We were alerted to the image above from the American Chemicals Society. Which purports to show the elements that we might all run short of in the near future. The idea that we might run short of gallium or germanium is, to put it most politely, silly. The thought that we might run short of hafnium is a claim so alarming as to call into doubt the species of those making the claim let alone their knowledge.

Sadly, this is all being perpetrated by the British Government - we’re all paying for this through our taxes. The source is the “Chemistry Innovation Knowledge Transfer Network” which appears to be these people.

We have gone through this before, at book length. Hafnium is one of the examples we spend considerable time upon there.

For gallium the extraction is from bauxite, the ore for aluminium. We’re not about to stop mining bauxite so we’re not going to stop having gallium available. Just those resources there should be good for a thousand years rather than the 100 the claim is being made about. For germanium the major source is coal. We are unaware of any likely shortage of coal.

But it’s hafnium that really shows that someone isn’t thinking.

There are no ores, no economic deposits of hafnium. They simply do not exist at current prices. However, all zircon (the sand, which is processed to make zirconia, the oxide, or zirconium, the metal) is 2 to 4% hafnium. We usually don’t bother to separate the two because it’s a pain and why bother?

However, sometimes we do and that’s where our hafnium comes from. Are we going to run short of this in the next 100 years, as claimed? Well, no, not really, Because as we can see from the claim in the chart even their estimation of the risk to zirconium supplies is much lower. So if we’ve still got zircon we’ve still got hafnium.

Well, perhaps there might not be enough contained? Accurate numbers are difficult here but rough estimates are that the world uses some 500 tonnes a year of hafnium as hafnium. It also processes some 600,000 tonnes a year of zircon/zirconia (note that tonnages of ores and concentrates are not the same as material contained). At that 2 to 4% Hf content - call it 3% between friends - that’s 18,000 tonnes a year of hafnium of which we use 500.

We are not going to run out. Really, we’re not.

And yet your and our tax money is spent on promoting this idea that hafnium is going to be in short supply. Why? Well, because we must have a circular economy, that’s why. The argument in favour of a circular economy being that we might run out of hafnium. The problem being that the argument starts with the desire for the circularity rather than the examination of the hafnium supply.

And yes, just to repeat this, we’re all paying for this propaganda. Perhaps we should stop doing so?