Material World

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book covers some of the most important materials in today's world. It covers the extraction, refinement, and use and explains why the material is important and its challenges. It is also, by extension, a book about the modern world.

🎨 Impressions

What is profoundly fascinating is that much of the production of critical elements is limited to a few places. For example, the production of neon gas in Azovstal, the mines in Peru for copper, etc.

It is a bit similar to How the World Really Works and Chip War and has a lot of linkage to those two books.

✍️ My Top Quotes

• These perpendicular formations, a product of the prevailing winds, are called seif dunes – after the Arabic word for ‘sword’ – and some run for nearly a hundred miles.

• Geologists have something called the Udden–Wentworth scale, which dictates that any solid, loose grain of a given size (strictly speaking somewhere between 0.0625mm and 2mm) is a type of sand.

• Imagine we compressed the entire existence of this planet into one calendar year: so the earth formed at midnight on 1 January and now, the moment you’re reading this, is the very microsecond of midnight, 365 days later on New Year’s Eve. Single-celled organisms would begin to form in late February. Some of the oldest existing rocks would form in early March. The Lewisian gneiss, a series of rocks you will find further up the coast from Lochaline, would form in April, which is to say up to 3 billion years ago. But life as we might recognise it, the first insects and reptiles, would not evolve until the beginning of December, about the same time as the Great Glen Fault was splitting Scotland apart. The age of the dinosaurs would begin on 13 December and end on 26 December. That meteor probably responsible for Libyan desert glass would smash into the Great Sand Sea early in the morning on 29 December, while the very first human-like animals would evolve at 5.18pm, early in the evening of 31 December. What of Homo sapiens ? Well, we would finally arrive, late to the party, a few hundred thousand years ago, which is to say: at about a quarter to midnight on New Year’s Eve.

• ‘Le béton? Mais c’est de la boue! ’ (Concrete? But it’s just mud! )

• 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. 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.

• We tend to underestimate the importance of the built world. Shelter is one of humanity’s primary needs, yet it is easy, when you have a roof over your head and a firm floor beneath you, to forget this.

• There are now more than 80 tonnes of concrete on this planet for every person alive – around 650 gigatonnes in total. To put that slightly meaningless number into perspective, it is considerably more than the combined weight of every single living thing on the planet: every cow, every tree, every human, plant, animal, bacterium and single-celled organism.

• The problem with CCS is that while it works in theory, it is so expensive that it is hard to make the sums add up – especially in a high-volume, low-margin sector like cement.

• The latest such chips can fit roughly 15 million transistors into a dot the size of a single full stop on this page. The transistors in today’s smartphones are not just smaller than a red blood cell (about a thousand times smaller, as it happens); they are smaller than the COVID-19 virus. Actually you could fit four of them inside a coronavirus, each transistor having about the same dimensions as one of the virus’s spike proteins, those club-like tendrils radiating out from its centre.

• There are many weird and wonderful manufacturing techniques in the Material World but the Czochralski process is among the most captivating. The polysilicon is tipped into a quartz crucible (the crucible must be incredibly pure, or else it may introduce impurities back into the silicon) and heated up to just under 1,500°C. A seed crystal, a pencil-sized rod of silicon, is dipped into the melt and is then slowly pulled upwards, rotating slightly. Gradually, a perfect, solid ingot, a boule, begins to form out of the melt.

• ‘Here’s something scary,’ says one veteran of the sector. ‘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.’

• Any movement, however indiscernible, can disturb the workings of the machinery here, which is why you don’t tend to find fabs very close to airports or motorways.

• For some decades, transistors have been etched on to silicon wafers not by hand or by physical machinery, but by light. The principle is a little like a movie projector, except in reverse. While a projector takes a small image and uses lenses to blow it up to a cinema-sized screen, photolithography begins with a big blueprint of a silicon chip, with all its transistors and features, and uses lenses to project that image down into mind-bogglingly small dimensions.

• 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.

