How did the light emitting diode change the world? And, come to mention it, might it perversely actually prompt us to puff more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? What do bananas tell you about the nature of capitalism? In what way is an AirPod, or any other earbud you can stick into your ear, a sort of weapon? And what on earth do car seats have to do with the world’s coming demographic time bomb?

These are, I realise, a decidedly random list of questions, questions I imagine few of you will have spent much time pondering, but bear with me. Because (and yes I’m afraid this is a sales pitch but then this is the internet so, you gets what you pays for) over the past few months I’ve set off on a bit of a mission to try to answer some of them.

The result of this slightly surreal journey is a new podcast I’ve made for Sky News called “Stuff Matters”. I say “I’ve made” but of course this is far from the truth, since this is, by my standards at least, a mammoth enterprise involving a brilliant team who have tried to turn some of my slightly offbeat ideas into something actually entertaining.

The pitch behind it is each week we take an object - for the most case an everyday product you probably have inside your home - and ask a few seemingly obvious questions that turn out to have not-at-all-obvious answers. Where did it come from? How was it made? And, most intriguingly of all, what can it teach us about the world.

I’ve long had a feeling - something you’ll have picked up on if you’ve read Material World or watched much of my output for Sky News - that there are marvellous, magical, sometimes-disturbing stories just beneath the surface of the everyday items we mostly take for granted. Ponder concrete and you understand the bizarre underbelly of sand production. Consider copper and you look at the world of power afresh.

Well, to some extent that’s the idea behind Stuff Matters. Every episode is a journey deep into the rabbit holes you sometimes find yourselves swept into (well, I do at least) when considering the objects around you. So we’ve spoken to Nobel-prize winning scientists, businesses making missiles, the world’s greatest experts in how to ripen fruit, and a few other folks as well. If there is a subtitle to this effort (possibly also my entire career), it is that supposedly boring stuff is often actually tremendously interesting.

I would *love* you to subscribe or listen to Stuff Matters. Aside from anything else, I happen to think it’s rather good. And if you don’t believe me, take it from someone who actually reviews podcasts for a living, the brilliant James Marriott, who just gave it a five-star review in *The Times*.

Let me know what you think of it. There are a few unexpected easter eggs (as I think they’re sometimes called) buried away in there. Oh and if you have any clever ideas for random objects we should cover in a future episode then message me, stick a comment here or join the subscriber forum (because on top of all of this we’re also doing bonus episodes for subscribers!).

I realise I never reposted this very Material World-relevant piece I wrote for the Sky site not long ago, so here you go:

Load up a satellite map of Texas and find your way to a city called Midland, all the way over the in the West of the state.

Now zoom out a bit and scroll around the environs. For miles, hundreds of miles off into the scrubland of West Texas, and all the way into New Mexico, you see something... strange. It’s as if the entire surface of the land is covered in what looks like a printed circuit board - the desert pocked with perpendicular plots of what look like concrete, with lines running between them. Raising the question: what on earth is going on here?

The short answer is that these are the surface manifestations of one of the most extraordinary, and underapprecated, phenomena of the modern age. They are the visible signs of an energy gold rush that has completely changed geopolitics as we know it, as well as going some way to explaining why Donald Trump is intervening so aggressively in the Middle East.

Zoom in on those pads (actually they’re not made of concrete but hard rock quarried from the desert - caliche as they call it here) and you might just be able to spot what’s going on here. Some are topped by tall drilling rigs that cast their shadows across the desert landscape. Others have a single pumpjack, nodding away. These are the hallmarks of oil extraction.

For this area around Midland TX is the epicentre of a geological region known as the Permian Basin. And the Permian Basin is the single most important region for fracking anywhere in the world.

And fracking - hydraulic fracturing to give it its full name - has completely changed the game for America. This country was always a big oil producer, but fracking has sent its oil and gas production into the stratosphere, making it comfortably the world’s biggest producer of these fossil fuels.

The main principle behind fracking is that rather than drilling into an oil or gas reservoir, a large underground area where these hydrocarbons have collected over millions of years, instead you go looking for them in different types of rock. It’s harder work, and involves a lot more effort, since you have to agitate and blast the oil and gas out rather than collecting it from a reservoir (this is an enormous simplification but that’s the main principle - it’s not like turning on a tap).

The story of the fracking revolution goes back decades, with many of the precursor technologies having been pioneered in the 1940s, but at least part of the origin story is to be found in the 1970s, and the original oil price shocks. Back then, Middle Eastern countries imposed an oil embargo on the rest of the world, plunging countries like the US into crisis.

While America in general and Texas in particular (those of an older vintage will remember the soap opera Dallas) have long pumped oil from the ground, the country was always dependent on imported oil to top up its supplies and feed the mammoth fleet of American refineries, American trucks and American planes. So the oil crises of the ‘70s and ‘80s were a serious shock to the system. Successive presidents, from Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan onwards, began to incentivise domestic US gas production and the extraction of hydrocarbons from “unconventional” sources. The objective was to try to make America energy independent, so nothing like this would happen again.

But it wasn’t until the 2000s that the shale revolution began in earnest, as first gas and then oil producers deployed new drills and pumps that enabled them to penetrate far under the ground. Once upon a time you could only go down so far, but new drill bits changed that. Once upon a time you could only drill vertically, but new techniques enabled oil producers to drill horizontally, all the way along the oil and gas-bearing shale rocks.

As is often the case with new technologies, the advent of fracking was viewed by some with deep suspicion - and for understandable reasons. Some botched early attempts at hydraulic fracturing contaminated local water supplies in Pennsylvania and Wyoming. And since pumping water underground can cause seismic activity, there have been some small earthquakes caused by fracking. Fears about these impacts are part of the explanation for why most countries in Europe have banned the new technologies.

In America, however, the oil industry has embraced fracking with gusto. And the impact has been extraordinary. For nearly half a century, the world’s oil leaderboard in terms of crude production was led by Saudi Arabia and, every so often, Russia. But a decade ago, America leapfrogged everyone else and strode into top place. Since then, its oil production has only risen higher. Now it pumps nearly double the amount the next biggest oil producer does.

And much of that story comes back to the Permian basin, which is where most of America’s oil comes out of the ground. The basin actually comprises a number of different regions, but most of them feed into pipelines that find their way down to the Gulf coast, in particular to export terminals like Corpus Christie and Houston.

It’s not quite right to say America is energy independent these days. Its refineries are configured for the heavy, sticky crude you get in Canada and Venezuela, so most of them still suck in oil from overseas. But if you look at total production, statistically at least, America produces enough crude oil to satisfy all its needs.

In fact, something rather extraordinary happened last year, though it passed mostly below the radar. For the first time in many decades, America pumped more oil and crude products (which also includes other hydrocarbon-related liquids) out of the ground than it consumes for its own economy. This watershed moment is part of the reason why an assault on Iran is plausible for America, in a way it never was before.

For while the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is certainly causing a serious economic impact in the US, where prices of gasoline and diesel are up sharply in recent months, America is nonetheless less vulnerable, less dependent on the Middle East than ever in the post-WWII period. In statistical terms, if not in practice, it is an energy island, in a way few other countries - especially those in Europe or Asia - can claim to be.

