Peak Iron?

[Irbis]

While I was reading old scientific papers, I saw that "Peak Iron" (similar to modern Peak Oil) moment was predicted several times already, like in declaration of 1910 International Geological Congress in Stockholm here. Dates ranged from 1980 to 2015 - and now I wonder, were people then wrong, did we circumvent their calculations somehow, or will Peak Iron still happen, just later? Could someone enlighten me?

[Blayne]

We're in "Peak Everything" right now, all statistics showing "X many years/centuries" of stuff still in the earth neglect to mention the exponential increase in the energy required to extract diminishing quality of the stuff nor the envirionmental degredation as a result of having to extract said resources from increasingly remote and fragile ecosystems.

For example despite the amount of US coal being mined increasing exponential in terms of quantity the stuff being mined is so poor in its stored energy that the energy value extracted from coal mining has actually flatlined, this has catastrophic implications has increasingly complex societies require an energy surplus.

[Surlethe]

You'll know we're in "peak X", for X an important good, when futures prices for X start a consistent, long-term rise. (See: oil.) If you believe we're in peak X, or very close to peak X, and the price isn't reflecting that we're in or close to peak X, then you should get your ass to the futures market in X and make a fortune.

So here's the question: are there futures markets in iron? What is the long-term price trend?

[Simon_Jester]

I don't think the futures market in iron is pushing things much higher than it is for commodities in general due to speculation. All commodities have risen in the past five years or so. That might reflect us hitting peak in everything at once, but I doubt it, since there's underlying economic forces like the supercharged financial sector running around looking for things to invest in and not caring whether it's investing in iron, mortgages, or watermelon futures.

Also, iron lends itself to recycling a lot better than some other commodities, so hitting "peak" iron may have different consequences even if we are in it now.

[Surlethe]

I don't think the futures market in iron is pushing things much higher than it is for commodities in general due to speculation. All commodities have risen in the past five years or so. That might reflect us hitting peak in everything at once, but I doubt it, since there's underlying economic forces like the supercharged financial sector running around looking for things to invest in and not caring whether it's investing in iron, mortgages, or watermelon futures.

Well, what that means is that speculators think that future prices of X will be higher than they're predicted to be. So the speculators think that "peak X" is happening right now, and they're the ones with money in the game. Since the empirical evidence suggests that markets are pretty efficient, that suggests to me that this is evidence we're in peak X, for X lots of things. (I am assuming you're right that the price commodities in general are rising.)

Mind, I'm being a little bold, and by a little bold I mean completely wrong (NEVER REASON FROM A PRICE CHANGE.). Future commodity prices could also be rising because of great news: industrialization in the second and third worlds, economic recovery in the first world. So let me say that future X prices rising is consistent with peak X, not slam dunk evidence for being in peak X.

Also, iron lends itself to recycling a lot better than some other commodities, so hitting "peak" iron may have different consequences even if we are in it now.

Yeah, even "peak oil" won't really mean "no oil left." It will just mean "to get oil, we'll have to use some other energy source to synthesize it from biomass or from atmospheric CO2." I'm not even really sure what, say, "peak aluminum" would mean.

[Simon_Jester]

I don't think the futures market in iron is pushing things much higher than it is for commodities in general due to speculation. All commodities have risen in the past five years or so. That might reflect us hitting peak in everything at once, but I doubt it, since there's underlying economic forces like the supercharged financial sector running around looking for things to invest in and not caring whether it's investing in iron, mortgages, or watermelon futures.

Well, what that means is that speculators think that future prices of X will be higher than they're predicted to be. So the speculators think that "peak X" is happening right now, and they're the ones with money in the game. Since the empirical evidence suggests that markets are pretty efficient, that suggests to me that this is evidence we're in peak X, for X lots of things. (I am assuming you're right that the price commodities in general are rising.)