• Fab 18 might be where the world’s most advanced chips are made, but they are mostly designed elsewhere, primarily in the US, with intellectual property that derives from a company based in Cambridge, England: ARM. TSMC’s fabs would not function without machine tools from the Netherlands and Japan, or chemicals from Germany and bits and pieces from a range of other nations. There is only a handful of companies capable of making perfect silicon wafers, and none is headquartered in either the US or China. And there is only one site in the world capable of making the quartz sand for the crucibles where those wafers are crystallised. When politicians talk lazily about re-shoring, it often betrays a deep ignorance of what is happening out there in the Material World.

• 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.’

• 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.

• Deepest point here is nearly 1.5 kilometres (1 mile) underground, which is nothing compared with, say, the Mponeng gold mine in South Africa, which is the world’s deepest at 4 kilometres. At that kind of depth the rock temperature is 66°C. At Boulby the rocks are a mere 39°C, though that is only the starting point.

• Iron was not the first metal we learned to smelt (as you’ll see in the following section) but these days it is the archetypal one, accounting for roughly 95 per cent of all the metal we produce and use.

• Just look at a ranking of the substances we dig, blast and pump out of the planet’s surface each year. Sand and gravel: 43 billion tonnes; oil and gas: 8.1 billion tonnes; coal: 7.7 billion tonnes; iron ore: 3.1 billion tonnes. And like pretty much all of those materials, our appetite for this metal shows no sign of abating: after a dip in 2020 during the pandemic, global iron ore output hit a record high in 2021.

• At one end of the spectrum is cast iron or pig iron (so named because when it was first made it would set in a series of channels and moulds resembling a litter of piglets being nursed by their mother).

• Damascus, whose swords have such a fine steel grain that even today no one has worked out how to replicate

• Arms makers of Damascus, whose swords have such a fine steel grain that even today no one has worked out how to replicate

• In a typical farm in New England in 1800, with mostly wooden tools, it took just over seven minutes of labour to yield a kilogram of grain. In 1850, with cast iron tools, the same job took just under three minutes. By 1900, with steel tools, it was less than 30 seconds per kilogram.

• In 2018, as he announced the imposition of tariffs on steel imports, Donald Trump tweeted that he was doing so to protect the US and its workers. ‘IF YOU DON’T HAVE STEEL,’ he wrote in his characteristic block capitals, ‘YOU DON’T HAVE A COUNTRY!’

• Mao called it the Great Leap Forward, and it certainly boosted iron production, but since neither the chairman nor many of his advisors understood the difference between iron and steel, they were dismayed to discover that much of what came out of the backyard furnaces they had commissioned was brittle, useless iron – not steel. And that metal nonetheless had a terrible cost. In the following years China experienced the worst famine in history. Tens of millions of people – the final toll is still debated today but conservative estimates range from 17 to 30 million – died of starvation and fatigue in those four years between 1958 and 1962.

• Hughes, whose father had been chief engineer at the ironworks at Merthyr Tydfil, was by then in charge of the Millwall Iron Works in London, one of the biggest producers in the UK, supplying all of the Royal Navy’s iron for cladding its ships. In 1870 he set sail for the Sea of Azov and made his way north to the Donbas. Within a couple of years his ironworks were up and running and in the following decades this complex of blast furnaces would become the biggest iron producer in the Russian Empire. He founded a nearby settlement, which became known as Yuzovka (Hughes-ovka). Today the town has become a city, since renamed as Donetsk; it is the capital of Ukraine’s industrial heartlands.

• There are bigger blast furnaces in Korea and China, and Russia still forges millions of tonnes of steel at the plant at Magnitogorsk. 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.

• 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. The iron that comes out the other end may not have much carbon embedded in it, but its production entails the creation of enormous quantities of CO2 – around 7–8 per cent of the global total.

• 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.

• Once upon a time the UK produced more steel than any other country. This was where modern blast furnaces and steel manufacture began. Today, China produces more steel every two years than the UK’s entire steel output since the industrial revolution.

