Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future

by Ed Conway

For replacing all the coke for Britain’s 30 megatons of steel consumption would necessitate using nearly half the surface of the UK purely for charcoal production. To do the same thing for global steel production would entail chopping down half of the Amazon. Depressing as this thought experiment might be, it rather underlines why we are still tipping and spraying so much hard, energy-dense coal into blast furnaces like the one here in Port Talbot.

But while iron ore is relatively easy to come by, some of these exotic additives are not. 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.

It helped the Model T leapfrog its competitors – lighter, more manoeuvrable and with a greater power-to-weight ratio than other cars, most of which were forged out of the heavy, conventional steels of the day.

The strength, electrical performance and corrosion resistance of steel have risen by a factor of nearly ten over the past half-century alone.

Australia has more of the world’s mineable iron ore than any other country. Each year, it extracts more than twice as much as Brazil, its nearest rival, and about three times as much as China.

This brings us back to a recurrent theme of the Material World. What makes these substances so useful is not merely their physical properties but the fact that we are able to procure them so easily and at relatively low cost. When did iron become commonplace?

All six of the materials featured in this book are essential to modern life, but there is something especially seductive about copper. This shimmering metal is at once a symbol of our ancient history and a key to our future.

One of the least-appreciated economic stories of the modern world – again, because it mostly happened out of most people’s view – was the astonishing leap in productivity afforded to manufacturers by electric drive motors. Out went the clunky, inefficient steam engines in factories and in came electric motors. This alone doubled American manufacturing productivity by 1930, and then again by 1960.

In part, this is because unlike computing or robots or even financial services, the end product provided by this mine has remained the same for decades.

The technical term for what it is doing is ‘block cave mining’ and the concept of it is enough to induce a wince. While most underground mining involves digging along a seam of rock and then drilling or blasting the ore out, block caving is somewhat more brutal. Rather than following a seam you dig a tunnel underneath the ore and then plant large quantities of high explosive into the rocks above your head. Having stepped back some distance you blast those rocks and then let gravity do its job, collapsing hundreds of thousands of tonnes of rocks into that tunnel.

This is the first of the clues as to why Paul Ehrlich lost the bet; we became ever better at producing more stuff with less manpower.

The second reason Ehrlich lost the bet is that we have come up with ever niftier ways to extract the metal from the rocks.

When miners talk about the reserves they have left of a given material, that means everything they’ve got left in their mines or approved mine sites that could be economically extracted at any given moment. The reason we have about 30 to 40 years’ worth of copper reserves left (42 at the time of writing) is not because that is what’s left in the ground, but because that’s the kind of time horizon over which miners tend to make plans.

Without copper there is little hope of fulfilling any of the net-zero blueprints designed by governments and environmental institutes around the world. So, as our appetite for electrification intensifies, some intrepid explorers are seeking out deeper, darker and more controversial places to get this metal.

At the heart of the mystery is a set of conical features about 150 metres high, discovered by a bathymetric survey of this spot in the Sargasso Sea years ago. ‘Everyone assumed they were volcanoes,’ says Bram. ‘We weren’t so sure.’

That might imply deep-sea copper resources of well over a billion tonnes – a staggering amount, far more than our entire terrestrial reserves. Enough, certainly, to supply the entire world with all its copper for many decades, without ever having to dig another hole like Chuqui, let alone three of them every year. Which of course raises the question: what’s the catch?

Then again, this is just one of the many paradoxes of the Material World. Another even more mind-bending one is that we may be reliant on the very fossil fuel that got us into this mess to help get us out of it.

Crude oil is, alongside its sister fuel natural gas, the greatest energy force of the past century.

That changed in the mid-nineteenth century when chemists worked out how to distil a flammable liquid from bitumen. Kerosene, after the Greek for wax, was a wonder product.

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.

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.

The final discovery – the one that really mattered – happened in 1933 at the labs of British chemicals giant ICI. This was in Northwich – at the very same site where soda ash and sodium bicarbonate are still being made from salty Cheshire brine today.

Many of these uses were only discovered decades after polyethylene had been invented, but its potential as electrical insulation was what immediately leaped out to ICI.

The technical name for this class of ship is VLCC – very large crude carrier. These are the workhorses of the ocean: capable of carrying up to 350,000 tonnes of oil, longer than the Empire State Building is tall. There are bigger oil tankers these days – the ultra-large crude carrier class – but they are almost too big: unable to dock at any but the very deepest deep-water ports, so it’s mostly VLCCs these days.

Today, almost all smartphones run on batteries derived from the discoveries of Whittingham, Goodenough and Yoshino. The trio was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019.

That this invention – first prototyped in America and then mostly developed in England – only came to be mass produced in Japan is one of those topics that still causes frustration in the Anglophone world.

We have, in other words, been here before. If you travel up from Antofagasta, through the hills, beyond the colourful shacks of the shanty town, and follow the railway line as it ascends towards the Andes, after about 10 miles you will come to a dilapidated bunch of buildings and a sign: O’Higgins.

