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Your phone, TV and light bulbs would be duds without a host of hard-to-find elements you’ve probably never heard of. Should you be worried?
YOU may have read about it here. You may have read about it elsewhere. Five or so years ago, the world was on the brink of crisis, one involving a group of chemical elements known as the rare earths. With exotic names such as yttrium, europium and dysprosium, they had become essential components of our fridges, televisions and smartphones – pretty much all electrical gadgets, in fact. But China, with a near monopoly on rare earth production, was slashing exports. Demand was about to massively outstrip supply.
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In the end, it was a bit of a damp squib. The price of some rare earth elements did soar to a peak in 2011 – and then dropped away again almost as fast.
How this storm brewed, but never broke, is an instructive story about our use of Earth’s mineral resources today, and what that means for the future. Not so long ago we relied on just a dozen or so elements to make most of what we manufacture, ones with familiar names like iron, aluminium, copper and silicon, that are widely present in substantial quantities in Earth’s crust. Now, though, our ambitions extend throughout the periodic table. Like Michelin-starred chefs, we are combining this material menu in increasingly exotic ways. That gives us a new flexibility, but makes us dependent on some obscure elements found only in small amounts and in a few places.
In this new material landscape, it’s no longer just about how much stuff there is, but how much it costs, how we use it, where it is and who controls it. Over the next six pages, we take a look at how we are using Earth’s mineral resources today – and what crunches we might anticipate in the future.
If you are one of the estimated 2 billion people in the world that now own a smartphone, you are walking around with a periodic table in your pocket. Besides silicon in its chips, copper in the wiring and hydrocarbon-based plastics in the casing, there is indium and tin in the touchscreen, probably lithium and cobalt in the battery, and possibly antimony as a fire retardant in the outer shell. That’s just the start: each smartphone contains at least 30 different elements, most probably more (see “A world in your smartphone”, below).
The rare earth elements, a group of 17 that nestle towards the bottom of the periodic table, are also there in numbers. Yttrium, lanthanum, cerium, praseodymium, europium, gadolinium and terbium are exploited for their light-emitting properties to make the colours of the screen. Tiny but powerful magnets in the microphone, speaker and motion sensor contain crucial doses of neodymium, dysprosium and others.
It’s not just smartphones. Europium gives colour to liquid crystal televisions and low-energy light bulbs, and makes euro banknotes glow under ultraviolet light as an anti-forgery measure. Magnets containing neodymium and dysprosium power the wind turbines and electric cars of the green energy revolution.
In the decade or so before China put on the brakes in 2010, global production of rare earths had more than doubled (see “The rare earth story”, below). When China announced a 40 per cent cut in its export quota, it controlled 97 per cent of the world’s rare-earth supply. At its peak in July 2011, the price of a 1-kilogram lump of dysprosium had skyrocketed to over $3000, 20 times the price just two years before.
But rare earth elements aren’t actually rare. Although they aren’t nearly as abundant in Earth’s crust as something like aluminium or iron, they are all present in parts per million, with workable deposits dotted across the planet. China just happened to mine them more cheaply. In fact, a mine at Mountain Pass in the Mojave desert, California, had been the world’s leading producer of rare earths before it closed in 2002 in the face of Chinese competition and local environmental concerns.
One effect of the Chinese cut in exports was to rewrite that equation. By August 2012, mining company Molycorp had restarted production at Mountain Pass. In November 2012, a mine at Mount Weld in Western Australia also opened its doors. Starting a new mining operation is a notoriously slow business, but this time companies had seen the crisis coming. “Something that looks like a strategic vulnerability to people in government looks like a business opportunity to entrepreneurs,” says , an economist at the University of Texas at Austin and a former Pentagon adviser. “If there is restricted supply, entrepreneurs expect prices to go up, so they start to invest.” According to Gholz, there are now more than 200 mining firms worldwide trying to convince investors to put money into new rare earth deposits.
Meanwhile, companies making products containing rare earths also took matters into their own hands, reducing their use of them or stopping it entirely. “The price spike caused demand destruction for many rare earths, as a lot of manufacturers designed them out of their products,” says David Merriman, an analyst at mineral consulting firm Roskill Information Services in London.
