World Mining Production Peaks - Lead Antimony Arsenic Titanium & more

[00:00:00]hello and welcome everybody to the video that I promised you nearly three weeks ago but failed to actually do so hopefully this screen recording is working hopefully it's also actually taking the input from my microphone so I promise to make a video about the yearly release of the global mining output data for almost all metals and minerals although some are just grouped together like platinum group metals and rare earths are all just grouped as their respective name so said data is released by the USGS and at the end of February as usual they released the set for this year which is technically the data concerning last year and also as you previously saw they had all the other you know previous years back to 1997 that you can also look at as well you go down and you have everything you want at least almost everything got your cobalt coming out of the Congo although the US does mine some a little bit up in Minnesota beryllium oxide which is where we get aluminum from so each thing will have two pages the first page here contains US data and it'll have you know production from mines amount recycled will be down there as well although there's no recycling of bauxite or for example here because you don't recycle or you recycle the metal that you get out of the ore so the actual amount of aluminum recycled you would find up in the aluminum page itself and then it'll also tell you down in this paragraph it'll tell you like what percentages were used for what stuff so you know 70% of the bauxite and alumina or was used to actually make aluminum so then you scroll down and then the second page for each thing is the International page where you have the primary or biggest global producers will be list and then everyone else just gets thrown under other countries down there and then you'll have the world's total and this should be million tonnes if I'm data in thousand metric tons so yes obviously 129 thousand thousand is 129 million so these are the totals that you'll see and then off to the side will have the total reserves which reserves are out of the total amount that we know is actually out there in the ground reserves are what we know based on current prices and based on current mining capabilities we can definitively extract from the ground the resource which will be down here the resource is just the grand total amount all together that we know is there whether we can actually dig it up or not or whether we can afford to dig it up or not you got arsenic beright which will be get barium from bauxite sware aluminum comes from beryllium bismuth boron bromine cadmium cesium chromium clay cobalt copper everything all the way down to zinc and zirconium even but okay so you see how everything's set up and so I gather data like this I just went back through each year one by one by one all the way back to 97 and gathered the totals and everything and put them up together in my let me fullscreen this in my dumb excel chart here and why am I in the middle let's go up to the top and I laid everything out and then I made graphs the graphs over to the side we'll get to those so we're gonna start with lead and work our way down I don't remember why any particular way I went in this order yeah I have no idea so don't actually don't try to ask me that in the comments so I don't have an answer all that's gonna do is like boost my view traffic so the row of graphs that will examine up here on the top those are the ones that production is still increasing globally the middle ones here are for metals and minerals whose production has clearly peaked and the bottom row is for metals and minerals whose global production seems a bit more ambiguous we will start with these one by one so then take a look at lead and I'm sorry I did not like colorize all of these and make them all to visually appealing but start with lead here let's amplify the size of the graph just a little bit make it a bit clearer okay so Global lead production did indeed peak back in 2013 or between 2013 and 2014 2012 and 2013 and has been declining since then has lost about 15% or so it got up to around five and a half million tonnes per year mined out of the ground and has now dropped down to just blow four and a half million tons now lead prices have not like completely spiked up yet in response because for this big up shoot here the production output globally was climbing faster than demands demand was climbing only about half as quickly so that big production bump did sort of overshoot demand and gave us sort of a global surplus of lead supply and then afterwards I believe next one down was molybdenum but for some reason molybdenum is like way off somewhere so we'll just go with zinc which is also mined in the millions of tonnes per year and zinc is still increasing it did hit a bit of a bump and production did sort of stack Nate for the last several years then declined a little bit but all preliminary indications are it is going to keep going on its way upward tin which everyone thinks is like ridiculously common is actually not as abundant of a metal everyone seems to think it is its production is measured in thousands of tons per year and it did have a peak point back around 2007 or so but has since recovered from that and seems for the better part to be still increasing is now back up above 300,000 tons per year again another item that has already peaked in global production is antimony antimony is not a material that many people are actually familiar with antimony production is measured in thousands of tons a year and peaked back in 2007 or 2008 just below 200,000 tons and has been steadily declining ever since then antimony is used in a variety of things from