However, the most intriguing thing about this factory is not what it’s making but who is making it. 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 reason the car industry has remained one of the last great redoubts for high-skilled, high-paid manufacturing in Europe, Japan and the US is that these carmakers still largely make their own engines. Part of the reason car manufacture long remained dominated by these ‘legacy’ regions is that making engines is hard.

So who makes it matters enormously, and the answer to that question – as with so many other questions in the Material World – is primarily China. 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

Turning lithium and graphite into chemicals pure enough to play the role of cathodes and anodes – perfect matrices in which lithium ions can nest – is such a complicated business that it represents an entire economic sector of its own. So supplying these battery companies you’ve probably never heard of is a panoply of cathode active materials firms you’ve almost certainly never heard of: Panasonic gets most of its materials from Sumitomo Metal Mining; CATL gets most of its materials from a company called Ronbay Technology.

Except that this is no monk. The man on the horse is Leopold II – the Belgian king who ran Congo as his personal fiefdom for more than two decades at the turn of the twentieth century. Under his rule, millions of people in Congo died as their colonial overlords became exceptionally rich, from the rubber exported to become tyres in the first automobiles, from the ivory from slaughtered elephants and, most of all, rich from the proceeds of this country’s extraordinary mineral wealth.

The DRC, on the other hand, sits astride a set of truly unique geological features. The most famous are to be found in the former Katanga province in the south of the country.

But the company that once extracted all that uranium, copper and cobalt might end up playing an important role in the future of lithium. Walk round to the back of the statue of Leopold in Brussels and you see an old copper plaque where, in archaic French script, it says: ‘The copper and tin of this statue come from the Belgian Congo. They were donated by the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga.’

Starting in 1906, as the king sought to transfer ownership of this African nation to the Belgian state, this company controlled and ran Congo’s mining industry. Copper and cobalt, tin and uranium, zinc and germanium, silver and gold – they were all mined by the Union Minière, with most of the profits heading back home.

And when independence finally came in 1960, the company supported plans for Katanga to become a breakaway republic, similar to South Africa’s apartheid state. The plot failed, but Congo’s first post-independence leader, Patrice Lumumba, was deposed in a CIA-backed coup and handed over to secessionists who later killed him and disposed of the body, though an officer kept one of Lumumba’s gold-crowned teeth as a trophy.

The first is that we have worked out how to turn complex products into commonplace items.

The second is that these items are not merely commonplace but, more often than not, cheap. It

Or how about solar panels, the silicon cousins of semiconductors? The price of photovoltaic modules halved 500 times between 1975 and 2019, to the extent that new solar cells are now considerably cheaper, per megawatt hour of power, than new coal or gas-fired plants.

That this happens across so many different products is no coincidence. Indeed, we have a name for the phenomenon: the learning curve. The more experience we have of making things, the better we get at doing them and the lower the cost, both for producers and consumers.

But encouraging as this is, it isn’t the full picture, because renewable energy is inherently intermittent, and we have yet to build the energy storage that can help keep the grids buzzing when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. Batteries, excellent as they are, are not energy-dense enough to solve this conundrum. The likeliest backup, alongside a host of new hydroelectric reservoirs, is a brand new fuel: hydrogen.

However, using electrolysis to create hydrogen is eye-wateringly inefficient.

Let’s start with the monopile which sits beneath the water – a tube rammed into the ground to act as a foundation. This is made of heavy steel plates, which alone weigh as much as 800 tonnes, equivalent to three jumbo jets.

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.

It is possible to squint into the distance and envisage an era where humankind has replaced most of its fossil fuels with renewable alternatives. We will still probably need oil for a few products, such as the graphite in batteries. We’ll need a bit of coal for a few industrial processes and a little natural gas too – but all in much, much smaller doses than today.

That brings us to three risks on the road ahead. The first is that people despair and give up. Is there any precedent for successive generations of humanity consciously sacrificing some of their livelihoods for a future they will never experience themselves?

The second risk is that this effort to build our way towards net zero is stymied by political resistance and public apathy. In countries around the world, authorities are making it more difficult, not less, to secure planning approval for the wind turbines and solar panels we need to satisfy our eventual need for power.

We will not achieve net zero if we have a long-lived shortfall of lithium or copper, which means we need more people with more ingenuity to think about ways of obtaining those minerals. But at the time of writing there was such a dearth of young people wanting to study mining that the Camborne School of Mines in Cornwall, one of the world’s pre-eminent metallurgy institutions, had suspended new intakes for its mining engineering degree. If there is no one left who knows how to procure the minerals we need, what hope have we then?

The third risk is that the geopolitical foundations upon which the Material World is built disintegrate.

But none of this will come as a surprise because by now you will know how much these materials matter. You will know that they represent the foundations of modern life, and that without them we are in deep trouble. You know that energy in its various stripes undergirds their production and that when materials and energy are suddenly in short supply that things don’t tend to go very well.