So what does this rare earth non-crisis tell us? First, that in absolute terms we aren’t in danger of running out of any material resource just yet. Despite a sharp uptick in our use of most elements in the past decade or so – and that in the teeth of a major recession – our consumption represents at most a few per cent of known reserves. That goes for the rare earths and other less common elements, but also for the traditional elements we still use the most: iron, aluminium, copper and zinc. And reserves are just the amount of stuff considered economic to mine at any one time. As one reserve is exhausted or becomes too expensive, so others may open up, as China found out. By last year, its share of the global rare-earth market had fallen to 88 per cent, and it is expected to sink to 75 per cent in the next few years.
So there’s nothing to worry about. There’s plenty of stuff to go round, and market forces, plus our new capability to mix and match many elements, mean we needn’t fear supply crunches: we will innovate past them. “The main message is don’t panic, people are ingenious and will find a way around problems,” says Gholz. In a on Foreign Relations published last October, he argues that China is unlikely ever to regain its grip on rare earth supplies.
But it might not all be that straightforward. One question is how much of Earth’s mineral resources it is sensible or desirable to extract. It’s a question more often posed of our burning of hydrocarbons, which contributes more directly to dangerous warming of the planet, but the mining and refining of all metals are energy-intensive businesses. “Can the planet cope with us extracting more and more of these things, burning more and more carbon to get them out and using more and more water? In certain parts of the world that’s becoming a real issue,” says Andrew Bloodworth of the British Geological Survey (BGS) in Keyworth, near Nottingham.
Perhaps surprisingly, life-cycle analyses of the environmental impact of mined elements, taking into account energy consumption and toxicity to human and other life, are comparatively thin on the ground. One of the most comprehensive was undertaken last year by Philip Nuss of Yale University and Matthew Eckelman of Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. They showed that many “speciality” elements we are now using more of, such as the rare earths, do greater environmental damage on a per-weight basis than more traditional materials (see periodic tables of energy demand and toxicity). The worst offenders are the group of precious metals centred around platinum, including iridium and osmium, as well as palladium, rhodium and ruthenium, which are used in catalytic converters and as catalysts to make pharmaceuticals and fertilisers and in oil refining. Nevertheless, the comparatively small amounts of these elements in circulation means the list of the greatest environmental sinners overall has a familiar ring: iron, aluminium, calcium, copper and mercury ().
But even discounting environmental concerns, there are other clouds on the horizon. In the case of the rare earth non-crisis, we were lucky that there happened to be mothballed capacity elsewhere when a supply crunch came. Rapid action reduced prices – and is continuing to do so to such an extent that the mining companies that stepped into the breach are now finding it difficult to turn a profit or attract investment. The activities of speculators on commodities markets, as well as the panic buying of rare earths in the aftermath of the Chinese announcement, also increased volatility. “Market speculation has played a very important role in rare earth prices, which in turn has affected supply and demand,” says Merriman.
Meanwhile, China still supplies 97 per cent of “heavy” rare earths, such as terbium and dysprosium, which aren’t produced commercially at Mountain Pass or Mount Weld. “The industry has hardly moved on from the situation we had before – China still produces the vast majority of rare earths,” says Merriman. This might just be a crisis delayed.
It isn’t all about the rare earths, either. Certainly they stand at the top of most experts’ lists of “critical” materials for which we cannot rely on future supplies. Drawing up such lists is fraught with difficulty, not least because it is difficult to predict how our use of technology will change. Demand for electric cars, bikes and buses hasn’t risen as much as forecast, for instance, says Frank Marscheider-Weidemann of the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research in Karlsruhe, Germany. That has lessened pressure on neodymium and dysprosium supplies, and possibly kept demand for platinum-group metals for catalytic converters higher.
Something similar applies for compact fluorescent light bulbs, and hence demand for some rare earths such as yttrium; LED lights, which need much less of the rare earths, have proved more popular. On the other hand, demand for wind turbines and photovoltaic cells is buoyant, adding pressure on neodymium and dysprosium in the case of turbines, and elements such as silver, gallium and indium in the case of photovoltaics.