credit card Max trips to flame retardant and suppressor materials nickel is a bit more unclear but there's also mined in millions of tons per year nickels used in an awful lot of alloys and and has externally played it onto a lot of metals because it's extremely resistant to corrosion especially for ships it's extremely resistant to saltwater corrosion nickel had a bit of a first peek up at around 2.6 million tonnes per year and was falling but now it's resumed climbing and it hasn't yet reached or surpassed that period yet so I'm throwing it into the ambiguous category as it's now back up to about 2.3 million tons per year and nickel consumption is now beginning to climb extremely fast as it is also extremely important in the production of electric vehicle batteries gallium a relatively rare metal that is necessary for semiconductors necessary for the manufacturing of solar panels necessary for the manufacturing numerous superconductors involved in the use of maglevs required in the manufacturing of fiber optic cables which allow us our modern instantaneous communication infrastructure all kinds of various things and also LED lighting which is every lighting nowadays and also touch sensors which is like every surface nowadays not really but we're going there galleon production is just measured in tons per year but galleon production had somewhat of an initial peak just below 450 tons per year back in 2013 2012 and dropped but is now heading back up again like nickel hasn't reached that initial first point yet but is still shooting back upwards so we throw it into the ambiguous category then we move over a little bit some more and the all-important metal copper copper truly runs our civilization as that's obviously if what allows us to be surrounded by and have access to so much electricity copper has no inhibition about it whatsoever is just still going straight up no real bumpy ride like tin or zinc had now almost double its yearly production in 1997 global mining output has now reached over 21 million tons per year and we had a semi plateau and apparent sharp drop off after a peak in global garnett production for things like garnett that you might think are just used for you know jewelry or for ex purpose and actually find they're used for a lot of things abrasive blasting water filtration in the brace of powders non-slip coatings sandpaper you know ceramics glass electronics filtration glass glass polishing petroleum industry even you got all these other uses for stuff that many people might not be aware of indium production has semi peaked but appears to be coming back up so it was enough for me to throw it into the ambiguous category indium is all around you indium tin oxide is what's used for a lot of electronics screen LEDs it's also used in the touch sensors of a lot of touchscreens it's also used in the manufacturing of solar panels it's also used in fiber optics it's also used in pretty much every around you whether or not you know it so back up to the top row here we have the rare earths their production each year has still been increasing and in the very recent years China has been ramping up its mining operations a lot so production's been shooting up for the moment especially as demand for rare earths is constantly being driven up right now by everything from increased electric vehicle sales globally increased electronic sales in production especially as third world countries are continuing to modernize and also as well everyone trying to dive into renewable energy which doesn't even broadly mean renewable energy as a whole anymore it basically just means wind and solar because that's all anyone ever tries to focus on both of which happen to require a lot of rare earth materials actually down on the post peak production row we have germanium one of the few rare earth materials that actually gets its own entire section of data in the usgs releases and one of the ones which solar panels are majorly dependent on along with also computer devices and a lot of precision laser devices used in the manufacturing process so as you can see obviously germanium 'he's not all that abundance of its measured in just tons not million tons now thousand tons just tons and we just began one year of a renewed increase so if we have a few more years of renewed increase without coming back up towards that peak points then i'll end up having to put your main IAM down the bottom row of ambiguous but for the moment it looks like a germanium production has peaked and the peak was around 164 165 tons and down on the bottom row we have tunston measured in thousand tons its peaked twice so far and looks to be flattening off which is why I have it down in the ambiguous section and both Peaks ironically were around the same amount of around 90,000 tons a year tungsten is a very heavy and very very strong metal so it's used in a select few high-strength alloys all right skirting over here some more we have fossil a rock which thankfully for the moment production is still increasing we have recently hit 270 million tons per year phosphate rock is what we grind and crush up into phosphorus fertilizer and particularly the mining of phosphate rock is actually what allows us to churn out so much fertilizer so quickly at a rate that allows us to output the amount of crop growth that we actually do in the modern age which allows us to feed the current civilization population size that we have fluorspar fluorspar has evidently peaked we did have one positive gain again but then every zoom falling now we have had one more year of positive gain again so we'll have to see if it starts increasing again I'll throw it down into the ambiguous category like usual but it appears to have peaked for the moment around seven and a half