That is almost entirely thanks to the oil being pumped out of the ground in the Permian Basin, which accounts for the lion’s share of that increase in domestic production. And, whether or not this sea change in energy provision was at the top of the president’s mind when he committed troops and vessels to the Persian Gulf, it is of great significance when it comes to the consequences.

For the prime issue the world is faced with today is that about a fifth of the oil it had come to depend on is no longer there. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz means the world - especially Europe and Asia - need to replace the oil and gas they were previously getting from the Middle East with oil and gas from somewhere else.

For many, including Europe, Russia is not an option. So the main other supplier is none other than the US. If Europe and the UK are to thrive in the coming months, not to mention continuing to be able to fly and replenishing their gas storage for next winter, they will depend, to an extraordinary degree, on the stuff coming from fracked wells in the US. For all that it has banned fracking domestically, Europe is now wholly reliant on it.

All of which raises the question: can America step up and provide the missing oil the rest of the world needs? The market certainly hopes so. An armada of oil tankers is currently on its way across the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico, hoping to fill up with American oil, diesel, kerosene and other products. It is a rush the likes of which we have rarely ever seen before, as shipping companies redirect carriers that would once have headed for the Strait of Hormuz and the other Gulf on the other side of the world.

But, based on our experiences travelling through the Permian in recent weeks, the answer is not entirely encouraging. Although American exports have leapt in recent months, oil producers in Texas remain reluctant to increase their production at the rate European buyers would like.

In part that’s because they’re nervous that the oil price will not stay high for long. Think back to the engineering necessary to frack oil: it takes far more capital investment than traditional oil production in places like Saudi Arabia. Increasing production does not simply involve turning a tap. American oil costs more, per barrel, to get out of the ground than regions like the Middle East and Russia, and so producers remain nervous to commit to a blizzard of new drills and wells.

The second issue is rather more pragmatic. Right now there is plenty of pipeline connecting the Permian with the export terminals in Corpus Christie and Houston. However, there is a lack of pipelines to take the natural gas that comes out at the same time. The upshot is that for every extra barrel of oil pumped out right now, there is a lot of natural gas which currently has nowhere to go.

The consequence of that - crazy as this will sound in energy-starved Europe - is that right now gas prices in the Permian are in negative territory. Producers are literally paying people to take gas off their hands. Why? Because they want to pump oil but can’t do anything with the gas. An increasing amount of it is being flared into the sky above Texas, purely to try to satisfy the demand for oil from mainly European consumers.

That, however, is a real waste of money - not to mention bad for the environment. However, it underlines why this is not as simple an issue as you might have thought. Those hoping America would come to the rescue as Europe and Asia face an energy shock might find themselves seriously disappointed.

Originally published on Sky News website

I suppose the first thing to say is: sorry. I’ve been very conscious that I haven’t posted much on recently. But I can now, at least, provide at least a partial explanation, which is that I’ve been working on a new book(!)

Trade World is, as the title probably suggests, a sort of companion to Material World. But while MW dealt primarily with the raw materials and mineral resources that underpin the modern world, Trade World delves into new territory. It tells the story of the vast web of interconnections that allow the modern world to function: supply chains, transport, middleman in their various guises. The underbelly of the modern world.

If you’ve read Material World you will probably remember that one of the chapters traced the journey of a silicon chip all the way from the mine to the smartphone into which it is eventually implanted. What I hope came across from that chapter (“The Longest Journey”) was that the degree of interdependence around the modern world is far greater than you might have imagined. Even before the silicon that will eventually become that chip has arrived in the TSMC foundry in Taiwan, it has probably circumnavigated the world once or twice. It has passed through multiple hands and multiple companies, being transformed all along the way via a series of processes that are exotic and mind-bending.

And to some extent, that probably won’t surprise you. We expect sophisticated products like smartphones and semiconductors to have exotic backstories. But what about everything else?

For it turns out these long journeys, with supply chains that bestride the globe, are hardly reserved for technology. In fact, they are everywhere.

And that is the overarching theme (though not the only one!) of this new book. Today, even the most humdrum item in your cupboard or your closet is likely to have a backstory that is wondrous, marvellous and, sometimes, disturbing. It will have clocked up more airmiles than most of you have (well, most probably sea miles). It will have passed through multiple hands, in multiple countries, most of which are nowhere to be found on the label.

That loaf of bread that looks like it’s about the most domestic, homespun product you can buy from the supermarket? The ingredients have invariably travelled thousands of miles to get from you. That pair of jeans that says it’s made in Bangladesh? Actually that massively oversimplifies the story - it was made in a host of countries, not one. The car you bought because you love the brand? Not even made by the brand!

Those items are not chosen accidentally, by the way. While Material World was the story of six substances, Trade World is the story of three everyday products that turn out to have a far deeper, more mind-bending backstory than you might have expected. Bread, clothes and cars. Understand them and you begin to understand the extraordinary history, present and future of the 21st century economy.

The story of “globalisation” (by which I basically mean: the modern world) is far knottier, far more interesting and full of far more surprises than I expected when I began on this book.

When I started writing it, I was mostly just trying to understand what really happens - not in theory but in the real world - when trade breaks down, when tariffs rise and when ships cannot travel from one side of the world to another. But over time, it became something else: a deep dive into the underbelly of the modern world. It became a lot more like Material World than I had expected.

All of which is why I wanted to share these thoughts with you today. And over the coming months, as publication date (early September) approaches I’ll have more hints and sniffs of some of the topics and stories from inside the book. I’m both tremendously excited to share it but, by the same token, conscious I need to be tantalising enough that you’ll actually buy a copy!

Upon which note, (and you’ll already be expecting this if you follow fellow authors) I’ll end with a plea: it would make an enormous difference if you could pre-order a copy now.

If you’re in the UK, may I suggest Waterstones? If you want a signed copy you could order from Backstory, a wonderful independent bookstore in London. Backstory will also ship the book internationally, if you’re outside the UK and want a copy at the earliest possible opportunity. Oh and yes there will be an audiobook and ebook and it’ll be available at all sorts of other outlets too.

Now I’m going to get on with the final edits. I hope you are all well in these topsy-turvy times.

If you’ve read Material World you may recall that there was a short postscript to the section on oil. It was rooted in two places in the Persian Gulf: Ras Tanura and Ras Laffan. These two locations have similar names (“Ras” is Arabic for a headland) and might at first glance look rather similar (lots of big steel tanks and long steel pipes, as well as the occasional flaring chimney) but actually they are important in rather different ways.

Ras Tanura is the primary export terminal in Saudi Arabia, where the vast flows of oil from Ghawar and the other oil fields are processed and then loaded onto oil tankers. It is, as I described in the book, an extraordinary place - a temple to hydrocarbons, and represents a special place in the Saudi national story. For this was the place where King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud ceremonially opened the valve in 1939 that marked the real beginning of the story of Saudi as a petrostate.

