Engaging Energy

A program from BBC Radio 4 that looks at possible shortages in the metals supply chain.
This link will only be active until Feb 18th, sorry.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00qjx5q/Out_Of_This_World/

Its an OK program. It covers the basics well, the researcher obviously found the two main sides of the argument. He didn’t chase down their fundamental positions though.
He looks a new technology as a solution mainly in recycling of metals, skipped over substitution in a sentence, had some kook from Surrey Uni muddying the waters with talk about space mining phosphorous (of course you aren’t going to mine bulk commodities in space to throw down Earth’s gravity well, that’s stupid ! If you were that desperate you’d use them to farm in space and throw the products down the well. Idiot !)

The guy who seems to being interviewed in a pub is a co-author of the UK’s only public, government sponsored report that I’ve seen on this topic. The report is OK, though quite why someone would employ a consultancy that specialises in the environmental impacts of waste disposal to conduct a metals supply study is a mystery. Its a bit like employing an undertaker to speak about health issues.

The MaterialsUK group is carrying out a much fuller examination of all this including something that I advocated in my thesis on copper supply, a full materials flow analysis to find out how much of what is where in the UK’s economy. Once you know that, only then can you really start to tailor policy towards material consumption. David King was right that we must eventually get to a post-consumption economy, but there are a few steps that we must take to get there. Knowing how we consume is one of them.

A quick question; at what point did mining engineers suddenly become the people who find minerals ? As a resource geologist I must have missed that meeting

Just a final word on the whole materials security discourse. This is being driven by two main movements; the anti-consumption environmental movement and the American economic/energy independence/security side of the tracks. Bit of an unholy alliance really It should be recognised that the majority of pressure coming from West of the Atlantic is from the industrial/military and for those who are really interested; the US’s stance towards material security is embodied in the book “Minerals, Critical Minerals and the US Economy” . The majority of public pressure coming from Europe is from the anti-consumption angle, but economic imperatives to support high value, high-tech manufacturing in Germany and the Franco-centric nuclear industry are also important factors behind the scenes.
The flip side of the argument comes from the economists (Humphries on the program) and the materials scientists.

My own opinion is that there is no generalisation to be made here about materials running out on a global scale. Each material has a specific set of consumption pathways that it may take, each has a set of potential physical substitutes, each has a potential set of new sources, each has an availability to recycling, each technology that uses each material has its own pathway.

There is however likely to be issues over local availability as geology, politics and economics conspire to restrict efficient supply, and that really is the point. If we want to fight over ‘stuff’ we can, all we need to do is keep increasing its consumption without increasing the efficiency of its supply or recycling, human nature and politics will do the rest for us. However, since we know that conflict (physical or economic) is pretty much inevitable without concrete action to change course, do we not have an ethical responsibility to try and alter course whether it be though scientific/technological innovation or policy-led initiatives ?

The miners will mine only what they can sell, nothing other than economics is required to control that, so putting on the table products or policies that adjust consumption projections has to be the way to go.