Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

by Ed Conway

Today, China produces more steel every two years than the UK’s entire steel output since the industrial revolution.

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.

Confucius, Plato and Aristotle had all expressed fears about humankind’s propensity to throw the natural world out of balance.

While in Antofagasta, I visited a control centre where men and women in front of monitors waggled joysticks controlling the various crushers and diggers at a copper mine more than a hundred miles away. The trucks beneath Chuquicamata’s pit in the new underground mine will be autonomous too.

The dawn of the electrical age coincided with a virtuous circle of mineral abundance, with newly invented electrolytic refining techniques and newly exploited mega-mines like Chuquicamata helping satisfy Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse’s demand for copper wiring, dynamos and transformers. There is a prospect now that this latest energy transition may coincide with a vicious cycle, where political resistance prevents the exploitation of the very copper needed to wean the world off fossil fuels. On the basis of one estimate, if we are to satisfy that demand in the coming decades we may have to build another three mines like Chuqui every year

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.

Yet this is an enormous oversimplification since a barrel of oil can yield hundreds of end products without which we are all stuffed. To take an obscure but increasingly important example, I once visited the Phillips 66 Humber Refinery in the English county of Lincolnshire, where they turn the tarry stuff left at the bottom of the barrel into something called “needle coke.” That needle coke—a hard, black, stony substance, which looks a lot like coal—is the main feedstock for the production of synthetic graphite, the chief ingredient in the anodes in lithium-ion batteries.

While Britain and America built their early chemicals industries out of salt, Germany deployed coal and alchemy. Pharmaceutical giant Bayer had made millions by turning German coal into acetylsalicylic acid, a drug better known as aspirin. BASF had made millions by turning German coal into an extraordinary range of dyes. Turning German coal into a gasoline that could be used in tanks, trucks and planes was, in the circumstances, simply the next logical step.

America’s forces in Europe—tanks, trucks, battleships and subs—ended up consuming a hundred times more gasoline than in the previous war. “My men can eat their belts,” General George S. Patton told Dwight Eisenhower, “but my tanks have gotta have gas.”

For Japanese military strategists, one of the attractions of kamikaze tactics was that in such missions, you only had to budget enough fuel for a one-way trip.

As the end came, Hitler, holed up in his bunker in Berlin, was dictating war plans to divisions that had long been at a standstill for the lack of fuel. Outside, army trucks were being dragged by oxen.

Engine knock was one of the great early challenges faced by the motor industry. In an effort to outdo its rivals at Ford, General Motors (GM) began in the 1920s to look for a way to quiet the engines in its Cadillacs. 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.”

After news broke of the deaths, some states banned the use of leaded gasoline. It looked briefly as if GM would be forced to come up with an alternative (of which there were a few, including ethyl alcohol, though since this could not be patented it was also significantly less lucrative a prospect). But then, in an extraordinary stunt, the inventor, Thomas Midgley, held a press conference where he washed his hands in a solution of tetraethyl lead and spent a minute inhaling its fumes, to prove there were no ill effects. It was a bizarre pantomime, especially since, unbeknownst to the journalists witnessing it, Midgley had just spent a period in Florida recuperating from lead poisoning himself.

But there is no safe amount of lead, however microscopic. This substance can accumulate over time in the brain, the bones and the lungs of anyone exposed to it. Lead impairment means whole generations of people who inhaled these fumes have lower IQs than would otherwise have been the case. There are even compelling studies suggesting a correlation between leaded petrol and violent behaviour.

Clean yet dirty, commonplace but extraordinary, the most interesting thing about petrochemicals is how little time most of us spend thinking about them. But they are everywhere.

There are many, many different varieties of plastic—thousands in fact—but few are quite as versatile and useful as polyethylene. It can be spun into ultra-high molecular weight varieties that are stiffer than steel or into low-density sheeting, which is as soft as wax. Its incredible ductility means it will tend to stretch rather than breaking. Water resistant and durable, heatproof up above water’s boiling point yet recyclable, polyethylene could be strung into strands strong enough to deflect bullets; its non-conductive properties meant it was the perfect electrical insulator.

Polyethylene isn’t the only plastic—indeed it’s one of five main families of human-made polymer. There is polystyrene, famed for its puffy packaging foam but equally capable of being moulded into a hard, clear plastic. There is vinyl—polyvinyl chloride—from which you can make hard pipes or soft shower curtains. There is nylon, famed for its silky stockings but just as easily moulded into hard machine screws. There is polypropylene, flexible enough to be used as the lid of a flip-top bottle but hard enough to be formed into furniture. There are also thermosetting materials like epoxy resin, most familiar to us as a glue but even more important as a binding matrix that helps carbon fibre and fibreglass set into ultra-hard materials. Thermosetting plastics have to be heated, cured, to adopt their chemical form while thermoplastics, which comprise most of today’s plastics, do not. Nor does it end there: there are 15 other categories of synthetic polymer, as well as tens of thousands of sub-categories—all materials the world had literally never seen before.

In the past 13 years we have produced more plastic than our entire output between its invention in the early twentieth century and 2010.

There is a certain empirical logic that secures lithium’s place as one of the six key members of the Material World. This is a magical metal: alongside hydrogen and helium it was one of the three primordial elements created in the Big Bang, making it one of the oldest pieces of matter in the universe. No other element has quite the same combination of lightness, conductivity and electrochemical power. No other metal is quite as good at storing energy. So light it floats in oil, so soft you could cut it with a kitchen knife but so reactive that it fizzes and bangs when it makes contact with water and air, it is one of those materials you don’t ever see in its elemental form outside of a chemistry lab.

