Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

by Ed Conway

For a standard gold bar (400 troy ounces) they would have to dig about 5,000 tonnes of earth. That’s nearly the same weight as ten fully laden Airbus A380 super-jumbos, the world’s largest passenger planes—for one bar of gold.

The Material World is where you will find the most important companies you’ve never heard of, companies like CATL, Wacker, Codelco, Shagang, TSMC and ASML.

What about aluminium, the most common metal in the earth’s crust—albeit one we only learned to refine relatively recently? What about platinum and its sister metals such as palladium and rhodium—scarce, important ingredients in electrical components and catalytic convertors? What about chromium, which plays an essential role in the manufacture of stainless steel, or cobalt, or rare earth metals such as neodymium, which goes into precision magnets?

When Russian forces shelled the Ukrainian port of Mariupol in 2022, among the buildings under fire were some of the earliest examples produced from blocks of alkali-activated cement. Amid the loss of human life and immiseration of a people, something else was being destroyed too: one of the best clues we have about how to mass produce this magical material without causing such damage to the planet.

The latest such chips can fit roughly 15 million transistors into a dot the size of a single full stop on this page. The transistors in today’s smartphones are not just smaller than a red blood cell (about a thousand times smaller, as it happens); they are smaller than the COVID-19 virus. Actually you could fit four of them inside a coronavirus, each transistor having about the same dimensions as one of the virus’s spike proteins, those club-like tendrils radiating out from its centre.

Even the chips that bear Apple’s name—the A16 Bionic was the latest iPhone chip at the time of writing—are in fact manufactured by another company altogether, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company or, as it’s better known, TSMC. That company in turn was only able to make the chip with the help of machines made by another, even more obscure company, ASML. And at the heart of ASML’s machines are critical components made by other companies, some of which will be familiar (the lenses are made by Zeiss, with glass from Schott) and some less so (the lasers are made by another German company, Trumpf).

“I want world sympathy in this battle of Right against Might.”

For it turns out saltpetre is not the only rock we have used to help us grow our food. While nitrogen is by far the most important fertiliser, there are also two others: phosphorus and potassium. Together these three—NPK as they are often called after their chemical symbols—constitute the holy trinity of fertilisers, sprinkled and sprayed on fields around the world in their millions of tonnes to help grow the crops that feed the world’s 8 billion mouths.

Then someone had an idea: what about digging even deeper into the Zechstein Sea? They pulled out the old rock cores from those first surveys back in the 1930s. Beneath the layers of sylvite was a layer of something never before discovered in such vast quantities: polyhalite, a hard, stony crystal of sulphur, magnesium and calcium whose name quite literally means “many salts.” Could they mine that? So as they searched for a rationale to keep the mine alive, the team at Boulby pondered the ingredients in polyhalite: sulphur, magnesium and calcium.

At this point it’s worth noting that copper is not the only metal capable of conducting electricity. Aluminium does a decent enough job, and since it is significantly lighter it is often used for high-voltage long-distance cables that need to hang high on wires rather than under the ground. Silver is even more conductive than copper and can rival its ductility if not its strength, but this underlines another one of those recurrent lessons from the Material World. As with concrete or steel, what matters just as much as a substance’s powers is its ubiquity. Silver is rare. Copper might not be as prevalent as iron, but there is much more of it than there is of silver, and humankind has more years of expertise at mining and refining it than any other industrial metal.

Before the 1930s the main export had been wild pearls caught in the Gulf, until a Japanese businessman, Kokichi Mikimoto, found a way to culture these pearls artificially, causing an instant collapse in Gulf revenues.

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. Here in Saudi they call this anticline “En Nala”—the slippers. Many oilfields have been discovered both before and since, but nothing like Ghawar. There is a category given to fields with proven reserves of more than 500 million barrels of oil: giants. Then there are those with 5 billion or more: the super-giants. Ghawar is bigger than any super-giant ever discovered before or since. Its precise size is still debated today—and indeed it is ever-changing as more reserves of oil and gas are discovered—but it has already produced more than 70 billion barrels of oil and has around 50 billion more still available underground. It belongs in a category of its own: not a giant or a super-giant but perhaps, as some have called it, an elephant—or rather the elephant, since we will almost certainly never discover another place quite like it.

Berg had discovered a geological wonder, a place as significant for hydrocarbons as the Pilbara is for iron ore and the Andean foothills of Chile and Peru are for copper.

This revolution began in the 1980s with George P. Mitchell, a Texan entrepreneur who started his career as a dedicated environmentalist, egged on by books like the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth to try to mitigate the damage being done to the planet. In his case, he reasoned that since natural gas is much less pollutive than coal—with many times less carbon or sulphur emissions—it represented the fuel of the future.

The oil coming out of Ghawar, for instance, is sometimes called “Arabian light”: light because it is less viscous and dense than, say, heavy, gloopy Venezuelan Merey crude or Maya crude from Mexico. And since you can pump lighter oil out of the ground more easily, Saudi oil—at least the stuff they have onshore—needs considerably less work and expense to pump and refine than most other oils around the world. Oils can also be “sweet” or “sour”—a measure of sulphur content, which dates back to the early days when crude was mostly used for indoor lighting. Too much sulphur in your kerosene and not only was there a noxious smell when it burned, it would also tarnish the silver in your lamp. Back then the quickest way to test for this before burning was to give it a quick taste—the more sulphur, the more sour it was—and this shorthand has stuck. Broadly speaking, the less heavy and sour an oil is, the less time and effort refineries have to put into processing it, so lighter and sweeter crudes usually fetch a higher price.

