Public policy and future mineral supplies

A widespread and pessimistic view of the availability of mineral commodities calls for strong government initiatives to ensure adequate future supplies. This article provides a more market oriented and optimistic perspective, one that focuses on production costs and prices rather than physical availability. It sees short-run shortages continuing to plague commodity markets in the future as in the past. Though painful while they last, these shortages are temporary and do not pose a serious long-run threat to human welfare. Moreover, even without government intervention, they self-correct. The sharply higher prices that they evoke create strong incentives that foster supply and curb demand. Potentially more serious are long-run shortages due to mineral depletion. Such shortages are often thought to be inevitable, a conclusion that flows directly from the physical view of depletion. For various reasons, we reject this view of depletion in favor of an economic view. The latter recognizes that depletion may create long-run shortages, but stresses that this need not be the case if new technology can continue to offset the cost-increasing effects of depletion in the future as it has in the past. The economic view also suggests that a list of mineral commodities most threatened by depletion can best be compiled using cumulative availability curves rather than the more common practice of calculating commodity life expectancies based on estimates of available stocks.<p>Validerad;2018;Nivå 2;2018-08-08 (rokbeg)</p

Deep-sea mining of seafloor massive sulfides

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2009. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Elsevier B.V. for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Marine Policy 34 (2010): 728-732, doi:10.1016/j.marpol.2009.12.001.The potential emergence of an ocean mining industry to exploit seafloor massive sulfides could present opportunities for oceanographic science to facilitate seafloor mineral development in ways that lessen environmental harms.The authors are grateful for support from the Elisabeth and Henry Morss, Jr. Colloquia Fund, the ChEss (Chemosynthetic Ecosystems) Project of the Census of Marine Life, InterRidge, the Ridge 2000 Program of the National Science Foundation, and the authors’ institutions

(Invited) Material Criticality and Energy Storage Materials

A critical raw material provides essential properties to an engineered material or system, has few if any easy substitutes and is subject to supply-chain risks or concerns about long-term availability. In lithium-ion batteries, cobalt, lithium and graphite frequently are cited as possible critical materials. In addition, for emerging energy storage technologies, manganese, magnesium, vanadium and others are possible critical materials. In some cases, supply-chain risks relate to geopolitical concerns about nations mining or processing a raw material. In other cases, risks are due to a material's being produced largely as a by-product or companion to other major or host materials - in which case, a material's availability depends on developments in the markets for both the companion and host materials. Over the longer term, society is not in danger of running out of any single raw material. Rather, it faces the prospect of mining lower quality mineral resources, implying higher costs and greater environmental disturbances unless offset by process innovations. This talk reviews the nature and degree of 'criticality' for those raw materials with actual or possible important roles in energy storage. </jats:p