But even today, nowhere else can rival the throughput of crude that normally comes out at Ras Tanura. It gets pumped through giant pipes that serve it up to multiple enormous oil carriers, many of them loading up not at the mainland but on “Sea Island”, the offshore platform at which ships can dock and fill their bellies without ever touching dry land.

And if Ras Tanura is the ultimate central point of the global oil system, then Ras Laffan, in Qatar, is the same thing for gas, sitting as it does on the edge of the mammoth North Field (the single biggest store of useful energy anywhere on the planet). Other countries produce more gas these days than Qatar, but - and this is the crucial bit - nowhere else on the planet is quite so much oil and gas concentrated in quite such a small area.

And that, really, was the reason I wanted to write about these two places. The key point about the Persian Gulf, a point so simple it’s sometimes forgotten altogether, is that the vast majority of the gas is found in a relatively small space. Look at a map of where the oil and gas is and you very quickly see a pattern, it is mostly concentrated in and around the coastline of the Persian Gulf.

And for all that there have been a few pipelines built in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in recent years, the infrastructure to get that oil out by land simply doesn’t exist. The vast majority of the oil has to come out by sea - hence the extraordinary amounts Qatar has been investing in liquefied natural gas plants.

And when it comes to getting that oil and gas out, there is only one way it can go: through the strait of Hormuz. Which brings us to where we are today. When I wrote this postscript in Material World, I wrote that Ras Tanura was “a very important place, and also a very vulnerable one. Directly opposite, on the other side of the Persian Gulf, is Iran, one of Saudi’s greatest enemies. This site is within range of countless Iranian missiles, which could level the port within a matter of minutes.”

Back then, it was not hard to imagine this terminal coming under attack (indeed there had been periodic drone attacks by Houthi rebels, financed by Iran, in the preceding years). What seemed less obvious was that we would, within a few years, be confronted with a closure of both of these terminals. Yet that is the extraordinary set of events that has occurred in the past week. Ras Tanura and Ras Laffan are both closed. I simply couldn’t imagine writing a sentence like that up until this week.

It is hard to know where this takes us. What we do know - and what you know, having spent time thinking about the Material World - is that politicians tend to underplay how much these places matter. They underestimate the importance of the physical foundations of the modern world. They forget about the centrality of places like Ras Tanura and Ras Laffan, until, all of a sudden, something happens that forces them to take notice. We may now be living through another one of those periods.

By definition, my day job tends to get rather busy at times like this, so I don’t expect to be able to post all that much here, but if you tune into Sky News you can catch some of the increasingly lengthy “primers” we’ve been making in an effort to wrap our heads round these baffling, terrifying global events. Here, if of interest, is the latest one.

However, it so happens I have also been working on something else, a new project that is, among other things, the explanation for why posting has been so light on this platform in recent months. I think you’ll find it interesting - it’s the most fascinating thing I’ve worked on since Material World. More on that soon. In the meantime, good luck navigating the roller coaster of geopolitics and economics over the next few weeks.

Of the six materials I wrote about in Material World, I’d say the one that most people were most surprised about was salt. If you were trying to tell the story of civilisation through a few key minerals then it’s blindingly obvious that you’d have iron and copper in there, and for that matter oil (or another hydrocarbon). But salt…?

However, if you’ve read the book you’ll know that salt is a massively underrated substance. Even today it’s the bedrock for a whole family of chemicals we still use for the manufacture of everything from paper and glass to the silicon wafers that become semiconductors and the lithium ion compounds that go into our smartphone and electric car batteries. Even today, salt is at the heart of everything.

All of which is why the film I’ve just made for Sky News strikes particularly hard. The long and short of it is I’ve spent the past few months travelling around the UK, revisiting factories and plants I first visited when I was researching Material World, to take the temperature of Britain’s chemicals sector. What I found was desperately depressing - because the scale of collapse in this industry went even beyond what I expected.

Many of the critical processes I describe in the book - from the manufacture of soda ash to the production of ammonia - are no longer happening in the UK. In the period between my book being written and the time you read this, the plants have shut down. In the case of those two chemicals, this is the first time we haven’t made them in this country in more than a century.

And soon, that might even be true of salt itself. Honestly, it feels crazy to posit this - after all, Britain has never had to rely on imported salt, never in modern civilisation - but we’re on the brink of losing our salt independence.

Anyway, rather than me blather on too much about this here, the main thing I wanted to say was: have a watch of this film. It’s not the most jolly but it is, I think, important. And let me know what you think

I suppose the only other thing I’d say is that this isn’t just about chemicals. It’s about a deeper question. What matters more: to be able to get hold of something cheaply or to be able to make it domestically? That’s not an easy question to answer. But it’s one I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. In fact, I’m in the thick of working on a new project that tries, one way or another, to get to the bottom of that question: why are some things made in one place and not another? Do we really understand the way the world’s networks of supply are really configured? And what does that teach us about the world we’re living in today (and the world we’ll live in in future)?

But that’s for another day. For the time being please do watch the film and spread the word. Britain is, for better or worse, providing the world with a pretty good case study of what deindustrialisation looks like. And far from slowing, the pace has accelerated since I wrote Material World.

I’ve just recorded a screen for Sky News about rare earth metals and I figured it might be worth a quick download. This is an interesting story, both because there is a decided gap between the various conventional wisdom takes and the likely reality, and because the latest twists and turns in this roller coaster have all sorts of lessons for the wider Material World.

Now, as you’ll already know if you read MW, I didn’t include rare earths as one of my key substances. Why? Because, as I wrote there, “We can make headphones and electric motors without neodymium magnets – though they would be bigger and less efficient. The materials in this book are the very hardest to replace.”

The rare earths are a suite of 17 elements mostly nestled in their own special corner of the periodic table. They are best thought of as metallurgical spices. Add them in small quantities to other metals and they do all sorts of extraordinary things. Yttrium can help make modern jet turbine blades resistant to the astounding heat inside an engine. Add neodymium to iron and boron and you have the strongest magnet known to humankind.

Though they are rarely visible on the surface, the chances are you’ve already interacted with a rare earth element today. If you have a pair of earbuds, the little ones that fit in your ears (and, for that matter, most over-ear headphones too), their speakers are powered by neodymium iron boron magnets. That satisfying snap as you close the case of Airbuds or a modern tablet or laptop? Neodymium magnets. The motors that help robots move their limbs, or raise or lower the windows in a car? Again, motors with neodymium magnets.

Remove these rare earths from the equation and while civilisation wouldn’t grind to a halt, everything would certainly become slower and less efficient. Jet engines would be less efficient. Electric cars ditto.

The funny thing about rare earths, however, is for all that everyone vaguely appreciates that they’re incredibly important, the market is actually surprisingly small. According to Rob West, who regular readers will know is one of the smartest analysts out there on the energy transition, the total size of the Rare Earth oxide market in 2024 was “about the same as the North American avocado market”(!)

This is a function of two things. First, the fact that you actually don’t need all that much neodymium or scandium or yttrium in your special alloys. A sprinkling will sometimes do. Second, prices have been getting lower and lower in recent years. And that, in large part, a function of something else: massive Chinese dominance of the market.