million tons per year fluorspar obviously or at least hopefully obviously from the name is our primary source of obtaining fluoride or fluorine now don't start worrying about your supply of toothpaste just yet because dental and medical products actually only make up about 9% of our fluoride / fluorine consumption globally the actual primary major consumers of our fluoride or fluorine supply are actually the smelting of metal alloys Florida fluorine is added in in some of them at least that wouldn't you know flow were shaped into molds as easily apparently adding fluoride or fluorine actually makes them you know more malleable when they're molten makes them more likely to take to the mold shape that you're trying to get it into and the other half of the majority of it is consumed just in the general chemical industry usually in the form of hydrofluoric acid which then just gets consumed usually in a catalytic process to make other things all right down here again in the ambiguous category since it's been you know climbing for numerous years since its sudden peak and drop off and also because we all know hyoeun is not one of the things that's really going to completely pique anytime soon for real at least but for the moment it did have a sudden peak and drop-off recently and but has been climbing up ever since then it peaked at around 3.4 billion tons per year and fell almost down to 2.2 billion tonnes per year but over the past couple of years since that it has climbed back up to two and a half billion tons per year and iron I'm not going down like a used train for iron because you should all know it's it's it's just it's just steel it's not all steel but it's basically all just used to make steel two percent of it is used in a particular ferrous compound that's really important in cleaning and treating wastewater but again that's like 2 percent of the global iron supply gets consumed for that here we have lithium production measured in thousand tonnes per year and here you can see if you overlaid the graph of yearly electric vehicle sales you would see basically a match right here with this massive up chute down here we have it reom which is another rare birth material and which is part of what makes LEDs the lights that we've all switched over to now for the sake of energy efficiency LEDs at least the common ones use a particular metal diode by the acronym of YAG y AG which is atrium arsenic gallium but it reom measured in thousand tons though barely it peaked just under 9,000 tons per year and had a plateau and came down you know bump back up and has since remained level but it's been almost 10 years of it's kind of not really indicating that's going back up so I'm keeping it in the peaked category for the moment silver is down here in the ambiguous category as it appears to have peaked in 2015 and was going down but then just this last year it came up again by a tiny bit so I threw it into ambiguous we'll wait and see when the next set of data comes out if it keep sticking up again or if it resumes declining or if it goes flat but Silver's peak was around twenty-seven twenty-eight thousand tons per year and as of the moment is down around twenty six thousand tons a year and just as with gold aside from you know jewelry and you know ingots that are kept in reserves silver is a very crucial part of computers and electronics and now that everyone's going crazy for solar panels that's beginning to eat up a lot of the global silver supply it's shot up from less than one percent of yearly consumption to around eleven or twelve percent of yearly silver consumption and for the moment demand from solar panel manufacturing has just been filling in a gap that's been gradually left as traditional photography has died out because traditional photography used silver compounds on the of photography paper to develop it but we're reaching the end of that where you know traditional photography is almost completely dead and once traditional photography is dead there's no more gap that solar is just like filling in then it's just going to be butting heads with everything else and I'll be out molybdenum measured in thousand tons up at about three hundred thousand tons a year now molybdenum is used in a lot of various alloys it's more commonly used to add heat resistance to metals and to raise the melting temperature of various alloys which is why one of the main consumers is in aircraft engines and also in regular internal combustion engines and in our Peak area although you may consider this ambiguous we have titanium measured in thousand tons per year titanium had gotten up to about 2 into 10,000 tons and then it peaked and fell down then it rose and now it's declining very slightly again titanium is a high-strength metal it's it's not normally used just by itself it's usually alloyed with other thin but its primary use whether by itself or in an alloy form is to give metals high strength and down here something everybody overlooks we have sand and one of the few other things measured in billions of tonnes now sand does not mean any sand we mean industrial grade sand which is a very specific type of sand basically you can basically just think water weathered instead of wind weather which means desert sand is useless to us we need things like former ocean bottom sand or former beach sand or current beach sand in some places or a riverbed sand or River floodplain sand so Global sand production had an initial peak back in 2006 rate above 1.4 billion tonnes per year then dropped but has been increasing since then hasn't quite reached that point again yet which is why it's down in the ambiguous category but has reached about just under 1.3 billion tons per year now and industrial grade sand is one of the most important