Predicting indium and tellurium availability

Like other resources commodities, indium (In) and tellurium (Te) production, consumption and availability are controlled by many often interrelated factors, with varying amounts of predictability. These limiting factors include total amount present (calculated from the Clarke Number), geology, mines & mining technology, co-products & by-products, recyclability, price, demands, strategic and other reserves, legal/regulatory strictures, access, logistics, distance to processing & market, politics, toxicity, location, availability of water, deposit grade (tenor) & tonnage, smelting/refining/processing requirements, purity specifications, trade strictures/sanctions, production inducements, and others. Absolute values can be calculated for some of these variables (e.g., the Clarke Number provides an upper limit on the total amount present), with others reasonably estimable, and yet others predictable only in the grossest sense. In particular, many restrictive (bottleneck) factors are arbitrary, capricious and unpredictable. Prior official estimates of resource availability, as for example efforts to predict depletion of remaining oil & gas supplies, do not confer a great deal of confidence in the validity of such predictions: hubris or humility? All such efforts to predict availability must be transparent and thoroughly-documented to enable reasonable due-diligence to be performed. Further, the variables should be quantified and entered into a well-defined table or tables in a standard set of software to enable others to use differing assumptions and more complete or valid data to calculate updated estimates.