June 22nd, 2010 
Aaron Turpen 
- Image via Wikipedia
This argument has surfaced yet again and yet again it’s going the rounds on the blogosphere. When these doom-and-gloom stories popped up at almost exactly this time last year, I fell for them. The problem is, this same basic scary report pops up and the same stupid arguments are pitched by the same people over and over.
Yes, rare earth elements are (uhhh) rare. Duh.. It’s kind of in their name. Sure, China holds 95% of them in the current market. There’s a reason for that.
It’s not because all of them are in China. They aren’t. These rare elements are actually all over the place. It’s just a matter of going to get them. The reason China holds the market is because these elements are a pain in the ass to get and the payoff isn’t that good. So China with their slave labor is about the only place they can be acquired at a low enough cost to make it worth the trouble. China happens to mine just about everything, by the way. Rare earth is just a side job for them.
When the story made it’s annual appearance this year, it was on AutoWeek. This time, it included lithium, which I thought had been totally dispelled thanks to huge finds in Nevada and South America. Apparently not. It’s included. Again.
Of course, the arguments against this rare earth doom are equally as entertaining. Some point out that it’s all a big oil conspiracy (there’s always at least one of those). Others immediately bring politics into it and begin chanting “W did it” and “Obama is screwing it up.”
Once in a while, though, the Web produces someone who can make cogent commentary. Like this (from AutoWeek):
Aeroengr wrote:This headline is a joke. Some people are just speculating about what the future price of rare earths might be, and their possible impact on EVs. I’m glad GM’s Bly exposed the lithium shortage for the phony issue it is, and put the neodymium issue in perspective. There are hundreds of alternatives. Example: switched reluctance motors use no rare earths and work great in EVs. Iron can replace cobalt in LiIon batts. Meanwhile, we have all seen what surging oil prices can do to our economy.
What Aeroengr understands, and so many others apparently don’t, is that markets have a way of figuring things out. What he doesn’t say, but should be implicit in his statement, is that when politicians get involved to try to “sweeten the deal” or otherwise manipulate the market, they always screw the pooch. Carter dumped cash into building solar and wind farms in California, but as soon as the gov cash was gone, the wind farms went idle.
The same is happening right now with biofuels as government wishy-washiness on subsidization shows that these “solutions” are market pipe dreams that can’t happen without efficiency improvements. Spain is another good example. Their government ran out of cash, stopped subsidizing solar power, and now all kinds of solar electric utilities are going belly up.
When left to their own devices, free (or mostly free, anyway) markets tend to figure things out on their own without nudges from government busy-bodies.
And before anyone says it, no, Big Oil does not dominate because of “free markets.” It dominates because it owns government and regulators, so it gets to do whatever it wants. Look at BP and their whopping $75 million liability in the Gulf. Do you think that cap was put in place by government for any reason other than to protect Big Oil? If so, how do you think Big Oil got it there? Right. They own government.
In my mind, that’s just another argument for getting government out of markets.
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Ya know, we could easily wire up the highways and provide electricity for automobiles in an extremely efficient manner (especially when compared to batteries).
I’m thinking about hydrogen again. Our energy evolution has been slowly going towards hydrogen, it seems. Coal is something like 1:10 (hydrogen:carbon), oil is a little better, and natural gas is 1:4. Since hydrogen is so plentiful and easy to get, it seems that it would be the stuff of choice for energy. Splitting methane is the most common way to get it right now, but there are a thousand ways being investigated currently. I especially like the biological ones using seawater and some bacteria a Japanese scientist came up with.
Why would hydrogen “be the the stuff of choice for energy”? It takes more energy to get H2 from water or methane or any other naturally-occurring source than is released when you oxidize it. Suggest you start a YASHESS blog. :)
Hydrogen is the most abundant energy source in the universe. It’s what powers the sun. It doesn’t have to come from water or methane. I can come from any of a number of sources and all of them can be greener than even solar panels or windmills. Imagine getting hydrogen from sea water using a bacteria. Easier to build and easier on resource use than a 1,000 acre wind farm. More reliable too.
