Demand for neodymium-based magnets could outstrip supply in the coming decade. The longer-term prospects for the metal’s supply aren’t as dire, but a careful look at neodymium’s potential future reveals many of the challenges we’ll likely face across the supply chain for materials in the coming century and beyond.
Peak panic
Before we get into our material future, it’s important to point out just how hard it’s always been to make accurate predictions of this kind. Just look at our continuous theorizing about the supply of fossil fuels.
One version of the story, told frequently in economics classes, goes something like this: Given that there’s a limited supply of oil, at some point the world will run out of it. Before then, we should reach some maximum amount of oil extraction, and then production will start an irreversible decline. That high point is known as “peak oil.”
This idea has been traced back as far as the early 1900s, but one of the most famous analyses came from M. King Hubbert, who was a geologist at Shell. In a 1956 paper, Hubbert considered the total amount of oil (and other fossil fuels, like coal and natural gas) that geologists had identified on the planet. From the estimated supply and the amount the world had burned through, he predicted that oil production in the US would peak and begin declining between 1965 and 1970. The peak of world oil production, he predicted, would come a bit later, in 2000.
For a while, it looked as if Hubbert was right. US oil production increased until 1970, when it reached a dramatic peak. It then declined for decades afterward, until about 2010. But then advances in drilling and fracking techniques unlocked hard-to-reach reserves. Oil production skyrocketed in the US through the 2010s, and as of 2023, the country was producing more oil than ever before.
Peak-oil panic has long outlived Hubbert, but every time economists and geologists have predicted that we’ve reached, or are about to reach, the peak of oil production, they’ve missed the mark (so far).