Mineral scarcity on Earth: are Asteroids the answer
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Mineral scarcity on Earth: are Asteroids the answer Carol Dahl 1,2
&
Ben Gilbert 3 & Ian Lange 3
Received: 8 August 2019 / Accepted: 2 June 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Depletion of minerals and other non-renewable resources has long been a source of worry to industrial economies. This worry waxes when markets are tight and wanes when they are not. However, evidence has continued to mount that there are staggering amounts of minerals in space that are technically within our grasp. Scientific work has considered mineral availability and technical ability to mine on near earth objects. Within the last decade, a number of space related industries have gained attention. While availability and technical feasibility are both necessary conditions for this industry to develop, they are not sufficient. Rather sufficiency also requires financial feasibility. Although studies have considered the costs of mining asteroids, we are aware of no papers that model the effects on terrestrial mineral market structure with the injection of extra-terrestrial minerals. Our contribution is to consider the current state of mineral markets and provide a model of firm entry to derive implications to the market from space mined minerals entering the market. We provide a numerical simulation to demonstrate what prices asteroidal entrants might face for the injection of a variety of metals and provide an online model for others to change inputs to their asteroid and metals of choice. Keywords Mining space . Asteroids . Milling . Smelting . Magnetic precious metals . Demand . Cost JEL classification codes L72 . Q30 . Q31
Introduction Tribute to John Tilton The authors are honored to have been invited to contribute an article in honor of John Tilton’s 80th birthday. John has been a bulwark in the Mineral Economics community for many decades and a leading figure in Mineral Economics at Colorado School of Mines, where we all had the good fortune to have him as a valued colleague. We wish him a belated Happy Birthday with many more returns of the day. We would like to thank two anonymous referees for their comments on the paper and are especially appreciative of some the references they provided us. The authors would also like to thank the Dubai Future Foundation for their funding support. However, all analysis and views in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of any of their affiliated institutions or their members. * Carol Dahl [email protected] 1
Department of Business Administration, Technology and Social Science, Luleå University of Technology, Luleå, Sweden
2
Payne Institute of Public Policy, Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO, USA
3
Division of Economis and Business, Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO, USA
Although few argue about the importance of metals and minerals to modern life, there is more divergence in thought and across time about their relative economic abundance on Earth and where to turn for the next frontier. Duri
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