During the next few decades we will encounter serious problems mining many important metal minerals at the desired extraction rates. Amongst them are all precious metals (gold, silver and platinum-group metals), zinc, tin, indium, zirconium, cadmium, tungsten, copper, manganese, nickel and molybdenum. A number of these metals are already in short supply (e.g. indium). Metals like gallium, germanium and scandium are not incorporated in table 1 by lack of data, but these metals suffer from a very low extraction rate as they are by-products (in very low concentrations) of other metal minerals; independent production growth is therefore not an option, thus making an increasing role for these elements impossible.
Peak Minerals
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