Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future

by Ed Conway

hadn’t travelled out into the high desert to set off a bomb; I had come because of a spreadsheet. Some months earlier, scanning through Britain’s trade statistics, I had noticed something odd: flows of gold were distorting the figures, and hence our picture of the nation’s economy.

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.

Later I would learn that while it might once have taken about 0.3 tonnes of ore, extracted via more traditional mining methods, to obtain enough gold for a typical wedding ring, these days it might take between 4 and 20 tonnes of rock.

So in the months after I returned from Nevada I kept returning to a few questions. If this is what it takes to extract a metal we could mostly live without, then what does it take to extract those materials we really need?

But pretty much everything from social networks to retail to financial services is wholly reliant upon the physical infrastructure that facilitates it and the energy that powers it. Without concrete, copper and fibre optics there would be no data centres, no electricity, no internet. The world, dare I say, would not end if Twitter or Instagram suddenly ceased to exist; if we suddenly ran out of steel or natural gas, however, that would be a very different story.

The funny thing about these supply chain crises was that each of them seemed to take the world’s governments and policymakers by complete surprise. They were surprised that there was a shortage of semiconductors, that cars needed so many of them and that the shortage of new cars would push second-hand car prices up to record highs.

There are a couple of straightforward lessons here. The first is how little we understand about how everyday products are actually made. The second is that, given all this complexity, no single human being could carry out, or for that matter direct, these numerous processes.

This – the process of turning silicon into a tiny silicon chip – was the most extraordinary journey I had ever traced.

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.

It’s a crucial irony that pursuing our various environmental goals will, in the short and medium term, require considerably more materials to build the electric cars, wind turbines and solar panels needed to replace fossil fuels. The upshot is that in the coming decades we are likely to extract more metals from the earth’s surface than ever before.

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 it turns out oil and other fossil fuels have only ever represented a fraction of the total mass of resources we’re extracting from the earth. For every tonne of fossil fuels, we exploit 6 tonnes of other materials – mostly sand and stone, but also metals, salts and chemicals. Even as we citizens of the ethereal world pare back our consumption of fossil fuels we have redoubled our consumption of everything else. But, somehow, we have deluded ourselves into believing precisely the opposite.

There are other forms of glass that occur in nature. Obsidian, a jet-black stone used by our prehistoric ancestors as a tool, is actually a kind of volcanic glass formed by magma as it rapidly cools into stone.

Yet the economic enigma of sand is that in certain guises it is very precious, so much so that the European Union deems its purest, most elemental forms a critical raw material.

Silicon is a chemical enigma too, metallic yet not quite metal, conductive but only on its own terms.

Given we have learned how to transform a cheap, inert substance into something so valuable, perhaps we shouldn’t be shocked that these skills have become so highly prized.

China may be able to dominate global steel, construction, battery and smartphone manufacturing, and even, more lately, social media, but a world-beating semiconductor industry? Not yet.

When they consider humankind’s development, economic historians tend to look straight through glass. Why did the industrial revolution happen when and where it did: in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?

Rubber and glass. For a period, a shortage of these materials was regarded as so critical that the great powers were willing to suspend the normal rules of warfare.

Some years ago a US Supreme Court justice tried to explain his definition of pornography: ‘I know it when I see it’.

But arguably the single most important figure in the history of concrete is someone remembered for many innovations but not this one: Thomas Edison.

First, while much of the silicon in Europe is produced using alternative energy sources, especially hydropower, the Chinese silicon industry is far more reliant on coal for the enormous amounts of power needed to turn quartz into polysilicon. Producing silicon is a dirtier business than you might have thought, but especially so in China.

One theory is that part of the reason Taiwan has succeeded where China has failed is that it simply struck it lucky with its timing; back in the 1960s and 1970s when it sent many of its graduates to university in the US, they ended up studying engineering and working at companies like Intel and Texas Instruments. They brought that technical knowledge back to Taiwan.

Xi Jinping has a ‘Made in China 2025’ policy, which promises to increase China’s dominance and self-sufficiency in the manufacture of everything from complex machinery to semiconductors.

When politicians talk lazily about re-shoring, it often betrays a deep ignorance of what is happening out there in the Material World.

There is another reason why it pays not to underestimate this substance. If you want to understand capitalism and power, the best place to begin is with salt.

There have been 13 major dynasties in China – some lasting hundreds of years. There have been different political creeds from feudalism to communism, but throughout this country’s extraordinarily long history there has been one institutional thread, one constant: the salt monopoly.

