26 ms·

A looming copper crunch and why recycling can’t fix it

231 points by simonebrunozzi 4y ago

stevenjgarner 4y ago
It will be interesting to see to what extent either other conductors (such as graphene, one of the best conductors [0]) or asteroid mining for iron, copper, nickel, and cobalt [1] become feasible in time (mid-century?) to offset the shortage of copper. [0] https://www.nanowerk.com/what_is_graphene.php https://www.nanowerk.com/what_is_graphene.php [1] https://pwr.edu.pl/en/university/news/raw-materials-from-asteroids-we-know-where-to-best-extract-them-from-10446.html https://pwr.edu.pl/en/university/news/raw-materials-from-ast...
- stevenjgarner 4y ago
  Not much discussion on HN yet about "the looming copper crunch" - these postings all had no comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32111282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32111282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32101391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32101391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28710646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28710646
jmclnx 4y ago
Well, in the US maybe time to eliminate the 1, 5 and maybe 10 cent coins ? Yes, the 1 cent coins have little copper, but multiple millions are produced per year. The others have a copper core. With current inflation, 1/5/10 cent coins cannot buy anything. The only reason for the 25 cent coin are vending machines.
- ravenstine 4y ago
  Not much copper in those unless you collect pre-1982 pennies. New pennies have such a thin layer of copper plating that separating that would be more trouble than it's worth. EDIT: Darn, can't delete now. Yes I agree, the penny should be eliminated to save on copper.
  - jmclnx 4y ago
    true, but with the number of these made each years, they add up. Plus all these do is cost everyone money to handle (banks, shops and even the Gov).
- brtkdotse 4y ago
  Is physical currency still common in the US? I haven’t used physical currency in probably 5-6 years, outside the 10 SEK the tooth fairy leaves.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    Come to Austria. The entire country revolves around cash. I rarely see someone pay with card at the supermarket and it's most likely a foreigner. Small shops and cafes don't even take cards, only cash and the rare time they do it's only for larger sums. Also tips are common almost everywhere.
    - fmakunbound 4y ago
      What's the reasons for that?
      - jbverschoor 4y ago
        Same reason people DuckDuckGo. They have a stronger connection to the history of snooping on civilians
      - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
        Easier tax fraud mostly to keep your illicitly gained money away from the taxman. Plus conservative population that is skeptical about new tech and strongly keeps outdated ways of working and doing business (visible in any company there). Letters are common as well and digitalization is pretty weak. Like what's the last tech product you remember that came out of Austria?
    - givemeethekeys 4y ago
      I've heard similar about Germany (someone from Germany, please chime in). There's a lovely under-appreciated privacy about using cash.
      - sva_ 4y ago
        Cash is still king in Germany, but use of "contactless" payment methods have drastically increased in the pandemic. Small shops often prefer or only take cash, or accept card payment only from a certain amount due to fees of the processors. I heard small businesses prefer cash for tax reasons as well.
- stevenjgarner 4y ago
  The copper penny hoarders are beating you to it [0]. I met a "retired" guy who is driving around the US buying boxes of pennies from banks sorting them into copper or not. He sells the sorted copper pennies to penny hoarders [1] and uses the non-copper pennies to spend at the Walmart NCR cash registers (they have to love him). He said he does not get rich but makes enough to get by. We went out for a meal and discussed the feasibility of sorting the pennies by date using ML. The real gold mine would be that an AI approach might potentially identify numismatic grade pennies and really pay for itself. [0] https://www.wikihow.com/Hoard-Copper-Pennies https://www.wikihow.com/Hoard-Copper-Pennies [1] https://moneyning.com/make-money/how-to-cash-in-your-pennies-for-more-than-a-cent/ https://moneyning.com/make-money/how-to-cash-in-your-pennies...
  - shrubble 4y ago
    There are slight differences in weight between the 1982 and later, and the copper containing pennies. You don't need to use ML, you need a comparator of the kind found in 1000s of vending machines.
    - OJFord 4y ago
      ML's just a comparator where the designer doesn't (necessarily) understand the logic, right?
      - loa_in_ 4y ago
        If you have an universal constructor, yes, it's going to be a problem that solves itself. In practice you need a high fidelity weight sensor and a handful of transistors.
    - dehrmann 4y ago
      What if we ran that ML on the etherium network?
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    Codyslab sorting copper pennies using magnetic inductance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gM9mOk6eb8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gM9mOk6eb8 Seems very simple and low tech.
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  is that a large enough driver of demand?
- sva_ 4y ago
  I'm actually quite fond of the 25 cent coins I got from the US. They work in shopping carts here (you have to put a coin into a shopping cart to get it, and you get the coin back after you bring it back, but they usually only accept 1 or 2 euro. I'm much more likely to still have the quarter, since I can't spend it here.) I got bunch of coins when I had to use a laundromat in the US once, they only accepted quarters. Exchange $20 at a different machine and get a ton of metal. I suppose its like legacy software.
  - gerdesj 4y ago
    Back in the late '70/early '80s the UK 10p coin was similar enough in size and weight to fool some German vending machines as a "1 DM" coin (Deutchmark). The rough rule of thumb rate of exchange was 1 GBP to 4 DM back then.
    - sva_ 4y ago
      A large number of European vending machines still accept the 10 thai baht coin as a 2 Euro coin (10 baht are approx. 30 cents). I heard the newer machines use a combination of methods, including weight and electrical resistance to test if a coin is actually the right one.
- light_hue_1 4y ago
  > Yes, the 1 cent coins have little copper, but multiple millions are produced per year Billions are produced per year, not millions. The mint makes on average 10 billion pennies per year, https://qz.com/1318203/making-pennies-costs-the-us-mint-millions/ https://qz.com/1318203/making-pennies-costs-the-us-mint-mill... Varies by year. It is still a totally irrelevant amount of copper. One penny has 2.95g of copper in it. 10 billion pennies have 30,000 tons of copper in them. Worldwide copper production is 20 million tons. 0.015% of the world's copper is used for pennies. That's a rounding error. Just because a number is big, doesn't mean it matters. Sure. Get rid of the penny. But not because it will impact our copper supply in any way.
  - sixstringtheory 4y ago
    Still, I care less about relative quantities and more about what can be produced with the absolute amount at hand. How many houses, cars or circuit boards could be made with 30,000 tons a year? There’s always some bigger problem you can point to that seems to render the point at hand useless, but as they say, 30K tons of copper saved is 30K tons of copper earned.
    - light_hue_1 4y ago
      > Still, I care less about relative quantities and more about what can be produced with the absolute amount at hand This attitude is exactly why our planet is dying. Instead of investing time and effort into things that matter, people become hyper-focused on worthless things that have no impact. Like measures to conserve a trivial amount of water at home. It's a poisonous and wasteful way to think. > There’s always some bigger problem you can point to that seems to render the point at hand useless That's simply not true. We have real problems to solve. The numbers are clear. This isn't one of them.
  - walnutclosefarm 4y ago
    I believe you've misplaced a decimal in your conclusion. 30,000 is 0.15% of 20,000,000, not .015%. Still pretty insignificant, though.
- tedunangst 4y ago
  What percentage of US copper consumption is devoted to penny production?
  - tomnipotent 4y ago
    All new pennies since 1983 are 98% zinc.
- JoshuaDavid 4y ago
  The US mints about 8 billion pennies per year, which at 2.5g each and 2.5% copper, works out to about 500 metric tons of copper. Add in nickels (1.5B x 5g x 75% copper = 5600 metric tons), dimes (3B x 2.2g x 92% copper = 6100 metric tons Cu), and quarters (2.5B x 5.7g x 92% copper = 13000 metric tons copper). Which works out to just over 25000 metric tons of copper per year used in US coinage. About 2 million metric tons of copper are used in the US per year. So all coinage represents about 1.25% of US copper consumption, of which quarters are about half. There are some good reasons to eliminate small coinage, but "it will noticeably help with a copper shortage" isn't really one of them.