This is something you’ll already be familiar with but it’s worth trotting the numbers out al the same. China is responsible for roughly 70 per cent of all rare earth mining and roughly 91 per cent of all finished rare earth metal production. Those neodymium magnets inside your earphones? There is a good chance they came from the soil of Inner Mongolia, the site of China’s biggest rare earth mine.

Despite their name, rare earths are not very rare. They are to be found in most corners of the world. There are enormous reserves under the ground in Brazil, in India, in Australia and America - as well, of course, as China. But refining rare earths is hard. Very hard - far harder than nearly every other metal refining. By some accounts it takes as many as 100 processes to extract the metals from their ores. It takes enormous amounts of energy along the way. The waste products produced along the way are nasty - nastier than the kind of thing you tend to find at most copper or iron mines (and that stuff isn’t exactly very palatable).

All of which is why in recent decades most G7 nations were perfectly happy that most of the world’s rare earth production was happening somewhere else. Anywhere but in their own backyards. And since China was able to produce these magnets far cheaper than anyone else (the less said about the emissions the better), that meant cheaper consumer electronics for everyone. It meant a company like Apple could shower their devices with neodymium magnets (what else did you think “MagSafe” was?).

But of course, here we are in the midst of a trade war and, once again, rare earths are back on the front pages. The reason, this time around, is that China has announced a set of regulations which mean anyone buying their REE, or the products made with them, will have to apply for a licence from the Chinese government.

It’s hard to say quite how onerous this will be in practice, but it does seem more far-reaching than any of the previous restrictions imposed by Beijing. Quite why China is doing this is, as ever, a bit of a mystery. The obvious explanation is that it’s an attempt to retaliate to the US, though in this case the restrictions seem to apply internationally. The other obvious explanation is that China wants to wield control over certain nooks of the supply chain, including military applications (there’s a lot of rare earths in an F35 fighter jet, for instance).

A more intriguing theory is that China might also be fishing for more information about what applications those rare earths are actually used for. Is this an attempt to map out a somewhat opaque supply chain? One of the strands in Material World is that our understanding of how stuff is made, of the web of relationships and processes that stand between consumers and the raw materials that go into their products - is shockingly primitive. China’s “map” of the global economy is better than anything Western governments have at their disposal. But is this exercise an attempt to improve that map yet further?

Covering this story left me wondering, too, why people aren’t talking about Spruce Pine a bit more. After all, China might have a near monopoly on rare earths, but the US has a near monopoly on the ultra pure quartz you need to make the silicon wafers we turn into semiconductors and solar panels. Should America decide to cut off exports from the rest of the world, it would have just as crippling an effect as these Chinese restrictions.

However… however, the key thing to note here is that in the longer run, restrictions like this will almost always backfire. Why? Because with enough incentive G7 nations will bite the bullet and start refining their own rare earths. This is something Tim Worstall, who unlike most of the rest of us has actually worked in rare earth markets, is convinced of. So convinced, as it happens, that he’s raising funds to actually do it.

Sure, making this stuff domestically, with all the environmental restrictions that implies, would make magnets a bit more expensive, but then again that’s probably a price that can be borne (remember, we don’t need all that much of them, and the whole market is about the same size as the US avocado market).

In much the same way, if America blocked ultra pure quartz exports, then in the short run it would be very disruptive for silicon wafer production, but in the longer run, it would incentivise miners, explorers and refiners to find alternative sources. All of a sudden, synthetically produced quartz would justify its considerably higher price. In short, what look like strangleholds would rapidly dissolve - albeit after a bumpy year or two.

The broader macro lesson here is that for decades we prioritised price over everything else. It made sense to buy all our rare earths from China given the price was so low. It made sense to concentrate all ultra high purity quartz from a single location because that cost so much less than any alternative.

The upshot was a world economy where most stuff got cheaper year upon year. Globalisation wasn’t just about opening up more cheap labour markets - it was about creating supply chains with hyper specialisations for every imaginable component. Only when those supply chains are prodded and bent, as they are right now, do we begin to learn how they actually function.

That, though, is a subject for another day. Indeed, it’s a subject I might have quite a lot more to say about in the coming months...

Once upon a time, there were few industrial sites quite as, well, industrial as the chemicals plant on the banks of the River Tees.

There on the north bank at Billingham was the Haber-Bosch fertiliser unit which was helping feed the world (not to mention developing the technology that most other fertiliser plants around the world would end up adopting). There was a plant making the chemicals used to make things like perspex. Indeed, the perspex that went into Spitfire canopies came from here.

Off on the south bank, out on the coast, were the tall towers of the blast furnaces, belching smoke into the sky and the convertors forging the steel that would help Middlesbrough construct the world. Alongside it, on the Wilton site, was a forest of chimneys belonging to countless different units. This was where Teesside made the polyester that clothed the world (a British invention, don’t you know).

There were power stations and polyurethane plants, as well as the ethylene crackers: high-pressure steel containers for the chemical reaction that turned North Sea oil into ethylene - the precursor to the most important plastic in the world, polyethylene (another British invention).

These materials, many of them still made in Britain until surprisingly recently, represent part of the backbone of the modern world. Yes, there’s countless other important innovations that have happened since, but the whole point of my writing Material World was to say: we don’t talk about this stuff enough, and it still matters.

The fact that polyethylene was invented here in Britain provided the allies with a decisive edge in WWII, since it was used to shield the wires that enabled British planes to have airborne radar. This lightweight material indirectly saved countless lives. But this plastic is also the backbone of the modern world too. It goes into packaging that helps keep pharmaceuticals and foods clean. It goes into water pipes and bubble wrap, into hip replacements and flak jackets. As I wrote in the book, “every six seconds we make enough of it in Europe to wrap the Eiffel Tower from head to toe.”

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As you know, there is and was a dark side to this too. We waste far too much plastic and chuck too much of it away into rivers and the seas, where it can play havoc with ecosystems. The plants here were sometimes desperately dirty - especially back before the more stringent environmental regulations were put into place. One of the brooks that fed the Tees here was, for a period, famous for being the most toxic river in the country.

So it is quite hard when you visit Wilton these days, as I did when I was researching Material World a few years ago, to reconcile what you see there today with what once was. As you will recall if you read the book, I was spending a moment staring at that one-time famously toxic river when, all of a sudden, a seal popped its head out of the water and stared us in the face. In all the time we spent driving around there, I saw not a single human being.

In part this owes itself to the fact that by the time I visited, much of the plant had been shut down and was empty. The polyester plant had gone. The steel works were in the process of being disassembled. But that emptiness was also a little deceptive. These days, for better or worse, you don’t need many humans to run a plant producing millions of tonnes of product (we’ll come back to this later). So back then, the fertiliser plant was still running, as was the place which used to produce the precursors for perspex. And the ethylene cracker was still flaring away into the Teesside sky.

“Not a lot of people know that most of Europe’s plastic bags begin their life here in Teesside,” said the fellow who was showing me around. “But they still do. Not that anyone wants to talk about it.”

