways of extracting and refining the metal.
One other solution is to go wireless.
Re:During the Manhattan Project... (Score:3, Informative)
ahref=http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Researc
Use gold (Score:3, Informative)
A friend here has been investing in gold for some time, maybe he is on to something.
BTW, pennies are not copper anymore. From the US mint:
The alloy remained 95 percent copper and 5 percent zinc until 1982, when the composition was changed to 97.5 percent zinc and 2.5 percent copper (copper-plated zinc).
Copper is very recyclable, and in demand. It pays anywhere between pennies to $1.50/pound or more to recycle it.
Now that electronics are disposable because of quick upgrades and poor reliability, they will be recycled more in the future. There is a bunch of copper and gold and other nice stuff in there.
Its a crime that the zinc industry lobbies congress with cash every time we try to get rid of the penny. Its useless. In fact all change is. What can you really buy for less than a buck? If its less than a buck, splurge and get two.
If I start my own restaurant, I will not take or receive change. Its heavy, and it would cost more of my employees time to count, sort, and organize the change than if they just threw it in the trash. Or maybe I could just throw it in the tip pool, and give it to them in cash later.
Re:A penny saved is copper earned (Score:3, Informative)
What's the problem? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Pennies are not copper anymore (Score:5, Informative)
Oddly enough, the composition of pennies did not change between 1962 and 1982. There should be no difference between a 1971 penny and a 1981 penny, in terms of copper content.
The US Mint made 7 different variations of the penny in 1982 (counting the various different mint marks), after which they made pennies exclusively out of copper plated zinc.
More info is posted here [usmint.gov] and here [coaleducation.org].
Re:A penny saved is copper earned (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Not Enough? (Score:3, Informative)
"Multiply that by overall population estimates of 10 billion people by 2100 and the world will require 1.7 billion metric tons of copper by that date--more than even the most generous estimate of available resources."
Re:Aluminum (Score:4, Informative)
>for a long time due to the lower resistance.
Transmission lines are already often made with aluminum.
The problem with aluminum for transmission lines isn't so much the conductivity, but the mechanical strength. Aluminum is paired up with steel or some composite to solve that issue.
Re:Pennies are not copper anymore (Score:4, Informative)
Ashtray outperforming 401k: http://www.321gold.com/editorials/nevalainen/neva
Copper is at $2.1373 / lb today, meaning:
100 pre-1982 pennies (95% copper, 3.11 grams of copper, ignore the zinc as it is a small amount) are worth $1.39
(1982 is when they switched to the 95% zinc we have today.)
now if only I had a machine to sort out the pre and post-'82 pennies...
Purchasing power is king (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Aluminum (Score:2, Informative)
The problem is the corrosion that results when you try to connect aluminum and copper wiring. The connection (if not treated with those special compounds) gets highly resistive and heats up, starting fires.
Re:REAL Scarcity would mean HUGE price increases (Score:4, Informative)
re: oil sands costs
They're profitable when regular oil is around $30/bbl - we're over $60 right now, and it's projected we'll stay at $50 or more for the foreseeable future. Oil sands are profitable _now_; just ask Alberta.
Re:Economics (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Pennies must go! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Pennies must go! (Score:4, Informative)
Power transmission isn't all copper (Score:3, Informative)
Most power lines use steel reinforced aluminum cable, and have since the 1950's. It's a lot cheaper and a lot lighter than copper. The drawback is that, at high voltages, the aluminum gets hot, hotter than the steel, and sags. There is a fair amount of research going on into better aluminum alloys to avoid the problem.
-h-
They already do... (Score:3, Informative)
Pre-1982 pennies are already worth more as scrap than as currency. (Post-1982 are mostly zinc).
It takes abou 145 pre-1982 pennies to get have a pound... at the current copper price of just over $2 pound, they appear to be worth more as scrap than as money, although I suspect logistical considerations would eat into any profit making scheme based on this fact.
Zinc is worth just under $1 pound, and it takes over 160 of the current pennies to make a pound - so they are worth more as money. US Mint statistics say it costs them .81 cent to make a penny, of course there is more than raw material costs there.
By the way, I don't know what planet you are on, but gold and silver coins still have intrinsic value :-)
The red-headed stepchild of non-renewables: He. (Score:5, Informative)
I wasn't partiuclarly aware that this was a consumable resource until recently, but it is. Every cubic foot of helium gas that's released up into the atmosphere is basically lost forever -- it's so light that it just keeps going up and up, and eventually escapes our atmosphere.