  - rowanG077 4y ago
    Huh? 1.25% seems incredibly significant to me. That can be the difference between a shortage and no shortage.
    - eru 4y ago
      Doesn't seem very significant to me. But it's a much higher percentage than I would have expected.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    The US mint also destroys old coins, so you need to know the net production.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
I'm guessing Mining.com has a strong pro-mining take on many different topics.
- _whiteCaps_ 4y ago
  I think this is originally from Business In Vancouver magazine: https://biv.com/article/2022/07/looming-copper-crunch-and-why-recycling-cant-fix-it https://biv.com/article/2022/07/looming-copper-crunch-and-wh... (although replacing Mining.com with Vancouver would still be true)
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    I think it's an S&P Global report that they're all quoting. https://ihsmarkit.com/Info/0722/futureofcopper.html https://ihsmarkit.com/Info/0722/futureofcopper.html Not sure if that's available but the same source was expecting a mild glut of copper over the next few years due to new mines opening and no one seems to predict higher prices long term, so I think this might just be standard industry whining that taxes and health and safety and environmental laws are holding them back. > Even though a rise in demand is anticipated, this will not be enough to absorb the increase in supply, Commerzbank's commodities analyst Daniel Briesemann said in a note. > Also, the conspicuous supply difference is due to the expected noteworthy recovery in mine output. > According to ICSG, mine output >will rise by 3.9% due to the commissioning of several new projects and the expansion of existing mines, Briesemann said. > This was echoed by UK brokerage Marex Spectron, which said in a research note Dec. 7 that according to CRU -- a commodity research company -- the view is that after a deficit in 2021, the following two years are expected to see a surplus. > Aside primary copper production, an increase in secondary production, from scrap copper, was also likely to contribute to copper's surplus, Briesemann said.
nayuki 4y ago
This is the inevitable outcome of continuing to uphold the status quo of the car-dominant society: shortages in gasoline, lithium, cobalt, copper, urban land, etc. We have to face the music: Converting gas cars to electric will only fix a small fraction of all the problems caused by cars. Redesigning cities so that most people won't require a car to work and live is the real solution.
- konschubert 4y ago
  We need every possible contribution to fight the dooming climate emergency. Bicycles AND electric cars. Renewables AND nuclear AND carbon capture. I am very much against cars in cities, just like you, but this is an independent topic. If you try to fight climate change by banning cars you will run out of time and lose both fights.
  - nayuki 4y ago
    What you said is factually true, but I think there are bigger problems in context. Most people, having grown up with cars from parents and peers, can't imagine anything other than a car-centric life. The distances are too far, the bus comes once an hour, and biking is too dangerous. So getting an electric car might be the only improvement that they can think of. Especially given the upfront cost of electric cars and their reduced convenience for long road trips, it's easy to feel that they made enough personal sacrifices for the sake of the common good. While electric cars are a somewhat bitter pill to swallow, the real bitter pills are things like ending exclusive single-family detached house zoning, increasing density, allowing mixed residential-retail-office neighborhoods, converting car lanes to bike or transit lanes, building rail lines (which can easily take a decade), offering decent inter-city train service. I fear that electric cars offer an easy "personal responsibility" band-aid that exhausts people's willpower to demand more substantial collective change. > Don't hijack the climate emergency for your political agenda. What's with this accusation?
    - hunterb123 4y ago
      Some people have only lived in highly dense areas and can't imagine why you'd need a car in certain cities or regions. Those seem to be the people who push the car-less idea the most, because it meets their world view, but doesn't work once you step outside the downtown bubble. But what I think they want are solutions to the parking, traffic, and other issues that stem from city overpopulation and/or planning mismanagement of cities. As an outsider I agree cities need to rework how they handle cars (idling in traffic for an hour to go 10 miles, parking being hell, etc.) but it's a specific problem to cities (some more so than others)
twoeyes2 4y ago
Can aluminum take up the slack? I know long distance power cables are often aluminum. Even some of the larger gauge in-home wires. If copper prices rise too much, some demand will switch over to other conductors.
- salty_biscuits 4y ago
  Sure, depending on the application you can just redesign to larger gauge aluminium. Aluminium has useful mechanical properties that trump the lower conductivity (such as power lines,where thermal cycles can make copper brittle). You could argue that there is a silver shortage in a similar way as the article has argued a copper shortage...
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    The lower conductivity of Al isn't important: you just use larger wires to make up for it and get the same resistivity. Al is so cheap that it's still much cheaper than Cu even with thicker wires. Al also has low density, so even with thicker wires, it isn't as heavy as Cu, which is important with power lines.
dieselgate 4y ago
> Currently recycling (an EV battery) is an expensive process where North Americans are footing the bill,” Chiang said. “That’s why they’re charging people thousands of dollars for recycling. That’s why the stat is only 5% of all EV batteries are being recycled. Wow this was new for me, it makes plenty of sense to reuse the batteries when they’re no longer sufficient for an automobile - but is that’s something available to the general public?
- sgtnoodle 4y ago
  No one is repurposing whole packs because they are only gotten rid of after they've completely failed. Repurposing individual battery cells is difficult when they're tightly integrated into a battery pack. They're welded in, and often entombed in wax, foam or adhesives. If you can disassemble down to a module level, then you have a shot. Usually when an EV pack fails, it's due to a single module going bad. There's a pretty good sized industry to refurbish failed Prius battery packs by disassembling them down to modules, and then characterizing the modules and matching them back up with similarly degraded but otherwise healthy modules across many battery packs.
jmyeet 4y ago
It's good to highlight these issues but honestly I'm just not worried about that because this is the kind of thing that spurs innovation. That could be recycling more copper, using less copper, findin gnew sources of copper, finding alternatives to copper and so on. Remember that copper's primary use is as a conductor and there are lots of conductors from aluminium to gold. I don't expect fuel-based vehicles to go away completely because there are still use cases where fuel is better than electric. Cold conditions are still a problem for EVs. Range is another factor. What I expect to see more of is using renewables to store energy in the form of fuel instead of in batteries eg producing methanol, methane, ammonia or kerosene. This will at least be carbon neutral. It's not currently economic to do it but the advantage comes in not needing potentially expensive batteries, being relatively easy to store and not requiring power grid infrastructure in remote or unstable regions.
antiquark 4y ago
Cars are here to stay, whether the collectivists like it or not.
- vkou 4y ago
  Yes, and we can really stick it to the collectivists by spending ~$10-15,000/year per vehicle on the initial purchase of the car, and the associated costs of insurance, gas, maintenance, parking, and car-dedicated infrastructure.
- nayuki 4y ago
  As if paving roads everywhere, providing free parking spots, and socializing the cost of collisions wasn't collectivist. Right.
- mjhay 4y ago
  You might want to brush up on the concept of economic "externalities," and also how transportation funds are raised and the shares of funding different transportation modes receive. After that, I bet you'd have some worthwhile things to say on this topic.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  Freely-available roads are socialist. They should all be privately owned and have toll gates.
cercatrova 4y ago
