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We are very good at counting dollars of GDP, but our understanding of how much stuff we are pulling out from the ground is surprisingly primitive.
Boron never featured on any pandemic preparedness plan, yet getting hold of enough has proved central to the effort to produce and distribute a vaccine for COVID-19—no easy task given boron is mostly found in a handful of spots with volcanic activity and an arid climate. Nearly a third of the global reserves are in Turkey, with other supplies located in the deserts of California and the Far Eastern reaches of Russia.
Indeed, if you’re on a pristine beach in the Caribbean or Hawaii, the chances are that your feet are probably sinking into parrotfish excrement: the fish eat the corals, extract the nutrients, and poop the remaining calcium carbonate on to the seabed. For the most part, the whiter and warmer the beach, the more likely it is to have come out of the bottom of a parrotfish.
As one glassmaker put it, glass is not a material; it’s a state. It is more adjective than noun.
Each year we produce enough concrete around the world to cover the entire landmass of England.[20]
Each year the human body needs several kilograms of table salt, sodium chloride, if it is to keep on functioning. Among other things, salt helps our machinery of nerves, muscles and tendons to operate, allowing electrical currents to flow.
Historians have long theorised that the reason much of human civilisation began on coastlines was because of easy access to salt.
Indeed many of what the English call their Roman roads were originally ancient salt routes, which the Romans simply paved over when they conquered the country.
The Romans were among the first culture to provide formal salt rations to their soldiers—each one received an allowance, which is where the word “salary” comes from, though it might better be thought of as a form of health insurance than cash, since they were also paid in money. When we talk about someone “earning their salt” or being “worth his salt,” we are following an old Roman tradition.
if it’s not grown, it’s mined.
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.
A fine ironworker, capable of beating an unpromising lump of cast iron into a strong sword of steel (smashing the metal, we now know, was one way of removing some of the carbon), became one of the most prized citizens of any kingdom.
“Brothers and sisters,” said the man. “I want to tell you this. The greatest thing on earth is to have the love of God in your heart, and the next greatest thing is to have electricity in your house.”
Indeed, we still generate the vast majority of our electricity the very same way Michael Faraday did in 1831: by rotating a magnet around copper, or vice versa, to convert movement into electricity.
Perhaps you can see the challenge we are facing: if we are to fulfil the various promises made in recent years to get to net zero we will need staggering amounts of this metal. Reducing our carbon footprint will mean increasing our copper footprint.
The vast majority of the world’s cobalt reserves are to be found in one of the world’s most unstable countries: the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where conditions in the mines can be notoriously poor. Nor is cobalt the only important battery metal that poses such questions. We also need lots of nickel for many high-performance battery chemistries, yet much of the world’s nickel is produced in Indonesia, where it often involves the destruction of pristine rainforests
We have spent much of the past few centuries gradually climbing up a thermodynamic ladder. Coal has about twice the energy density—in other words the amount of energy that can be released per kilogram of weight—of wood. Kerosene, refined from crude oils, has nearly twice the energy density of coal.
Between 2007 and 2021 U.S. oil production more than doubled, and America leapfrogged Saudi and Russia to become comfortably the biggest crude producer in the world. Such a jump was not merely unusual, it was unprecedented and, to most casual observers, almost incomprehensible: it was as if the world had just added a whole new Saudi Arabia to its oil production.
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
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The columns where this happens are much the same as the kind you might use to distil whisky, only a lot taller and bigger. Indeed, in the early days of oil refining back in 1920s America, much of the know-how for fractional distillation came direct from the spirits industry, where many technologists had been put out of work by prohibition.
The end products can be roughly divided into six categories: there is gasoline for cars; diesel for trucks, trains and other heavy transport; petrochemicals, which go into lots of things including plastics; kerosene to fuel jets; waxes and lubricating oils; and asphalt, which covers our roads.
The reason we are back in Chile once again is that in much the same way as there is nowhere else on the planet with quite so much copper, there is also nowhere else on the planet where we can lay our hands on quite so much lithium.
In much the same way as we talk today about petrostates like Saudi or Russia, the battery age is giving birth to a new breed of electrostates: countries like Chile, Argentina, Australia and, of course, China, which will dominate the extraction and refining of these materials.
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.
