Disappearing Elements?

I assume that very few organic chemists lie awake at nights worrying about running out of chemicals with which to play. Even when the oil fields in the Middle East run out, huge untapped fields in Russia along with the 400 billion barrels of oil now thought to be under the arctic should keep the organikers happy for a long time. And this doesn’t even include the vast oil sand reserves in Canada. Inorganic chemists don’t have quite the same security blanket. Sure, if your project involves highly abundant elements like Fe or Si, then you’re golden. But what about the rarer elements? In one of my first posts to this blog, I mentioned a report which discussed the depletion of the world’s supply of helium. Since helium is not a renewable resource, when it’s gone, it’s gone. As the world’s demand for inorganic chemicals continues to grow, we are eventually going to run out of them, or least they’ll become rare enough to no longer be a commodity.

Back in January I ran across an article discussing the stock price of First Solar, a maker of solar panels. Their panels are based on cadmium telluride thin film technology. In 2006, First Solar consumed about 4% of the world’s annual supply of tellurium, an element even rarer than platinum. First Solar’s stated intent is to quadruple their output of solar cells, which would require 16% of the world’s supply. Since other solar cell companies are also beginning to gear up using similar technologies you can imagine what this is going to do to the supply of tellurium. Think what’s going to happen to the price of CD-RWs, DVD-RWs, and rewriteable Blu-Ray discs, all of which depend upon Te.

And even if we don’t completely run out of an element, the cost may rise to the point at which we can no longer afford to do any chemistry with it. Back in the last millennium, automakers were all hot to convert their Pt/Rh based catalytic convertors into (mostly) Pd based catalysts. There were both advantages and disadvantages to this move, but one of the main driving forces was price. Due to a smaller market, Pd was about 4 times cheaper than Pt and, at one point, about 10 times cheaper than Rh. Even though Pd catalysts require much higher metal loadings, the overall price was still cheaper. This love affair with Pd died down some when some accountants actually calculated the total amount of Pd needed for this switchover and discovered that there might not be enough Pd available in the world to do this, especially if all the car companies started using Pd. And, of course, as soon as the interest in Pd started to rise, so did the price, negating much of the original advantage of Pd. (I realize that noble metal prices have more to do with the stranglehold the mines in South Africa have over the market as opposed to true market forces, but that would just ruin this part of the story, so I’m ignoring it.) So before you plan your next research project, make sure you pick an element which has a long future.