beltstrike

[Condottiere]

Extraction costs, whether infrastructure, production, human or ecological.

The Chinese can control theirs, and I'll presume that even without subsidies, it probably is lower than anywhere else, without including start up expenses.

They need a permissive global trading environment to continue to prosper, so it's not really in their interests to completely boycott exports, but selectively force corporations to set up factories, that require these elements, within the Middle Kingdom.

 

[vegas]

Go look up Indium,

Yep.

I injured myself today, so I have been hung up in bed (getting old sucks) and I decided to do as you suggest and look up Indium as I had nothing better to do. It took me a few hours but I looked through the last 28 years of USGS pricing data, I found a spot price for it online for a representative 2019 price. I also read a couple reports on the element.

Here is what I see for Indium prices over time (1991-2018 & Jul-19 spot):

peaked in 2006 at $850/kg;
began to fall dropping below $500/kg in 2009 before recovering, but
never cracked the low $700s/kg before resuming its fall;
price bottomed in 2016 in the $200-300s/kg before rebounding slightly again;
As of 2018, the last year there is USGS data, it was in the $300s/kg
The current bid/ask spread for it was from the high $200s vs low $300s today.

That price pattern is not indicative of a bottleneck or shortage of Indium. Basically it is trading just off the lowest price in 12 years and is back to where it was priced in the late 90s.

Just for contrast, gold trades today over $50,000/kg; silver is at $580/kg.
Indium is not an expensive element.

Yes, Indium is used in flat panel displays and demand is going up. It is also so cheap its used in solder since the adoption of RoHS. Those are the #1 (FPDs) and #2 (Solder & alloys) industrial uses for it.

But the market for Indium is quite small for an industrial metal, around 1000 tonnes per year worldwide. (For contrast, silver industrial uses run to about 17000 tonnes per year, plus there is a nearly equal amount demanded by consumers.) USGS does not provide estimates of Indium reserves. Ore abundance estimates range from 165 to 394 ppm; near that of silver; maybe more, maybe less. We don't know.

Looking at all this, my bottom line conclusion is:

Indium is an industrial commodity with small demand that has seen plenty of price volatility as many commodities have over the last two business cycles. Its relative scarcity may hold back adoption of Indium on a wide scale (e.g. in photovoltaics) but does not impede on current uses in displays or solder.

I can't see anything particularly worrisome about Indium. It’s the same price today it was 2 decades ago.

 

[giant.robot]

A lot of rare earths have similar industrial demand to Indium, on the order of ones to tens of kilotons, thanks for the awesome research vegas. As flykiller points out, rare earth availability is less an aspect of raw deposits or refining but monopoly control by the Chinese government.

None of these materials are rare to the point of it makes sense to spend trillions of dollars trying to mine asteroids. The return on investment is so far in the negative the idea is simply absurd.

The Falcon Heavy expendable variant can lift 63 metric tons to LEO for $150M. That's about $2.3k per kg. If you were generous, or rather SpaceX was generous and launched at cost, you might be able to get to about half that: $1k per kg. As a comparison air freight is around $2-4 per kg. A pure Indium ingot apparently goes for about $475. Even if it only took a metric ton of space infrastructure to get a 1kg ingot of Indium, the price is a few orders of magnitude too low to justify the cost of that infrastructure.

 

[flykiller]

I can't see anything particularly worrisome about Indium. It’s the same price today it was 2 decades ago.

just as a contrary point, price does not necessarily reflect abundance. for example it's easy to pump water from an ancient aquifer in the middle of the desert, but once it's gone it's gone. did your research how much indium actually remains available, or was it all simply costs-based?

 

[giant.robot]

just as a contrary point, price does not necessarily reflect abundance. for example it's easy to pump water from an ancient aquifer in the middle of the desert, but once it's gone it's gone. did your research how much indium actually remains available, or was it all simply costs-based?

