Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

by Ed Conway

And the more I travelled, the more I realised that I had spent most of my life inhabiting another world altogether, a place I came to think of as the ethereal world. Perhaps you live there too: it is a rather lovely place, a world of ideas. In the ethereal world we sell services and management and administration; we build apps and websites; we transfer money from one column to another; we trade mostly in thoughts and advice, in haircuts and food delivery. If mountains are being torn down on the other side of the planet, it hardly seems especially relevant here in the ethereal world. When I flew out to Nevada to film that mountain being exploded I was really looking to film a visual metaphor, to turn the physical into something ethereal: a news report that would help people understand an idea like trade flows that bit better. Standing at the edge of the pit there, though, it occurred to me that my perspective had been dangerously shallow. All of a sudden I realised I was staring out from the brink of one world and into another: the Material World. The Material World is what undergirds our everyday lives. Without this place your beautifully designed smartphone wouldn’t switch on, your brand new electric car would have no battery. The Material World will not provide you with a gorgeous home, but it will ensure your home can actually stand up. It will keep you warm, clean, fed and well, however little heed you may pay it. The Material World is where you will find the most impo...

The striking thing is how rarely the price of such goods ever reflects their importance. Look at the national accounts of any large nation and it’s staggering to consider how much raw materials are reflected in national GDP. Staggering, because it is so minuscule. There is a clear and cogent economic logic to this: statistics like gross domestic product are ultimately measures of how much people will pay for a given item, and 99 times out of 100 raw materials—be they metal or mineral or food—are pretty cheap. But price is not the same thing as value, and occasionally, in extraordinary circumstances such as war—“supply shocks,” economists call them—you end up where the British and Germans ended up in 1915: prepared to trade critical goods with which the better to kill each other.

The sum total amount of material we have dug out of the ground in the past century is a figure so big that even the numerical unit itself is rarely ever used: a teratonne. Or rather 6.7 teratonnes (or, to be even more precise, 6,742,000,000,000 tonnes). Given the combined weight of every object manufactured by humankind is, according to one estimate, around 1.1 teratonnes, here is another way of looking at it: for every human-made object on this planet, every building, plane, train, car and phone, try to picture a pile of earth, sand and dirt six times its weight. And the pile of moved material is getting bigger with every year that passes.[5]

Rather than having to form and fire bricks before laying them laboriously with mortar, you can simply pour concrete into a mould. A job that would hitherto have taken days or even weeks can be done in hours with a fraction of the workforce. A couple of centuries ago, nearly all building was done with brick or timber; today concrete accounts for about 80 per cent of all the materials we use in construction.

In the three years between 2018 and 2020, China poured more concrete than the U.S. had in its entire existence, from 1865, when it opened its first plant producing Portland cement—that variety patented by Joseph Aspdin—via the construction of the Hoover Dam, the U.S. highway system, Manhattan and everything else through to the present day.

It doesn’t take much imagination to realise which country Neil is most concerned about. In the past couple of decades, China has come to dominate much of the silicon business. About 90 per cent of silicon production these days is not for computer chips but for solar panels, and nearly all of that takes place not on the east coast of the U.S. but in China.

But here’s the thing: while China controls much of the global supply chain of metallic silicon and solar polysilicon, it has yet to crack the manufacturing techniques needed to create wafers for the most advanced silicon chips. In much the same way as it has yet to master the processes Wacker uses to turn out polysilicon with less than one in a billion atoms of impurity, it has not yet refined the Czochralski process enough to produce wafers as perfect as those pulled out of the crucibles at Shin-Etsu. Which is why you or I won’t ever be allowed into this holy of manufacturing holies: for fear of industrial espionage—that these methods and secrets could be stolen and replicated in a factory in Xinjiang.

“Here’s something scary,” says one veteran of the sector. “If you flew over the two mines in Spruce Pine with a crop duster loaded with a very particular powder, you could end the world’s production of semiconductors and solar panels within six months.” No high-purity quartz means no Czochralski crucibles, which means no monocrystalline silicon wafers, which means, well, the end of computer chip manufacture as we know it. We would adapt; find a new process or an alternative substance. But it would be a grisly few years. Perhaps this is why those who work in high-purity quartz are so jumpy. Perhaps that’s why the man who passed on that scary thought exercise insisted that I didn’t print the type of powder that would play such havoc with the processing of those mines in North Carolina, which quietly serve this tiny but pivotal role in the functioning of the modern world.