Although it's not as important to us as a civilization as copper, and will probably take longer to become scarce, it's not something that's partiularly easy to get. Right now we get most of our supply from the natural gas industry -- helium is present in natural gas but doesn't burn, and if not extracted from the gas prior to use just goes out the tailpipe. There are (or were) government-backed programs to extract and store the He prior to use of the natural gas, but I'm not sure if that's still going on.
We use an increasing amount of Helium in its liquid form as cooling, partiularly for MRI machines. I can only see this usage getting bigger in the future; plus, liquid He is one of the only ways to reliably get objects down to ultra-cold temperatures, which might become very important in the future. (Superconducting computers?) The point is that we really haven't exploited Helium very far, and yet we're 'burning' through it fairly quickly, along with the natural gas supply.
It's just another thing that when it's gone, it's gone. It may seem frivolous now, but when you consider the difficulty of synthesizing a hydrocarbon chain, it's not partiularly tough. Make me a mole of helium atoms cheaply on an industrial scale? Now that's difficult.
Re:REAL Scarcity would mean HUGE price increases (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Pennies must go! (Score:4, Informative)
One day I found a sign on the counter of check out explaining something called "swedish rounding". The explanation said something like they "round down prices ending in 1,2 to 0 and 6,7 to 5 and round up prices ending in 3,4 to 5 and 8,9 to 0." My head was spinning trying to figure out how that worked. I have since see the explanation more simply as 0,1,2 are rounded to zero, 3,4,5,6,7 are rounded to 5, and 8, 9 are rounded to 10.
from this blog: http://michaelandrews.blogspot.com/2005/07/swedis
Re:Not Enough? (Score:3, Informative)
However, I'm not really talking about wireless connectivity as a replacement for LANs. I'm referring to point-to-point wireless connectivity as a replacement for wide area distribution systems like your phone line.
Today, I can get wireless T1 speed connectivity with a rooftop antenna here in the South Bay. It's more expensive than DSL, but it exists. If your area doesn't have DSL, it becomes a very viable alternative. If your area doesn't have phone lines and everyone uses a cell phone instead, the popularity of the technology would likely bring the price down sufficiently that building a wired infrastructure for the sole purpose of running DSL connections would be seen as a waste of money.
There are also alternatives to copper for hardwired data connectivity. In small WANs, copper is quickly going the way of the dodo in favor of fiber. Above a few hundred feet, speed limitations make copper impractical. (Gigabit Ethernet is limited to 100 meter runs.) Since fiber is already being used in people's homes for audio in their entertainment centers, it isn't much of a stretch to expect that a developing nation would push for fiber switches for LANs as well.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the only reason copper is still used at all in LANs is that it is already an established part of the infrastructure of most buildings. (That, and cost, but again, cost is only a factor because the technology isn't being deployed broadly, owing in large part to the preexisting copper.)
As for copper heat sinks, there are plenty of alternatives. Water cooling is starting to become popular, as it produces less noise than an air-cooled heat sink. Water cooling is almost a requirement for some higher density chips due to the general inability to distribute the heat evenly enough inside the chip for a heat sink to work effectively. Copper heat sinks are a temporary workaround to a much bigger problem....
About the only place that copper can't reasonably be replaced by something better at a similar price point is the bottom of cooking pans.... :-)
Re:Monster (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Pennies must go! (Score:5, Informative)
In Australia, we phased out our 1c and 2c coins about 15 years ago; I think it was mainly a cost-saving measure - and nobody wanted to deal with piddly small change. (The remaining coinage contains between 75% and 92% copper, depending on the denomination, so that fact the 1c and 2c coins were copper is coincidental.)
The $1 note was replaced with a $1 coin in 1984, and the $2 note was replaced by a coin in 1988. Again, I believe it was a cost-saving measure - the low denominations had a high turnover rate from wear (like the US $1 note), coins are much more durable. There were other spin-offs e.g. use in vending machines.