"Remains available" isn't really a meaningful metric because "available" is has a flexible definition. Rare earths aren't necessarily rare in terms of proportion of the Earth's crust, they're mostly just chemically difficult to separate from ore. To make them economical to use industrially high concentration deposits are the primary source of them. This is the same concept as most precious metals, they're found all over but not necessarily in high concentrations. Concentrated veins are prized over extracting them from other ores because it's cheaper.

At the scale most rare earths are used industrially we're not going to "run out" of them. If the actual raw amount available to extract dries up their price will increase until functional replacements become attractive, products using them become too expensive to produce, and/or exploitation of more expensive deposits becomes viable.

The break even price for asteroidal rare earths is astronomical (pun intended). It's very far beyond the horizon, certainly not something that will happen in the next several decades. So asteroidal rare earths fitting into the "exploitation of expensive deposits" is way beyond the horizon.

 

[vegas]

just as a contrary point, price does not necessarily reflect abundance. for example it's easy to pump water from an ancient aquifer in the middle of the desert, but once it's gone it's gone.

Your water example is conflating price and cost. The COST of pumping water is low, but the PRICE can be very high, depending on the price of the next best alternative to your ancient aquifer...

I focused on price because it is readily observable and if Indium in is in "shortage" or a "bottleneck" (not your words, Aramis and Mike's words) then price should rise dramatically. With the price in the $200-300s/kg for the last 3+ years, there certainly is not a shortage.

did your research how much indium actually remains available, or was it all simply costs-based?

Yes, I looked for abundance, cost and price data. Abundance and cost are estimates of unobservable or proprietary information respectively.

Re: abundance:

USGS does not provide estimates of Indium reserves. Ore abundance estimates range from 165 to 394 ppm; near that of silver; maybe more, maybe less. We don't know.

One report suggests there are reserves of 15000 tonnes, another that there are reserves and resources of 50000 tonnes.

Mining industry accounting has specific rules for what counts as a reserve, hence the use of "resources" by the other source. And of course these are always "identified" reserves; there are certainly other "unidentified". We don't know what we don't know. That is why I looked up the estimate range (in ppm) for abundance. Those were the 1st and 3rd quartiles of estiamtes btw. (We can't know for certain how much there is until we find it all!)

AND +1 to giant.robot for his "remains available" post.

AND I could add, as price gets high, recycling becomes viable. Everything I looked up is just about mining.

Re: cost:

one NREL report form 2015 suggests variable costs ranging from $100/kg to $350/kg (depending on quality of source.) If that is right, you will not see full production of Indium until the price is well north of $350/kg as firms have to cover all their costs to be incentivized to invest and produce more not just there variable costs.

Cost information is proprietary, so these are only rough estimates.

 

[vegas]

Another day laid up in bed, another rare earth researched: Rhenium.

Here is what I see for Rhenium prices over time (1991-2018):

peaked in 2010 at $4700/kg;
steadily dropped every single year since to under $1500/kg in 2018

That price pattern is not indicative of a bottleneck or shortage of Rhenium. Quite the opposite, market commentary suggests we have been in a market glut for several years now. One spot price I found suggested the price has rebounded to the $2000s, but price comparability is a bit difficult with these industrials with tiny markets (more on that below), so I'll withhold judgement on 2019 market recovery until I see USGS data.

Rhenium is used in superalloys for high performance turbine engines (#1 use, 80% or so of demand) and oil refining as a catalyst (#2 teens% of demand).

The market for Rhenium is tiny: a mere 50 tonnes per year worldwide. In dollars that's less than US$100M per year.

USGS estimates of Rhenium reserves in the US at 400 tonnes with resources of 5000 tonnes. Worldwide reserves are 2600 tonnes with resources of 6000 tonnes. So at present demand, the US has 7 years worth in reserves, nearly 100 years worth in resources, and over 80% of the worlds resources. Also btw, China is not a significant supplier of Rhenium; Chile is the world's chief producer.