Despite such uncertainties, we can pick out some consistent risk factors. Concentration of reserves or production in only a few places is one: the rare earths, tungsten, antimony and carbon in the form of graphite in China, or the platinum group of metals in Russia and South Africa. Some 85 per cent of the world’s supply of niobium, an element used to make high-strength steel alloys, currently comes from just one mine in Brazil, says Bloodworth.
Just as with the rare earths, it is not always that other countries don’t have reserves. “China dominates production of many metals not because they have any more tungsten than anyone else,” says Bloodworth. “But they have the smelters and the big kit, and the West has lost interest in doing a lot of these things. We’ve exported our heavy industry and environmental obligations somewhere else.”
Another risk is when in-demand elements are by-products of mining for something else. One example is gallium, used as a semiconductor in the likes of smartphones and for Blu-ray lasers. It is present in bauxite ore, the main source of aluminium, in concentrations of between 10 and 180 parts per million. Gallium is one of the fastest-growing of the new breed of elements: the European Commission in the European Union will increase by 8 per cent every year until 2020.
At the moment, demand for fresh aluminium is sufficient to cover our gallium needs and then some, says of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. But as more and more aluminium is recycled, bauxite production is set to decline – and with it gallium supplies. “The amount of gallium that’s used and its price would never justify mines for gallium alone,” says Mueller. It is a similar, less acute story for tellurium, a copper by-product used in solar cells, and hafnium, a companion to titanium used in small amounts in many applications, from nuclear fuel rods to integrated circuits.
Recyclability is also a factor that affects an element’s riskiness. Again, it’s not the traditional elements, which tend to be used in bulk, that are the problem: it is relatively easy and cheap to recycle iron from a lump of steel or aluminium from a drinks can. According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), recycling rates for these elements, as well as for copper, zinc, tin and lead, are above 50 per cent. But flatscreen televisions, smartphones and batteries, often thrown away after just a few years or even months of use, are locking up an increasing amount of the newly essential elements. A UNEP report published in 2011 identified 34 metals with recycling rates of less than 1 per cent, including all the rare earths, gallium, indium, hafnium, tellurium and a host of other speciality metals (see periodic table).
You might say that were the prices of these elements to rise, it would increase the incentive to recover more of them. But there are constraints to this, not least because of the increasingly complex blends of metals we use to make products. “There are thermodynamic limits to how much can be recovered from the waste stream,” says Nuss. “Some metals mixed with other elements can’t simply be recovered and then used with their original functionality.” Without more focus on designing electronic products from which individual elements can be easily recycled, that is likely to remain a problem.
This is a particular concern when an element has low “substitutability” – that is, we know of no other element that can do the same job. According to and his colleagues at Yale University, some familiar names such as magnesium and lead fall into this category. With relatively abundant supplies of these elements, this is less of a concern. For europium and dysprosium, on the other hand, it is a big worry.
Risk factors can play off against each other. Some platinum-group elements have low substitutability, for example, but “the good news is that we’re really good at recycling them”, says Bloodworth. His colleague at the BGS, Richard Shaw, has compiled a – amount and concentration of known reserves, substitutability, recyclability and good governance in producing and reserve-holding countries – to give a sense of which elements we would do well to rely on less. “We wanted to come up with something in which people could see our working,” says Bloodworth. “We used publicly available sources of information and a pretty simple algorithm to calculate what the end result is.”
The riskiest elements at the top of the BGS ranking are metals used on small scales in niche applications with few sources: the rare earths, tungsten and antimony. At the bottom are elements such as aluminium, zinc and copper, where a geographical spread of resources and high recycling rates mean we can reasonably expect continuity of supply (see element risk profiles). In May last year, an EU-wide exercise came to similar conclusions, , among them antimony, gallium, germanium, graphite, magnesium, indium, niobium and tungsten, as well as the rare earths and platinum-group metals.
The diagrams on these pages give more insight into some of the complexities of this new material world we have created. Perhaps, as with the rare earth crisis that wasn’t, we will deftly continue to sidestep impending crunches. But with a whirl of geopolitical, economic and environmental factors in play – and a whole periodic table now to keep tabs on – the most certain thing about our material future is uncertainty itself.
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This article appeared in print under the headline “The materials bonanza”