Beneath the sub-fab is one of the most sophisticated set of dampers on the planet, meaning the edifice is almost entirely disconnected from terra firma, which, given this is one of the more seismically active parts of the world, is no bad thing. Any movement, however indiscernible, can disturb the workings of the machinery here, which is why you don’t tend to find fabs very close to airports or motorways. Those machines are comfortably the most expensive thing in the fab. There are whole rows of them, most of them white, self-contained units about the size of a minibus. Some of them implant chemicals on to the wafers—doping, as it’s called—others deposit nanolayers of material and some use lasers to etch circuits on to the silicon. Back in the 1950s, semiconductor assembly involved lines of women working at desks, using tweezers to manipulate transistor wires into place. In today’s fabs you might see one or two human beings, kitted up in white body suits so as not to introduce impurities to the cleanroom, but almost everything here is done by robots. These plants are so automated they are known as “lights-out” fabs—where they can operate almost entirely without workers. It is a surreal, somewhat dystopian vision: a world without humans. Yet from a silicon wafer’s perspective, human beings with their grimy nails, their flaky skin and tainted breath are walking vectors for impurities. All you need in one of these fabs is for a single stray atom to float into the machinery an...

Quite how these mirrors are made is yet another closely guarded trade secret, but according to Zeiss, they are ground down from blocks weighing 50 kilograms, and robots are used to polish and correct the outer layer with ion beams. Suffice it to say, they are, according to one ASML engineer, “probably the smoothest man-made structures in the universe.” If you blew one of them up to the size of the United States, the biggest bump would be less than half a millimetre high. Having bounced off a staircase of these mirrors, the EUV light in all its 13.5 nanometre glory hits the wafer and etches that intricate design on to it. There is more than a whiff of science fiction about all of this—astoundingly perfect silicon wafers being manipulated by mind-bogglingly flat pieces of glass—yet there is nothing fantastical about it at all. And here at the heart of the silicon supply chain is that very same company that produced the glass in those binoculars the British government secretly traded for rubber during the First World War.

As recently as 2013 China’s “salt police”—a 25,000-strong force with its own special gold badge in the shape of salt crystals—was cracking down on private merchants who had been trying to sell salt online. This was ostensibly less about state control or revenues than about public health: China has had a spate of food contamination mishaps, and has been battling iodine deficiency among much of its rural population for years.

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.

sedatives like Librium, anti-depressants like Valium,

Swapped examples?

It is thanks to these products, the fruit of the chloralkali process, that we can expect clean drinking water and clean living conditions. It’s still easy to lose sight of just what a revolution it was when, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, soaps and detergents went from being expensive, artisanal creations to mass-produced items. The availability of cheap soaps and sanitary items arguably helped increase life expectancy more than any other innovation over the past couple of centuries. And at the very heart of this revolution was salt.

They are so widely used today that it is estimated that around half of the nitrogen in our bodies was fixed from the air via the Haber–Bosch process. Were it not for these chemicals, we would have to turn over pretty much every square mile of land on the planet to agricultural production, covering it with manure from an equally enormous stable of animals, and even then we would still only be able to support roughly half the world’s population. But in those earliest years, the main use these nitrates were put to was creating explosives for the German army.

And iron is indeed everywhere. It courses through our bodies in our red blood cells. It is the main element in the planet’s core and the second most abundant metal in the earth’s crust (at 5 per cent, after aluminium which is 8 per cent). Just look at a ranking of the substances we dig, blast and pump out of the planet’s surface each year. Sand and gravel: 43 billion tonnes; oil and gas: 8.1 billion tonnes; coal: 7.7 billion tonnes; iron ore: 3.1 billion tonnes. And like pretty much all of those materials, our appetite for this metal shows no sign of abating: after a dip in 2020 during the pandemic, global iron ore output hit a record high in 2021.

