We're really, really, not about to run out of elements

A startling piece of misinformation is circulating again. The thing that makes us sad about this - no, really sad - is that it comes from the American Chemical Society. You know, one of those official bodies that we’d hope would actually be informative. Even, possibly, attempt to be factually correct. You can see their warning about the elements we’re going to have significant supply problems with here. We’ve covered this subject at book length here (it’s free!).

But to cut to the short version. The ACS says that there’s a serious threat of running out of gallium, germanium and hafnium in the next 100 years. All of which is a heck of a surprise to any geologist or anyone actually in the metals business. So it’s difficult to grasp why the chemists are in such a tizzy about it.

Gallium is extracted from a Bayer Process plant. That’s the stage of the aluminium business that turns bauxite, the ore (and possibly the most common component of the Earth’s surface) into alumina, the oxide. The gallium in the bauxite goes into solution and with the right little doohickey it can be extracted. Which is what is done. We have - already mapped out, ready to roll - at least a 1,000 year supply of bauxite. We’re not going to run out of gallium.

Germanium has two sources, a byproduct from the mining of zinc from spharelite and another process which extracts from fly ash. That’s the waste left over from the burning of coal. There are hundreds of millions of tonnes of fly ash lying around the countryside in vast ponds. We’re simply not going to run out of germanium.

Zircon is a common enough mineral, the world uses perhaps 600,000 tonnes a year, there are millennia of it out there at least. All zircon is 2 to 4% hafnium. We usually don’t bother to extract it as for near all uses the two are so similar that we don’t care. Sometimes we do care and so we extract the Hf from the Zr to use them separately. We extract perhaps 500 tonnes a year of the 20,000 tonnes of hafnium already incorporated in the zircon/zirconium moving through the system. We’re not going to run out of hafnium.

All of which is bad enough, the official sources being so horribly out of whack with reality (and as an aside, one of the reasons that state planning works so badly, it so often starts from such lack of knowledge as this). But Ga, Ge, Hf, they’re not exactly at the top of the worries list for most people.

But think on it, if they’re this wrong about these simple things then what else is wrong in all of the other things they’re saying to us?