In my years, I've often learned that only necessity will push people towards solutions. In this case with copper, only once we have used up most of the copper available easily will we truly start to care about extracting it in more efficient ways, whether it be through recycling or other means. If it's too easy to do the naive way, people just won't care about efficiency enough to do it the hard way. It's the same thing in software with bloat even as hardware gets faster. Rather, it is precisely because hardware gets faster that software engineers have little regard for the speed of their software, since any inefficiences will be overshadowed by the horsepower of the raw silicon. What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away, I've always known, but now I see it everywhere, not just in software.
jti107 4y ago
i might have missed it in the article but it seems the issue is that there arent enough mines coming online to meet the new demand NOT that we dont have enough copper. it is about the same abundance as zinc and nickel. this is where the free market should help, if the price goes up enough it should incentivize companies to open more mines and possibly innovate new mining methods.
- nick__m 4y ago
  the article address that : While there is enough copper in the world, geologically speaking, to supply the increased demand, there isn’t enough time. It takes 10 to 15 years to get a new copper mine through permitting and construction. Twenty years is not unusual for very large projects.
  - defrost 4y ago
    It's mining dot com trumpeting the S&P Mineral Intelligence position on the recent independant Copper position report .. anticipatinting a potential crunch in 15 years if not averted now by investment in developing projects. The average time figure quoted is best read as "typically, in the absence of the demand we see ramping up now..." and reflects a typically sedate pace for mineral projects which have 50+ year lifespans with trannational owners who overlap exploration, development, and production. The industry voice here is for Cu projects to accelerate. ( FWiW 14+ years back I wrote a chunk of the backend of what was sold on to become S&P Min.Intell. https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/metals-mining https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met... )
    - nick__m 4y ago
      That is somewhat reassuring, thanks for your informed perspective.
- EMM_386 4y ago
  The article is on mining.com, there is a section about mining :) > In B.C., there are currently two mine expansion proposals that are close to having final investments decisions made, Goehring said – Highland Valley Copper and Red Chris — and two proposed new mines: the KSM gold-copper mine and the Galore Creek copper mine. etc.
onion2k 4y ago
If the number of EVs on the road today remained static for the next 20 years, recycling the metals in them might be able to make up the bulk of the demand. But EV sales are growing exponentially. Why would car manufacturers be limited to copper from cars? For example, there's huge amounts of copper in telecoms infrastructure that's being replaced with fibre at the moment. The originating source of the metal is irrelevant. The only things that matter at purity, contaminants, and cost. If the copper is sufficiently high quality, doesn't contain anything that would stop it being used in a battery or a motor, and it's cheap enough, then it's all good.
- alar44 4y ago
  The bulk of copper used in cars is for wiring everything up, not motors or batteries.
  - phpisthebest 4y ago
    That is true for ICE.. an Electric Motor uses a lot of copper
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    Tesla has a patent on replacing lots of individual power and control wires with a single smarter wire carrying both for multiple components. They were talking about it for the model Y and it was suppossed to reduce 1.5km of wire down to 100m but I dont think it's hit production vehicles yet. They mostly talked about lighter weight and easier robot install, but should be cheaper and use less copper too if that actually becomes an issue.
twic 4y ago
> For some standard EV models, Ford will use lithium-iron-sulphate batteries Googled this, and google gave me a page full of results for lithium iron phosphate batteries. Not a single mention of sulphate (or sulfate). There are people actually getting paid a salary to do this.
- kccqzy 4y ago
  It is actually similarly difficult to Google other new battery chemistries like lithium-iron-manganese-phosphate batteries (Google would confuse it with lithium ion manganese oxide batteries). Double quotes still help though.
  - visarga 4y ago
    This is a Google Search bug. If you search for something less popular, that exists close to a popular phrase, it will give you the popular results. Kind of like "horse riding a man" fails in both Dall-E and Google Image search: 1. https://www.google.com/search?q=horse+riding+a+man https://www.google.com/search?q=horse+riding+a+man 2. https://labs.openai.com/s/5iMgC0d3AxrZ2Z39A7nnSuKY https://labs.openai.com/s/5iMgC0d3AxrZ2Z39A7nnSuKY They pretend they are using transformer neural nets in search, yet fail at such a clear semantic task that should have been easy for transformers to solve.
- buildbot 4y ago
  Bing has way better results for this search at least: https://www.bing.com/search?q=lithium+iron+sulfate+batteries https://www.bing.com/search?q=lithium+iron+sulfate+batteries
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  Having worked in content marketing, I can assure you that they were likely paid too little to care.
londons_explore 4y ago
Copper as a material is fairly unique in that many things we make of copper have alternatives that could be used if the cost was too high. For example, copper is used for water pipes. But we also have steel and plastic pipes. Copper is also used for wiring and electrical conductors - but we can redesign circuits to use higher voltages (double the voltage needs only one quarter of the copper). Or, we can switch to aluminium for wiring, which is also a good conductor. Plenty of users are already economical with copper. For example, have you noticed that if you buy a USB cable that's 1 meter it is less than half the price of a 2 meter cable? Don't you think that's odd, because presumably there is a fixed labour+materials cost for the connectors, and a per-meter cost for the cable itself? No... The USB specification requires a specific wire resistance, which means longer wires must also be thicker (more copper) to meet that spec. Lately, very cost sensitive USB wires have moved to aluminium conductors. There is talk of electric cars with 800 volt (vs 400 volt) battery systems... The main reason to switch is to reduce the cost of copper wires and motor coils.
- dangrossman 4y ago
  > There is talk of electric cars with 800 volt (vs 400 volt) battery systems... The main reason to switch is to reduce the cost of copper wires and motor coils. It's not just talk, a number of EVs run at 800V (Porsche Taycan, Audi E-Tron GT, Lucid Air, Hyundai Ioniq 5, Kia EV6). And while there may be a cost benefit for the manufacturer, it also makes a more desirable car for the owner, since they can charge twice as fast. While most 400V EVs top out around 125 kW charging rates, the 800V EVs can hit mid-200s.
  - sacrosancty 4y ago
    Wait what? How does the motor voltage affect charging rate? That's limited by the chemistry in the cells and perhaps heat dissipation, isn't it?
    - snek_case 4y ago
      The charging voltage has to mach your battery voltage, so twice the voltage in the charging cable means you can send more power for the same amount of amps.
amluto 4y ago
Some cursory searching suggests that between 40 and 50% of copper is used in building construction. I don’t know the further breakdown, but: Copper is widely used for flashing. For this application, galvanized steel, aluminum, and stainless steel can substitute. All are less expensive. Copper is used for pipes. They are much more expensive than plastics. Arguably, depending on the particular application, one or more plastic options are as good or better. (Copper is unharmed by moderate chlorine concentrations and sunlight. It’s mechanically strong. It’s inert to water at appropriate pH. It is quite reactive to water at the wrong pH. Boiler condensate will quickly destroy it.) Copper is used for heavy-gauge electrical wire. For many of these applications, aluminum is much less expensive and arguable superior (it’s lighter and more flexible). Copper is used for 12 and 14 gauge branch circuits. Aluminum branch circuits are currently strongly discouraged. In any event, a lot of copper is consumed for applications that don’t need it. If prices go up, the industry can adapt.
- NegativeLatency 4y ago
  Not just pipes but also fittings and valve assemblies mostly in brass
- labrador 4y ago
  I hope people realize this is the solution and not the Pebble Mine in Alaska https://www.kuow.org/stories/copper-versus-salmon-why-an-alaska-mine-matters-in-the-northwest https://www.kuow.org/stories/copper-versus-salmon-why-an-ala...
- ThunderSizzle 4y ago