Well, not any more. Because Sabic, the company that operates the ethylene cracker at Wilton, has just announced that it will be closing. On the surface, this is, in the grand span of Britain’s story of deindustrialisation, a relatively small chapter. The demise of a plant most people haven’t heard of, run by a company most people haven’t heard of, making a product most people haven’t heard of (even if they use it every day), resulting in the loss of around 100 jobs.

But the problem is: this is far from an isolated case. And the sorry story of Wilton is something we should all be aware of. Indeed, in some senses, the demise of this place is just as if not more significant than the near-collapse of British Steel, an episode that hogged the headlines for weeks, and eventuated in the government essentially nationalising the company.

So… why does British Steel get a bailout while this place dies a quiet death? I have a pet theory.

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The end of ICI

This theory begins in the mid 1990s. Back then, nearly all of the units here were owned and run by a single company: Imperial Chemicals Industry.

ICI was one of the most important companies in the world, one of the biggest employers in the country. It was so important and influential that it dominated the corporate conversation in the country. Its massive headquarters on the banks of the River Thames - just down Millbank from Parliament - were arguably the real power centre for UK plc. Together with its continental counterpart BASF and American firms like Dupont, ICI was one of the giants of global industry.

But it disintegrated in somewhat catastrophic circumstances in the 1990s, selling off vast parts of its estates. All of a sudden, Britain’s chemicals industry was split into countless pieces. Much of ICI still lives on today, in a different guise. Much of the pharmaceutical bits (eventually) became AstraZeneca. Parts of the salt-related chemicals business were eventually acquired by Indian group Tata. Much of the basic chemicals business was bought by Jim Ratcliffe and became Ineos. But even this is an over-simplification.

It’s worth saying that while it’s tempting to see ICI’s implosion, and the later closure of various bits of the diaspora, as an indictment of the quality of Britain’s chemicals industry, this really couldn’t be further from the truth. Take the ethylene cracker at Wilton - the one that’s just shut down. Back when ICI sold it in 1999 to American chemicals firm Huntsman, it was one of the lowest cost crackers in the world. That might sound bonkers these days, but it’s really true. It was cheaper to make ethylene on Teesside than it was to make it in most of Asia and the US!

In part that was because it was a pretty advanced, efficient plant - and a big one at that. And in part it was because it was fed, via pipeline, with cheap oil from the Ekofisk oil and gas fields in the North Sea. Even in the aftermath of ICI’s collapse, things looked bright for Britain’s chemicals industry - still one of the world’s leaders. And since the world’s appetite for polyethylene was rising exponentially, there was no reason to suspect that, in only a couple of decades, the site would face its effective demise.

So: what went wrong? Well, that alone is the subject of an entire book, but here, off the top of my head, are a few contributory factors to bear in mind.

First, North Sea oil output peaked and fell. Gradually, it became clear that there was more oil more easily available elsewhere - most notably in the US, thanks to the shale revolution. Second, Asian competitors, which had struggled up until the 2010s to build their own ethylene plants, learnt the technology. Soon enough there were crackers on the other side of the world competing and beating Teesside on price. Third, Europe began to impose growing regulations on big polluters like the chemicals industry.

Hypothesising that the future of the region might be not in old fashioned oil and gas-based chemicals but in cleaner, newer technologies like carbon capture and hydrogen, the UK government encouraged firms to invest in this new hydrogen economy. By then, Huntsman had sold the cracker to Sabic, which saw Wilton as their “green” play. As the world shifted to “blue” and then “green” hydrogen, these crackers would be perfectly placed to benefit from the new green economy.

In the meantime, energy prices into the UK went from being among the lowest in Europe to among the highest in the developed world. The hydrogen economy remained what it was back a decade ago - which is to say, a lovely idea but, in practice, way too expensive to compete with old fashioned chemicals and energy. And, first gradually and then suddenly, Wilton was out of business. British ethylene could no longer compete - to the extent that even wealthy, patient firms like Sabic (an offshoot of the Saudi government) could no longer justify the losses.

All of which is to say, the announcement of its closure today is far from surprising. It has been coming for years, the consequence of a series of unfortunate events and poor decisions.

But don’t take from that that this was altogether inevitable.

What would have happened if ICI had never fallen to pieces in the 1990s? Would government have paid more attention if the firm shutting down was a household name rather than an obscure Saudi-owned group?

To what extent is the implosion of the chemicals sector more broadly a consequence of the fact that each chemicals plant doesn’t employ as many people as a single steelworks - even though their broader contribution to GDP is significant? Allowing a steelworks like Scunthorpe to close down, with the loss of, maybe 2,000 jobs overnight, is seen in Whitehall as politically unpalatable. But right now chemicals plants are closing with astounding regularity - 100 jobs a time. It all adds up eventually - perhaps to more job losses than would have happened at British Steel. But it’s death by a thousand cuts - and so it doesn’t reach the threshold at which Westminster sits up and pays attention.

More widely, what would have happened had more attention been paid to galloping energy costs a few years ago rather than today? One of the points I made in the book was that part of the problem facing British industry in recent years is that they have had to bear most of the extra green levies on their power bills, while countries like Germany imposed most of those costs on households instead. One of the key planks of the Industrial Strategy document released earlier this week is that those costs will no longer be borne by industrial energy users. But this is hardly a new issue: why did it take so long to change?

Either way, the reality is that Wilton doesn’t now just feel empty; increasingly, it is empty. A site that felt pretty desolate when I visited a few years ago is now almost deserted. A part of the country that was supposed to be “levelled up”, as the previous government put it, is now being levelled.

And Britain is becoming ever more dependent on other countries for the chemicals it uses for everything from pharmaceuticals to weapons to fertilisers. That’s unprecedented. And is something we should all spend some time pondering.

Is there anything more American than a tin of Campbell’s Soup?

The condensed soup immortalised by Andy Warhol is still a staple of American supermarkets even today. Indeed, the Campbell’s Company (founded in 1869) is one of the oldest food companies in the US.

So it might seem odd to hear that this quintessentially American product might find itself smack bang in the middle of Donald Trump’s trade war. Yet that’s precisely what’s happening now. Campbell’s warned about tariff impact in a recent analysts’ call, and there have been a few reports on what this spells for American shoppers.

But this is one of those stories that gets more interesting, and more topsy-turvy, the deeper you go down the rabbit hole. Because it turns out that this story is also inextricably linked with the ongoing negotiations over Britain’s trade agreement with America - and, for that matter, the fateful decision last year to close the blast furnaces at Port Talbot.

All of which probably sounds a little… random. Why is the cost of tinned food affected by the fate of an obscure steel plant thousands of miles away in south Wales? Well, you won’t be surprised, given the nature of this Substack, to hear that it all comes back to the Material World.

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Let’s start at the start - a long way from the supermarket shelves, where the metal that goes into those tins is being made.