When Mao would boast about his country’s industrial prowess, which he did often, he tended to couch it in terms of steel output. China would overtake British steel production within three years! It would overtake America within ten years! Steel mills were ordered to go flat out to try to hit those targets, and when that wasn’t enough the Chinese population was ordered to build “backyard furnaces” into which they would throw junk metal in an effort to make steel. That junk metal included pots and pans used for cooking, tools and ploughs used for farming, wagons and cans used for carrying and holding water. Homes were torn down so the wood and thatch could be burned as fuel; whole forests were stripped of trees (something which triggered floods in the following decades); millions of peasants were pulled off the fields to mind the furnaces.[7] Mao called it the Great Leap Forward, and it certainly boosted iron production, but since neither the chairman nor many of his advisors understood the difference between iron and steel, they were dismayed to discover that much of what came out of the backyard furnaces they had commissioned was brittle, useless iron—not steel. And that metal nonetheless had a terrible cost. In the following years China experienced the worst famine in history. Tens of millions of people—the final toll is still debated today but conservative estimates range from 17 to 30 million—died of starvation and fatigue in those four years between 1958 and 1962. Some...

This was not just an industrial revolution, but a material revolution and, most of all, an energy revolution—the first great energy transition, with humankind shifting from wood and charcoal power to fossil power. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, most of the industries in Britain were powered by coal. This was, it’s worth saying, quite unique. In 1800, 95 per cent of Britain’s energy came from coal; at the very same point, almost all of France’s energy—over 90 per cent—still came from burning wood. No longer was Britain yoked to the organic limitations of how many trees could be grown on its landmass. And around this time, its income per capita, which for most of history had been more or less the same as France’s, began to soar. By the early nineteenth century it was 80 per cent richer than France.[7] Perhaps the simplest way to illustrate the importance of this energy transition—this rupture with humankind’s natural constraints—is to ask what life would look like today if we ditched coal and coke from our blast furnaces and returned to using wood and charcoal instead? After all, some countries, most notably Brazil, still use lots of charcoal instead of coke, so it’s theoretically doable—until you run the numbers. For replacing all the coke for Britain’s 30 megatons of steel consumption would necessitate using nearly half the surface of the UK purely for charcoal production. To do the same thing for global steel production would entail chopping down half of the ...

But today the nature of cleaving and digging is of a different order entirely. For evidence of this, consider Mount Whaleback, just outside the town of Newman. This is one of the great icons of modern-day mining. The mountain itself is long gone, replaced with a hole 6 kilometres long, 3 kilometres wide and hundreds of metres deep. The entire top surface of the earth has been scraped away by enormous diggers, ground into chunks, carried on vast, mile-long trains and thence shipped to China or Japan, where it has become the skyscrapers of Shanghai and the rails that carry bullet trains from Tokyo to Osaka. Twenty-first-century Asia—and elsewhere besides—was built out of Pilbara iron.

Even apparently small breakthroughs were more significant than they might at first seem. There’s a strong case that handheld power tools (their motors and circuitry made of copper) revolutionised the built world almost as much as ready-mixed concrete.

Quite what constitutes the biggest mine on the planet is a matter of some debate. By one measure—the amount of metal extracted from a single place—the iron ore mines of Australia, Brazil or Russia would easily surpass this place. But since iron ore tends to be found in far greater concentrations than copper, with about 60 per cent in each hunk of ore, compared with barely 0.6 per cent in copper ore, you need to move a lot more earth for each tonne of copper than each tonne of iron. Based on my back-of-an-envelope sums (surprisingly scant research has been done on this topic), copper mining results in the disturbance of considerably more of the planet’s surface than the production of any other metal—even though there is so much less of the end product.[*2]