  Probably completely anecdote evidence, but plastic piping needs to be replaced every 20-ish years, while copper has easily last multiple decades. 20 years is fine assuming all the piping is easy to get to (e.g. around a hot water heater). A lot of piping is not and would require refinishing quite of a bit of piping. My research seems to indicate most residential plastic tubing still has a lifetime of 20 years, from what I can tell.
  - jefftk 4y ago
hestefisk 4y ago
Time to buy copper miners?
brian-armstrong 4y ago
Bitcoin solves this.
timzaman 4y ago
Copper price seems pretty nominal. Nonsensical article. Shrug.
francoisdevlin 4y ago
Productivity 3 modules anyone?
balderdash 4y ago
The headline should really just read “looming copper price increases” If copper prices triple, demand will react. The price of copper is inconsequential to EV production, demand will be rationed elsewhere.
- joshlemer 4y ago
  Hopefully demand for EVs (seems automobiles in general) is more elastic than you make it out and people start gradually living less cad centric lives and cycling/walking/bus/subwaying more.
  - eru 4y ago
    The demand for EVs is probably elastic, but the impact of copper prices on EV prices is probably small enough that it doesn't matter. And thus EV demand won't react much to copper prices.
tommykins 4y ago
The major problem for copper is the lack of large projects in the pipeline - current mineral explorers are entering a new phase of what they need to look for and it's a super exciting time to be working in Exploration, honestly. P.S - Incredibly biased as I work in Mineral Exploration.
- ghouse 4y ago
  Are you based in the US? If so, please drop me a note regarding a previous producer in NW Arizona.
  - tommykins 4y ago
    Not US based but have done work in Nevada, Arizona + Utah and might be able to answer your question.
    - ghouse 4y ago
      Please email me -- address in my about. Looking to hire someone to sell a Cu/Zn mine.
- edye 4y ago
  Does the mining industry need help with software? I was talking to someone with experience in the the oil & gas sector and he mentioned that there is a lot of things that could be automated because scraping data and data entry is often being done by hand.
  - chintler 4y ago
    I might have a solution for this. Can I drop you a note?
    - edye 4y ago
      Sure.
dkbrk 4y ago
For information on this sort of thing the USGS mineral survey is an excellent source. There's the general overview on copper [0], annual summaries, e.g [1] for 2022, and the more detailed "yearbook" [2] which it looks like is in the process of being updated since the last official release in 2017. for example, [1] says this about "World Resources": > A U.S. Geological Survey study of global copper deposits indicated that, as of 2015, identified resources contained 2.1 billion tons of copper, and undiscovered resources contained an estimated 3.5 billion tons. Note that this article is careful not to outright say "there isn't enough copper", even if it heavily implies it. It says there aren't enough mines for future demand. And in the sense that more mines should be built in anticipation of that demand, it's correct. But the idea that a copper shortage will meaningfully delay electrification is ridiculous; even if there is a shortfall, all that will mean is that EVs will become slightly more expensive while other uses of copper move to substitutes and more mines are built. The economic incentives are too strong for anything else to happen. [0]: https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-center/copper-statistics-and-information https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-c... [1]: https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022-copper.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022-copper.pdf [2]: https://pubs.usgs.gov/myb/vol1/2017/myb1-2017-copper.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/myb/vol1/2017/myb1-2017-copper.pdf
- inversalAutoDoc 4y ago
  > ... even if there is a shortfall, all that will mean is that EVs will become slightly more expensive Seeing as expense is currently a major barrier to adoption of EVs by the general public, I'd say that becoming even slightly more expensive provides a significant barrier to electrification in the near-term.
Pokepokalypse 4y ago
yeah - there's not going to be a shortage of aluminum any time soon.
Thorentis 4y ago
Instead of worrying about how we substitute every ICE car for an EV car, we should be trying to get cars off the road. COVID has taught us that: people value being close to home, people value spending more time in their local communities, a sizable portion of the workforce does not need to commute to work. We should be leveraging these facts when planning towns, to reduce the reliance on cars.
- bluefirebrand 4y ago
  > COVID has taught us that: people value being close to home, people value spending more time in their local communities, a sizable portion of the workforce does not need to commute to work. I think you could easily look at people's reactions to COVID lockdowns and reach the opposite conclusion. A lot of people hated being stuck at home, a lot of people couldn't wait to get back to normal, travelling to see concerts and sporting events, or just travelling for fun. A lot of people, despite having jobs that can be done remotely, prefer to commute to offices because they think it has other benefits. All COVID really showed us is what is possible with regards to remote work and keeping people close to home, not is what is largely desired by people.
  - phpisthebest 4y ago
    I dont know if it really even showed us that The supply chain problems, in part are a result of the Lockdowns. So sure it "showed us" what people already knew, information workers can work from home. The final tally is still out on if that was better for companies or not, or if companies in the long term will keep work from home for employee Hell at my company it is about 50/50 on if people want to work from home or not. I think HN being what is it tends to not recognize that here we have a strong bias towards WFH that may not be shared by large parts of the workforce
  - Thorentis 4y ago
    I think a large reason for people longing for all those things again, was because many people who were locked down, were locked down in suburbia, which has almost none of those things within walking or even driving distance (under an hour, obviously you can drive further). But regardless, I think the solution to many issues being talked about here is bette decentralised planning. We need to do away with monolithic cities surrounded by an endlessly increasing suburban sprawl. It requires every household to have at least 1 car, and it means if peool do need to spend time close to home, they suddenly miss out on many things they love or even need. Many small towns is better than a few huge cities.
chewz 4y ago
Add more red tape... There are rich resources of high-grade copper waiting for approval 20 years... In Chile, In US... etc.
badpun 4y ago
Wouldn't it make investing in copper miners a good idea? Currently the ETF (https://www.globalxetfs.com/funds/copx/#performance https://www.globalxetfs.com/funds/copx/#performance) is at 7.5 P/E, while some of the individual companies can be had at 4 P/E.
- danuker 4y ago
  I am skeptical. There are almost 1B tons supposedly economically extractable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_copper#Reserves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_copper#Reserves
usrusr 4y ago
2.5 times as much copper per vehicle as in ICE. 2.5 times according to the article that tries hard to be alarmist, so they probably don't underestimate. How much of the global copper supply went into cars? If it was a lot I'm sure that car manufacturers would have found ways to do with less (e.g. the dead simple step of moving to a higher voltage)
thdespou 4y ago
Last time I checked copper price was 6000 per metric ton.Today is 7800. Invest in copper people https://markets.businessinsider.com/commodities/copper-price https://markets.businessinsider.com/commodities/copper-price
- IMTDb 4y ago
  Copper price today is exactly the same as it was in July 2006 (using the same source you linked). Not sure this is such a wonderful asset when you look at it this way.
  - thdespou 4y ago
    Not sure what are you referring to the price of copper has been increasing for the past 20 years. 2006 was high because it was before the housing prices with all of the plundering. The demand has increased and the are no signs of slowing down https://www.macrotrends.net/1476/copper-prices-historical-chart-data#:~:text=The%20current%20price%20of%20copper,2022%20is%20%243.60%20per%20pound https://www.macrotrends.net/1476/copper-prices-historical-ch....
lyeager 4y ago
I wonder how bad things would need to get before getting metals from asteroids becomes economically viable?
jollyllama 4y ago
https://www.amazon.com/Boom-Bust-Story-About-Copper-ebook/dp/B007EDOKWA https://www.amazon.com/Boom-Bust-Story-About-Copper-ebook/dp... Bill Carter has written an excellent book on the business cycle of copper and some of the problematic consequences.

