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America has a tungsten problem

noleary.com

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Re: America has a tungsten problem

#21

Post by ericmay »

a2tech wrote: post #15

This website has no author attribution and this is the only article on it. I would be very suspicious of its claims (not that I disagree with them, just that unattributed works on brand new websites are not ALWAYS the most trustworthy). The United States has exported the dirtiest businesses internationally for quite a few years (raw mineral extraction is a dirty, nasty business, with slim margins). Now that China has…

> Now that China has become more adversarial and also more established (you mean people want to actually get PAID to slave away in a mine, or even worse, refuse to even work in a dangerous and dirty pit mine?!) the US is facing some hard decisions.

There is an implication here that the United States is immune or afraid of doing “hard” or “dirty” work and so we outsourced refining and mining to China.

This doesn’t seem to be correct.

China has a national strategy to dominate refining of rare earth minerals and critical components and our entire society wants cheap products and China was the cheapest place for this stuff and environmental rules are more lax, and with an authoritarian regime supporting and fast tracking the business for strategic reasons, well there you have it.

Part of the strategy involves decoupling China from a weak link in the energy supply chain infrastructure: oil and refining rare earths, manufacturing products that use them, and more is how they are pursuing some level of energy independence from the USA which controls oil flows globally, for the most part.

With respect to avoidance of “dirty” jobs. The EU is far, far worse in this respect than the United States is or was.

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#23

Post by a2tech »

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #14
MisterTea wrote: post #2

I really would like to see answers to the four questions at the end. Though I would hazard a guess that the answers to the first three can be summed up as "it's easier and cheaper to let China do the dirty work." The last question I cant answer as I don't understand boom-bust mining cycles. Edit to add: > After all, it turns out tungsten actually isn't hard to find! It's all over the United States. In fact, it's pret…

> The Wikipedia Tungsten article states the largest reserves are in China followed by Canada, Russia, Vietnam and Bolivia. This contradicts the articles claim. No, it does not, it's just a confusion of the term reserves. That's not on you, though, because everyone constantly gets it wrong. Reserves are not estimates of the amount of a mineral underground. To be counted as proven reserve, you need to show that the min…

The US has lots of tungsten and other minerals. The problem is mining them here--people really don't want to see huge holes in the ground, industrial run off, and ecological collapse.

If the fundamentals of international resource extraction changes (which because of the increase in wages and living standards and expectations in China is happening) then we might see wide spread and rapid mining happening in the US. My questions in that scenario are 1) who will work these mines? The US is running at very high employment right now, and mining is very hard work 2) where would our ore refinement equipment and skills come from? China has 50 years of ore refinement development behind them. They have infrastructure to BUILD the infrastructure for ore extraction and refinement. My understanding is that they're uninterested in selling that currently 3) then all the other local issues like where will they be able to sell locals on building giant mines, dealing with the heavy traffic, potential environmental concerns, etc.

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#24

Post by pixl97 »

ericmay wrote: post #21
a2tech wrote: post #15

This website has no author attribution and this is the only article on it. I would be very suspicious of its claims (not that I disagree with them, just that unattributed works on brand new websites are not ALWAYS the most trustworthy). The United States has exported the dirtiest businesses internationally for quite a few years (raw mineral extraction is a dirty, nasty business, with slim margins). Now that China has…

> Now that China has become more adversarial and also more established (you mean people want to actually get PAID to slave away in a mine, or even worse, refuse to even work in a dangerous and dirty pit mine?!) the US is facing some hard decisions. There is an implication here that the United States is immune or afraid of doing “hard” or “dirty” work and so we outsourced refining and mining to China. This doesn’t see…

A good way to put it as "China was very willing to subsidize the cost of mining these elements as environmental damage".

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#26

Post by a2tech »

ericmay wrote: post #21
a2tech wrote: post #15

This website has no author attribution and this is the only article on it. I would be very suspicious of its claims (not that I disagree with them, just that unattributed works on brand new websites are not ALWAYS the most trustworthy). The United States has exported the dirtiest businesses internationally for quite a few years (raw mineral extraction is a dirty, nasty business, with slim margins). Now that China has…

> Now that China has become more adversarial and also more established (you mean people want to actually get PAID to slave away in a mine, or even worse, refuse to even work in a dangerous and dirty pit mine?!) the US is facing some hard decisions. There is an implication here that the United States is immune or afraid of doing “hard” or “dirty” work and so we outsourced refining and mining to China. This doesn’t see…

People in the US will do dirty jobs if thats what there are, but like people everywhere (in aggregate), would rather not.

We outsourced refining and mining to China because 1) it was cheap 2) it meant poisoning the ground and air and ripping up vast tracts of land somewhere else.

China's rare earth metals stratagem I believe grew out of this--it didn't happen immediately, but rather some bright bulb saw the growing reliance on access to the minerals and encouraged internal growth and acquisition competing resources. Absolutely, very clever.

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#27

Post by aeternum »

MisterTea wrote: post #2

I really would like to see answers to the four questions at the end. Though I would hazard a guess that the answers to the first three can be summed up as "it's easier and cheaper to let China do the dirty work." The last question I cant answer as I don't understand boom-bust mining cycles. Edit to add: > After all, it turns out tungsten actually isn't hard to find! It's all over the United States. In fact, it's pret…

It's often hard to beat bulk mining. When you're already mining a quarter billion tons of iron and 5B tons of coal, you get a decent amount of all other trace(rare-earth) metals as part of that stream.

It's far easier to just collect tungsten as it rolls down your conveyor belt.

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#28

Post by stevenwoo »

noleary wrote: post #18
a2tech wrote: post #15

This website has no author attribution and this is the only article on it. I would be very suspicious of its claims (not that I disagree with them, just that unattributed works on brand new websites are not ALWAYS the most trustworthy). The United States has exported the dirtiest businesses internationally for quite a few years (raw mineral extraction is a dirty, nasty business, with slim margins). Now that China has…

Hey, I wrote the article. This is my personal website that I wrote mostly over the weekend. I went down a rabbit hole reading about metals and mining and just thought it was interesting. Not an expert or a nefarious actor, unfortunately.

The formatting of the website on iOS safari moves the left margin off screen so I could not read all of your essay. But you may enjoy reading Material World by Conroy based on what I could read, he does not cover Tungsten.

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#30

Post by themanmaran »

noleary wrote: post #18
a2tech wrote: post #15

This website has no author attribution and this is the only article on it. I would be very suspicious of its claims (not that I disagree with them, just that unattributed works on brand new websites are not ALWAYS the most trustworthy). The United States has exported the dirtiest businesses internationally for quite a few years (raw mineral extraction is a dirty, nasty business, with slim margins). Now that China has…

Hey, I wrote the article. This is my personal website that I wrote mostly over the weekend. I went down a rabbit hole reading about metals and mining and just thought it was interesting. Not an expert or a nefarious actor, unfortunately.

> Not an expert or a nefarious actor

If it helps, I know @noleary and can confirm this is a true statement!

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