In fact, a better number to focus on is not the reserves figure miners usually cite, but another number: the resources. Resources, it turns out, are a measure not just of what we have already pencilled in for future extraction, but all the metal under the ground, including stuff yet to be discovered. The figures here clearly involve a lot more guesswork, but they are also somewhat more reassuring: according to the U.S. Geological Survey, the world’s total copper resources are 5.6 billion tonnes, of which we have already discovered 2.1 billion tonnes. This works out at roughly 226 years’ worth of our annual copper consumption today—or about 115 years based on our consumption in a decade’s time, when the green energy transition is in full flow.[20] Yet there are, of course, consequences to all of this. The flipside of getting ever more effective at mining ever poorer copper ores is that we displace ever more amounts of the planet in our bid to do so. Between 2004 and 2016 Chilean miners increased annual copper production by 2.6 per cent. Yet the amount of ore they had to dig out of the ground to produce this marginal increase in refined copper rose by 75 per cent. The most staggering thing about this statistic, however, is not just the numbers themselves but the fact that they show up in no environmental accounts or material flow analysis, which count only the refined metal. When it comes to even the United Nations’ measures of how much humans are affecting the planet, this ...

This brings us to the real challenge: not so much that we are likely to run out of the metal, nor that it will become too expensive. The real question is how much more of this blasting and digging people will tolerate. As this book went to print governments around much of South America, including Chile and Peru, the world’s second biggest producer, were voicing concerns about the environmental costs of copper mining. They began to impose limits on copper extraction, raising questions about its future supply.

“This is the last great extraction,” he says. “We need to build batteries, but after this it’s recycling; it’s the circular economy. We don’t see ourselves as selling metals; we want to rent them. We want to support brands using recycled metals. Our position is: let’s let the science do the talking.” To that end, the company has sponsored peer-reviewed research that shows, among other things, that while a kilogram of copper produced in a conventional mine generates 460 kilograms of waste, a kilo of copper produced from polymetallic nodules generates a mere 29 kilograms of waste.

Electricity is no longer just the second greatest thing in the world after God; it is the first great hope for addressing climate change. But even on the basis of the most optimistic assumptions about improving recycling rates and cutting back on energy use, we will still need astounding amounts of it if we are to succeed. And extracting copper—whether from under the ground or under the sea—is a messy business.

There was oil. Astonishing, unbelievable, world-changing amounts of oil. Berg had discovered the southern point of what was later called the Ghawar field. It is so vast that it took geologists many years to realise that a well they struck more than a hundred miles north was actually drilling into the very same reservoir. The field stretches 175 miles north to south and 19 miles across; when you see it on a map it looks a little like a ballet dancer’s stretched leg.

Most American refineries are set up for the kinds of heavy, sour crudes you get from Canada, Mexico and Venezuela. That made sense when it looked as if the U.S. was running out of domestic oil, but then came the shale oil revolution. American shale oil, it turns out, is typically light and high quality, meaning it is not best-suited for domestic refineries. The upshot is that while arithmetically America is energy independent—producing far more oil than it consumes—in practice it is anything but. It must keep sucking in heavy oils from elsewhere to feed its refineries while sending Texan crude off to Europe and Asia to be refined.

But the Wesseling oil refinery is unusually large. There is a street that runs from the top to the bottom but it is so long you can hardly see all the way to the end. You can ride a bicycle around the perimeter for an hour (most people cycle here; ignition engines are frowned upon) and still you haven’t seen it all.

Yes, Germany’s synthetic fuel was a thing of wonder, but on the other side of the Atlantic, American refineries were making their own breakthroughs. Among them was a complex catalytic cracking technology carried out in skyscraper-sized refinery units that produced high-grade 100-octane fuel, as opposed to the 87-octane variety coming out of places like Wesseling. An octane rating is essentially a measure of how well fuel can withstand pressure in an engine without prematurely exploding or “knocking,” as it’s sometimes called. The higher-octane fuel meant Spitfires and Lancasters could be equipped with superior engines, such as the Rolls-Royce Merlin. They could fly 15 per cent faster than their German counterparts, had 1,500 miles more range on their bombing missions and a maximum altitude 10,000 feet higher. This fuel advantage might even have swung the balance in the Battle of Britain.

