Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

by Ed Conway

One consequence is that hardly anyone has ever heard of the chloralkali process, which is a shame because it is one of the most important industrial achievements of the modern age. Here’s how it works. Brine is pumped out of the fields in Cheshire and piped up to a plant in Runcorn, which used to be part of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) but is today owned by another firm, Inovyn, part of Ineos. There on the banks of the Manchester Ship Canal, the brine is piped into a room full of hundreds of electrolysis cells, where a strong current is run through it. The scale of power you need for an operation like this is mind-boggling. This single room of electrolysis cells consumes more electricity than the city of Liverpool. It also creates such an enormous magnetic field that anyone with a pacemaker is not allowed anywhere near the building. Yet the funny thing about electromagnetic power is that the human body can’t detect it. I stood there in the middle of the dusty cell room at Runcorn, being exposed to the strongest magnetic field anywhere in the country, yet I felt…nothing. Right next to me, beyond a flimsy Perspex screen, this electrical current was tearing the brine apart, atom by atom. There was a low hum and the sound of sloshing liquid as out of one electrode came a yellow cocktail of chlorine gas and some brine; out of the other came hydrogen gas and sodium hydroxide, better known as caustic soda. These substances, humdrum as they may sound, are among the most impo...