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Later on I did the sums for myself. For a standard gold bar (400 troy ounces) they would have to dig about 5,000 tonnes of earth.
to obtain enough gold for a typical wedding ring, these days it might take between 4 and 20 tonnes of rock.
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 every tonne of fossil fuels, we exploit 6 tonnes of other materials – mostly sand and stone, but also metals, salts and chemicals.
He got out to investigate and discovered that the desert was covered in great sheets of yellow glass.
This luminous stone was not forged like diamonds, sapphires and other such gems over thousands of years of heat and pressure within the earth’s crust. Instead, it was created in the blink of an eye by a falling star. That meteor 29 million years ago had turned the sand into a kind of glass – Libyan desert glass.
The silica content of Libyan desert glass, on the other hand, is a staggering 98 per cent. Not only did this make it the purest naturally occurring glass to have been discovered anywhere, it was purer than anything humankind could create – for the time being at least.
especially the beautiful white ones on tropical beaches, are composed mainly of something else: the ground-down remains of seashells and corals. Indeed, 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.
The silica content of sand matters because that ultimately determines what you can do with it.
lead, a toxic metal that can leach into drinks left in a crystal decanter).
Humans, in other words, are a considerably bigger geological force than nature itself, and have been, according to the data, ever since 1955. Or – another way of looking at it – by 2020 the total weight of human-made products, from iron to concrete and everything else besides, was greater than the total weight of every natural living thing on the planet.
for every human-made object on this planet, every building, plane, train, car and phone, try to picture a pile of earth, sand and dirt six times its weight. And the pile of moved material is getting bigger with every year that passes.
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. There were all sorts of other happy outcomes too – children did better at school, their mothers became happier and less depressed. And all thanks to a cheap bag of cement.14
In the three years between 2018 and 2020, China poured more concrete than the US had in its entire existence, from 1865, when it opened its first plant producing Portland cement
But silica content isn’t everything; if you want to make silicon metal, what matters far more is shape. Actually, what we’re looking for here isn’t exactly sand – at least as the Udden–Wentworth scale would have it – but more a sort of large gravel, with chunks the size of a cricket ball.
For every 6 tonnes of raw materials thrown into the melt – quartz, coal and woodchips – about a tonne of silicon metal comes out.
Nor are the consequences of all this smoke and heat trivial. It takes about 45 megawatts of electricity to power one of these furnaces – enough to power a small town. It is, says Moe, frankly impossible to turn quartz into silicon at scale without emitting carbon dioxide, which means that even if the electricity powering the furnace is generated from hydropower, these silicon smelters would still be contributing to global carbon emissions.
What happens next is known as the Siemens process and it involves breaking down that pure silicon metal into its elemental pieces and re-forming them all over again. The metal is ground into a powder, mixed with pure hydrogen chloride, distilled and then heated up in a bell jar to 1,150°C. At the end you are left with long rods a little like the heating elements in an old kettle, except that the material here is not furred-up limescale but ultra-pure silicon.
the energy cost of ultra-pure silicon such as this is more than 3,000 times that of cement and 1,000 times that of turning iron into steel.
semiconductor grade polysilicon. This can have as many as ten nines (99.99999999 per cent purity), where for every impure atom there are essentially 10 billion pure silicon atoms. But
The more perfect the atomic structure in your silicon, the more easily and freely electrons can flow around. The more defects – so-called grain boundaries – the greater the chance of that flow being disrupted and the semiconductor conking out.
The next task (and the next leg of the journey) involves rearranging its pure but higgledy-piggledy atoms into a perfect matrix. That means flying the polysilicon to the other side of the planet, to a plant on the north-west coast of the United States, just outside Portland, Oregon.
But here’s the thing: while China controls much of the global supply chain of metallic silicon and solar polysilicon, it has yet to crack the manufacturing techniques needed to create wafers for the most advanced silicon chips. In much the same way as it has yet to master the processes Wacker uses to turn out polysilicon with less than one in a billion atoms of impurity, it has not yet refined the Czochralski process enough to produce wafers as perfect as those pulled out of the crucibles at Shin-Etsu.
Yet if you want to get high-purity quartz – the kind you need to make those crucibles without which you can’t make silicon wafers – it has to come from Spruce Pine, a small town on the Blue Ridge escarpment in North Carolina.
‘If you flew over the two mines in Spruce Pine with a crop duster loaded with a very particular powder, you could end the world’s production of semiconductors and solar panels within six months.’
In a vacuum chamber inside this machine, tin is melted until it becomes a liquid. That molten tin is then dropped down into the chamber in a continuous stream. In the midway point of their cascade, each of these tiny droplets is zapped twice by pulse lasers, provided by German company Trumpf, which are powerful enough to cut through metal. These bursts heat the tin up to a million degrees, transforming it into a kind of plasma that simultaneously creates a burst of EUV light. This pinpoint smashing of molecules happens 50,000 times per second, so fast that the stream of tin droplets and the
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according to one ASML engineer, ‘probably the smoothest man-made structures in the universe’. If you blew one of them up to the size of the United States, the biggest bump would be less than half a millimetre high. Having bounced off a staircase of these mirrors, the EUV light in all its 13.5 nanometre glory hits the wafer and etches that intricate design on to it.
