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Mandatory toe dip. I’m in the mining game and stories about metals commodity shortage like these come around all the time and it’s laughable. You here about t
by rmm 7y ago
Mandatory toe dip. I’m in the mining game and stories about metals commodity shortage like these come around all the time and it’s laughable.
You here about the popular ones (rare earth, lithium etc) but there are plenty of others. (We just finished going through a vanadium shortage apparently).
It’s so bad all it takes for an exploration company to get a substantial bump in share price is to mention it. During the great lithium shortage, the amount of companies who had a large bump for just mentioning that they would be investigating old core samples for lithium was ridiculous.
Argh.
- pfdietz 7y agoRemember the big concern about cobalt in the 1970s (I think it was)? People were talking about mining the sea floor for that one.
- whatshisface 7y agoIt's not that the shortages don't almost happen, it's that the free market is good at fixing them. If the warnings come, people will think they can make a bunch of money by mining, and they will invest in solving the problem.
- ksec 7y ago>it's that the free market is good at fixing them I love this phase. Has there been any incidents that Free Market failed to fix in terms of mining or commodity trading?
- nkrisc 7y agoNo, because the Free Market can only solve problems. Any time it fails to do so it is because an external force interfered.
- Nasrudith 7y agoInelastic goods that lack subsitutes - usually subsitutes are readily available even if they are inferior. Using wooden plows instead of steel ones is technically a fix to the problem even with the performance loss involved. The Irish Potato famine technically qualifies as one given Malthusian claptrap was used to excuse exporting grain in a famine as "addressing unsustainable population growth". The failure there was that the farmers couldn't afford the available food despite being responsible for its production. The rentseekers played themselves too by damaging their investment - Ireland's population /still/ hasn't caught up.
- sfifs 7y agoWasn't that a misinformation cover story by CIA for the Glomar Explorer so they could retrieve a sunken Soviet sub?
- ConcernedCoder 7y agoHughes told the media that the ship's purpose was to extract manganese nodules from the ocean floor. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer
- trothamel 7y agoIt's funny that everyone else seemed to have bought it at the time. My father worked for a company that repaired ships at sea at the time, and he apparently went out on a cruise where they harvested manganese nodules. I don't know if it was the ship's owners figuring that if hughes wants it it must be valuable, or if it's the CIA spreading the wealth to make its cover story more plausible, but I do know he has that nodule somewhere.
- dredmorbius 7y agoThe nodules exist. Recovery is not economically viable. Unless you can also harvest Red Subs.
- greglindahl 7y agoActually, people are now seriously starting to mine these things. It's a big environmental disaster in the making.
- aerophilic 7y agoI think the real question is recovery is not viable at $x/ton. Given a high enough x, going to the moon/asteroids start looking attractive as well.
- dredmorbius 7y agoManganese, not cobalt. Glomar Challenger cover story. Uni prof of mine was on the ship. Had no idea of the true mission until he read about it in the papers.
- pfdietz 7y agoManganese nodules were being investigated not for their manganese -- they would have totally flooded that market -- but for the less abundant but more lucrative metals like cobalt they also contain.
- dredmorbius 7y agoI conducted reasearch on the proposed enterprise in the 1980s. A goal, and the primary one evident in the literature, was manganese nodule mining. Producing manganese. I don't have my original references handy, but some citations: https://epubs.siam.org/doi/abs/10.1137/0143008 https://epubs.siam.org/doi/abs/10.1137/0143008 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0160932778900601 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0160932778... https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF03354283 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF03354283
- pfdietz 7y agoThe market price of cobalt now is around $38/lb. The market price of Mn ore is about $0.01/lb of contained Mn. A good Mn nodule might contain 1% cobalt. It would be really stupid to mine these things for their manganese. Of course you'd sell what Mn you could, but that's not the value proposition here.
- dredmorbius 7y agoShow me the contemporary (1970s) references stating cobalt, not manganese, was the primary goal. Keep in mind: this was a cover story. It needn't be rational, merely plausible.
- 7y ago
- tyingq 7y agoThe helium shortage seems to come up a lot lately. Not mining, I understand, but that's what came to mind.
- bin0 7y agoFrom what I understand, the helium shortage is mostly due to current price. Price will go up, more plants will go up, and there is plenty in natural gas deposits. The feds have just been dumping at artificially low prices. Prices are already increasing, and NASCO just put up a new plant a few months ago.
- hodder 7y agoThe shortage of almost any commodity or product is due to price. The earth has abundant amounts of rare earth elements, hydrocarbons, gold, platinum, silver etc. The iron laws of commodity trading are supply and demand curves. A non existent supply curve basically never exists. There is almost always a price with which one can acquire a commodity or bring in supply. As you stated in the helium case, prices may need to rise for increased supply to come on absent new technology. Side note: Whale oil is about the only “useful” commodity I can think of that was almost eliminated entirely. Whales were basically saved by the oil and coal industries as lamps moved from whale oil, to kero, and eventually incandescent light. Ironically these industries now threaten sea life through pollution and global warming, but they were initially a saviour of the whales.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago> Whales were basically saved by the oil and coal industries as lamps moved from whale oil, to kero, and eventually incandescent light. Also, AFAIR, synthetic lubricants.
- bin0 7y agoFrom what I understand, whale oil is still one of the best choices in many machine applications (including cars) and wasn't really killed so much by synthetic lubricants as by the Endangered Species Act.