I've been writing for more than a decade and a half about a broad category of metals often nowadays dubbed "strategic" because they are crucial to high-tech applications such as solar photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, flat screens, semiconductors, batteries, optics, aerospace and a wide array of military applications including night vision, radar systems, communications satellites, radiation shielding, vehicle armor, submarine hulls, precision weaponry, and on and on.
It is the military applications which interest me here because much of the volume of strategic minerals in most civilian devices can be recycled when devices containing them are junked. But, of course, in warfare the whole point in many cases is to just blow stuff up. And, once you do that to something containing any of the strategic minerals important for military applications, there is no chance to recover the metals and use them again.
That's why this headline caught my eye: "Ukraine's Drone Warfare Devouring 4% Of Global Germanium Demand As China Chokes Supplies." I can't verify whether this claim is true, but some nonzero amount of germanium is being consumed by drone warfare, not just in the Ukraine-Russia war, but also in the Iran war with the United States and Israel. It's important to note that germanium has many civilian applications such as semiconductors, solar energy, autonomous vehicles, scientific instruments, battery technology and a variety of health care applications.
Now with the rush of the world's militaries to embrace drone and missile warfare and other high-tech weapons, we can expect much larger amounts of germanium to be tied up and ultimately to be scattered to the winds if that germanium is in weapons to be exploded. And, the same is true for all the other metals associated with modern, high-tech warfare.
This has me thinking about Romanian economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen who was the first major economic theorist to point out that the law of entropy (commonly referred to as the Second Law of Thermodynamics) insures that all nonrenewable resources such as metals will be degraded to the point that they become unrecoverable. Of course, when explosive military applications are involved, this degradation is instantaneous and total for each weapon detonated. However, even the most careful recycling of civilian and nonexploding military devices will never recover 100 percent of the original nonrenewable material. Eventually, all metal ores worth mining will be exhausted and all existing objects with metals in them will degrade and the loss of the use of metals will move from being theoretical to actual. Our modern technical society, however, will almost certainly collapse before that point due to many reasons that will, of course, include the increasing difficulty over time of maintaining our access to metals.
One might think that given this reality—one firmly anchored in physics—that our modern society would be carefully husbanding the remaining minable and recyclable metals and working out ways to recycle them with ever more completeness. While interest in recycling metal fluctuates with price, the mining industry is being called upon to dramatically increase its output.
I called into question whether such a dramatic increase in output is sustainable in a July 2022 piece entitled, "Acceleration forever? The increasing momentum of mineral extraction." To understand our current trajectory, it's helpful to know the following: Half of all the copper ever extracted as of 2018 from the Earth has been mined between the year 2000 and 2018.
Copper is central to the emerging electronically oriented technology future. Could we double the production of copper in the next 19 years all over again? And, could we do it once again in the following 19 years? As I have argued repeatedly, it is the rate of extraction that matters more than the stock of any resource. Increasing the rate of extraction will require more and more energy and other resources as lower and lower grade resources are tapped. Therefore, increases will require more and more effort, possibly slowing the rate of increase and maybe even stopping the increase altogether or even putting it in reverse.
From 1970 through 2022, the rate of extraction of lithium increased 2,539 percent. Could we continue with that rate of increase in the rate of extraction in the next 52 years, that is, increase the extraction rate by a factor of 25 again?
This is what I think about when I read about the importance of so-called strategic metals: the current scramble to secure supplies, the emphasis on their use in warfare, the seeming indifference to the fact that they are nonrenewable, and the failure to address seriously the need for recycling. All this tells me that the quest of the United States and other countries to secure access to supplies which are not in the hands of adversaries will almost certainly fall dramatically short of stated goals. And, strategic metals wasted on warfare will mean less available to create the high-tech world our tech overlords are promising to build which, as it turns out, requires huge physical resources. While there are many reasons to believe that this high-tech world will not emerge as promised (and that may actually be a relief!), there can be no dispute that a lack of physical resources would prevent it from being built out at scale.
Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Naked Capitalism, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.
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