One of its engineers, a man called Thomas Midgley, discovered that a drop of tetraethyl lead in gasoline would miraculously increase octane levels and stop all the pinging. And so began one of the most shameful stories of pollution in modern history—considerably more shameful than today’s carbon emissions, since while the science of global warming came after the adoption of fossil fuels, everyone knew the risks of putting lead in petrol right from the start. Vitruvius, the Roman philosopher whose recipe for cement helped inspire the invention of modern concrete, had observed that the men who worked with this heavy metal looked desperately unhealthy, and advised people to steer clear of drinking water that came through lead pipes. Lead is a powerful neurotoxin, especially damaging to the brains of children. Doctors knew, policymakers knew and most members of the general public knew too—but rather than seek a way to remove lead, GM simply removed the word from the chemical’s brand name: they called it “Ethyl.” There were warning signs from the start, with a spate of illnesses at a refinery in New Jersey shortly after it entered the market. Men were quite literally going mad, hallucinating and then working themselves up into a frenzy. Six men died who all worked in the same place, the section of the refinery where they synthesised tetraethyl lead. The unit had been nicknamed the “House of Butterflies,” because people there were continually brushing imaginary insects off their...

Nor does the agriculture sector’s reliance on fossil fuels end there. Back in the glasshouse Nof crouched down and showed me a white, perforated plastic pipe running beneath the rows of vines. The pipe, it transpired, was puffing out a concentrated stream of carbon dioxide. This was another Dutch innovation. Since carbon dioxide is, alongside light, the main input into photosynthesis, you can dramatically accelerate the rate of growth by increasing the CO2 content inside the greenhouse from the atmospheric average of just over 400 parts per million to 800ppm or even 1,000ppm. And where does that CO2 come from? It is sequestered from the flue of the gas boiler and pumped straight into the conservatory.

Sending these rocks off to be refined in China helps in another, less discussed way too: it means Australia need not take responsibility for all the emissions produced when they are refined, which is rather a lot. Turning rocks into a refined product is, as you have already seen, a tough job involving a lot of energy and quite a lot of greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, lithium produced from hard rock is responsible for many multiples the greenhouse gas emissions and water usage of the lithium produced from the brines underneath the Salar in Chile. If you buy an electric car, there is usually no telling where the lithium in your battery pack came from, but answering that question goes a long way to understanding just how environmentally friendly or unfriendly its production was. Eventually, after a few years of use, that car will “pay off” those environmental costs versus a petrol car, but that length of time could vary significantly.

Except that this time there are three important differences. The first is that this time around we are moving down the energy ladder rather than up it. Lithium-ion batteries are significantly less energy-dense than oil, gas or even coal. The second is that the materials we are mining are not being burned; their power is not being vaporised but installed inside batteries, which could, in theory at least, be recycled. The third is that the countries doing the extraction are no longer so sure that they want to do it any more. Shortly after my conversation with Cristina, the new Chilean draft constitution was put to the country in a referendum. The people voted to reject it, but the Boric government pushed ahead with plans to tighten up regulations on the extraction of both copper and lithium. Even as the world needs more of these minerals, it is not altogether clear that the electrostates are ready to provide them.

Before a cell has been allowed anywhere near here it needs to be pulled apart from the rest of its battery pack, something that is far easier said than done. Battery manufacturers tend to prioritise passenger safety over everything else, with the upshot that the packs being put together at Gigafactory Nevada are so tightly closed with adhesives and fasteners that there is no easy way to disassemble them. So one of the hardest steps in the recycling process is actually the first one, pulling the battery pack apart, ideally without setting it on fire. The next step, however, is precisely that. Those little batteries are dropped into an enormous blast furnace where they are smelted down into a molten liquid. If you think this sounds a lot like iron manufacture, you’re not entirely wrong, except here the molten liquid coming out of the furnace contains nickel, cobalt and copper while the slag being drained away contains the lithium. Watching the batteries tumble into the top of the furnace is an unexpectedly satisfying experience, because after each one drops into the steaming mouth there is a sort of belch of yellow sparks and steam as it is digested. This belch, it turns out, is the energy stored up in that lithium, helping fire the furnace and melt the rest of the contents. As you watch the smelting and then the treating of these metals, what’s striking is how similar it all is to conventional mining. Umicore simply does with the lithium slag that comes out of its furnace m...

