Lying BBC Ramps Up Natural Resources ‘Shortage’ Propaganda

The article states:

In just over five years Britain will have run out of oil, coal and gas, researchers have warned.

A report by the Global Sustainability Institute said shortages would increase dependency on Norway, Qatar and Russia.

As your intrepid mineral resources correspondent (aka El Reg‘s dodgy metals dealer) I thought I’d better have a look at the report that claimed this. As it happens, it appears to be an update of maps to this report from last year from the Institute And Faculty Of Actuaries that led to the claim [PSI editor’s note – facts in dispute: see reply from Faculty of Actuaries at foot of this article].

Given my background, obviously I looked at the minerals rather than the fossil fuels part of it. And in this writer’s opinion I have to say that the people who wrote it betray a baffling ignorance of the subject under discussion.

They appear to work under the impression that mineral reserves are somehow the definition of the number of minerals we have left to us, when in fact reserves are the working stock of extant mines (more or less). They also seem confused about mineral resources, which are the piles of stuff where we know their location, how to get them out, that we can do so while making a profit at current prices and with current technology, though we may not have got around to proving that to the required legal standard. When we have proven it, they will move from being resources to reserves.

Given that phosphate rock and potassium as resources are good for 1,500* and around 7,000** years to therefore claim that, as this report does, that they were in very scarce supply in this last decade just gone is thus, well, it’s not very accurate is it?

Given that the two are also 0.2 per cent and 2.5 per cent of the entire crust of our planet the idea that we’ll ever run out of either with future technologies also seems a tad suspect.

And then I spotted this one. It’s a piece from New Scientist, a place I was knew as a seriously interesting magazine (Dedalus certainly used to make me larff).

In detail:

Without more recycling, antimony, which is used to make flame-retardant materials, will run out in 15 years, silver in 10 and indium in under five. In a more sophisticated analysis, Reller has included the effects of new technologies, and projects how many years we have left for some key metals. He estimates that zinc could be used up by 2037, both indium and hafnium – which is increasingly important in computer chips – could be gone by 2017, and terbium – used to make the green phosphors in fluorescent light bulbs – could run out before 2012.

This prediction was made in 2008. You recall how Apple stopped shipping iPads last year as the indium tin oxide to make the screens ran out? That we’ve been completely bereft of CFL lightbulbs for two years now as the terbium disappeared? No and no? Exactly.

For a metals guy, the one that stands out most is that reference to hafnium. It betrays a complete and total ignorance of how mining actually works. It’s true that there are no mineral reserves of hafnium, nor are there any mineral resources. So, our guys looked at what was in stockpiles, saw there were no reserves nor resources and concluded that it will run out.

However, “resources” and “reserves” are a legal and economic description, not one of actual availability. And given that Hf doesn’t form any interesting ores, we can’t go digging for it and make a profit by having done so. This is not the same as stating that there’s not plenty available though.

For when we go digging for zircon (the mineral sand) from which we extract zirconia (the oxide) and ultimately zirconium (the metal), we find that it contains two to four per cent Hf. We don’t care though, Zr and Hf are so chemically similar that we just don’t bother to separate them.

Except when we try to make nuclear-grade Zr: then we do care because Zr is transparent to neutrons and Hf opaque. So, to make those fuel rods for reactors, we extract the Hf from the Zr: and that’s where the global supply of some few hundred tonnes a year (perhaps 500) of Hf comes from.

So yes, there are no reserves and no resources because we cannot mine for it directly or profitably. But we can still produce it profitably. There’s some 18,000 tonnes a year of Hf in the 600,000 tonnes a year of Zr we do process and there’s some thousands of years of that Zr out there for us to process. And we only use 500 tonnes a year of Hf… so it’s not going to run out by 2017, is it?

This display of ignorance doesn’t stop here:

Take the metal gallium, which along with indium is used to make indium gallium arsenide.

This is the semiconducting material at the heart of a new generation of solar cells that promise to be up to twice as efficient as conventional designs. Reserves of both metals are disputed, but in a recent report René Kleijn, a chemist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, concludes that current reserves “would not allow a substantial contribution of these cells” to the future supply of solar electricity. He estimates gallium and indium will probably contribute to less than 1 per cent of all future solar cells – a limitation imposed purely by a lack of raw material.

Sigh. Gallium is another one of these byproduct metals. We can’t get it directly and profitably.