The first thing you need to know is that making a tin can is hard, surprisingly hard. I realise this probably sounds a little counterintuitive. If I asked you what you thought the most challenging steel in the world to make was, you’d probably say: weapon grade steel, or maybe the kind that goes into a submarine hull or into the landing gear on an Airbus A380. But actually in some ways, it turns out making the steel that goes into tin cans (they’re mostly steel - the tin is just a plating) is even more exacting.

For one thing you can’t just use any old metal. The specifications for steel in aircraft landing gear (and submarine hull) are forgiving enough that you can make it with recycled steel made in an electric arc furnace. Back to one of the misconceptions about “virgin steel” - actually we don’t need it for a surprising number of use cases these days.

But packaging steels - the term for the kinds of steels that go into tinned food - are a different matter. You need to roll a very, very low carbon steel out into thin coils of perfect flatness and consistency. You need to plate that steel with tin. You need to treat that tin with a whole series of processes even before it gets anywhere near the plant that takes that steel and turns it into a can.

And of all the grades of packaging steel, the very hardest to pull off is what’s known as “Drawn and Wall Ironed” steel. DWI tins might look a lot like any other tins, but they are considerably more sophisticated, because the body is formed of one piece of metal (unlike old-school can bodies which are actually formed of two pieces of metal soldered together). Essentially you take a steel disk and stretch and form it in a metal press/die, ending up with a can that’s light, uniform and seamless. For a product like tinned soup, it’s the dream can.

The catch is, you can only pull this off if the steel disk you’re inserting into the machine is phenomenally good steel. Any blemishes or areas of weakness in the metal and it’s a bit like blowing up a dodgy balloon - except with metal.

All of which is to say: making this kind of steel is quite hard, and, for the time being at least, those who decide metal grades and processes have determined that only blast furnace iron will do.

Oh, and there are only so many companies around the world making it. There’s plants in the Netherlands, in Germany and Korea. There are some makers of DWI quality steel in China, where the quality was historically below par, but is improving all the time. And for decades, packaged steel has been one of the proudest products of the steel mills of South Wales, owned these days by Tata Steel.

Tata recently shut down the blast furnaces at Port Talbot, with an audacious (and controversial) plan. The superficially audacious part you probably already know about: they would replace all their steelmaking with an electric, and much lower carbon, alternative. There are all sorts of reasons this will be hard - not least the fact that Britain has the highest electricity prices in the developed world. But actually that’s not the really daring bit. The really daring bit is that they also want to become the world’s first scale producer of electric arc furnace-made DWI steel.

No-one has managed to make recycled steel at scale that’s consistent and reliable enough that if you stretch it out like a balloon it maintains its integrity. Tata think they have a chance to crack this nut. But the more you understand about the nature of this kind of steelmaking, the more you realise that what’s happening in Port Talbot is even more of a gamble than is widely appreciated.

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Anyway, the other important thing to note is that America, most of whose steel is made these days not in blast furnaces but electric arc furnaces, doesn’t make anything like enough DWI steel to satisfy its demand for cans. And since no-one is building new blast furnaces, it’s not likely to any time soon. So, for the foreseeable future it will have to import it in from overseas.

About 80 per cent of American tin cans are made from imported steel. And since that steel can’t easily be substituted, the companies that make those cans will have little choice but to pay the tariffs imposed by Donald Trump.

None of this ought to have come as a surprise to the White House. Last time they imposed tariffs on metals in 2018, they eventually excluded certain products, like these, that couldn’t really be substituted or reasonably quickly replicated domestically. This time: no exceptions. Steel importers face 50 per cent tariffs on everything. So if things continue as they are right now, it’s pretty inevitable those costs will eventually spill into the US economy, potentially being passed onto consumers in the form of more expensive condensed soup (and other tinned items).

But this brings us to the much-hyped trade agreement with the UK. As you’ll no doubt be aware, President Trump has announced a deal with Britain, which will permit it tariff-free access for steel and aluminium, as well as for a certain number of cars and aerospace products. That would be a big deal for American tinned food producers, because right now a significant chunk of their DWI steel comes from… Tata Steel in Port Talbot.

Indeed, look at the UK’s steel exports to the US by category and you can see packaging steel, or “tin plate” as it’s also confusingly known, is the third biggest category. I’ve marked the types of steels that come from Port Talbot in red here. For all that Britain might not make much steel these days, it’s actually quite important when it comes to tin cans.

Sidenote: this is a reflection of the way the global steel market works these days. Rather than trying to make every kind of steel, many countries now tend to specialise in certain varieties of steel, with the presumption that, since it’s a global market, they can just buy in the other stuff from elsewhere. So Britain is a moderately big player in tin cans and coil, but it doesn’t make any weapons-grade steel (that’s Sweden) or plate steel (mostly Asia).

Anyway, back to that trade “deal”. In theory, it could ensure at least some tariff-free DWI steel gets into the US. Welsh mills could help save American tinned food buyers a good few cents! But, despite being proudly announced by Trump and Keir Starmer many weeks ago, only the car and aerospace part of the UK-US agreement has actually been formalised. The metals deal is seemingly missing in action.

Why? It comes back, in part, to those blast furnaces in Port Talbot. Because Tata has shut down the furnaces and has yet to build the electric arc furnace that will (in theory) replace them, it is temporarily having to ship in most of its virgin steel from the Netherlands and India. That steel then gets processed in its existing plants and turned into the DWI its customers have come to expect.

The upshot is that the DWI steel being made in South Wales was actually “melted and poured” (a key bit of terminology in steel) somewhere else altogether. Strictly speaking, it’s not really UK steel at all. It’s just processed here.

That might seem like a moot point, but for the American trade negotiators it’s all-important. They have insisted in talks with their British counterparts that only steel “melted and poured” in Britain should be entitled to be tariff-free. And if that stays the case, even Tata’s DWI steel will face the same tariffs as everyone else.

So here we are. A mazy, unpredictable set of circumstances, all of which mean American consumers end up facing higher Campbell’s Soup prices. But this is just one tiny example of what happens when tariffs get imposed. I wrote a bit more about this in relation to aluminium (sorry, aluminum) for the Washington Post the other day. Even if you have 100% faith that tariffs will bring back production to the US, it will take many years to happen (beyond the life of this presidency) and it also forces you into perverse decisions. Should America be using more of its power generation to smelt aluminum or to run data centres or chip foundries? The logic of tariffs is to incentivise aluminium smelting over those other sectors.

In the meantime, for UK steelmakers (and, by extension, American tin-makers) the clock is ticking. The President has insisted that if the UK’s steel deal isn’t agreed by 9 July then it could be scrapped altogether.

Doubtless there are countless other such rabbit holes out there - do message in or comment if you’ve encountered one yourself. I suppose what we’re living through is a surreal collision between trade theory and chaos theory.

There is something profound about visiting a blast furnace and seeing it in operation.

I challenge anyone to get up close to the tuyeres, the metal veins that pipe white hot coal particles into the roaring cauldron; to stand by the wall and know you are within a few feet of hundreds of tonnes of lava, bubbling at 1,400 degrees; or to see the stream of molten iron glugging from the bottom without being somewhat moved. These sites, with their sparks and heat and smells and vibrations, are ground zero for industry - even now, even in the 21st century.

