Comment by nickpinkston | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickpinkston | Hacker News Reader

The quote from the article below [1] demonstrates why the doomers, degrowers, Neo-Malthusians, etc. keep getting resource scarcity wrong. They keep quoting the "proven reserves" numbers [2] that only count what is extractable with current tech at current prices, factoring out new technologies / techniques, as well as reserves not discovered yet or discovered but not yet "proven".

[1] "But while demand for lithium has been subdued, many believe the expanding supply outlook for the metal is mainly what is pushing prices lower this year, with a wave of fresh supply expected to come online from facilities in China, Australia and Chile. Five analyst forecasts, including ones from Bank of America (BofA), JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley that were reviewed by Bloomberg in mid-January, for instance, anticipated production increases of between 22 percent and 42 percent in 2023 alone. “Supply is coming on stream faster than you can say ‘boo’. Demand remains strong, but prices have been unsustainable for some time now,” analyst Dylan Kelly of Ord Minnett recently told Mining.com."

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proven_reserves

Once upon a time, my conception of oil drilling was roughly that there were these giant tanks of oil underground, and to extract it we more or less stuck a straw down and sucked it out. And that one day, the well would make the same sound as the straw as you're finishing a milkshake, and we would suddenly have no more oil available.

Then circa 2002 I got a job at an oil well services company, and learned a lot of complexities about oil drilling. A key insight is that not all oil is equally economic to extract, and therefore the amount of oil available to extract is only fixed for a given price and set of technologies. As prices go up, the amount of available oil goes up too; as technology invariably marches forward, the amount of available oil goes up.

This behaves nicely with the control system we call the free market. As oil gets used up, prices will go up, which will unlock more available oil acting as negative feedback. At the higher price, some oil users will find a different solution to their problem, while other oil users will grumble and pay up, acting as a second source of negative feedback. This process repeats as the available oil at the new price point is exhausted.

This same pattern exists for essentially all mined resources. We're not going to one day run out of cobalt or lithium or whatever. As mines that are economic at current prices shut down, its price will go up, and some users will find an alternative, while others will grumble and pay. The higher prices will enable mines that weren't viable at the lower prices.

Pedantically, there is a "limited" amount of these resources right? Like "if you drill deep enough there's always more" feels incompatible with the fact that these resources are all downstream of actual geological effects.

Or is it really actually "dig deep enough and we find stuff" has almost always been true, making this distinction without a difference?

Just can't help thinking about lakes and acquifers drying up. Even in a more "renewable" scenario, at one point there is a bottom. I just wonder if we have a good feeling for where that is .

Sure, for any sort of mineral or metal there's a hard limit to how much there is in the Earth's crust, and while the oil was created by a natural process, that process doesn't take place on a time frame that's useful to humans (and might not take place at all now that bacteria has evolved).

We don't sit around fretting about the limited supply of palladium or something, because there's never been as much of it that was easy to extract as we wanted. We do worry about lithium, because right now it's economic to extract it in very large quantities and we know that won't last forever. But my point is that we won't transition from the current abundance to "every last atom of mineable lithium has been extracted and if you want more you have to dig up a landfill and pull it out of discarded CR2032 batteries" overnight. When we've dug up all the lithium available at the current price, there will still be plenty more at a slightly higher price, and when that's used up, there will be more at a price slightly higher still, and so on. Yeah, there's a limit, but long before we hit the limit, the gradual price increases will have push society to find a way to go on without copious amounts of newly mined lithium.

An analogy is "if you take half of what's left each day, you'll never run out".

It's not just economic cost, it's also energy cost (the EROI). It costs some % of a barrel of oil just to pump up a new barrel of oil. When that ratio is 100%, you can no longer pump oil for energy, though you might still pump it for the raw materials, or to convert a different source of energy into tasty gasoline.

So there probably always be oil remaining in the ground that costs too much energy to extract.

In the “infinite energy” argument, there is some notion of “well I can use solar energy to get this oil, which has different characteristics, even if the energy is less overall”. Not all energy sources are fungible, right? But it’s a good point

Even with no changes in tech the 'proven reserves' are way less than the amount of minable stuff out there as turning an area of land with say gold in into proven reserves involves drilling a load of holes in it and sending the drill cores off to be analyzed which is expensive and so only done on the bit you are about to mine.

Yes, resources are infinite. That is why the carrying capacity of the earth is also infinite. Because the ingenuity of humans is infinite.

See, this is it right here, you're doing it! You're resorting to extremist hyperbole, when what matters are actual details.

Resources are not infinite, but that is not relevant. What is relevant is the (finite) amount and the rate at which they are used.

To go hyperbolic in the other direction, if there are a trillion accessible grams of something and humanity uses a kilogram a year, then we won't run out for a billion years.

But both your hyperbole and mine are pointless. The question can't be answered without the actual details. Your argument is just "resources aren't infinite so we shouldn't use any of them!" That's not a good argument.

Another thing people often seem to miss when comparing lithium for batteries to oil for combustion, is that lithium is not a fuel in a battery, it's a vessel. It doesn't get burned up. Whether we can recycle it efficiently enough is a big open question, but it's not gone the way fossil fuels are.

Straw man fallacy. Your parent comment didn’t make that argument, only that resources are relatively more plentiful than the assumptions that many people make. I would argue the GP is correct.

Technological advances in the 1970s in agriculture (incl. genetic engineering of more nutritious yellow rice, artificial fertilizer from petrol products, improved planting density) allowed us to increase food staple yields. These improvements have expanded world food yields to double the amount of population that can be sustained by the current number of farm operations.

Fracking and horizontal drilling have made US oil/gas drilling (not just pumping of existing wells) profitable again. The explosion of cheap oil in the 2010s (and the cratering of oil prices in Trump’s term) was created by this technology. Fracking isn’t as cheap as the cheapest pumping in the world (probably Saudi light oil), so assumptions must be made about prices and when this technology can add to the world supply. But re-pressurizing existing wells (which is what fracking is) had been tried for 50+ years and only around 2005+/- did the technology work to make it become profitable.

Both of these are examples of modern technology that has bent the supply curve by breaking the simple, fixed assumptions of some economists. And no, no one thinks the supply curve bends infinitely.

Anti-human nihilist much?

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