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 economist John Maynard Keynes once called gold a “barbarous relic.”

In 2019, the latest year of data at the time of writing, we mined, dug and blasted more materials from the earth’s surface than the sum total of everything we extracted from the dawn of humanity all the way through to 1950.

For every tonne of fossil fuels, we exploit 6 tonnes of other materials—mostly sand and stone, but also metals, salts and chemicals.

This book about the Material World is told through six materials: sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium.

After oxygen, which attaches itself to pretty much everything else, silicon is comfortably the most common element in the earth’s crust.

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.

A few years ago, Mexico began providing families with the cement to pave over dirt floors, with the consequence that parasitic infections dropped by 78 per cent. The number of children with diarrhoea dropped by half; those with anaemia dropped by four-fifths.

Cement production accounts for a staggering 7–8 per cent of all carbon emissions.

concrete use alone accounts for around a tenth of the world’s industrial water use.

China’s semiconductor import costs as of 2017 were greater than Saudi Arabia’s total revenue from oil exports, or for that matter the entire global trade in aircraft. “No product,” he says, “is more central to international trade than semiconductors.”[8]

If you were to remove all the sodium chloride from the oceans and spread it evenly over the land, you would glaze the world in a salt crust over 500 feet thick.

For most of England’s history those who lived here were unaware of the slab of rock salt—halite as it is technically known—but there was little need: there were brine springs where salty water naturally issued from the ground. Celtic and then Roman settlements were built around these springs in Middlewich and Northwich, Nantwich and Leftwich. Over time the -wich suffix in a town’s name came to denote saltworking.

In the Cheshire town of Northwich, not far from where the brine comes out of the ground, you will find another part of this salt diaspora, an old ICI site run these days by Tata Chemicals, which also owns British Salt. That the Cheshire salt which once provided Gandhi with the cause for his iconic satyagraha is now being produced by an Indian company is one of those ironies little appreciated outside the Material World.

The Saltpetre War ended with a stunning victory for Chile. In January 1881 Chilean forces occupied Lima; by 1884 they had signed truces with Bolivia and Peru and took a vast swathe of territory to their north, including Antofagasta, all of Bolivia’s coastline and a large chunk of Peru’s caliche zone. It is hard to think of many other wars with a more consequential result than this. Chile won control of some of the most important mineral resources in the world—not just the nitrates of the Atacama, but the world’s biggest reserves of copper and lithium. This conflict turned the country into a resources superpower, depriving Bolivia of its coastline in the process.

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.

Sand and gravel: 43 billion tonnes; oil and gas: 8.1 billion tonnes; coal: 7.7 billion tonnes; iron ore: 3.1 billion tonnes.

Around 70 per cent of the world’s niobium—a rare earth element that helps harden steel for use in jet engines, critical pipelines, superconducting magnets, and the skeletons of bridges and skyscrapers—comes from a single mine in Brazil.

Australia has more of the world’s mineable iron ore than any other country.

But this is no canyon, this is the Chuquicamata copper mine. It is a monumental hole gouged out of the mountainscape of the Atacama Desert. Longer and wider than New York’s Central Park, it is so deep that if you dropped the world’s tallest building, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, into it, the whole thing, lightning rod and all, would be completely swallowed by this fissure. More earth has been removed from here than anywhere else in history, making it one of the more unlikely engineering marvels of the modern age.[1]

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]

The reason the U.S. took possession of so many small islands in the Pacific and Oceania was due to an 1856 Act passed by Congress amid that first rush to seize the nitrate-rich bird droppings found on those Peruvian rocks. It was thanks to the Guano Islands Act, which allowed U.S. citizens to occupy any unclaimed, uninhabited island containing bird droppings, that the U.S. took possession of Midway Atoll, Howland Island and a host of other barren, desolate rocks in the middle of nowhere.

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.

While Ghawar is the world’s biggest oilfield the North Field, which sits under the sea just off Qatar, is comfortably the world’s biggest natural gas field. And since we can turn natural gas into heat or power far more efficiently than any other fuel, the amount of useful energy we can extract from here is greater than anywhere else on the planet—bigger even than Ghawar and all the oil flowing through the Ras Tanura terminal in Saudi. At the time of writing, nowhere else came close to the North Field, making it the single most important energy source on earth.[1]

For while the Tesla logo is emblazoned all over this building, it turns out every single cell made here in Nevada is in fact made by Panasonic. About two-thirds of the footprint is occupied not by Tesla but by this century-old Japanese electronics company.

Part of the explanation for why Japanese companies like Sony were early leaders in battery production wasn’t just that they needed better cells for their gadgets like the Handycam; it was that they could repurpose their reel-to-reel assembly lines to wind up cathodes and anodes instead of cassette tape, so giving birth to the modern battery age. Go

As things stand, China controls about 80 per cent of the world’s battery production capacity. Indeed, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, one of the chroniclers of this new era of gigafactories, even if all the European and American grand visions for battery production actually materialised, by the beginning of the 2030s China will still be turning out seven out of every ten batteries produced anywhere in the world.[2]

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. This next rung in the battery production chain might seem somewhat trivial, but do not be fooled; after all, the most valuable component of a battery is not the engineering or the casing but the raw materials pasted in slurry form on to those cathodes and anodes.[3]

A typical electric car battery contains about 40kg of lithium, alongside 10kg of cobalt, 10kg of manganese and 40kg of nickel.

This is home to the Hawthorne army base or, as it is sometimes called, “the world’s biggest depot.” What that means in practice is countless hangars, some small and others large, arrayed all the way across this dusty valley, covering a staggering 225 square miles. Many hold ammunition for the U.S. armed forces but inside some of these sheds are piles upon piles of critical metals, a kind of elemental war chest ahead of a coming industrial battle.[4]

In one respect, everyone is benefiting from the scale of Asian dominance and ambition, for it has helped cut battery prices enormously. They have fallen 89 per cent in inflation-adjusted terms between 2010 and 2020. The U.S. and its allies could probably win the battle for control of the semiconductor supply chain; not so for batteries.[5]

Steel, as you know, is perhaps the most recycled metal on the planet, and in the United States the vast majority of stuff being milled is already made from scrap melted down in mini mills. 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]

J.B. Straubel, one of the co-founders of Tesla, has now left the car company to set up Redwood Materials, which promises to “unmanufacture” millions of old electric vehicle batteries in the coming years.

As Wright observed this steady fall in prices and improvement in quality, he came up with a rule of thumb: every time the production of an item doubles, its cost falls by about 15 per cent. And Wright’s law, as it is sometimes called, has been eerily successful at explaining the fall in the price of everything from container ships to specialised plastics.