things to our civilization apart from your most automatic instincts probably been to assume that it's used for glass well it is obviously glasses you know burnt sand however its most common use and its most important used is as a construction material it is used to make concrete it's used to make cement it's used just as an aggregate or a filler material in construction processes as well industrial grade sand is what forms our civilization and despite its production levels we actually might be having some supply issues with it soon but we'll talk about those another time chromium measured in million tonnes per year chromium has been still going up granted more in a stair-steppy fashion as you can see most recently it's gotten up to 36 million tons per year chromium most often used in an alloy was steel to make stainless steel which aka just means it has about 10 percent chromium in it most of which is usually on the outside because chromium doesn't you know degrade or weather as easily so it protects the steel from rusting then vanadium has seemingly peaked although if it gets more than one year in a row of going back up I'll throw it down into ambiguous but it seemed to have peaked around 82 or 83 thousand tons per year back in 2013 it's used in a lot of alloys to give metal of strength specifically a knocking strength or anti knocking strength basically for any kind of machinery whether it's in regular cars electric cars airplane engines trains factory parts construction equipment vanadium is used in alloys for machine parts that constantly come in contact with other machine parts and or machine parts and metals that are constantly going to be undergoing a lot of impact or vibration rhenium is a another rare earth material rare as you can see production is measured in just tons and seemed to appeal back in 2008 at about 56 tons although it hasn't really declined it's just wobbled along this kind of plateau and during 2018 the total production for the year was about 48 tons small bits of rhenium are used in very specific alloys for metals that deal with extremely high extremely sudden amounts of heat now up on the top row again we have another battery maker metal cobalt measured a thousand tons per year just as lithium is however unfortunately for us not as abundant as lithium is and we'll be finding that out soon enough production has reached about 140,000 tons a year and again as I've said in numerous videos before about 60 to 70 percent of global colbaugh production comes out of a single country the Democratic in quotation marks Republic of the Congo but cobalt is necessary for the manufacture of batteries especially electric vehicle batteries which obviously demand for is now exploding because we're in a big rush to switch over to electric vehicles from liquid-fuel granted it's not going as fast as some people thought or hoped but it is still happening talc production has peaked although it has declined really really slowly and most recently actually started seemed like it was gonna kick back up so I'm probably gonna move it down into ambiguous but over time it has taken a net loss overall so I'm keeping it here just for probably just for this year it peaked around nine and a half million tons per year and since then has really gradually fallen down and as of the moment is right above 7 million tons per year talc is a white mineral that we ground up into powder and those fine powdery talc particles are then used for filler in the manufacturing of rubber manufacturing of some plastics the manufacturing of paper talc is part of what makes paper so absorbent so in decent part talc is what allows us to a have you know nice useful modern toilet paper tantalum sometimes called coltan is probably going to get put back up on the top row if it resumes increasing after this flat line that we've had for the last year or two since 2017 it did initially peak at about 1500 tons per year and then dropped but now over the last decade or so has been increasing again so how am I gonna bump it up to the top row and tantalum is usually a little-known metal that's used in a few very specific alloys aluminium production is still increasing and our high point so far was back in 2017 where it hit were hit about 315 million tons arsenic production has peaked arsenic is also I think the only one I forgot to actually give a side label to of what the measurements actually is arsenic although the first instincts that you mine goes to is just a poison it's actually now being consumed as I mentioned earlier by the making of LEDs computer semiconductors and also scanning lasers clay is also in the ambiguous section we peeked back in 2002 or seemingly at around 67 million tons per year and fell down but then we've been like gradually coming back up since then clay obviously I can assume almost all of you have to know is primarily used as construction material it's what bricks are made out of we move on to gold who is whose production is still increasing but by increasingly less amounts measured in thousand tons per year most recently global gold production was 3200 tons a year or just over it and again like silver and platinum and palladium gold is no longer mainly a theme for jewelry gold is now a critical components of civilization in the form of semiconductors and transistors inside of all our computerized devices and also as the nanowire filaments inside of many LED light bulbs boron production has taken a large upward spike recently but as then come back down and for the past year or so leveled off seemingly it almost reached 10 million tons per year but now it's standing sort of just below 9 million tons per year and the big consumer of boron is to make borosilicate glass and other types of borer rated glass which