If we are to eliminate carbon emissions and phase out fossil fuels in the coming decades we will have to electrify much of the world (less oil but more copper). We will need to build many more wind turbines (steel, silica and copper) and solar panels (copper and metallurgical silicon), not to mention hydroelectric dams (concrete). But none of this will do the trick unless we have a way of storing that energy. We will need to store it for short periods to deal with the inherent intermittency of renewable sources of energy, such as the sun and the wind. And we will need to store it so that road vehicles can get from A to B without burning fossil fuels.

The Salar de Atacama is the single biggest source of lithium anywhere.

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.

For not only do Chinese companies control about 80 per cent of battery production, they also control about 80 per cent of the manufacture of the materials that go into these batteries.

Belgium, of course, was hardly the only country engaged in the “scramble for Africa.” Britain, France, Germany, Spain and the rest also raced to invade, divide and control the continent, exploiting its minerals, trading them elsewhere and pocketing the proceeds. A similar process had occurred many times before, from ancient Rome through to the conquest of the Americas, but this scramble for resources (both mineral and, in the form of slavery, human) was particularly brutal.

Anyway, put all of this together—the uranium in nuclear bombs, the shameful history of exploitation in Congo, the lead poisoning of local children, for heaven’s sake—and you might not be inclined to look very favourably upon a company like Umicore. But here’s where things get…weird, for this firm, with its “colourful” history, might be one of the most important cogs in the machine helping us towards a green future.

The company formerly known as Union Minière may no longer mine for cobalt in the DRC, but it still processes the metal from there—alongside nickel, manganese and, of course, lithium—into the ultra-pure cocktails that get pasted on to rechargeable battery electrodes. There’s a good chance your next electric car will contain batteries with chemicals processed by Umicore.

Across the world, the end-of-life recycling rate—the proportion of scrap that goes on to be reused—is somewhere between 70 per cent and 90 per cent. For aluminium the rate is 42–70 per cent; for cobalt 68 per cent; for copper 43–53 per cent. For lithium it is less than 1 per cent.[5]

Everyone vaguely comprehends that the silicon chips inside them are objects of astounding complexity, though maybe not the extent of it—that the transistors are now far smaller than a virus and would be dwarfed by one of your red blood cells.

Yet without salt we do not have chlorine and without chlorine we do not have purified drinking water, not to mention a panoply of life-saving drugs. Without salt there would be no microchips or solar panels, since you cannot turn metallurgical silicon into super-pure polysilicon without the hydrogen chloride we electrolyse from salt. Without salt we would not have glass (since the soda-ash fluxes we use to melt sand are mostly obtained from salt) and without glass civilisation as we know it would break down. There would no vials in which to transport drugs, no lenses through which to see or to train the lasers with which we etch our silicon chips. Our lives are perched precariously on grains of salt and sand.

Concrete and steel are both amazing substances, but only when the steel is enmeshed in the concrete do they turn into the ultimate building material. Batteries are just as reliant on copper as they are on the lithium inside them. Lightbulbs are useless without glass. You cannot have a transformer without a core of silicon steel or copper wires wound around it—and without transformers, the most unappreciated of all innovations, our electrical grids would collapse.

That we do not pay much attention to the Material World is rather the point. Why would we, when it just…works? We have come to expect that gradually, each year, things just get better. Transistors have shrunk, transformers have become more efficient, steam turbines have become ever better at converting heat into power.

From wood to coal and from coal to oil and thence to gas, the energy density of these fuels increased with each step. We were getting more power from burning comparatively less fuel. On the one hand, the fuels themselves were getting considerably cleaner: wood combustion emits up to 110 kilograms of carbon dioxide per gigajoule of energy, compared with about 60 kilograms of CO2 for each gigajoule provided by natural gas. However, those improvements could not offset the fact that there were more and more of us consuming the energy.[4]

Today our tomatoes, our potatoes and indeed pretty much everything else are nourished with fertilisers made of natural gas.

What, after all, is an offshore wind turbine? Short answer: a structure made of glass, iron, copper and oil, with a sprinkling of salt.

There is, you will have noticed, no way of mass producing either wind turbines (or, for that matter, the silicon substrates of solar panels) without the use of fossil fuels. For the time being, the only way to turn silica into silicon metal is by smelting it with coking coal. Meanwhile, the blades of the wind turbine, in particular, are made out of resins that are primarily extracted from crude oil and natural gas. The story is similar elsewhere: you cannot make high-performance lithium-ion batteries without using graphite obtained from crude oil.

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.

The Material World is the bedrock of our lives today, sparing most of us from the hard work and drudgery of our ancestors. Back in 1801 it took us, on average, 150 hours of human labour to produce a hectare of wheat; today, thanks to steel ploughs, diesel engines and semiconductors guiding combine harvesters, it takes us less than 2 hours—and we pack much more wheat into each hectare. A century ago it took 230 hours of human labour to produce a tonne of copper; today it takes about 18. These astonishing (and for the most part unappreciated) leaps came about because we deployed enormous amounts of energy, metals and chemicals to industrialise farming and mining. The result is that barely a fraction of us now work in the industries that keep us all fed and sheltered.[12]