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A fine ironworker, capable of beating an unpromising lump of cast iron into a strong sword of steel (smashing the metal, we now know, was one way of removing some of the carbon),
This was neither the first nor the last time a country would import knowledge and equipment from overseas in an effort to build out its industrial base. People have been doing this forever: George Ravenscroft would never have worked out how to make clear, crystal glass without help from the artisans he had smuggled back from Venice. In the late nineteenth century Scottish-born industrialist Andrew Carnegie would import the Bessemer convertor into the US, helping cement his dominant position in the sector.
Eyebrows were raised in the early 2000s when a Chinese firm bought a ThyssenKrupp steel plant in Dortmund and transported it brick by brick to a site on the lower Yangtze River. But the Chinese were merely doing what the Russians, Americans and indeed most countries had done since humans first discovered how to make iron: importing knowhow and then building an empire on top of it.10
German buildings were relocated – Shagang’s flagship location on the Yangtze, just north of Shanghai – is now the world’s single biggest steelworks. Its 13 blast furnaces (to put this number into context, ...
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They took the blueprints for the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Complex and built a new steelworks: Azovstal.
Britain was also blessed with an unusual geology. It is hard to find many other countries as small as the UK with quite such a rich mix of different minerals, from plentiful iron and limestone through to more obscure metals like tin, zinc, copper and silica sand.
Coal and iron were helping birth the industrial revolution – coal to fuel the machinery, iron to build
In 1800, 95 per cent of Britain’s energy came from coal; at the very same point, almost all of France’s energy – over 90 per cent – still came from burning wood. No longer was Britain yoked to the organic limitations of how many trees could be grown on its landmass. And around this time, its income per capita, which for most of history had been more or less the same as France’s, began to soar. By the early nineteenth century it was 80 per cent richer than France.7
Back in 1810 Americans spent roughly the same proportion of their national income on iron nails as they do today on computers.
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.
Today, China produces more steel every two years than the UK’s entire steel output since the industrial revolution.
China remains utterly reliant on Australia for this all-important substance.
Copper bottoming, one of the early technologies of the maritime era, helped Britannia rule the waves.
Today, China is the world’s processer-in-chief, smelting and refining nearly half of the world’s supply of copper – not to mention a panoply of other metals too.
Coal has about twice the energy density – in other words the amount of energy that can be released per kilogram of weight – of wood. Kerosene, refined from crude oils, has nearly twice the energy density of coal. And a higher energy density means you can carry less fuel and go greater distances.
The end products can be roughly divided into six categories: there is gasoline for cars; diesel for trucks, trains and other heavy transport; petrochemicals, which go into lots of things including plastics; kerosene to fuel jets; waxes and lubricating oils; and asphalt, which covers our roads.
Not only were these tomatoes being warmed with natural gas, they were being nourished with a natural gas product too. This is not just a story about tomatoes. It is a story about all foods. The vast majority of the world’s crops are sustained by nitrogen fertilisers created from natural gas.
But every so often, there are wrinkles. In 2022, as gas prices soared after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, some growers simply opted out altogether. All of a sudden, glasshouses were left empty, tomatoes were in short supply, and food prices rose across Europe – in large part because of the shortage of natural gas. Even growers in Spain and Italy, who tend not to grow their tomatoes indoors, were hit by the rise in costs of fertiliser and of the diesel fuel in the trucks transporting their produce.
One argument about why plastic recycling rates remain so low (only about 25 per cent in Europe and 10 per cent in the US, compared with 80 per cent for steel) is that it is simply too complex, with consumers asked to distinguish between seven different types of plastic (those recycling codes you sometimes see on bottles)
Were China to shift all its coal-fired power stations on to gas, then the world would immediately be on track to hit its climate goals.
Oil overtook coal as the world’s biggest energy source in the mid-1960s but gas was only beginning to overtake coal at the time of writing, in the early 2020s. In part this is because gas is a lot trickier to move about than oil; it necessitates vast distribution networks, which take many years to build.
alongside hydrogen and helium it was one of the three primordial elements created in the Big Bang, making it one of the oldest pieces of matter in the universe.
This is now happening at such a rate in Australia that it has overtaken Chile as the world’s biggest lithium producer, though nearly all of their spodumene is actually shipped off to be processed in China, much as we do with copper concentrate and pretty much every other ore in the world.
The fastest-growing segment of the lithium industry is the mining of hard rock rather than brine, in large part because it is far easier to blast and dig up stone than to wait patiently for millions of cubic litres of liquid to evaporate.
electrostates: countries like Chile, Argentina, Australia and, of course, China,
it turns out every single cell made here in Nevada is in fact made by Panasonic.
And while most other carmakers have opted for big hulking square battery packs in their cars, most of Tesla’s cars still run on a tray of thousands of tiny laptop batteries – many of them made here in Gigafactory Nevada’s ‘dry room’.
Since the two ends of the factory are run by separate companies with wildly different histories and philosophies, the defining feature of this enormous building is actually something you can’t see from the outside: a solid wall that runs through the middle of it, keeping the two companies hermetically detached. Robot trolleys pass across from Panasonic territory to Tesla territory carrying trays of batteries, but no humans are allowed to cross this internal border.
China controls about 80 per cent of the world’s battery production capacity.
Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Limited (CATL), a secretive business that sells its batteries to most of the world’s biggest carmakers, including GM, VW, BMW and, as it happens, Tesla. It has created such a commanding lead that for many European countries the best hope these days is not to create a national champion but to persuade CATL to build a local plant.
A typical electric car battery contains about 40kg of lithium, alongside 10kg of cobalt, 10kg of manganese and 40kg of nickel.
China already has a head start, having done deals with nations from South America to sub-Saharan Africa in return for funding and investment. In 2023, CATL struck a deal with the Bolivian government to begin extracting lithium from the enormous Salar de Uyuni.
They have fallen 89 per cent in inflation-adjusted terms between 2010 and 2020. The US and its allies could probably win the battle for control of the semiconductor supply chain; not so for batteries.
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.
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
California there were a few days in 2022 when renewable power provided more than 100 per cent of the state’s demand. Texas is not merely an oil and gas powerhouse; it produces more wind power than any other state.
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?
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?
we have scaled up the flows of commerce: a single one of today’s container ships can carry more freight than the entire English merchant fleet could in the sixteenth century.