Mind, I'm being a little bold, and by a little bold I mean completely wrong (NEVER REASON FROM A PRICE CHANGE.). Future commodity prices could also be rising because of great news: industrialization in the second and third worlds, economic recovery in the first world. So let me say that future X prices rising is consistent with peak X, not slam dunk evidence for being in peak X.

Put it this way.

When I am confronted with an argument of the form "the market is doing this, and the market is usually right, therefore Y," where "Y" is some factual statement about the world... I get very skeptical very fast.

The problem is, well yes, never reason from a price change. More generally, the price is one dependent variable which reflects the behavior of many independent variables. There are a lot of reasons for the price of things to increase. Not all of them have to do with the physical difficulty of digging the stuff out of the ground.

The ur-example of this would be the Dutch tulip bubble. Tulips are pretty flowers, but growing them isn't really that hard, and it never gets much easier or harder as long as no one lets the sheep loose in your flower bed. The massive increase in the price of tulips in the 1630s Netherlands had nothing at all to do with any important physical fact about tulips. It was a simple case of speculators finding something to invest in at a modest profit, then more money following them into the area, then more, and more. And sooner or later, everyone notices that the price of tulips is going up every damn week, instead of fluctuating and gradually increasing like normal prices do. So everyone invests in tulips and you get a bidding war and the price goes through the roof.

And it all ends in tears, or at best bad comedy if the speculative bubble's consequences are relatively restricted (which the tulip bubble kind of was).

The market may well be, by and large, rational. But when it screws up, it screws up in a way that no sane person would- because the market does not and cannot do long-term optimization. It's just not in the algorithms. If progressive short-term optimization leads off a cliff, the futures market will duly march off a cliff.

Also, iron lends itself to recycling a lot better than some other commodities, so hitting "peak" iron may have different consequences even if we are in it now.

Yeah, even "peak oil" won't really mean "no oil left." It will just mean "to get oil, we'll have to use some other energy source to synthesize it from biomass or from atmospheric CO2." I'm not even really sure what, say, "peak aluminum" would mean.

Strictly speaking, "peak X" means simply that production has peaked. "Peak oil" means "we can't extract oil faster than this, or at least the market won't do it alone-" theoretically, more wells could be drilled and extraction could speed up temporarily, but that would require conscious intervention in the 'natural' process of resource exploitation.

"Peak iron" or "peak aluminum" is tricky because oil is a use-once commodity and iron and aluminum aren't. It's certainly possible that we'd hit a peak of resource extraction (no idea whether we have or not) in a given metal, but unless that metal is explicitly being burned up into nothingness (the only instance I can think of is uranium), the peak simply means we switch to relatively easy means of recycling and reclamation. Reclaiming metals is so easy that it's cash-competitive with mining more ore even before you hit peak metal, so having to move from an extraction-oriented to a recycling-oriented model is much less inconvenient than it is for oil, where only a tiny fraction of all oil products can be recycled.

[Blayne]

Peak X as it applies to reclaimable resources has more to do with the notion of diminishing returns for every additional pound extracted.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfAQktktGgQ

At about 3 minutes in it starts to be explained.

Basically Peak [Iron/Copper/Etc] means that we've already extracted the largest, easiest, best quality ores and need to move on to farther, more expensive, less quality materials. So for every point of iron we mine, is progressive more expensive, of less quality in terms of concentration % per pound of dirt, farther away and expend exponentially more energy to extract.

I'm not sure how market prices are relevant, when all you need to do is consult yields and mining studies. The Birgham Copper mine in Utah is *huge* because the concentration of copper went from 10% to 0.2% per pound, so now you need to mine 500 pounds of dirt just to get 1 pound of copper; this I think will probably have real consequences for us across the board because this is happening to every resources or soon will happen as we move to the right hand side of the bell curve.

[Mr Bean]

There is one issue with comparing this directly between Peak Iron and Peak Oil.
Once you use Oil (especially if you burn it) you lose the resource.
Not so with Iron, in fact funny enough it's already economical to dig through old landfills for Iron and other materials we as a consumerist society throw out. As well Iron has dozens of alternative materials. For example if your willing to use more of it there's lots of jobs Iron is doing that Aluminum could take over for as long as your willing to say use larger screws or a thicker sheet of material compared to what you could with Iron.