It will be interesting to see to what extent either other conductors (such as graphene, one of the best conductors [0]) or asteroid mining for iron, copper, nickel, and cobalt [1] become feasible in time (mid-century?) to offset the shortage of copper. [0] https://www.nanowerk.com/what_is_graphene.php https://www.nanowerk.com/what_is_graphene.php [1] https://pwr.edu.pl/en/university/news/raw-materials-from-asteroids-we-know-where-to-best-extract-them-from-10446.html https://pwr.edu.pl/en/university/news/raw-materials-from-ast...

stevenjgarner 4y ago
Not much discussion on HN yet about "the looming copper crunch" - these postings all had no comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32111282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32111282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32101391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32101391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28710646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28710646

jmclnx 4y ago

Well, in the US maybe time to eliminate the 1, 5 and maybe 10 cent coins ? Yes, the 1 cent coins have little copper, but multiple millions are produced per year. The others have a copper core. With current inflation, 1/5/10 cent coins cannot buy anything. The only reason for the 25 cent coin are vending machines.

ravenstine 4y ago
Not much copper in those unless you collect pre-1982 pennies. New pennies have such a thin layer of copper plating that separating that would be more trouble than it's worth. EDIT: Darn, can't delete now. Yes I agree, the penny should be eliminated to save on copper.
- jmclnx 4y ago
  true, but with the number of these made each years, they add up. Plus all these do is cost everyone money to handle (banks, shops and even the Gov).
brtkdotse 4y ago
Is physical currency still common in the US? I haven’t used physical currency in probably 5-6 years, outside the 10 SEK the tooth fairy leaves.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  Come to Austria. The entire country revolves around cash. I rarely see someone pay with card at the supermarket and it's most likely a foreigner. Small shops and cafes don't even take cards, only cash and the rare time they do it's only for larger sums. Also tips are common almost everywhere.
  - fmakunbound 4y ago
    What's the reasons for that?
    - jbverschoor 4y ago
      Same reason people DuckDuckGo. They have a stronger connection to the history of snooping on civilians
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      Easier tax fraud mostly to keep your illicitly gained money away from the taxman. Plus conservative population that is skeptical about new tech and strongly keeps outdated ways of working and doing business (visible in any company there). Letters are common as well and digitalization is pretty weak. Like what's the last tech product you remember that came out of Austria?
  - givemeethekeys 4y ago
    I've heard similar about Germany (someone from Germany, please chime in). There's a lovely under-appreciated privacy about using cash.
    - sva_ 4y ago
      Cash is still king in Germany, but use of "contactless" payment methods have drastically increased in the pandemic. Small shops often prefer or only take cash, or accept card payment only from a certain amount due to fees of the processors. I heard small businesses prefer cash for tax reasons as well.
stevenjgarner 4y ago
The copper penny hoarders are beating you to it [0]. I met a "retired" guy who is driving around the US buying boxes of pennies from banks sorting them into copper or not. He sells the sorted copper pennies to penny hoarders [1] and uses the non-copper pennies to spend at the Walmart NCR cash registers (they have to love him). He said he does not get rich but makes enough to get by. We went out for a meal and discussed the feasibility of sorting the pennies by date using ML. The real gold mine would be that an AI approach might potentially identify numismatic grade pennies and really pay for itself. [0] https://www.wikihow.com/Hoard-Copper-Pennies https://www.wikihow.com/Hoard-Copper-Pennies [1] https://moneyning.com/make-money/how-to-cash-in-your-pennies-for-more-than-a-cent/ https://moneyning.com/make-money/how-to-cash-in-your-pennies...
- shrubble 4y ago
  There are slight differences in weight between the 1982 and later, and the copper containing pennies. You don't need to use ML, you need a comparator of the kind found in 1000s of vending machines.
  - OJFord 4y ago
    ML's just a comparator where the designer doesn't (necessarily) understand the logic, right?
    - loa_in_ 4y ago
      If you have an universal constructor, yes, it's going to be a problem that solves itself. In practice you need a high fidelity weight sensor and a handful of transistors.
  - dehrmann 4y ago
    What if we ran that ML on the etherium network?
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  Codyslab sorting copper pennies using magnetic inductance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gM9mOk6eb8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gM9mOk6eb8 Seems very simple and low tech.
yieldcrv 4y ago
is that a large enough driver of demand?
sva_ 4y ago
I'm actually quite fond of the 25 cent coins I got from the US. They work in shopping carts here (you have to put a coin into a shopping cart to get it, and you get the coin back after you bring it back, but they usually only accept 1 or 2 euro. I'm much more likely to still have the quarter, since I can't spend it here.) I got bunch of coins when I had to use a laundromat in the US once, they only accepted quarters. Exchange $20 at a different machine and get a ton of metal. I suppose its like legacy software.
- gerdesj 4y ago
  Back in the late '70/early '80s the UK 10p coin was similar enough in size and weight to fool some German vending machines as a "1 DM" coin (Deutchmark). The rough rule of thumb rate of exchange was 1 GBP to 4 DM back then.
  - sva_ 4y ago
    A large number of European vending machines still accept the 10 thai baht coin as a 2 Euro coin (10 baht are approx. 30 cents). I heard the newer machines use a combination of methods, including weight and electrical resistance to test if a coin is actually the right one.
light_hue_1 4y ago
> Yes, the 1 cent coins have little copper, but multiple millions are produced per year Billions are produced per year, not millions. The mint makes on average 10 billion pennies per year, https://qz.com/1318203/making-pennies-costs-the-us-mint-millions/ https://qz.com/1318203/making-pennies-costs-the-us-mint-mill... Varies by year. It is still a totally irrelevant amount of copper. One penny has 2.95g of copper in it. 10 billion pennies have 30,000 tons of copper in them. Worldwide copper production is 20 million tons. 0.015% of the world's copper is used for pennies. That's a rounding error. Just because a number is big, doesn't mean it matters. Sure. Get rid of the penny. But not because it will impact our copper supply in any way.
- sixstringtheory 4y ago
  Still, I care less about relative quantities and more about what can be produced with the absolute amount at hand. How many houses, cars or circuit boards could be made with 30,000 tons a year? There’s always some bigger problem you can point to that seems to render the point at hand useless, but as they say, 30K tons of copper saved is 30K tons of copper earned.
  - light_hue_1 4y ago
    > Still, I care less about relative quantities and more about what can be produced with the absolute amount at hand This attitude is exactly why our planet is dying. Instead of investing time and effort into things that matter, people become hyper-focused on worthless things that have no impact. Like measures to conserve a trivial amount of water at home. It's a poisonous and wasteful way to think. > There’s always some bigger problem you can point to that seems to render the point at hand useless That's simply not true. We have real problems to solve. The numbers are clear. This isn't one of them.
- walnutclosefarm 4y ago
  I believe you've misplaced a decimal in your conclusion. 30,000 is 0.15% of 20,000,000, not .015%. Still pretty insignificant, though.
tedunangst 4y ago
What percentage of US copper consumption is devoted to penny production?
- tomnipotent 4y ago
  All new pennies since 1983 are 98% zinc.
JoshuaDavid 4y ago
The US mints about 8 billion pennies per year, which at 2.5g each and 2.5% copper, works out to about 500 metric tons of copper. Add in nickels (1.5B x 5g x 75% copper = 5600 metric tons), dimes (3B x 2.2g x 92% copper = 6100 metric tons Cu), and quarters (2.5B x 5.7g x 92% copper = 13000 metric tons copper). Which works out to just over 25000 metric tons of copper per year used in US coinage. About 2 million metric tons of copper are used in the US per year. So all coinage represents about 1.25% of US copper consumption, of which quarters are about half. There are some good reasons to eliminate small coinage, but "it will noticeably help with a copper shortage" isn't really one of them.
- rowanG077 4y ago
  Huh? 1.25% seems incredibly significant to me. That can be the difference between a shortage and no shortage.
  - eru 4y ago
    Doesn't seem very significant to me. But it's a much higher percentage than I would have expected.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  The US mint also destroys old coins, so you need to know the net production.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

I'm guessing Mining.com has a strong pro-mining take on many different topics.

