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Comment by endymi0n | Hacker News Reader

As one of my favorite comedians once put it: „Analysts are people who tell you what the world will look like in 15 years if nothing changes. Now do you REALLY want to know how long your toenails get if you don‘t cut them?!“

Movement here will come from a number of factors:

- Demand increases, which will: - open up more mines (nicely summarized in the long commentary in this thread) - incentivize better extraction technology

- Supply will decrease, which will make Cobalt more expensive, which in turn leads to: - battery chemistry with way less cobalt needed (already happening) - better recycling - technology accessing hidden reserves (oil shale and tar sands anyone?) - research into complete alternatives like pressured air, hydrogen, redux flow batteries etc.

We‘ll be fine and renewables will win in any case by now.

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"Analysts are people who tell you what the world will look like in 15 years if nothing changes."

I noticed at the bottom of the page this disclosure:

"Competing Financial Interests

G.Y. is a co-founder, chief technology officer, a board member and a shareholder of Sila Nanotechnologies, the company commercializing silicon-based anode materials mentioned in this Comment article."

Referring to co-author Gleb Yushin, "a professor of materials science at the School of Materials Science & Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA."

The other three authors are:

Kostiantyn Turcheniuk, "a research scientist at the School of Materials Science & Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA."

Dmitry Bondarev, "an undergraduate student at the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA."

Vinod Singhal, "a professor of business at the Scheller College of Business, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA."

Yeah, I'm disappointed that this submarine article has been on HN's front page for this long.

I also feel like articles like this tend to evoke some kind of sharp discontinuity – as if we’ll suddenly run out of nickel, and prices will explode. But the fact that we can predict the problem 10 years out is exactly why that won’t happen. Even if we do hit a hard limit without any natural tapering in supply, the clearer it becomes that we’re approaching a shortage, the more speculators will buy up current supply, smoothing the process out.

One of the first things we learned in civics class when I was all of 11 was that you should be very suspicious any time you see a line extrapolated out into the far future. Things never stay the same, especially rates of change.

Now half the media seems to be in the business of extrapolating lines out and trying to stir enough panic to get that click. Maybe we need more civics classes.

I don't like over confidence in any resource access, that's probably what oil digger thought 100 years ago.

Doesn't this example go against your point? I've been hearing that we were nearing the end of the oil supply since I've been a kid but the date keeps being pushed back. As the demand for oil grows the price goes up and new methods to extract more oil from the ground become profitable. Now current projections seem to target the 2050s at the earliest.

Yeah. I mean if you started digging oil 100 years ago - you would probably be rich enough for another century today. Even if you don’t dig it anymore.

This is also exactly what is holding back synthetic fuels from becoming profitable.

Fossil fuels will eventually lose out over synthetic fuels, but not until prices rise substantially.

How are "synthetic fuels" produced? If it's anything like synthetic lubricants, it's still fossil fuels, just with more energy-intensive processing.

From a theoretical standpoint, virtually any source of carbon could be used, you could even make it out of the carbon already in the atmosphere:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climatechange-carbon/scie...

my point is going too deep into one idea because we'll find more of it.

oil is flowing longer than expected .. and that's not something we're enjoying a lot right now

I remember oil exhaustion projected into the 2050 since I was a kid at the early 90's. Every time I ask for a source of those earlier dates, people point either at crazy conspiracy theorists or at projections of peak extraction rate at the early 00's, that seem to be correct¹.

1 - If you exclude oil substitutes that started being counted like oil by then. There have been two peaks at this time, and production is mostly staying steady. There was very little experience with how the after-peak of something with no replacement option would look like, so those projections were indeed very diverse and off-target.

I have seen news archives from the 1880s where they predicted the end of oil in 10 years. A few years ago a town dug up an old time capsule in which they had a new car from the 1950s, they buried it along with 10 gallons of gasoline in case gasoline was obsolete in 2000 (side note, the gas was bad, and the car destroyed by rust). The idea that oil would last forever was never really believed from what I can tell.

> do you REALLY want to know how long your toenails get if you don‘t cut them?!

Obvious reply: not cutting your toenails would be a change from usual

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