I didn’t say cars had to run on hydrogen (though I think it’s a more likely long-term solution that chemical batteries), only that hydrogen could become our primary source of energy.
Hydrogen may well be the most abundant energy source in the universe but it is not on earth. H2 the form in which energy can be extracted is NOT, as you state, plentiful. If you disagree please indicate where one can find all of this hydrogen.
It doesn’t matter where it comes from on earth; it takes more energy to produce elemental hydrogen than it releases. Simple chemistry, unless you are proposing fusion reactors. In the context of automobiles it’s just not going to happen.
H2 is typically produced from steam reformation of methane or from electrolysis of water, both of which consume considerable amounts of energy.
There may well be bacteria that produce H2 from seawater but they will require energy input. Where is this energy coming from? What are they feeding on? A carbohydrate of some sort? Where is it going to come from? As a living organism most of the energy they consume is for their own benefit with hydrogen as a by-product so the net energy output in the form of H2 will invariably be much less then the food they consume.
I imagined it, examined it and have concluded that it’s not going to happen.
Then what do you propose to use instead? Electricity? From what source?
Hydrogen is all around us. WATER IS 2 parts hydrogen. Water is the most plentiful thing on earth, covering 2/3 of the planet. Therefore, hydrogen is everywhere.
The bacteria will feed on nitrogen (also plentiful in the air) and sunlight (which is everywhere 50% of the time).
That’s just one way to make hydrogen. Others are working on splitting via sunlight, others on using chemical reactions, etc., etc., etc.
So poo-poo hydrogen all you want, you don’t have a better solution. Batteries have a finite lifespan, enough electricity to power everything we do now PLUS electric cars would require that we blanket the globe in panels or wind farms. Don’t try to tell me that doing that won’t harm ecosystems.
So what’s your solution? Got one? What is it? Let’s hear it!
Hydrogen burns. Water does not. Doesn’t that tell you something? Water is burn’t hydrogen. It is not hydrogen. The energy has already been extracted from it. The situation is analogous to carbon and carbon dioxide.
Now, back to these bacteria…They feed on nitrogen? So they are not carbon-based life forms? If nitrogen is their food they presumably oxidise it to obtain their energy? Or do they build nitrogen-based cell tissue using solar radiation as their souce of energy and emit hydrogen as a by-product? They utilise solar energy but as they are bacteria they can’t be photosynthesizing. Sounds like the product of someone’s imagination.
Let me, however, suspend my disbelief and go on to consider some of the practicalities of collecting the hydrogen from these critters. They need solar radiation so let’s take a best case figure of 20 MJ/m² per day incident solar radiation. Since these bacteria are reducing water to hydrogen as a by-product of their normal function one can assume a very low energy conversion efficiency – let’s say 1% so that’s 0.2 MJ/m² per day converted to hydrogen. Already we have a situation where we will need to cover large areas of sea water with some sort of collection mechanism that is transparent to sunlight but impervious to hydrogen gas and it has to be capable of being installed above the surface of the sea. At the risk of repeating myself, it’s not going to happen.
Why you claim that I don’t have a better solution? What, specifically, is the problem that you require a solution to?
OK, we’ll stick with gasoline and diesel and other petroleum products. Those will never become too expensive to extract and refine. Even if governments magically decide to get out of the way.
The details on the bacteria are something I don’t have. I only know what’s been published in the news and have seen no papers on the process yet. There’s another using algae.
Nothing says they have to be done in ponds. Algae isn’t done that way when it’s done with sustainability in mind.
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS “FREE ENERGY.” Of course H2 combined with O won’t burn. Just as electricity doesn’t appear out of nowhere, neither will hydrogen as an energy source.
It is, however, much easier to utilize and should be easier to get because it is everywhere.
Again, you haven’t given any solutions. In fact, you’ve intimated that no solution is needed. So like I said at the beginning… I guess we just keep drilling for oil, hope not too much of it spills everywhere, and keep being economically beholden to those few places that have easily-accessible oil?
What, specifically, is the problem that you require a solution to?