• No other people on earth can claim to have had as long a continuous cultural history as the Aboriginal populations

• In the 1960s a two-man helicopter from US Steel’s Brazilian unit was forced to land on a hill in this region. Quite why it landed in this remote spot is usually glossed over, but one version of the story popular among mining experts is that one of the geologists desperately needed to relieve himself. He stepped out and answered the call of nature, whereupon he looked down and noticed that the ground had gone a peculiar colour. There were rocks lying around of the same colour, so he picked one of them up; it was surprisingly heavy. He smacked it with a hammer and it cracked apart to reveal a vivid red surface. This was pure – incredibly pure – iron ore. Today, Carajás is the single biggest iron mine in the world, and is the explanation for why mining insiders sometimes quip that the most valuable feature of an exploration geologist is a small bladder.

• Back before the arrival of electricity, ‘ironing was the worst’, according to one Texas housewife. ‘Nothing could ever be as hard as ironing.’

• When electricity came to these outposts and towns, the very first item most families bought was an electric iron. Such things are long forgotten these days. When historians talk about the coming of electricity they usually talk about the obvious stuff – the replacement of dim kerosene lamps with bright lightbulbs and the introduction of electric pumps so water no longer had to be heaved all the way from the well. But what made electricity the next greatest thing after the love of God was that it rapidly improved nearly every aspect of everyday life, from the big to the small.

• The story of how Swansea became the world capital for copper production – Copperopolis as it was widely known – despite mining barely a particle of the metal, is another of those forgotten tales of the Material World, yet it’s well worth recounting, given it provided the world with an economic model it still deploys today.

• Of every 13 grams of copper ever mined and refined from this planet’s crust, at least one of them came from here.

• ‘Bad news,’ he wrote in the journal Science , ‘sells books, newspapers, and magazines; good news is not half so interesting.’ He then ran through a host of claims, many of them from Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb and The Limits to Growth , and declared them almost universally false.

• Cyprus (whose Greek name, Kupros, is where we get the word copper from),

• 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.

• 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 ground, including stuff yet to be discovered.

• Many oilfields have been discovered both before and since, but nothing like Ghawar. There is a category given to fields with proven reserves of more than 500 million barrels of oil: giants. Then there are those with 5 billion or more: the super-giants. Ghawar is bigger than any super-giant ever discovered before or since. Its precise size is still debated today – and indeed it is ever-changing as more reserves of oil and gas are discovered – but it has already produced more than 70 billion barrels of oil and has around 50 billion more still available underground.

• Oils can also be ‘sweet’ or ‘sour’ – a measure of sulphur content, which dates back to the early days when crude was mostly used for indoor lighting. Too much sulphur in your kerosene and not only was there a noxious smell when it burned, it would also tarnish the silver in your lamp. Back then the quickest way to test for this before burning was to give it a quick taste – the more sulphur, the more sour it was –

• Growing crops inside rather than outside, in large conservatories or even vertical farms with artificial lighting, means a single acre can yield as much as 400 times what you get from a typical field.

• The vast majority of the world’s crops are sustained by nitrogen fertilisers created from natural gas. The vast majority of the world’s animals are fed with food sustained by fertilisers created from natural gas. If fertilisers are among the most important substances in the world – and given that without them it would be impossible to support nearly half of the global population it’s a fair bet to say they are – then so too is gas.

• Today, polyethylene has become comfortably the most widely used plastic in the world. Every six seconds we make enough of it in Europe to wrap the Eiffel Tower from head to toe. Every six seconds! We produce about 100 million tonnes a year – which is more than the combined global production of copper and aluminium.

• Many countries have now banned single-use plastic shopping bags and other items like plastic straws. In some cases these bans have been short-sighted: the manufacture of paper bags and straws can create considerably more carbon emissions than their plastic counterparts. A plastic straw can be reused multiple times whereas a paper straw is unlikely to make it through more than a few sucks – as any parent of a young child will testify.

• But since a fully laden VLCC tanker’s hull is too deep to navigate the shallow waterways of Suez, they will offload some of their crude into pipes at the Ain Sukhna terminal before sailing through the canal to the Mediterranean and picking up their oil at the other end.

• 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.

• Qatar pumps the gas up through pipes and the CO2 and sulphur are removed at the steel jungle of Ras Laffan. It is hard, even as one paces through this astonishing complex of metalwork, to comprehend just how much this place matters. This single place provides around 4 per cent of global energy – comfortably more than every solar panel and wind turbine in the world combined.