Similarly, the old paper notes were replaced with polymer ones from 1992 (though the first, a commemorative $10 note, was released in 1988 for the bicentennial.) Polymer lasts longer and is much harder to counterfeit. [rba.gov.au]
Re:Not Enough? (Score:3, Informative)
I find your faith in our civilization... disturbing. The Sun's got about 4.5 - 5 billion more years till red giant shenanigans. I have no doubt society as we know it will be wiped out one way or another long before then. But still, I'm sure humans will make a good run.
Re:Monster (Score:4, Informative)
They are Gold plated for marketing. a nickel plated connector is just as good as any gold plated connector with nearly the same corrosion resistance and certianly overall a better connector.
My switchcraft solid nickel connectors are of much higher quality than any gold connectors sold.
Gold connector = marketing to fool consumers.
Re:Monster (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Pennies must go! (Score:3, Informative)
They aren't.
They did. [usmint.gov]
Re:The sad thing is... (Score:2, Informative)
Why is this sad? A bunch of resources have been moved from thousands of feet under the earth, where they were alloyed with other junk we don't want are ore. Now, thanks to previous generations, that copper has been moved upwards, transported closer to us, concentrated, and made easilly accessible.
All we need is the desire and the cleverness to mine it, and it's a pile of gold, waiting for us.
Saying that this is sad is like saying "There's not a lot of food at the supermarket...and the sad thing is, there are several large juicy steaks conveniently located in my refrigerator."
Re:REAL Scarcity would mean HUGE price increases (Score:5, Informative)
That's a pretty unconventional view -- actually, a unique view -- in the minerals world."
Actually, he is correct. We aren't going to run out of oil. There will be oil in the ground that isn't economical or technologically feasible to extract.
We are going to run out of plentiful and cheap oil (and $70 barrel is cheap). Which for all practical purposes means we are going to run out of oil.
Re:Pennies must go! (Score:1, Informative)
No one uses it. In all my time in retail (5 years in two locations) I can think of only a handful of times anyone has ever paid for anything with the dollar coins. Personally, I hate having change in my pockets any more than necessary, and having to carry around coinage just to use vending machines or make small purchases is annoying, much more so than carrying notes, which are compact and don't jingle.
I also attribute its failure partially to some of the public thinking the coin was "collectible" and thus hoarding rather than spending them
Re:Monster (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Monster (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Monster (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Pennies must go! (Score:2, Informative)
10. Are 1c & 2c coins still legal tender?
Yes, 1c and 2c pieces are still Australian legal tender, but they are not considered as 'currency' (or, money that is officially released for circulation). This means that you can take your old 1c and 2c coins to the bank and exchange them for currency totalling the same face value.
Source: Royal Australian Mint [ramint.gov.au]
Rate of resupply (Score:1, Informative)
There's also a "primordial" helium reservoir in the Earth that is slowly being outgassed, and can be partly discerned from the alpha particle source based on mass, but this is also a small reservoir and will not replenish helium quickly (where quickly = economically useful time scales -- again, think in terms of geologic time).
Most of the oil and gas fields from which helium is currently recovered have been existed for tens to a few hundred of million of years.
There is plenty of helium off the Earth but that's certainly expensive to recover, albeit possibly cheaper than manufacturing helium by inducing alpha-decay in susceptible elements. We're definitely not, however, going to wait for helium to accumulate again in those natural traps from which we're currently recovering it.
About Mars:
The same processes of radioactive decay and outgassing that exist on Earth act on Mars. The mnost important differences between the Earth and Mars might be differences in the initial concentration, and subsequent fractionation in the Martian crust, of radioactive elements that decay to form helium, and the susceptibility of Martian geology to form traps for helium. I suspect the concentration of radioactive elements is close enough to Earth's that this isn't much of an issue. Mars doen't have continents, so the concentration of radioactive material (a process related to fractionation by partial melting) may not be as pronounced, in which case the helium produced by radioactive decay would be more evenly distributed through the crust, reducing the ease with which it could accumulate in any particular spot. Earth has a more active geology that might be better suited to forming the kinds of folds and rock layers conducive to trapping helium, but that's pure speculation on my part. Conversely, the relative geologic stability of Mars may allow particular reservoirs to accumulate helium for a longer period of time. Maybe we'll resolve these alternatives when we get there...
In short, I can't make a strong case for the availability of helium on Mars, but I strongly suspect that by the time this becomes an issue for us it'll be a lot cheaper to import helium from elsewhere in the solar system.
Re:Not Enough? (Score:3, Informative)