Copper is going to start becoming an issue but the peak is far enough out and the material common enough a hundred years from now we might be slamming asteroids into the moon to mine them for copper. Unlike with Oil we really have dozens of alternatives to find material as common as Iron and Copper from non-terrestrial sources. Oil is very much a one and done material. Once we lose out on Oil we can't find anyplace handy in a nearby planet to mine it while Copper and Iron we have literally hundreds of sources floating around along with reclamation here on earth from plenty of waste sources as well as easy at hand alternatives.

[Simon_Jester]

Just to give an example, people have been recycling large metal ships for decades, since before World War Two- a time when the very idea of "recycling" or "environmentally friendly" was meaningless. They didn't think of it as recycling, they thought of it as chopping up old junk and selling it to someone who couldn't afford their own steel mill. But it was done then, because it was economically competitive with buying new steel.

[Junghalli]

Iron is the fourth most abundant element in the crust, making up 5% of the crust, according to Wikipedia.

Whereas this paper estimates ultimately extractable oil on Earth as 250 billion tons (by comparison the whole Earth is ~6 X 10^21 tons, assuming the crust is 1% of that it would be ~6 X 10^19 tons, so 250 billion tons would be a few hundred millionth of the crust).

These numbers make it intuitively hard for me to take "peak iron" terribly seriously, though I'll be honest and say I haven't looked into it so I suppose the feasibly extractable grades of material could be an extremely tiny percentage of the amount that would be found in low background levels in the rock or something.

[Spoonist]

Isn't iron peak something to do with the Big Bang etc.
That stuff "heavier" than Iron has to be made from novas or such, while Iron and lower can be made normally?

Which predicts that Iron is abundant all through the universe including earth.

Please correct me if I misremember.

[madd0ct0r]

sort of - stars that are too small to go nova can't make elements heavier then iron - so while excess energy does make them swell up for a while they eventually turn into a huge impure lump of iron.

Star's that are big enough to crush iron atoms into even heavier stuff get a runaway effect of more energy produced then needed to simply sustain the reaction ( similar to a nuclear reactor going critcal) - this means they increasingly rapidly crunch down the periodic table until it all happens so fast the outside of the star gets blasted off - supernova.

so you need a massive star to make anything heaveier then iron to start with.


Irbis on the other hand, is talking about the economic phenomenon where we hit 'peak iron' after which the amount produced steadily dwindles whilst getting more expensive. Since iron is really fucking common, energy intensive to extract and easily recycled (most modern steel made in the UK is at least 30% scrap purely for economic reasons) I doubt you'd ever see a major long term price rise for it.

Same for aluminium (wth the proviso that aluminium is REALLY energy intesive to extract, so rises in energy costs will drag it up too)

Something much rarer though like the various rare earth metals...

[Spoonist]

Same for aluminium (wth the proviso that aluminium is REALLY energy intesive to extract, so rises in energy costs will drag it up too)

Thanks.
regarding the aluminium thing Iceland got that covered.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rah ... um_smelter
They are bathing in free energy over there so a lot of smelting industry is looking into investments over there.

[Pendleton]

While prices will rise when the market figures out the easy stuff is gone, I'm not worried about iron. Everything will run out on a long enough timeline; what we're interested in is the stuff that impacts us first. In ecology this is known as Liebig's law of the minimum, that is, the limiting factor is always the resource least abundant, so if you have billions of tonnes of iron ore and scrap, but only a fraction of the energy needed to use it, or if your products require a rare earth metal in even shorter supply, then that's the problem.

So, worry not about iron (copper is a better metal for gauging industry activity anyway). Cheap energy, water and rare earths are the biggest issues.

