Until a few months ago, only electronic engineers and Jeopardy contestants could tell you that Tantalum was a key ingredient of the capacitors that lurk within nearly every cell phone, computer, and many other high-tech products. But now that the potential impact of the possible shortage of coltan (columbite-tantalite, a metallic ore from which niobium and tantalum are extracted) has hit the business section of every newspaper and web site nearly everyone knows that the cost of this industry-critical metal could now soar again if the murderous war in the misnamed Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) continues to escalate. There are conflicting
accounts about how much the hunt for coltan, which has to be dug for manually, has contributed to the political misery and
environmental degradation of the DRC but, in many ways, it bears a striking resemblance to the so-called oil curse suffered by many developing countries who are unfortunate to be parked over large deposits of crude. And, much like the oil shortage that has rocked the world, a potential tantalum shortage holds an equal amount of perils and opportunities.
Unlike oil, tantalum can be recycled, extracted off the PCBs of scrap electronics and reprocessed. Even a small rise in coltan ore prices could significantly improve the economics of electronics recycling for companies willing to invest in the technology and infrastructure required to extract the capacitors that litter nearly every circuit board that would otherwise be destined for the landfill. The rising price of tantalum, copper and other materials could also help tip the economics of
landfill mining toward becoming a widely-practiced industry. It’s exciting and not too far-fetched to imagine a day when the huge landfill sites that dot the countryside start to shrink as they are mined for the metals, minerals, organic compounds, and the energy assets they contain.
This potential material shortage also represents many opportunities within the electronics industry, especially for IC makers who can minimize the number and size of discrete capacitors needed to support their devices. Over the years, we’ve seen designers use on-chip passives, gyrators, impedance reflection, and other clever design techniques to pull as much functionality in to the silicon a possible while reducing the overall component count of a particular application. Although there are simply some functions that you cannot use anything but a tantalum capacitor for, innovative silicon design should be able to cut 25% or more of the remaining component count off the boards.
I expect that we can apply similar levels of ingenuity and entrepreneurship to other upcoming resource shortages. We’ve already begun to make good progress in the race to find alternatives to oil, gas and coal but we’ll also have to start thinking about technical solutions to impending shortages of copper, lithium, telluride, platinum, and several other commonly-used materials. Likewise, much of the world is already suffering from a shortage of fresh water, a situation that will only get worse unless we develop the technologies to conserve existing supplies and create new sources of clean water. Besides making one of the next large fortunes, the innovators who bring these technologies to market may well play a key role in averting the next series of conflicts around the world that could be easily triggered by dwindling water supplies.
Comments? Questions? Ideas for low-power desalinization systems? Write me at
lhg at en-genius dot net or post your comments on our blog.
