The Rare Metal Age - A Book Review

Mining & Minerals - Evaluations / Other Metals

Date posted: 12/30/15

Greg Klein suggests that you should read this book and that you might want to renounce technology to live in a cave, provided it is equipped with battery rechargers. Author David S. Abraham brings out some of the paradoxes of our dependency on increasingly elusive minerals while explaining the complicated but murky background of interconnected economic, social and geopolitical forces. It might take an event comparable to the OPEC 1973 oil embargo to jolt Western society out of its ignorance. Abraham tries to protect us from such a rude awakening with the book .... The Elements of Power - Gadgets, Guns, and the Struggle for a Sustainable Future in the Rare Metal Age. This book comes at a defining time when rare metals are increasingly critical for high-tech, green and military applications, he declares. Yet despite their prevalence, they are not understood. Our high-tech society does not understand its dependency on critical elements. By rare metals he means rare earths, tantalum, niobium, lithium, cobalt, graphite and more. Having examined a decade-worth of reports, he finds more than half the elements on the periodic table are critical to one country or another. Resources can be limited and the route from mine-to-market complex. As a case study, he presents the electric toothbrush, comprised of roughly 35 metals and relying on an extensive supply chain ... miners like China Xiamen Tungsten to supply the metal, a plant in Estonia to process it, and metal traders in New York to provide the alloys to component manufacturers, who sell their wares to the toothbrush manufacturer. It is a web that spans six continents. Yet sources of production can be frighteningly limited. Some 85% of the world niobium comes from the Brazilian Araxa mine, Abraham points out. Relying on one country and one mine in particular is a risky proposition. A natural disaster, political changes or conflict such as we have seen in Congo can quickly create shortages. Good read on ...