The road from materials research to commercial technology is a complex and tortuous one. It is not just a matter of what is physically possible. There are rigorous criteria that must be met along the way: financially competitive, mass production, reliability, durability, non-toxicity, ...
The materials needed don't just have to be available, cheap enough, and sufficiently abundant. One also needs supply chains that are not only reliable but also ethical.
In The Economist there is a fascinating (and disturbing) article that shows the complexities involved with the supply chains for just one of the metals used in our smart phones.
Why it’s hard for Congo’s coltan miners to abide by the lawTantalum, a metal used in smartphone and laptop batteries, is extracted from coltan ore. In 2019 40% of the world’s coltan was produced in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to official data. More was sneaked into Rwanda and exported from there. Locals dig for the ore by hand in Congo’s eastern provinces, where more than 100 armed groups hide in the bush. Some mines are run by warlords who work with rogue members of the Congolese army to smuggle the coltan out.
Before reading this article I had no idea what coltan is and so I read the Wikipedia page.
On the science side, I wrongly guessed that coltan was some compound containing cobalt and tantalum. It is actually a mixture of two distinct crystals, tantalite [(Fe, Mn)Ta2O6] and columbite [(Fe, Mn)Nb2O6].
On the economic side, I found it interesting that until a few years ago Australia actually supplied most of the world's coltan.
In terms of political economy, this problem is an example of the "resource curse", a common experience of countries in The Bottom Billion.
If you are concerned about these issues and you live in Europe you might consider buying a Fairphone.
This reminds me that the highest quality single crystal graphite is obtained from mines. Most of my first postdoc was spent making 2D graphene devices from ultrahigh quality single crystal graphite mined from Tanzania. I can only hope I didn't contribute to any human rights violations in retrospect. Certainly always good to remember where all these precious elements come from, thanks for the reminder.
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