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Running on Empty: Copper

thehonestsorcerer.substack.com

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Re: Running on Empty: Copper

#41

Post by why_only_15 »

warbaker wrote: post #30
why_only_15 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iceland is a tiny country with unusual amounts of energy. Not all renewable sources are the same -- hydropower is fairly reliable too, for example -- but Iceland is just not a useful example for the whole world. The largest geothermal plant in the world by far is in California, but it's a small portion of our total energy use so no one cares. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geysers

You can locate an aluminum plant pretty much anywhere you want, as the energy required to make aluminum is large compared to the cost of mining/shipping bauxite. This solves the main problem with geothermal, which is that it's in random locations around the world that don't necessarily have many people living there. Any place with significant volcanic activity (e.g. Hawaii) could probably do geothermal power if they…

Hawaii did do geothermal, but in fact it's so geothermically active their main geothermal plant went offline for a while because lava got shot up their boreholes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puna_Geothermal_Venture

Re: Running on Empty: Copper

#42

Post by pfdietz »

incrudible wrote: post #17

Yet another author who does not understand the meaning of reserves vs resources. Reserves are are deposits that can be recovered at cost at current market price. Increase the price and miraculously, reserves increase. Like with most commodities, price spikes are followed by price drops as supply catches up. Remember when we were running out of lithium? Prices are down 90% from that peak.

They are deposits that have been proved out and can be recovered at the current market price.

There may be other deposits, as yet undiscovered or confirmed, that can also be produced at the current market price, but those don't get included in "reserves".

Re: Running on Empty: Copper

#43

Post by morkalork »

IAmBroom wrote: post #39
wat10000 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iceland has a massive amount of geothermal and hydroelectricity. A large portion of that electricity is exported in the form of aluminum.

What a fascinating sentence to read!

It's an interesting way to frame it, like how California exports water to Saudi Arabia via alfalfa

Re: Running on Empty: Copper

#44

Post by forgetfreeman »

0manrho wrote: post #34

Other HN users have pointed out the many outright falsehoods present in this article, so I'll just get straight to the point: This is nonsense from a fearmongering collapse blog that doesn't understand what they're trying to speak authoritatively about. Other headlines currently present from the frontpage of this same site: > Collapse Will Look Nothing Like the Movies > How I Came To Believe That Civilization Is Unsu…

Perhaps we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater here? Cut through the underbrush of technical inaccuracies and you're left with a very simple core premise: our civilization is predicated on continuous growth while having only a finite pool of non-renewable resources to draw upon to achieve it. That this arrangement results in some fairly serious problems isn't really in question, so all we're really arguing about is timelines.

Re: Running on Empty: Copper

#45

Post by cornholio »

SyzygyRhythm wrote: post #10
chemotaxis wrote: post #2

I think the author is speaking authoritatively about things they may be less familiar with, or where they really want to push a particular doomsday / degrowth agenda (the only prescription at the end the article is that we need to stop technological progress). This paragraph in particular caught my eye: > Bah! Who needs copper anyway, when we have so much aluminum?! > Have you thought about how aluminum is made? Well…

Indeed. Aluminum is actually a (far) superior conductor to copper per unit mass. It would be used on transmission lines even if it was the same price as copper, because the towers can be cheaper and farther apart. It's in increasing use in EVs due to the lower mass. Copper is still used when the conductive density matters, like the windings of an electric motor. But if copper prices increase further, manufacturers wi…

There has been substantial development in a replacement for all copper wires in the form of CCA - copper clad aluminum conductors.

This product combines the advantages of both materials - low price and mass, stable connection, can be soldered etc. while using a small fraction of copper. It's making inroads into aviation and motor vehicle harnesses, and will probably be the default low cost option for new homes in a few decades.

Re: Running on Empty: Copper

#46

Post by jandrewrogers »

parliament32 wrote: post #5

Something I could use some clarification on: > Even though the industry would be willing to pay top dollar for each pound of metal delivered, there is simply not much more to be found. Copper bearing formations are not popping up at random, and there is no point in drilling various spots on Earth prospecting for deposits, either. The major formations have already been discovered, and thus the ever increasing investme…

We don’t prospect too many years beyond current requirements, the economics don’t warrant it. We also consider development costs and regulatory overhead when deciding where to prospect. Copper mining is capital intensive, ore grade contributes less to the calculus than you might think. No one has exhaustively scoured the globe for copper, the incentives to do so aren’t there.

Companies have strong incentives to sandbag reserve estimates from existing mines. Anecdotally I’ve heard rumors that whisper reserves for copper specifically have materially expanded in recent years, driven by market demand that justifies that effort.

Re: Running on Empty: Copper

#47

Post by [deleted] »

chemotaxis wrote: post #2

I think the author is speaking authoritatively about things they may be less familiar with, or where they really want to push a particular doomsday / degrowth agenda (the only prescription at the end the article is that we need to stop technological progress). This paragraph in particular caught my eye: > Bah! Who needs copper anyway, when we have so much aluminum?! > Have you thought about how aluminum is made? Well…

[deleted]

Re: Running on Empty: Copper

#48

Post by bonesss »

crote wrote: post #19
chemotaxis wrote: post #2

I think the author is speaking authoritatively about things they may be less familiar with, or where they really want to push a particular doomsday / degrowth agenda (the only prescription at the end the article is that we need to stop technological progress). This paragraph in particular caught my eye: > Bah! Who needs copper anyway, when we have so much aluminum?! > Have you thought about how aluminum is made? Well…

> Second, all that electricity, even if you generate it with nuclear reactors, have to be delivered via copper wires. This is indeed a massive red flag. You need conductors, but the material they are made of is pretty much irrelevant. These days you'd have to search quite a bit to find not-ancient copper conductors in the larger electric grid. Aluminium might have a slightly higher resistance, but when you can just u…

Another red flag vis-a-vie energy source is ignoring hydro electric. High energy consumers and areas with a constant surplus of hydro are a good match. One of the new mega dams on Central Asia was restarted and funded primarily by an aluminium conglomerate - cheap and stable pricing at industrial scales.

Re: Running on Empty: Copper

#49

Post by api »

chemotaxis wrote: post #2

I think the author is speaking authoritatively about things they may be less familiar with, or where they really want to push a particular doomsday / degrowth agenda (the only prescription at the end the article is that we need to stop technological progress). This paragraph in particular caught my eye: > Bah! Who needs copper anyway, when we have so much aluminum?! > Have you thought about how aluminum is made? Well…

It’s an ideology that’s been consistently and often staggeringly wrong since it first became very popular in the 1970s. Historically it’s been popular on the left, while demographic doomer stuff is more popular on the right.

These ideologies are normally used as “problemist” lead ins to the ideology the author is really pushing. For the left it’s usually Marxism or anarcho-primitivism of some kind. For the right it’s cultural authoritarianism, racism, and anti-feminism.

Because it’s problemism, there can be no solution other than what the author advocates. We can’t engineer our way out of scarcity. Only giving up on tech, or maybe a planned economy, can save us. We can’t prevent demographic decline by importing immigrants, heavens no, or by subsidizing reproduction the way we subsidize other long term needs. No, we have to take away women’s rights and push a return to ultra-orthodox religion. It’s the only way.

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