basically means high-strength glass and for the moment at least niobium production is still increasing now just under seventy thousand tons per year niobium is another metal that's like vanadium and chromium it's almost never used by itself it's incorporated into various alloys it particularly tends to give some more bending strength so so the metals remain flexible they can still bend to the degrees that the manufacturer wants them to however when niobium is incorporated they're much less likely to actually Bend and break vermiculite is down here in the ambiguous category as it peaked then came back down and then a plateaued and then it came back down it's plateaued again but it started climbing again for make you light is a particular type of mineral that is very important for buildup of soils and for a soil restoration actually and over here we have selenium it shot up to about 3,300 tons per year but then I came back down now it's climbing back up again selenium is used in various chemical compounds various miscellaneous alloys however it is now quickly being consumed in large amounts in the manufacturing of solar panels kiya Knights down here in the ambiguous category is a bluish looking mineral or at least most of the time and it's kind of stayed in this plateau range jagged and bumpy as it may be around 400,000 tons per year kyanite is used as a heat-resistant building material which means it's particularly used for the interior walls of furnaces blast furnaces combustion chambers of you know power plants manganese production still increasing up around 18 million tons per year I should finish this video just some time to go get my laundry to lyrium production we've dropped for one year but mainly it has been still increasing to lyrium is a rare earth metal measured only in tons and is and is being consumed for solar panels alongside cadmium cadmium tellurium is one of the the primary solar panel ingredients potash or basically just potassium oxide our primary source of potassium for potassium fertilizer and also for potassium chemical additives to countless things potash mining production has still been going up over the years cadmium the the other one the other ingredients to cadmium tellurium solar panels that I was talking about more abundant than tellurium at least measured in thousand tonnes per year and has been increasing this sudden climb here mainly being from the sudden installation of large amounts of solar power limestone production still increasing now up over 400 million tons per year limestone is of course used as as a construction material magnesium production still increasing although the majority of that came from this massive upsurge when China opened this massive massive set of mining operations out in the West magnesium is alloyed in a lot of metals in a lot of various machine parts feldspar is still really gradually increasing now to about 25 million tons a year feldspar is also primarily used as a construction material it's used as a filler or an aggregate it's used in paints it's used to make drywall soda ash also known as sodium carbonate and production over the course of time has gotten up to about 15 million tons per year sulfur used for so many different things so many chemicals the production of so many other types of chemicals and sulfur his mind however a lot of it is also separated out of petroleum coal and natural gas and production has recently hit about 80 million tons per year perlite is another one the minerals that gets that gets used in construction it's used for plaster or lots and it's up at around four and a half million tons or so salt just just general you know regular salt despite most people's assumptions the overwhelming majority of salts that we get access to is actually mined it's not it's not distilled or desalinated from ocean water so we actually mine salt a huge amount of which gets used as road salt to make sure that roads don't iced over in the winter in colder regions and huge part of it is also used in the chemical industry to get a hold of chloride and to be used to manufacture kinds of different chemicals and things that we use in our daily lives and I think stone is the last one I'm not sure I think it is actually I'll just go ahead and check yep stones the end okay so stone just general stone stone is basically it would be ambiguous it would always be ambiguous because stone isn't referring to anything really specific it's it's referring to just you know there's general good old rocks that aren't any of the specific types that we already talked about so stone is primarily used as a construction material as aggregates as filler as actual material itself used to make concrete you make cement anything and everything just some good old stone from the quarry next door you dig it up you could rind it up and then you build a civilization out of it and it had a peak of sorts in 2006 right before you know the financial crisis and collapse began it had its peak back then about 1.7 billion tons per year and it was flats you know during the whole economic problems but but as being on climbing its way up again and it's now back above 1.4 billion tons per year and so we'll see where it goes from there all right well hopefully that wasn't too boring I know it was pretty boring but that's the end of this so thank you for listening and checking out these graphs and stuff that I wasted all my time making so thank you guys for watching if you enjoyed obviously leave like on the video feel like energy and resources and that kind of stuff then subscribe and stick around support me financially if you feel like it through the links down in the description below PayPal patreon shop everything goodnight on my end and I will see you all around next time