Cobalt, Critical, Strategic and Rare Earth Minerals and Metals

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WHEN world leaders gather in Paris later this month to forge an agreement on climate change, they will discuss ways to use less fossil fuel, expand energy-efficient technologies and reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Yet even as our leaders are pushing us to use fewer resources, their vision will force us to use more.

Though energy from the sun and wind appears boundless, the resources needed to turn it into power are not. And as we move away from oil, gas and coal, there is increasing demand for the rare metals that are at the heart of green technology. In the process, we are trading one resource dependency for another, and unleashing a new set of economic and environmental ramifications.

These rare metals — a group of roughly 50 that includes indium, rare earths and gallium — are produced in small quantities, often several thousands of tons annually or less;

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A little past 9:30 on the morning of Sept. 7, 2010, a Japanese Coast Guard vessel in the East China Sea spots a Chinese fishing trawler off the coast of islands, known as Senkaku in Japanese and Diaoyu in Chinese.

The Japanese have little tolerance for such incursions in the Senkakus, which they annexed in 1895 after the Sino-Japanese War. But recently China has asserted claims to these islands extending hundreds of years earlier. The island dispute is wrapped up in a morass of misunderstanding and oneupmanship, with an eye toward the rich seabed resources nearby.

When you ask Japanese officials about the territorial dispute, they will look at you as if it is almost insulting to answer the question. “It’s our land,” one government official told me, as if an American diplomat had been asked if Hawaii is part of the United States.

On that morning, the Japanese vessel pulls alongside the smaller Chinese trawler and blares messages to the crew in Chinese from loudspeakers: “You are inside Japanese territorial waters. Leave these waters.”

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Only about 150 years ago, almost all materials in a person’s home came from a nearby forest or quarry. By the 1960s, with more developed supply lines and more consumer appliances, the average American home contained about 20 different elements.

Since then, a revolution has transformed the products we use and the materials that allow them to work. Products now rely on elements that were once mere scientific oddities just a couple decades ago. In the 1990s Intel used only 15 elements in its computer chips.

Now the company demands close to 60 elements. While rare metals have been around since the beginning of time, most were just discovered in the past few hundred years, and some just in the past century.

This transformation in the products we use appear subtle to the untrained eye. Modern lights, for example, emanate hues slightly different from predecessors. But these subtle changes mask a profound change in resource use. Whereas Edison’s lightbulb contained a simple metal filament, the resources in today’s LED lights are more akin to computer hardware, powered by gallium, indium and rare-earth elements.

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“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share — no chance,” Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer told a CEO forum before Steve Jobs released the iPhone in June 2007.

By the end of the first week of sales, however, most storeroom shelves were bare; Apple and its AT&T partner sold hundreds of thousands of phones. The company was on its way to taking more than 20 percent of the smartphone market within just a few months.

Only eight years later, we forget what a revolution the iPhone was. It became the first mainstream product to rely on a multi-touch glass screen, allowing the tapping, sliding and pinching that are now second nature for writing emails, determining directions and hailing a cab. As Steve Jobs himself said, “It works like magic.”

But in the initial hubbub little attention was paid to the iPhone’s most remarkable characteristic. The reason such a powerful device can sit comfortably in the palm of your hand is that it relies on nearly half the elements on the planet.

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