Fortunately we mine for aluminium by sticking bauxite into a Bayer Process plant, where we boil it in caustic soda. If you put the right doohicky on the side of this plant then you get the gallium out. It’s at about 100ppm, 100 grammes per tonne of bauxite processed. Some 8,000 tonnes a year passes through those plants, which is useful because only a few of those BP plants have the doohickeys and globally we only use around 400 tonnes of gallium a year. And yes, we do know that there’s around a 1,000-year supply of Ga in the bauxite that we already know that we’ll process for the aluminium content.

We simply don’t have any meaningful shortage of these metals that they’re worrying about. And our new report produced for the actuaries uses these older reports as the basis of its concerns.

And, as all good techie people know, GIGO. If the information you’re feeding into your process is bollocks then your output is going to be bollocks, and not of the he3 hi-niikoo’owu’u-no kind.

* Based on 300 billion tonnes of global resources remaining as estimated by the US Geological Survey at current global yearly consumption of 190 million tonnes a year (See PDF)

**Based on 250 billion tonnes of global resources remaining as estimated by the US Geological Survey, at current global yearly usage rate of 33 million tonnes a year (PDF)

We get it, you care about the planet. But don’t make alarmist nonsense about resources the basis of your arguments

All of which brings us to the much larger problem. We do have environmental problems. We do have resource constraints, it’s just that we don’t have the ones that everyone wants to talk about.

And we don’t have sensible policy discussions about the ones we do have (knowledge most notably), because that wellwater of science is so horribly polluted by these displays of ignorance. There simply isn’t any metal or mineral that we’re going to run out of in anything approaching a human timescale.

I spent some time running through the reserve, resource and total availability estimates a few months back and got too bored to finally complete it. There simply wasn’t anything at all likely to run out within a few thousand years and who in hell wants to try to predict extraction technology or prices beyond that?

And it’s for this reason that all that planning that people are trying to do about the imminent exhaustion of mineral reserves is just so pointless. There’s not going to be a shortage of minerals, yet our entire politics on the subject is based upon the assumption that we will.

Thus we get told we must recycle more; limit human civilisation; the poor cannot be allowed to become rich for there’s no resources – hell, there are those who insist that we can’t even have, as above, green energy because there’s not enough metals to make the solar cells from. This is all total horse-puckey.

Even going back to the Club of Rome and Limits to Growth we see the same problem. They assumed that mineral resources were 10 times mineral reserves. It’s a central assumption too and it’s how they reached the idea that we’re about to run out of everything. But there is no relationship at all between the two.

Worse, the expense of confirming reserves means that we only tend to do it for resources that we’re going to want to use in the next 30-50 years. Meaning that if you do make their assumption, that resources are 10x reserves, and reserves are usually only a 30-year supply, then your assumption itself is what leads you to the conclusion that there’s only 300 years’ worth left.

All of which should really rather scare us all. For it really is the way the world is run today – on the basis of conclusions reached from faulty assumptions. And if you’re not worried that the world is ruled by the misinformed who want to plan your life on the basis of their misunderstandings, then what would it take to scare you?

Updated: July 02, 2014

PSI Editor’s note: we have received correspondence from Karen Wagg, representing the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, as follows:

In the article it states: “As it happens, it appears to be an update of maps to this report from last year from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries that led to the claim.”

This has puzzled me because the Limits to Growth research by the IFoA contains no maps of the nature described and the report that prompted the piece is an independent report by Anglia University. It is not sponsored or endorsed by the IFoA and it is not follow-up research to the IFoAs sponsored report on “Limits to Growth”.  Describing it as such may be the author’s opinion but it is not factual.

Research referenced: http://www.anglia.ac.uk/ruskin/en/home/microsites/global_sustainability_institute/our_research/resource_management.html#p0006

IFoA Limits to Growth research: http://www.actuaries.org.uk/research-and-resources/documents/research-report-resource-constraints-sharing-finite-world-implicati

I would hope that in light of this email you might adjust your piece accordingly.  The IFoA is always happy to discuss its research if contacted, so if you do have any questions please do get in touch.

Regarding the Limits to Growth research itself;  we appreciate that not everyone will agree with the scenarios presented in the research, however its purpose was to stimulate discussion and debate amongst practicing actuaries. It was not designed to reflect every possible vision of the future, and with a topic such as this, there will inevitably be a range of views – as the ‘Lying BBC’ piece demonstrates.

Kind regards,

Karen Wagg

Media Consultant, Institute and Faculty of Actuaries