[CJvR]

Star's that are big enough to crush iron atoms into even heavier stuff get a runaway effect of more energy produced then needed to simply sustain the reaction ( similar to a nuclear reactor going critcal) - this means they increasingly rapidly crunch down the periodic table until it all happens so fast the outside of the star gets blasted off - supernova.

Actually it is the other way around. Fusion beyond Iron drains energy rather than generate it. The cooling core of the star can no longer keep supporting the upper layers of the star which then falls down on the core - this sudden dump of kinetic energy into the core rapidly sends pressure and temperature racing for infinity where just about anything can be fused.

[mr friendly guy]

Admittedly I find peak iron hard to believe, but am willing to wait for evidence. Mainly because of several reasons

1. The US has recycled lots of steel for a looong time, thus reducing the need for more iron.

2. The largest consumer of iron is the PRC, and eventually when they build all their mega cities, they can get away with recycling the steel.

3. The PRC has plans to increase its own iron production, either via foreign mines it owns or its own domestic resources.

4. Of the main iron miners - Brazil's Vale and Australia's Rio Tinto & BHP, Australia is increasing its production, not just from the major miners, but also small players as well.

[Blayne]

Here's a site after some quick googling suspicious name aside: http://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-p ... umber.html

Peak iron isn't about "We're running out of iron" it's "We've exhausted the best grade and most easily accessible ores." suggesting an even greater energy deficit to maintain our civilization, a problem compounded by peak oil and the lack such easy surplus energy from other sources.

The broader point is made here:

[Pendleton]

Like they say, the stone age didn't end due to a lack of rocks. Peak (insert commodity here) isn't about something running out entirely. It is always about something becoming scarce enough as to have an impact. Oil will never vanish entirely, nor will iron to a far higher degree. But whether it is economical or, better, energy efficient enough to go after it is another matter. Keep in mind there are loads of coal seams left in the US, yet the United States is considered, as with the UK, to be well past its peak in terms of coal output when you look at price and energy content, or even at pollution potential.

[Blayne]

The stone age didn't "end" it "evolved" because energy surplus allowed for civilization to grow into a more complex form and enabled technological advancement.

Peak X doesn't care about how much "coal" is still left over somewhere, the point is that that coal is of so low quality (probably subbitominous coal) and so energy extensive to extract due to distance, terrain, depth etc that the amount of energy we get back out from it has plateaued no matter how much more energy we expend into mining it.

That we could potentially switch to a different resource, belays the fact that all other different sources of energy do not have anywhere near the energy content or convenience and that society as a whole will feel crunch time, the impact isn't purely about higher prices its the fear that the energy surplus required for complex civilization to function may cease to exist forcing us to scale down significantly.

I don't believe we will be going all road warrior but the consequences still aren't pretty and they will not be comfortable for the first world.

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/23259 Here's a somewhat unrelated yet similar sort of thing dealing with the "Collapse Gap" between the FSU and USA, "Peak Resouces" along with several other economic and financial problems; all interelated and connect may force a major adjustment in the near term. Showing what could happen if the USA "collapsed" and how bad things could be relative to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I kinda find it very humorous if a bit sad that the FSU in its inefficiency and poor management was better prepared to allow its people to survive structural collapse than the United States may be.

[Simon_Jester]

That we could potentially switch to a different resource, belays the fact that all other different sources of energy do not have anywhere near the energy content or convenience and that society as a whole will feel crunch time, the impact isn't purely about higher prices its the fear that the energy surplus required for complex civilization to function may cease to exist forcing us to scale down significantly.

I think it's more likely that we'll see people simply being forced to act as though the physical economy matters again.

This is something that largely disappeared in the US, and in quite a few other Western nations, between 1970 and 2010 (I won't try to label exact dates). We shifted the focus of our economy to white-collar work. The main prestigious economic activity went from industry to finance, with a sideline in information technology that lies somewhere between the realms of physical production and abstract token-shuffling.

Peak oil is going to mean a lot more people will have to labor, if nothing else at building all those generator windmills and solar reflectors. That doesn't actually mean the people doing this will live bad lives, as long as the collapse of the economy doesn't trigger a collapse of the government.