The challenge here is that while developed nations already have about all the steel they need, they have nowhere near enough batteries to electrify the roads. Even on the basis of optimistic projections of mine discoveries and openings, the world will not have enough lithium to meet its needs by 2030. The firms exploiting the Salar de Atacama cannot accelerate the evaporation of their brine fast enough to provide all the lithium hydroxide the cathode producers and battery makers are demanding. And if they pushed to drain the salt lake faster, the Chilean authorities might ban them altogether.[6] We are heading, in short, for a bumpy few years. For decades we have convinced ourselves that the main constraint facing humanity is the scope of our imagination. We created an economic system so sophisticated and seamless that it allowed us to forget about the materials upon which it was built. But in attempting to build our way to net zero, we are confronting the inescapable limitations of thermodynamics and material constraints. There is a crucial distinction here, however. This time around we are building our way into the future. For centuries, humankind exploited energy commodities from the ground in order to burn them. Coal, oil and gas were extracted and then incinerated, releasing carbon along the way. This time, we are mining and refining lithium to seal into batteries that we can reuse and recycle. This step shift will not prevent us digging and blasting more than ever be...

And this, of course, is only a tiny part of the bigger picture. This fertiliser plant is actually of middling size by global standards; many of those in the U.S. and China are considerably bigger, so would require even more power from even more wind turbines (or solar panels or hydroelectricity plants) if they were to go green. Moreover, fertiliser production is only one slice of the industrial cake. The manufacture of green steel will gobble up even more hydrogen. Such things might seem beside the point but actually they are precisely the point. These industrial processes account for even more of the world’s primary energy use than the bit most people talk about—the generation of electricity. Electricity, it turns out, is the easy bit.[6]

It is a seductive vision. But it will involve a momentous effort and a lot of time and money to get there. There is no single switch we can flick to turn the entire Material World on to renewable energy. And it will necessitate extraordinary amounts of raw materials. Consider what it takes to replace a small natural gas turbine, pumping out 100 megawatts of electricity, enough for up to 100,000 homes, with wind power. You would need around 20 enormous wind turbines. To build those turbines you will need nearly 30,000 tonnes of iron and almost 50,000 tonnes of concrete, along with 900 tonnes of plastics and fibreglass for the blades and 540 tonnes of copper (or three times that for an offshore wind farm). The gas turbine, on the other hand, would take around 300 tonnes of iron, 2,000 tonnes of concrete and perhaps 50 tonnes of copper in the windings and transformers. On the basis of one calculation, we will need to mine more copper in the next 22 years than we have in the entirety of the past 5,000 years of human history.

But saving over a million tons of gas?!

In that case, the “breakeven year,” when atmospheric carbon levels are falling and the economic and climate benefits begin to outweigh the costs, will be around 2080. Other models put it even later.

This is not a consensus position.

We will not achieve net zero if we have a long-lived shortfall of lithium or copper, which means we need more people with more ingenuity to think about ways of obtaining those minerals. But at the time of writing there was such a dearth of young people wanting to study mining that the Camborne School of Mines in Cornwall, one of the world’s pre-eminent metallurgy institutions, had suspended new intakes for its mining engineering degree. If there is no one left who knows how to procure the minerals we need, what hope have we then? The third risk is that the geopolitical foundations upon which the Material World is built disintegrate. A silicon chip circumnavigates the world multiple times before ending up in your device. Much the same is true of most atoms of copper, which are mined on one side of the world, refined elsewhere (usually China) and then get integrated into a device destined for somewhere else altogether. The world as we know it—including all those virtuous circles that have helped prices fall year on year—depends on these interconnections. In those periods when supply chains work and materials can flow freely from one part of the world to another, it hardly seems to matter where things come from, where they are made or how they are made. They simply turn up and feed into an industrial machine we have stopped attempting to map or understand. But on those rare occasions when these supply chains break down, most obviously in the face of war or trade battles, all ...

Jarod C. Kelly et al., “Energy, Greenhouse Gas, and Water Life Cycle Analysis of Lithium Carbonate and Lithium Hydroxide Monohydrate from Brine and Ore Resources and Their Use in Lithium Ion Battery Cathodes and Lithium Ion Batteries,” Resources, Conservation and Recycling 174 (November 2021), https://doi.org/​10.1016/​j.resconrec.2021.105762