Will we ever run out of gold, silver, copper and other important conductors?
How long will these reserves last?


Short answer: longer than you think and will outlast me, you, our children and our grandchildren. Possibly last forever.

Long answer: This is a fairly complex issue. There was a book published about this topic several years ago claiming that we are running out of metals. Turns out that the book had a major flaw in its reasoning, so the same publisher followed up with a second book refuting the first one. Both books are open access and freely available so I recommend having a look.

The problem lies in the definition of the word reserve.

What are reserves?

A reserve is an ore deposit (that is, a concentration of a certain metal) that we know exactly how much is in there to a good degree, and we have detailed plans on how to extract it. This means, we have plans to build a mine, we know the cost of running the mine, etc. In some countries (for example, Canada and Australia) you are not allowed to call something a reserve unless you have the plans. This is a legal definition.

What are resources?

On the other hand, if you know how much metal is in the deposit, but you haven't made the plans to extract it yet, it is a resource. You are not legally allowed to call it a reserve.



The work required to develop a resource into a reserve costs money. You have to employ mine engineers, you need to get environmental approval, you have to do a lot of lengthy and costly things. Therefore, you don't "declare" a reserve until you have to. If you are a mining company and you have reserves of 40 years, why bother converting more of your resources into reserves? And this is exactly the problem: alarmists and the media consider the reserves, without the resources. Of course we have limited reserves! Because it's pointless to turn the resources to the reserves if we still have reserves!

Quoting Antonio Arribas, an exploration geologist, from an enlightening article published in the SEG Newsletter:


  One was published in issue 2605 of the international science magazine
  New Scientist in May 2007 (Fig. 5). In it, the author claims that,
  based on data by researchers from Yale University and the University
  of Augsburg, “if predicted new technologies appear and the population
  grows, some key resources will be exhausted” within what is
  graphically shown as an alarmingly short time frame (Cohen, 2007).
  Among the mineral resources covered, platinum, indium, and copper are
  particularly illustrative of the errors of interpretation contained in
  the article and the overall fallacy that this report represents.
  
  According to the article, humankind should be running out of platinum
  within four years (15 years from 2007). However, despite production of
  2,000 t of platinum between 2007 and 2017 and a metal price drop of
  26%, the global reserves of platinum group metals have decreased only
  by 2.8%3 (data from USGS, https://minerals.usgs.gov/
  minerals/pubs/mcs/). Likewise, according to this report we should have
  run out of indium sometime between 2012 and 2017. Never mind that, as
  a key component of indium tin oxide (ITO), this metal has been present
  as a transparent thin film conductor in the touch screen displays of
  every smartphone and tablet manufactured since then—including the 1.2+
  billion iPhones sold by Apple alone since the product’s release in
  June 2007, barely a month after publication of the New Scientist
  article.
  
  The second article and infographic selected were titled
  “Global resources stock check” and appeared in a June 18, 2012,
  article from BBC Future (www. bbc.com/future/story/
  20120618-global-resources-stock-check). In this report, the world
  supplies of indium, antimony, and copper, just to choose three, were
  projected to last through 2024, 2020, and 2044, respectively. I would
  argue that nothing but common sense is needed to believe that by the
  time of the Paris Olympiad in 2024, ITO-based transparent thin film
  conductors (or a new, and likely superior, substitute) will continue
  to be present in digital displays and thin-film photovoltaic cells,
  among many other applications. As for antimony, how do we reconcile
  the prediction that we should have only two years left of the metal
  now when, after production of
  1.1 Mt between 2011 and 2017, global reserves remain unchanged within the
  1.5- to 2.1-Mt range that has existed every year since 1997, when the U.S. Geological Survey started to record reserve estimates? In other
  words, for the time being and for the foreseeable future, the reserves
  of this metal are controlled by economics, technology, geopolitics,
  etc., and not by absolute limitations of availability in nature.