Louis’s finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert once famously remarked that ‘The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest number of feathers with the least possible amount of hissing.’

disaster.’ One consequence is that hardly anyone has ever heard of the chloralkali process, which is a shame because it is one of the most important industrial achievements of the modern age.

The chemicals revolution is perhaps the most-overlooked aspect of the industrial revolution, yet the development of chemical products arguably changed more lives than, for instance, the mass production of steel.

The closest one can get to seeing inside one of these solution mines, these enormous voids under the earth’s surface, is to visit a physical salt mine. The Winsford mine, just round the corner from British Salt in Middlewich, is the last such mine in Cheshire. Having been opened in 1844 – the same year Tsar Nicholas I visited the region – it is now the longest-running mine in the UK.

And as they do, on the other side of the world salts of a very different kind are being extracted from the ground. These salts will be turned not into pharmaceuticals or grit for the roads, but into another type of chemical altogether. It is a salt that was once so prized it provoked one of the most consequential wars in history.

This, the headquarters of the FCAB – the Ferrocarril de Antofagasta a Bolivia – is very much part of a working railway.

At the time of the company’s creation, Antofagasta was part of Bolivia – indeed, was one of its most important ports – and the majority of the caliche reserves were in Peruvian and Bolivian territory. However, it was enterprising Chilean immigrants who discovered most of the caliche, did most of the mining and forged the all-important links with English and German financiers who provided the capital for their businesses.

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.

Thanks to this white salt, Chile became the richest nation in Latin America.

In the event, the challenge was solved not by a Briton, an American or indeed a Chilean but a German. In hindsight this is no surprise; Germany was the world’s biggest importer of Chilean nitrates. It was utterly dependent on the fire drug both to nourish its soils and to manufacture explosives. So when the First World War began, no other country was more exposed.

Not everything in the world is made of steel, but nearly everything in the world is made with machines made of steel. Residents of rich countries spend little time thinking about such things; indeed, since steel production is dirty and energy intensive, wealthy countries are in the habit these days of closing down steel mills, reducing their domestic production and importing the finished product from countries where carbon emissions are not quite so controversial.

The vast majority of that is turned into steel, which, despite its name, is simply one of many varieties of iron. The clue here is the carbon content. At

collision. As countries become richer and more prosperous, are they really to be denied the concrete or steel the West poured and forged as it developed?

That, ultimately, was the origin story of Ukraine’s steel industry back in the mid-nineteenth century. Shortly after Russia’s humiliating defeat in the Crimean War and the death of Tsar Nicholas I – the same man who had been winched down the salt mine in Cheshire less than a decade earlier in 1844 – the new emperor Alexander II launched an ambitious reform programme with the aim of catching up with the West.

The one place that perhaps comes close – or did, until the rise of China – is the Magnitogorsk plant in Russia. This vast complex of eight blast furnaces dates back to 1932 and was the brainchild of Joseph Stalin.

By the 1990s, the east of Ukraine, dominated by coal and steel, was responsible for more than half the country’s industrial output. When the Berlin Wall fell and communism ended, these assets became a sought-after prize, much like the industrial fabric in neighbouring Russia.

But there were other unexpected consequences. Since Azovstal and its fellow Ukrainian steel mills were responsible for producing nearly half the world’s supply of neon, in the weeks after Tskitishvili began the shutdown, the world began to run short of the gas.

We have tended not to panic about shortages because even if you no longer had your own blast furnaces, you could always ship in some cold-rolled steel from China.

The pulverised coaldust streaming into the base of the furnace, alongside blasts of hot air from an array of metallic pipes called tuyeres, is a useful reminder that we cannot discuss iron and steel without discussing coal. For every tonne of molten pig iron you need just over a tonne of iron ore and just under a tonne of coal, most of it dumped in the top of the furnace but some sprayed into the sides in granulated form.fn1

Iron is a fossil fuel product. Each year we empty staggering quantities of coal – more than a billion tonnes, which works out at comfortably more than the combined weight of every human being on the planet – into the thousand or so blast furnaces operating around the world.

Yet there is an irony here for, in a pattern you will see recurring elsewhere in this book, the introduction of coal to ironmaking began as the solution to an environmental problem.

This story is intertwined with another one – the story of the industrial revolution. Quite why the revolution occurred in the UK rather than elsewhere in Europe, or for that matter Asia or the Americas, is still debated today.

Most obviously, there was a seemingly limitless supply of coal – good, rich anthracite, mostly – near the surface in much of central Scotland, the north-east of England, in Yorkshire, the Midlands, Kent, Gloucester and the valleys of South Wales.