So when I visited British Steel, the last remaining site where this process is still carried out in this country, I had expected to feel much as I did after I visited Port Talbot - wowed and exhilarated. But, for all sorts of reasons we’ll get to in a moment, that was not the feeling I was left with after visiting Scunthorpe. I left, instead, feeling unsettled for all sorts of reasons. It felt… weird.

And since the company is now on the brink of nationalisation, with the government set to legislate to take control of it today, I figured it was worth exploring this. Because as you’ll know if you’ve read Material World, places like this matter - more than simple national accounts reckonings might lead you to believe. And because I think the strange story of British Steel says rather a lot about the plight of a nation like Britain in the 21st century.

Anyway, you probably already know some of the background to this story but here is the potted version. There has been a steelworks at Scunthorpe since the very earliest days of modern steelmaking (by which I mean the Bessemer process - sorry you’ll have to read the book for more on that). Unusually, for UK steelworks at least, much of the iron ore for the process was actually mined on site, in underground and open cast mines that still scar the nearby landscape. The coal was freighted in from mines not far away and baked into coke (the highly carbonised kind you need for steelmaking) in two sets of ovens. Over time this became one of the biggest steelmaking sites in the country, with, at one stage, four blast furnaces working in tandem, all lined up one after the other (there were only two at Port Talbot though they were both a bit bigger than the ones in Scunthorpe).

For much of its life this site was part of the state-owned steel sector, a large, perennially crisis-ridden but world-beating business which covered most of the bases of modern steelmaking. There were electric arc furnaces making advanced alloys in nearby Rotherham. There was weapons grade and stainless steel in Sheffield and plate steel for shipmaking in Dalzell. There were blast furnaces aplenty, providing steel for tin cans and car bodies (South Wales), for construction (Teesside) and, here in Scunthorpe, for rail. Some of those other sites have been shut down but even today the blast furnaces here still turn out the steel that goes to Network Rail, to form the bedrock of Britain’s rail system, as well as exported rails going to Germany, India and elsewhere besides.

The workers of Scunthorpe treated steelmaking with a kind of romance you don’t often have in these sites. Pretty much ever other primary steelmaking site in the world gives their blast furnaces numbers. Here they named them after English Queens: Queen Anne, Queen Bess, Queen Victoria and Queen Mary. Victoria and Mary were shut down long ago - the steel frames remain, but they are mere shells. However, Anne and Bess are still operational. They are the last blast furnaces standing - just about.

The British steelmaking industry faces three interlocking challenges. The first is that making steel this way is incredibly carbon intensive. The chemical reaction happening inside a blast furnace as iron ore is stripped of its oxygen generates an astounding amount of carbon dioxide - to the extent that the main product, by weight, of a blast furnace is carbon dioxide. Think about that for a moment. The iron is a side-product. No other industrial site in the developed world is as carbon intensive as a blast furnace. If reducing carbon emissions is all you care about that, the single easiest way to achieve it is to shut down a few blast furnaces.

The second challenge is that running these places has become prohibitively expensive in recent years. In part this is because of the environmental costs - emissions trading schemes and so on. In part it’s because energy is so much more costly these days. And since the introduction of net zero legislation, businesses are duty bound to find ways to eliminate their emissions. And given that you can’t easily eliminate the emissions of a blast furnace (carbon capture remains prohibitively expensive - for the time being at least) that means investing in alternatives, the most obvious of which is an electric arc furnace.

That is what Tata Steel UK did over at Port Talbot, pulling down those furnaces I visited, promising to replace them with electric units. The problem with this is twofold. First, it’s very expensive - not just to build but (more importantly in the case of the UK) to run. Electric arc furnaces consume enormous amounts of power to generate the lightning storm inside their cauldrons. Watching them is arguably even more impressive than seeing a blast furnace - if perhaps slightly less elemental. But each time they run they are drawing more power than a small city. The other problem with electric arc furnaces is that while we are getting much, much better at working out how to make even obscure, advanced steels with them, there are still some varieties you can’t make. Now, as I’ve written here before, I think this notion that you “can’t live without virgin steel!” Is a bit overhyped. Even so, it’s something to ponder.

The third and final challenge for steelmakers is that it has become, in recent years, nigh on impossible to compete with cheap imports from China and, more recently, India. Contrary to the lazy impression you tend to get if you ask Whitehall economists about this, the steelworks in this country are actually pretty efficient operations. But the operations in China these days are not just efficient but also (much more) heavily subsidised. Think what you like about Donald Trump and his tariffs, but one of the reasons the US has consistently protected its steel industry, especially against Chinese competition, is that a) it doesn’t seem like entirely fair competition right now and b) the one thing worse than having to pay a bit more for steel is not having any domestic steel manufacturing any more. I appreciate that’s not an argument most economists would recognise: “why not import it all in from the cheapest country?” But (sorry, last book plug), well, this is not just about economics. Read Chapter 7.

Anyway, long story short, Scunthorpe is, at the time of writing, the last site left in the UK where we make blast furnace steel but, for some years, its days have been numbered. The site went bust a few years ago and was bought out of insolvency in 2020 by an obscure Chinese firm, Jingye.

Jingye is not a big company; it isn’t even in the top ten steel producers in China, let alone the world. Very little was known about the company or its founder, Ganpo Li, to the extent that when French ministers heard the company was planning to buy one of their steel sites (a subsidiary of British Steel) they blocked the takeover.

But for the then Conservative government, such qualms were rapidly outweighed by the relief that they wouldn’t have to take the site into public ownership. Jingye was about the only company willing to pay for Scunthorpe in its hour of need. And in recent years it has made all the right noises - at least as far as the government was concerned. It promised it would replace the blast furnaces at Scunthorpe with electric arc furnaces; it promised to keep the blast furnaces up and running in the process (something even Tata wouldn’t offer); it promised to inject lots of capital into the local area and safeguard as many jobs as possible.

But in recent months, things have clearly been going downhill. This government and the last have agreed to provide sizeable grants to Tata and British Steel/Jingye in exchange for them replacing their blast furnaces with electric arc furnaces (a large part of the reason they are having to decarbonise so quickly is net zero legislation - so there is at least some logic to the government support). Tata agreed a deal last year for £500m. But the talks with Jingye seemed to be going nowhere.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, the day of the Spring Statement, it emerged that Jingye had refused the government’s offer. It wasn’t just that £500m wasn’t enough. It wasn’t clear any amount would have been enough. The following day it announced it was planning to shut down the blast furnaces and the rest of the steelworks in a matter of months - perhaps as soon as June.

However enthusiastic one is about electric arc furnaces, there is something, shall we say, unsettling about this country, the country that invented coke-fuelled blast furnaces, becoming the first industrialised nation to shut them all down. There is something doubly unsettling about this country shutting them down without providing any replacement. But that was the path Jingye seemed to be determined on. Quite why they were doing so was, well, anyone’s guess. Even those high up in government couldn’t understand what was going on. They struggled to get any sense, any rationale, out of the company’s Chinese leadership.

