Supply, demand testing metals

Here’s the bottom line. We are in danger of, if not running out of metals, at least never again having enough to meet the world’s needs.

Indium, for example, is vital to the manufacture of solar cells, liquid crystal displays and other electronics. Yet there are predictions out of Germany that, within 10 years, we may have used up all the known deposits in the world.

That is the most critical situation, but supply of many metals is under some degree of stress.
In the last week of February, for example, bismuth prices shot up 25 per cent because Chinese medical companies could not acquire all they needed.

Professor Ross Garnaut has been in the news recently for his views on climate change, but in August he completed a commodities report for Rio Tinto, the conclusions of which were just as portentous.

He and colleague Song Ligang reasoned that, within 20 years, China was likely to be consuming more metals and energy than do all the industrialised countries today. They expected China’s economic output to increase by a factor of eight over the coming two decades.

This neatly coincided with a report in the magazine New Scientist that quoted the 10-year exhaustion horizon for indium, but its findings were that the German scenario was far too optimistic and that indium supplies could be critical within five years.

And then the magazine added a few other nightmare scenarios.

If each of the 500 million vehicles on the world’s roads in 2007 were re-equipped with catalytic converters, the world’s known platinum would be exhausted within 15 years. That re-equipping won’t happen, but gradually all new vehicles will be fitted with the pollution-fighting device.

The magazine applied the rule of thumb that, as we progress over the next 20 years, we would be moving towards a situation where every person on the planet would be consuming on a per capita basis half the amount of metals that Americans were using in 2007.

Nightmarish would be the only way to describe the effect, if New Scientist were right. Supplies of silver could dry up within 10 years, there would be no more antimony after 15 years. Lead would be almost impossible to buy within eight years, tantalum within 20 years and zinc 34 years.

More recently, New Scientist has added the Peak Coal concept to the industry by mounting a case that the black mineral is starting on the same decline path as oil has apparently been on.

The Australian