What about Linton Crystal, which makes the furnaces for the Czochralski process and the diamond saws that slice up the boules? What about JSR, one of the world leaders in photoresist technology? What about EV Group and IMS Nanofabrication, which dominate wafer bonding and mask production and are both based in Austria? What about all the other firms providing critical machinery for the fabs, which read like a list of mysterious names and acronyms: Veeco, Tokyo Electron, Lam Research, ASM Pacific, Applied Materials and Edwards …? Remove one or two of these companies and, well: no more computers
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If you want to understand capitalism and power, the best place to begin is with salt. That the following pages are rammed with politics, oppression and war is not coincidental. The fact that salt is essential for human survival (and that other more obscure salts have been essential for our sustenance) means it has been an instrument of power since its very earliest days. The reason salt earns its place as one of the six chief members of the Material World is not merely for its extraordinary properties – of which more later – but because of what it enabled us to do.
On the flipside, chlorine helps purify the water we drink. It also represents the chemical foundations for a whole suite of medicines – including sedatives like Librium, anti-depressants like Valium, antibiotics like vancomycin, used to kill the bacteria Staphylococcus, and anti-malarial drugs like chloroquine.
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. Indeed, it’s telling that the war’s very first naval engagement between German and British ships occurred not in the seas of Europe but off the Pacific coast of Chile, as the nations attempted to wrest control of the shipping lanes for nitrates.
But of all these steels perhaps the most obscure is something called low-background steel. This is a metal that is completely uncontaminated with radionuclides – a type of nuclear energy – and is essential for the production of sensitive equipment like Geiger counters and some medical devices. And producing low-background steel from scratch is essentially impossible today. Ever since the first atomic bombs were detonated, Earth’s atmosphere has contained tiny amounts of nuclear contamination – isotopes such as cobalt-60. The quantities are so small that they pose little discernible risk to
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This would be a seismic shift but we are already slowly creeping towards it. Based on current trends, by the second half of this century we will be getting more steel from recycling than from iron ore.
One calculation from 1886 found that a typical North Carolina housewife ended up carrying a cumulative total of 36 tonnes of water 148 miles in a single year. And that was before counting the wood to be heaved into the house for the stove. Even boiling water was a serious undertaking; ironing even more so.3
The generators and transformers of our electrical systems – made mostly of steel and copper – should be championed as among the most important (and for that matter brilliant) inventions in history, yet they usually get ignored in favour of the computer or the jet engine.
In every conventional power station, wind turbine, geothermal plant or hydroelectric dam, copper is
For a period, Swansea was refining around 65 per cent of the world’s copper. In a 5-mile radius from the town centre there were no fewer than 36 collieries, 12 copper refineries and all sorts of other metalworks, belching out sulphurous clouds and ringed by giant piles of waste.
There are reminders of this bygone era in modern financial markets too, where many metals are priced for delivery in three months – a convention that dates back to the era when it took that long to ship copper from Chile to Swansea.
Instead of just melting the copper ores to release the metal, they would electrolyse them as well – dunking them in a solution and passing a current through it. And electrolytically refined copper was far purer: the only variety pure enough for the advanced electric motors and generators that would power the future.
So what about all those areas that weren’t within a mile of a power station? The answer was provided by Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla, who pioneered the use of alternating currents. While the current in Edison’s wires would travel in one direction, like water down a river, the current in Westinghouse and Tesla’s wires pulsed, a little like the waves in the sea. The genius of AC was that it could send high voltages along very thin wires, which meant, first and foremost, that the world would not run out of copper and, second, that you no longer had to locate your power station right inside your
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They are smashed into a dust, which is frothed up in a special liquid solution that helps separate the copper from the rest. After that some of the dust is smelted and electrolysed, emerging as nearly entirely pure slabs of glistening copper – cathodes as they’re called. The rest – ‘copper concentrate’, a kind of dark, granulated earth which has about 30 per cent copper – is sent elsewhere to be refined into the finished article.
(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.fn2
The answer, it turns out, is the Chuquicamata tailings dam, where waste from the refining process is piped in and deposited. It is about as enormous as you would probably imagine, given it holds decades’ worth of muck from the biggest copper mine on the planet.
These days all that salt is covered in a greyish sludge of mud, rich in molybdenum and arsenic, covering an area about the size of Manhattan.
While the dumping stopped following judicial intervention in 1989, a recent study found elevated levels of nickel, lead and arsenic in the urine of local men.5
Its first great mining centre, Cyprus (whose Greek name, Kupros, is where we get the word copper from),
Between 1900 and today, the quantity of stone one needed to move and process to produce a single tonne of copper rose from 50 tonnes to 800 tonnes. The amount of water consumed along the way went from 75 cubic metres to 150. The energy needed for all this work rose from around 250KWh to over 4,000KWh. Yet here is the most striking datapoint of all: over that period, rather than increasing, the inflation-adjusted copper price was essentially flat.
Roman Empire the price of a tonne of pure copper was equivalent to roughly 40 years of the average wage. Forty years of work for a tonne of copper. By 1800 this had fallen to 6 years a tonne. In the following 200 years it dropped to just 0.06 years per tonne. For Paul Gait, a polymathic mining investor from London, this measure of the ‘real price’ of copper is the big story here. It is a productivity miracle, just as impressive as Moore’s law for semiconductors
Between 2010 and 2020 we mined 207 million tonnes of copper around the world, but far from falling, the total global reserves of copper grew by 240 million tonnes. Ponder that for a moment. Humankind is managing to increase our accessible supplies of this vital material at a rate that comfortably outpaces our actual exploitation of it. In fact, a better number to focus on is not the reserves figure miners usually cite, but another number: the resources. Resources, it turns out, are a measure not just of what we have already pencilled in for future extraction, but all the metal under the
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