Looking at all this, my bottom line conclusion is:

Rhenium is a rare element used in tiny amounts in highly specialized applications. Resources are plentiful in the US compared to demand, if uneconomical to extract at today. EOL engines and spent catalyzers are currently recycled for Rhenium contributing significantly to supply.

No one is going to the moon, an asteroid, or to war over Rhenium any time soon.

 

[BRJN]

Even if it only took a metric ton of space infrastructure to get a 1kg ingot of Indium, the price is a few orders of magnitude too low to justify the cost of that infrastructure.

If you have to stop after the first ingot and begin again from scratch to get the second, third, &c ingots, something is wrong with your design. The proper question may be "How much does the next batch cost?" If the machinery can keep working, the cost per ingot will drop over time. (Of course the data needed for those calculations may not yet exist, or may involve 'peeking through' patents / copyrights, which makes the data unavailable.)

 

[giant.robot]

If you have to stop after the first ingot and begin again from scratch to get the second, third, &c ingots, something is wrong with your design. The proper question may be "How much does the next batch cost?" If the machinery can keep working, the cost per ingot will drop over time. (Of course the data needed for those calculations may not yet exist, or may involve 'peeking through' patents / copyrights, which makes the data unavailable.)

I thought the math was implied but I guess not. If we have our magic 1 metric ton Indium refinery in the asteroid belt...it's just popping out ingots with nothing to do with them. We have a couple options:

• The magic refinery comes back to Earth orbit to deliver the ingot(s)
• We send a second magic ingot delivery vehicle to retrieve the ingots, it needs enough fuel to get to the belt, rendezvous with the refinery, and come back to Earth
• The ingot refinery has a mass driver to shoot ingots at Earth where another giant electromagnet catches them

Even if our magic refinery only masses a metric ton, an ingot retrieval vehicle (and fuel), mass drivers, or whatever else isn't going to be so light. To simplify things I just went with a ton of launch mass to get 1kg of Indium from an asteroid provided there was a magic 1 ton refinery.

Doing anything useful in space requires energy, nothing happens without it. Even solar power isn't free in space because you need to convert it into a usable form of energy which requires some amount of mass which has to come from somewhere.

Space is expensive and hard. The more stuff you put into space the harder and more expensive the whole endeavor. Even at its cheapest it's orders of magnitude more expensive than some of the hardest stuff to do on Earth. The remotest places on Earth are orders of magnitude more accessible and forgiving than the Moon.

 

[vegas]

I suspect Bezos or Branson could float about 10 flights on spec, provided they can keep things going on other projects. Balmer could, too. (Gates has sunk his wealth elsewhere.)

Heck, Besos and Branson working together could create a gold cartel to rival DeBeers Diamond Cartel.

Ooops. Maybe not Branson.

 

[mike wightman]

Latest youtube offering on the subject:

 

[vegas]

Thanks for the video, Mike.

I think the vids "next century" might be a little more realistic than your "couple of decades" up thread. You revising your time horizon for asteroid mining?

 

[atpollard]

Does anyone else remember that long period after the last trip to Skylab (Feb 1974) and the first mission to the ISS (November 2000)?
That's where we are heading in the near term. We cancelled the Shuttle (right or wrong), then started development on "Bigger than Saturn V" (right or wrong) and destroyed the Shuttle System infrastructure (making a Shuttle derived option impossible), then we cancelled "Bigger than Saturn V" and started "Bigger than Shuttle Derived" (right or wrong). Now we are winding down ISS operations (as Russia plans its withdrawal) and Commercial Space still has NOWHERE TO GO and soon NO GOVERNMENT CONTRACTS to deliver to an ISS.

So we will soon return to waiting for the NEXT thing to start over from scratch ... last time it took 26 years from the end of Skylab. How long will it take from the end of the ISS? NASA is still fixated on perfecting the F-1 and J-2 engines from the Apollo Era, so don't look to them for the answers.

