A Quick Look into the Future

Abstract

Economic importance for the indium mineral has been growing in recent years and indium is usually referred to as one of the technology minerals. High tech industries use indium in their application because of the special properties: transparency and electrical conductivity. Indium demand has more than doubled in the last decade and is expected to grow more in the near future. Indium is not found in its pure state in the nature which makes indium supply complex because it is by-produced from zinc. Indium supply could become problematic in the future because of high demand, the high dependence on zinc supply and the market functioning of indium. The objective of this master study is the exploration under deep uncertainty of plausible futures of a system (indium) that has an important dependence on the function of another bigger system (zinc). To achieve that a simulation model was built to explore uncertainties and to analyse what causes scarcities. The purpose of the model is to generate thousands of plausible futures in order to create and capture behaviours of interest and to explain them. Indium and many other by-produced minerals have similar market conditions and expectations of growing demand hence; the purpose of this study is also to give general insights in by-produced systems and to produce a model that is generic enough to explore other types of by-produced minerals. The methods used in this thesis are System Dynamics (SD) and Exploratory Modelling and Analysis (EMA). These methods are used together as Exploratory Systems Dynamics Modelling and Analysis ESDMA for the building of the simulation model (SD) and the exploration and analysis (ESDMA) of plausible future situations. ESDMA is a new multi-method and a special emphasis is on using and testing developed tools of ESDMA and to give insights into the usefulness of the method for analysing uncertainties of systems under deep uncertainty. The model built for this study is a generic model capturing the dynamics of supply and demand for indium and zinc and their dynamic relation. The model results indicate that many plausible futures of indium scarcities could be generated. In these futures, scarcities of indium is generated by the weak supply of zinc, high recycling of zinc and low recycling efforts for indium. The model indicates that in the first 30 years, supply of indium has little problems over the entire uncertainty space. After the first 30 years supplying indium becomes difficult, due to growth in demand, lags in zinc supply and poor market conditions of indium. Indium in slags and tailings of zinc can prove to be useful to mitigate scarcities in case it is feasible to refine the indium from those sources. The use of ESDMA can prove to be useful for exploring systems under deep uncertainties. The many plausible futures generated can be hard to generate with traditional scenario analysis where only few scenarios can be explored. As uncertainties often arise, due to lack of agreement of what generates a situation or what the effects could be, ESDMA proves to be very suitable to include different points of view and to test the difference in plausible behaviours generated. Analysing what causes what with the method is still difficult, because plausible behaviours can be many and understanding all of them is time consuming. Improving interaction with the ensemble of results and the analyst would improve the method because it can help in understanding and analysing results.