_whiteCaps_ 4y ago
I think this is originally from Business In Vancouver magazine: https://biv.com/article/2022/07/looming-copper-crunch-and-why-recycling-cant-fix-it https://biv.com/article/2022/07/looming-copper-crunch-and-wh... (although replacing Mining.com with Vancouver would still be true)
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  I think it's an S&P Global report that they're all quoting. https://ihsmarkit.com/Info/0722/futureofcopper.html https://ihsmarkit.com/Info/0722/futureofcopper.html Not sure if that's available but the same source was expecting a mild glut of copper over the next few years due to new mines opening and no one seems to predict higher prices long term, so I think this might just be standard industry whining that taxes and health and safety and environmental laws are holding them back. > Even though a rise in demand is anticipated, this will not be enough to absorb the increase in supply, Commerzbank's commodities analyst Daniel Briesemann said in a note. > Also, the conspicuous supply difference is due to the expected noteworthy recovery in mine output. > According to ICSG, mine output >will rise by 3.9% due to the commissioning of several new projects and the expansion of existing mines, Briesemann said. > This was echoed by UK brokerage Marex Spectron, which said in a research note Dec. 7 that according to CRU -- a commodity research company -- the view is that after a deficit in 2021, the following two years are expected to see a surplus. > Aside primary copper production, an increase in secondary production, from scrap copper, was also likely to contribute to copper's surplus, Briesemann said.

nayuki 4y ago

This is the inevitable outcome of continuing to uphold the status quo of the car-dominant society: shortages in gasoline, lithium, cobalt, copper, urban land, etc. We have to face the music: Converting gas cars to electric will only fix a small fraction of all the problems caused by cars. Redesigning cities so that most people won't require a car to work and live is the real solution.

konschubert 4y ago
We need every possible contribution to fight the dooming climate emergency. Bicycles AND electric cars. Renewables AND nuclear AND carbon capture. I am very much against cars in cities, just like you, but this is an independent topic. If you try to fight climate change by banning cars you will run out of time and lose both fights.
- nayuki 4y ago
  What you said is factually true, but I think there are bigger problems in context. Most people, having grown up with cars from parents and peers, can't imagine anything other than a car-centric life. The distances are too far, the bus comes once an hour, and biking is too dangerous. So getting an electric car might be the only improvement that they can think of. Especially given the upfront cost of electric cars and their reduced convenience for long road trips, it's easy to feel that they made enough personal sacrifices for the sake of the common good. While electric cars are a somewhat bitter pill to swallow, the real bitter pills are things like ending exclusive single-family detached house zoning, increasing density, allowing mixed residential-retail-office neighborhoods, converting car lanes to bike or transit lanes, building rail lines (which can easily take a decade), offering decent inter-city train service. I fear that electric cars offer an easy "personal responsibility" band-aid that exhausts people's willpower to demand more substantial collective change. > Don't hijack the climate emergency for your political agenda. What's with this accusation?
  - hunterb123 4y ago
    Some people have only lived in highly dense areas and can't imagine why you'd need a car in certain cities or regions. Those seem to be the people who push the car-less idea the most, because it meets their world view, but doesn't work once you step outside the downtown bubble. But what I think they want are solutions to the parking, traffic, and other issues that stem from city overpopulation and/or planning mismanagement of cities. As an outsider I agree cities need to rework how they handle cars (idling in traffic for an hour to go 10 miles, parking being hell, etc.) but it's a specific problem to cities (some more so than others)

twoeyes2 4y ago

Can aluminum take up the slack? I know long distance power cables are often aluminum. Even some of the larger gauge in-home wires. If copper prices rise too much, some demand will switch over to other conductors.

salty_biscuits 4y ago
Sure, depending on the application you can just redesign to larger gauge aluminium. Aluminium has useful mechanical properties that trump the lower conductivity (such as power lines,where thermal cycles can make copper brittle). You could argue that there is a silver shortage in a similar way as the article has argued a copper shortage...
- midoridensha 4y ago
  The lower conductivity of Al isn't important: you just use larger wires to make up for it and get the same resistivity. Al is so cheap that it's still much cheaper than Cu even with thicker wires. Al also has low density, so even with thicker wires, it isn't as heavy as Cu, which is important with power lines.

dieselgate 4y ago

> Currently recycling (an EV battery) is an expensive process where North Americans are footing the bill,” Chiang said. “That’s why they’re charging people thousands of dollars for recycling. That’s why the stat is only 5% of all EV batteries are being recycled. Wow this was new for me, it makes plenty of sense to reuse the batteries when they’re no longer sufficient for an automobile - but is that’s something available to the general public?

sgtnoodle 4y ago
No one is repurposing whole packs because they are only gotten rid of after they've completely failed. Repurposing individual battery cells is difficult when they're tightly integrated into a battery pack. They're welded in, and often entombed in wax, foam or adhesives. If you can disassemble down to a module level, then you have a shot. Usually when an EV pack fails, it's due to a single module going bad. There's a pretty good sized industry to refurbish failed Prius battery packs by disassembling them down to modules, and then characterizing the modules and matching them back up with similarly degraded but otherwise healthy modules across many battery packs.

jmyeet 4y ago

It's good to highlight these issues but honestly I'm just not worried about that because this is the kind of thing that spurs innovation. That could be recycling more copper, using less copper, findin gnew sources of copper, finding alternatives to copper and so on. Remember that copper's primary use is as a conductor and there are lots of conductors from aluminium to gold. I don't expect fuel-based vehicles to go away completely because there are still use cases where fuel is better than electric. Cold conditions are still a problem for EVs. Range is another factor. What I expect to see more of is using renewables to store energy in the form of fuel instead of in batteries eg producing methanol, methane, ammonia or kerosene. This will at least be carbon neutral. It's not currently economic to do it but the advantage comes in not needing potentially expensive batteries, being relatively easy to store and not requiring power grid infrastructure in remote or unstable regions.

antiquark 4y ago

Cars are here to stay, whether the collectivists like it or not.

vkou 4y ago
Yes, and we can really stick it to the collectivists by spending ~$10-15,000/year per vehicle on the initial purchase of the car, and the associated costs of insurance, gas, maintenance, parking, and car-dedicated infrastructure.
nayuki 4y ago
As if paving roads everywhere, providing free parking spots, and socializing the cost of collisions wasn't collectivist. Right.
mjhay 4y ago
You might want to brush up on the concept of economic "externalities," and also how transportation funds are raised and the shares of funding different transportation modes receive. After that, I bet you'd have some worthwhile things to say on this topic.
midoridensha 4y ago
Freely-available roads are socialist. They should all be privately owned and have toll gates.