This is something the US has that the USSR doesn't. In Soviet Russia, the government was totally responsible for the economy, and the major power structures of the state (army, politburo) were intimately tied in with their control of economic resources. Once the people grew discontent with the government and started ignoring it, the economy immediately collapsed. And if the people started withdrawing from the economy, the government had no way to run things. So there was a vicious cycle there, with no real way to stop it short of anarchy.

In the US, the government can in principle remain functional through an economic collapse (as during the Great Depression); it doesn't have to collapse and has the fallback option of just brute-force telling people what to do. The USSR started in that position, and when it broke they had nothing to fall back on.

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/23259 Here's a somewhat unrelated yet similar sort of thing dealing with the "Collapse Gap" between the FSU and USA, "Peak Resouces" along with several other economic and financial problems; all interelated and connect may force a major adjustment in the near term. Showing what could happen if the USA "collapsed" and how bad things could be relative to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I kinda find it very humorous if a bit sad that the FSU in its inefficiency and poor management was better prepared to allow its people to survive structural collapse than the United States may be.

It's not that the USSR (FSU? huh?) was "prepared" for collapse. To a large extent, it's simply that their system was set up such that people could live in it even when it didn't work. The US system (mostly, usually) works, but for the middle class up until the new depression, it worked so well that there was no incentive to live without it.

In a world where all the trains run on time, nobody bothers to worry about what happens if they don't. In a world where anyone who wants work can find it and use the money to buy a steady stream of creature comforts, nobody bothers to worry about what happens if suddenly there are a lot more people than there are jobs. Or if new creature comforts aren't available and they have to fix things.

[Blayne]

FSU means "Former Soviet Union", which is how I see it commonly referred to in post 1991 academic literature at my university.

The increase in the need to do labour is precisely my point, society can't support many of the more white collar workers with such a broad energy deficit that Peak Oil & Friends implies.

[Simon_Jester]

I'm not really sure how much of a problem this is.

I'd argue that in the developed world, we've reached a stage where we really do need (at least in the US, to a large extent in other countries) to stop and seriously implement all the things science has taught us, before we can really progress much. We could solve a lot of our existing problems (including the energy crisis) with 1980s and 90s technology, if only we were willing to make the effort to actually change things on a large scale.

The basic nature of the economic and social order we live under isn't going to improve much if we simply continue "like the past, only more so." So maybe there's something to be said for a process that compels a change in the shape of the economy, if it brings with it social, philosophical, and political evolution, as it probably will.

[Blayne]

What's needed is a real national effort at sustainable development and a national plan to plan ahead and implement things as well as a broad international effort at environmental problem solving especially wrt greenhouse effect.

Canada cant because of HarperGov(tm) and the United States can't because of.... Where do I even begin!? It's like the whole political system conspires against getting anythign done.

[madd0ct0r]

Star's that are big enough to crush iron atoms into even heavier stuff get a runaway effect of more energy produced then needed to simply sustain the reaction ( similar to a nuclear reactor going critcal) - this means they increasingly rapidly crunch down the periodic table until it all happens so fast the outside of the star gets blasted off - supernova.

Actually it is the other way around. Fusion beyond Iron drains energy rather than generate it. The cooling core of the star can no longer keep supporting the upper layers of the star which then falls down on the core - this sudden dump of kinetic energy into the core rapidly sends pressure and temperature racing for infinity where just about anything can be fused.

cheers. that does make a lot more sense.

As for the West switching back to manufacturing and industry?

America is still the worlds largest manufacturer. The UK still has workshops all over the place. The number of people out of work for a few years then opening a little garage or carpentry shop will steadily increase, as long as the skills get back into the general population. Anyone noticed how big maker's fairs are getting? The whole steampunk thing? it's a slow tide, but it's rising.

[Blayne]

Pretty sure China produces more stuff in bulk tonnage than the US in absolute terms albeit at less per capita efficiency. /nitpick