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. Most of us now realise that the batteries inside our smartphones and electric cars are made of many obscure ingredients we dig out of the ground—more on this in Part Six—but few are aware that among those ingredients is a big dollop of crude oil.

part of Hitler’s rationale for invading the Soviet Union was to try to secure the oil of the Caucasus—of Maikop, Grozny and Baku. “The life of the Axis,” he told Mussolini, “depends on those oilfields.” “Unless we get the Baku oil,” he wrote in 1942, “the war is lost.”

Two ICI chemists, Eric Fawcett and Reginald Gibson, were working on chemical reactions at high pressure, the same kind of technique that helped Haber and Bosch to fix nitrogen from the air and that helped Friedrich Bergius turn coal into oil.

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.

And while it is possible to recycle plastics at scale, the challenge is that while some types of plastic are perfectly suited to being melted down and remoulded, others are not. Soft drinks bottles made out of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), for instance, could easily be re-formed into a polyester fleece. But add a different type of plastic to the recycling process, a thermosetting one for instance, and what comes out is a bit of a mess.

Batteries are a form of fuel—albeit electrochemical rather than fossil. What occurs inside a battery is a controlled chemical reaction, an effort to channel the explosive energy contained in these materials and turn that into an electric current. And no ingredient was more explosive than lithium.[2] The first breakthrough came in the 1970s at, of all places, ExxonMobil, or as it was then known, Esso. In the face of the oil price shock, for a period the oil giant had one of the best-funded battery units anywhere, staffed by some of the world’s most talented chemists trying to map out the company’s future in a world without hydrocarbons. Among them was a softly spoken Englishman called Stan Whittingham. Soon enough Whittingham had one of those Eureka moments that changed the battery world forever. Up until then, one of the main problems facing battery makers was that every time they charged or discharged their batteries it could change the chemical structure of their electrodes irreversibly. Edison had spent years attempting to surmount this phenomenon, whose practical consequence was that batteries simply didn’t last all that long. Whittingham worked out how to overcome this, shuttling lithium atoms from one electrode to the other without causing much damage.

This concept—the notion that ions could travel across from the crystalline structure of one electrode to nest in the crystalline structure of another—was Whittingham’s brainwave. He called it intercalation, and it’s still the basis of how batteries work today. Whittingham put the theory to work and created the world’s first rechargeable lithium battery. It was only a small thing—a coin-sized battery designed for use in watches—but it was a start. Per kilogram of weight (or rather, given its size, per gram), his battery could hold as much as 15 times the electrical charge of a lead–acid battery. But every time Whittingham tried to make a battery any bigger than a small coin cell, it would burst into flames. In an effort to tame the inherent reactivity of lithium, he had alloyed it with aluminium, but this wasn’t enough to subdue it altogether. So Whittingham’s battery remained something of a curio until the following decade, when researchers working in the UK and Japan finally cracked the code.[3] The key figure here is an extraordinary man called John B. Goodenough, an American physicist who, as it happens, was born in Jena, the German city where Otto Schott and Carl Zeiss first perfected technical glassmaking. After studying at Yale, Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Goodenough eventually found himself in charge of the inorganic chemistry lab at the University of Oxford in the late 1970s and early 1980s, where he played the pivotal role in the battery...

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.

Panasonic gets most of its materials from Sumitomo Metal Mining; CATL gets most of its materials from a company called Ronbay Technology.

There’s the traditional battery recipe, lithium cobalt oxide (LCO): the closest thing to those early lithium-ion batteries pioneered by John Goodenough and still the most common cathode chemistry in smartphones and laptops today. There’s nickel, manganese and cobalt alongside the lithium (NMC), which is slightly less energy-dense but much longer-lasting. These are the kinds of batteries most new electric cars use, though the Tesla batteries Panasonic makes in Nevada have a subtly different recipe with nickel, cobalt and aluminium oxide in addition to lithium (NCA). There is something called lithium ferro-phosphate (LFP), a combination of iron and lithium phosphate, which is far more stable than other lithium-ion batteries but doesn’t hold quite as much power. You get the idea: lots of recipes, each with their own trade-offs.

A typical electric car battery contains about 40kg of lithium, alongside 10kg of cobalt, 10kg of manganese and 40kg of nickel. This is before you consider the graphite that goes into the anode.

Many lithium-ion battery recipes rely on cobalt to help electrons pass safely from cathode to anode.

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. Yet there is an important distinction between this use of fossil fuels and the way we mostly used them in the preceding three centuries. Here, we are building with them, not burning them.

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.[7] Here, however, is the most unsettling thing about this vision of the future: many of us—perhaps most of us—will never get to experience it. Calculating these things is a tricky business given how many variables are at play, but let’s take the most commonly used model and let’s assume everything else goes to plan and we get to net zero by 2050. 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.

The logic of Wright’s law is that as time passes and humanity gains experience, we get better at producing things more quickly.