cercatrova 4y ago

In my years, I've often learned that only necessity will push people towards solutions. In this case with copper, only once we have used up most of the copper available easily will we truly start to care about extracting it in more efficient ways, whether it be through recycling or other means. If it's too easy to do the naive way, people just won't care about efficiency enough to do it the hard way. It's the same thing in software with bloat even as hardware gets faster. Rather, it is precisely because hardware gets faster that software engineers have little regard for the speed of their software, since any inefficiences will be overshadowed by the horsepower of the raw silicon. What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away, I've always known, but now I see it everywhere, not just in software.

jti107 4y ago

i might have missed it in the article but it seems the issue is that there arent enough mines coming online to meet the new demand NOT that we dont have enough copper. it is about the same abundance as zinc and nickel. this is where the free market should help, if the price goes up enough it should incentivize companies to open more mines and possibly innovate new mining methods.

nick__m 4y ago
the article address that : While there is enough copper in the world, geologically speaking, to supply the increased demand, there isn’t enough time. It takes 10 to 15 years to get a new copper mine through permitting and construction. Twenty years is not unusual for very large projects.
- defrost 4y ago
  It's mining dot com trumpeting the S&P Mineral Intelligence position on the recent independant Copper position report .. anticipatinting a potential crunch in 15 years if not averted now by investment in developing projects. The average time figure quoted is best read as "typically, in the absence of the demand we see ramping up now..." and reflects a typically sedate pace for mineral projects which have 50+ year lifespans with trannational owners who overlap exploration, development, and production. The industry voice here is for Cu projects to accelerate. ( FWiW 14+ years back I wrote a chunk of the backend of what was sold on to become S&P Min.Intell. https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/metals-mining https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met... )
  - nick__m 4y ago
    That is somewhat reassuring, thanks for your informed perspective.
EMM_386 4y ago
The article is on mining.com, there is a section about mining :) > In B.C., there are currently two mine expansion proposals that are close to having final investments decisions made, Goehring said – Highland Valley Copper and Red Chris — and two proposed new mines: the KSM gold-copper mine and the Galore Creek copper mine. etc.

onion2k 4y ago

If the number of EVs on the road today remained static for the next 20 years, recycling the metals in them might be able to make up the bulk of the demand. But EV sales are growing exponentially. Why would car manufacturers be limited to copper from cars? For example, there's huge amounts of copper in telecoms infrastructure that's being replaced with fibre at the moment. The originating source of the metal is irrelevant. The only things that matter at purity, contaminants, and cost. If the copper is sufficiently high quality, doesn't contain anything that would stop it being used in a battery or a motor, and it's cheap enough, then it's all good.

alar44 4y ago
The bulk of copper used in cars is for wiring everything up, not motors or batteries.
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  That is true for ICE.. an Electric Motor uses a lot of copper
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Tesla has a patent on replacing lots of individual power and control wires with a single smarter wire carrying both for multiple components. They were talking about it for the model Y and it was suppossed to reduce 1.5km of wire down to 100m but I dont think it's hit production vehicles yet. They mostly talked about lighter weight and easier robot install, but should be cheaper and use less copper too if that actually becomes an issue.

twic 4y ago

> For some standard EV models, Ford will use lithium-iron-sulphate batteries Googled this, and google gave me a page full of results for lithium iron phosphate batteries. Not a single mention of sulphate (or sulfate). There are people actually getting paid a salary to do this.

kccqzy 4y ago
It is actually similarly difficult to Google other new battery chemistries like lithium-iron-manganese-phosphate batteries (Google would confuse it with lithium ion manganese oxide batteries). Double quotes still help though.
- visarga 4y ago
  This is a Google Search bug. If you search for something less popular, that exists close to a popular phrase, it will give you the popular results. Kind of like "horse riding a man" fails in both Dall-E and Google Image search: 1. https://www.google.com/search?q=horse+riding+a+man https://www.google.com/search?q=horse+riding+a+man 2. https://labs.openai.com/s/5iMgC0d3AxrZ2Z39A7nnSuKY https://labs.openai.com/s/5iMgC0d3AxrZ2Z39A7nnSuKY They pretend they are using transformer neural nets in search, yet fail at such a clear semantic task that should have been easy for transformers to solve.
buildbot 4y ago
Bing has way better results for this search at least: https://www.bing.com/search?q=lithium+iron+sulfate+batteries https://www.bing.com/search?q=lithium+iron+sulfate+batteries
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
spaceman_2020 4y ago
Having worked in content marketing, I can assure you that they were likely paid too little to care.

londons_explore 4y ago

Copper as a material is fairly unique in that many things we make of copper have alternatives that could be used if the cost was too high. For example, copper is used for water pipes. But we also have steel and plastic pipes. Copper is also used for wiring and electrical conductors - but we can redesign circuits to use higher voltages (double the voltage needs only one quarter of the copper). Or, we can switch to aluminium for wiring, which is also a good conductor. Plenty of users are already economical with copper. For example, have you noticed that if you buy a USB cable that's 1 meter it is less than half the price of a 2 meter cable? Don't you think that's odd, because presumably there is a fixed labour+materials cost for the connectors, and a per-meter cost for the cable itself? No... The USB specification requires a specific wire resistance, which means longer wires must also be thicker (more copper) to meet that spec. Lately, very cost sensitive USB wires have moved to aluminium conductors. There is talk of electric cars with 800 volt (vs 400 volt) battery systems... The main reason to switch is to reduce the cost of copper wires and motor coils.

dangrossman 4y ago
> There is talk of electric cars with 800 volt (vs 400 volt) battery systems... The main reason to switch is to reduce the cost of copper wires and motor coils. It's not just talk, a number of EVs run at 800V (Porsche Taycan, Audi E-Tron GT, Lucid Air, Hyundai Ioniq 5, Kia EV6). And while there may be a cost benefit for the manufacturer, it also makes a more desirable car for the owner, since they can charge twice as fast. While most 400V EVs top out around 125 kW charging rates, the 800V EVs can hit mid-200s.
- sacrosancty 4y ago
  Wait what? How does the motor voltage affect charging rate? That's limited by the chemistry in the cells and perhaps heat dissipation, isn't it?
  - snek_case 4y ago
    The charging voltage has to mach your battery voltage, so twice the voltage in the charging cable means you can send more power for the same amount of amps.

amluto 4y ago

Some cursory searching suggests that between 40 and 50% of copper is used in building construction. I don’t know the further breakdown, but: Copper is widely used for flashing. For this application, galvanized steel, aluminum, and stainless steel can substitute. All are less expensive. Copper is used for pipes. They are much more expensive than plastics. Arguably, depending on the particular application, one or more plastic options are as good or better. (Copper is unharmed by moderate chlorine concentrations and sunlight. It’s mechanically strong. It’s inert to water at appropriate pH. It is quite reactive to water at the wrong pH. Boiler condensate will quickly destroy it.) Copper is used for heavy-gauge electrical wire. For many of these applications, aluminum is much less expensive and arguable superior (it’s lighter and more flexible). Copper is used for 12 and 14 gauge branch circuits. Aluminum branch circuits are currently strongly discouraged. In any event, a lot of copper is consumed for applications that don’t need it. If prices go up, the industry can adapt.