How about a list of still UNANSWERED QUESTIONS from the before Apollo 11:

• Can a human being survive indeterminately at less than 1G?
  • We know the answer is YES at 1G (Earth).
  • We know the answer is NO at 0G (space).
  • If people cannot survive long term at low gravity then we will NEVER live in communities on the Moon and Mars.
• Can the theoretical performance of a "torrodial aerospike" or "plug nozzle" rocket engine allow smaller, lighter, altitude self-adjusting engines that can serve as their own heat shields and be recovered?
  • We have preliminary research going back to the 1960's but the funding keeps getting cut and the program cancelled before they reach a conclusive answer.
  • Most of the COST is the engine ... recoverable and reusable would be a game changer.
  • Commercial Space would benefit from NASA and DARPA funded fundamental research like this ... it is the reason these agencies were created!
• If a place existed for people to travel to in LEO, would commercial space vacations/trips become a viable business venture?
  • With a destination, the PRIVATE providers could sell flights.
  • With DATA, business ventures could make forecasts and generate venture capital.
  • With a "foothold", private commercial ventures (Lab Modules, BEO exploration) would have a starting point.
  • As SKYLAB created a place at very low cost using surplus hardware from abandoned NASA Projects, there is likely much existing HARDWARE that could be repurposed to "bootstrap" a starting point for Commercial Space.
  • Inexpensive inflatable Habitats have already been built and proven at the ISS ... considering the BILLIONS spent on the "biggest rocket ever", I suspect Congress could be convinced to spend MILLIONS to provide an inflatable habitat and Power Module for a Commercial Space "free trade zone".

[Or we can continue to do NOTHING and see if we get different results this time.]

 

[mike wightman]

I think the timescale really depends on two main factors:

Space X getting Starship to work as intended
the competition to get permanent Lunar bases

 

[vegas]

Yes, those were your steps one and two, but no one is even targeting a moon base before mid-2030s and that is going to be a camp site not a commercial operation, and surely will be delayed if the history of big engineering projects gives us any guide, right?

That would mean asteroid mining remains much further off...

 

[whartung]

There needs to be a commercial drive, tourism isn't going to cut it, frankly.

I have no idea what that could be. I don't know what's interesting in low or high earth orbit. I don't know what could be worth the extraordinary costs to facilitate manufacturing in 0G or "cheap" vacuum.

Right now the commercial drive was servicing ISS, and hoisting internet into the sky. Spinlaunch is working on making the latter much cheaper, but it won't as a general purpose launch platform.

Lunar and beyond is a State, "pure research" level project. I don't know what's lingering on the moon to enthuse ventures to go up there in search of profit and new markets, especially considering the great costs and risks.

 

[mike wightman]

Starlink, the various GPS systems, environmental monitoring, communication, observation.

One a Lunar base has some manufacturing capacity then orbital power satellites,

Refueling stations in Earth orbit are next to allow for a manned mission to Mars and the building of Musk's Folly.

Asteroid mining will happen when it becomes cheaper to exploit them than mineral deposits here on Earth - there will be a geo-political element to this.

One final thing to consider are the brainwashed youth of today who think they will all die due to a climate crisis - moving industry to space is environmentally friendly.

I think I will revise my prediction to a few decades...

 

[Condottiere]

Or you leave industries dirtside, and build gated communities in orbit.

 

[kilemall]

The push for IMTU is massive plague, not Covid or Interstellar crops, but airborne Ebola.

 

[atpollard]

The greatest threat is that somebody else might do it because they know something that you don’t.
NASA hated the idea of a suborbital flight when the US Army Redstone project suggested it … then Russia did it and suddenly NASA was in charge, it was a top priority and Redstone-Mercury was a great idea.

There are other countries talking about Space Stations and Moon Bases … let just one of them do it and see how priorities suddenly change.