NegativeLatency 4y ago
Not just pipes but also fittings and valve assemblies mostly in brass
labrador 4y ago
I hope people realize this is the solution and not the Pebble Mine in Alaska https://www.kuow.org/stories/copper-versus-salmon-why-an-alaska-mine-matters-in-the-northwest https://www.kuow.org/stories/copper-versus-salmon-why-an-ala...
ThunderSizzle 4y ago
Probably completely anecdote evidence, but plastic piping needs to be replaced every 20-ish years, while copper has easily last multiple decades. 20 years is fine assuming all the piping is easy to get to (e.g. around a hot water heater). A lot of piping is not and would require refinishing quite of a bit of piping. My research seems to indicate most residential plastic tubing still has a lifetime of 20 years, from what I can tell.
- jefftk 4y ago

hestefisk 4y ago

Time to buy copper miners?

brian-armstrong 4y ago

Bitcoin solves this.

timzaman 4y ago

Copper price seems pretty nominal. Nonsensical article. Shrug.

francoisdevlin 4y ago

Productivity 3 modules anyone?

balderdash 4y ago

The headline should really just read “looming copper price increases” If copper prices triple, demand will react. The price of copper is inconsequential to EV production, demand will be rationed elsewhere.

joshlemer 4y ago
Hopefully demand for EVs (seems automobiles in general) is more elastic than you make it out and people start gradually living less cad centric lives and cycling/walking/bus/subwaying more.
- eru 4y ago
  The demand for EVs is probably elastic, but the impact of copper prices on EV prices is probably small enough that it doesn't matter. And thus EV demand won't react much to copper prices.

tommykins 4y ago

The major problem for copper is the lack of large projects in the pipeline - current mineral explorers are entering a new phase of what they need to look for and it's a super exciting time to be working in Exploration, honestly. P.S - Incredibly biased as I work in Mineral Exploration.

ghouse 4y ago
Are you based in the US? If so, please drop me a note regarding a previous producer in NW Arizona.
- tommykins 4y ago
  Not US based but have done work in Nevada, Arizona + Utah and might be able to answer your question.
  - ghouse 4y ago
    Please email me -- address in my about. Looking to hire someone to sell a Cu/Zn mine.
edye 4y ago
Does the mining industry need help with software? I was talking to someone with experience in the the oil & gas sector and he mentioned that there is a lot of things that could be automated because scraping data and data entry is often being done by hand.
- chintler 4y ago
  I might have a solution for this. Can I drop you a note?
  - edye 4y ago
    Sure.

dkbrk 4y ago

For information on this sort of thing the USGS mineral survey is an excellent source. There's the general overview on copper [0], annual summaries, e.g [1] for 2022, and the more detailed "yearbook" [2] which it looks like is in the process of being updated since the last official release in 2017. for example, [1] says this about "World Resources": > A U.S. Geological Survey study of global copper deposits indicated that, as of 2015, identified resources contained 2.1 billion tons of copper, and undiscovered resources contained an estimated 3.5 billion tons. Note that this article is careful not to outright say "there isn't enough copper", even if it heavily implies it. It says there aren't enough mines for future demand. And in the sense that more mines should be built in anticipation of that demand, it's correct. But the idea that a copper shortage will meaningfully delay electrification is ridiculous; even if there is a shortfall, all that will mean is that EVs will become slightly more expensive while other uses of copper move to substitutes and more mines are built. The economic incentives are too strong for anything else to happen. [0]: https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-center/copper-statistics-and-information https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-c... [1]: https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022-copper.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022-copper.pdf [2]: https://pubs.usgs.gov/myb/vol1/2017/myb1-2017-copper.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/myb/vol1/2017/myb1-2017-copper.pdf

inversalAutoDoc 4y ago
> ... even if there is a shortfall, all that will mean is that EVs will become slightly more expensive Seeing as expense is currently a major barrier to adoption of EVs by the general public, I'd say that becoming even slightly more expensive provides a significant barrier to electrification in the near-term.

Pokepokalypse 4y ago

yeah - there's not going to be a shortage of aluminum any time soon.

Thorentis 4y ago

Instead of worrying about how we substitute every ICE car for an EV car, we should be trying to get cars off the road. COVID has taught us that: people value being close to home, people value spending more time in their local communities, a sizable portion of the workforce does not need to commute to work. We should be leveraging these facts when planning towns, to reduce the reliance on cars.

bluefirebrand 4y ago
> COVID has taught us that: people value being close to home, people value spending more time in their local communities, a sizable portion of the workforce does not need to commute to work. I think you could easily look at people's reactions to COVID lockdowns and reach the opposite conclusion. A lot of people hated being stuck at home, a lot of people couldn't wait to get back to normal, travelling to see concerts and sporting events, or just travelling for fun. A lot of people, despite having jobs that can be done remotely, prefer to commute to offices because they think it has other benefits. All COVID really showed us is what is possible with regards to remote work and keeping people close to home, not is what is largely desired by people.
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  I dont know if it really even showed us that The supply chain problems, in part are a result of the Lockdowns. So sure it "showed us" what people already knew, information workers can work from home. The final tally is still out on if that was better for companies or not, or if companies in the long term will keep work from home for employee Hell at my company it is about 50/50 on if people want to work from home or not. I think HN being what is it tends to not recognize that here we have a strong bias towards WFH that may not be shared by large parts of the workforce
- Thorentis 4y ago
  I think a large reason for people longing for all those things again, was because many people who were locked down, were locked down in suburbia, which has almost none of those things within walking or even driving distance (under an hour, obviously you can drive further). But regardless, I think the solution to many issues being talked about here is bette decentralised planning. We need to do away with monolithic cities surrounded by an endlessly increasing suburban sprawl. It requires every household to have at least 1 car, and it means if peool do need to spend time close to home, they suddenly miss out on many things they love or even need. Many small towns is better than a few huge cities.

chewz 4y ago

Add more red tape... There are rich resources of high-grade copper waiting for approval 20 years... In Chile, In US... etc.

badpun 4y ago

Wouldn't it make investing in copper miners a good idea? Currently the ETF (https://www.globalxetfs.com/funds/copx/#performance https://www.globalxetfs.com/funds/copx/#performance) is at 7.5 P/E, while some of the individual companies can be had at 4 P/E.

danuker 4y ago
I am skeptical. There are almost 1B tons supposedly economically extractable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_copper#Reserves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_copper#Reserves

usrusr 4y ago

2.5 times as much copper per vehicle as in ICE. 2.5 times according to the article that tries hard to be alarmist, so they probably don't underestimate. How much of the global copper supply went into cars? If it was a lot I'm sure that car manufacturers would have found ways to do with less (e.g. the dead simple step of moving to a higher voltage)

thdespou 4y ago

Last time I checked copper price was 6000 per metric ton.Today is 7800. Invest in copper people https://markets.businessinsider.com/commodities/copper-price https://markets.businessinsider.com/commodities/copper-price

IMTDb 4y ago
Copper price today is exactly the same as it was in July 2006 (using the same source you linked). Not sure this is such a wonderful asset when you look at it this way.
- thdespou 4y ago
  Not sure what are you referring to the price of copper has been increasing for the past 20 years. 2006 was high because it was before the housing prices with all of the plundering. The demand has increased and the are no signs of slowing down https://www.macrotrends.net/1476/copper-prices-historical-chart-data#:~:text=The%20current%20price%20of%20copper,2022%20is%20%243.60%20per%20pound https://www.macrotrends.net/1476/copper-prices-historical-ch....

lyeager 4y ago

I wonder how bad things would need to get before getting metals from asteroids becomes economically viable?

jollyllama 4y ago

https://www.amazon.com/Boom-Bust-Story-About-Copper-ebook/dp/B007EDOKWA https://www.amazon.com/Boom-Bust-Story-About-Copper-ebook/dp... Bill Carter has written an excellent book on the business cycle of copper and some of the problematic consequences.