I had been trying, without much success, to get access to British Steel for years. Having visited Tata before its closure, I wanted to be sure that, if we were going to become the world’s first industrialised nation to end primary steelmaking then at the very least such a historic moment needed to be scrutinised and, at the very least, documented. But Jingye didn’t seem to have much interest in publicity.

Eventually, however, I managed to gain access into the site for Sky News. We went up last week - the first TV crew to get inside in half a decade, since the early, heady days of the Jingye takeover. Having stood outside the site to report on various goings on over the years, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. In the event, I found the whole experience somewhat emotional. The report we filmed can be watched here, if you want a sniff of what it’s like inside.

But what you might not get from the film was what I found weird and unsettling about the experience. The first clue was the blast furnace itself. Now, I’m not exactly a connoisseur of blast furnaces, but I have visited one or two in my time (well, two) and the quantity of iron gushing out of the Scunthorpe furnace was, frankly, a little underwhelming. Only when I began talking to the workers did I begin to piece together what was going on. They were doing everything they could to conserve the furnace’s fuel and materials.

As we toured the site - not just the blast furnace but the iron ore and coal piles and the continuous casting works and the rod mill and the old coke ovens, shut down a couple of years ago - we began to glean that the workers here were reeling from a terrible shock. Most of them were just discovering, that very day, that Jingye was planning to starve the blast furnaces to death.

A few of them had learnt in a powerpoint presentation the previous day that Jingye had cancelled orders for the raw materials needed to keep the furnaces going: chiefly iron ore and coke. In the absence of those orders, the blast furnaces would have to be shut down not in June but in a matter of weeks - in May. And that was on the assumption that the workers could keep it running at a more conservative rate than usual. That somewhat underwhelming tap was a sign, I sensed, that the rationing had already begun.

And since the UK now has to import coke and iron ore (the mine in Scunthorpe was closed decades ago because the ores - 30% purity - couldn’t compete with the 60% pure stuff shipped in from Sweden, Brazil or Australia) which can take weeks to arrive, those orders need potentially to happen in a matter of days. All of which explains why the government is calling MPs in for an emergency sitting today. If those orders don’t happen soon, then it will be too late to save the blast furnace.

Because if you starve a blast furnace, there is no easy way to start it up again. Such things cost tens of millions of pounds. Quite why Jingye was planning this remains a mystery. The company never seems to talk to the media. It hasn’t explained its rationale. The most plausible theory is that it plans to relocate most of the operations in Scunthorpe to existing mills (and new ones) in China. Another more outlandish theory, not entirely dismissed by officials in Whitehall, is that it could be acting under orders from Beijing, who would welcome the demise of another leg of British industry. For the time being, though, no-one really knows.

However, if anything could shock the company into a reaction it is the government’s decision to take control of the site at Scunthorpe (and the associated works further north in Skinningrove and Teesside). Nearly every episode I can think of in recent history of a nationalisation like this has been preceded by the insolvency or collapse of the company in question. The state has essentially saved the company from collapse. But in this case the company has not liquidated its British assets. It is still, legally at least, the owner of them. From a Chinese perspective it’s hard not to see this as a form of appropriation. I can’t think of a precedent off the top of my head (if you can, please do leave a comment below).

So this raises all sorts of deeper questions that go far beyond British Steel itself. However much one might agree with the decision to save the Scunthorpe blast furnaces from starvation, what kind of Pandora’s Box does this open? If the government can take control of a company simply because it doesn’t agree with the leadership’s strategy, how might it choose to deploy that power in future? Is it setting a new precedent taking it into significantly more interventionist territory? And what will this spell for future relations with China (remember the UK was in the process of cosying up to Beijing only a few months ago)?

All of which is to say, this is a fascinating, but unsettling story. And it underlines the point that runs through the chapters on steel and iron in the book: that however much ministers might like to treat this sector as they do most other parts of the economy, when push comes to shove it is just… different. We are about to witness what happens when push comes to shove.

One of the first challenges I faced when planning Material World was coming up with the list of substances I’d be covering. Needless to say, the initial list was not quite the same as the one I ended up with.

For one thing, the original plan was for seven materials, not six: the seventh substance was going to be wood. So I read an enormous pile of books on forest management and cultivation and actually spent some time out in woodland in Wales watching how 21st century forestry actually functions. None of that material ever made it into the book, because, as I began writing I realised that if I’d kept wood in there the whole thing would have been enormously long (and the book is pretty long as it is).

In the very initial drafts I assumed my battery material of choice would be cobalt rather than lithium. But the deeper I delved into the science and practice of batteries, the more I realised that while there are undoubtedly good journalistic reasons for focusing on cobalt (primarily the fact that most of it comes from the DRC and conditions there can be grim), in practice cobalt is becoming less important as different cobalt-free battery chemistries are growing far faster than cobalt-dependent chemistries. So lithium it was.

Another material I considered for a while was aluminium.

There is no doubting it is among the world’s most important substances. Without aluminium, a strong, light metal, we might never have mastered powered flight. Even today, when composites are becoming more prevalent in fuselages and wings, aluminium is still essential for aircraft manufacture. Then there’s our power systems: aluminium is the metal of choice for the high voltage power cables you see on pylons around the world (copper is more conductive but also far more heavy, so not best suited for stringing between tall towers). And, more and more these days, aluminium is being used in cars - especially electric cars where weight savings are all-important.

But I only had space in Material World for one or two industrial metals. Steel had to be there; so too did copper - so no aluminium. Long story short, I never got to go and visit an aluminium smelter, which was rather saddening. All of which is to say, when I had the opportunity to visit one for my day job at Sky News, I leapt at it.

Many years ago there were lots of aluminium smelters in the UK. There was one in Anglesey, another in Northumberland and a whole series of them in Scotland. Today there is only one left, the smelter at Lochaber, located just outside Fort William.

The Lochaber smelter is rather extraordinary, not merely because aluminium smelters are themselves rather extraordinary things. We take this metal for granted these days - it is workaday, humdrum, even. The other day I had to buy a new set of handlebars for my bike and I was struck that the aluminium option was the cheap, boring option, while carbon fibre or titanium were the far sexier alternatives.

But not long ago aluminium was a true wonder metal. Before the 19th century no-one had even set eyes on it; refining it was so hard that aluminium was the most precious of all metals. Napoleon III famously impressed his guests by serving them food not on plates of gold but of aluminium. The little aluminium block on the very top of the Washington Monument was, when it was put in place in 1884, the biggest piece of pure aluminium on the planet.

Two years later, the Hall–Héroult process was invented, making it possible for the first time to mass produce aluminium and the world changed forever. That probably sounds a little over the top, but it’s hard to conceive of how the Wright brothers could have lifted the Kitty Hawk flyer into the air without using aluminium as the metal for their engine. It’s hard to imagine how we could have built the thousands of miles of electrical grids we have today relying solely on copper. So working out how to make aluminium - not just in the laboratory but in vast quantities, was an extraordinary breakthrough.

Today, aluminium is still made using the Hall–Héroult process, in Lochaber and indeed elsewhere around the world. Alumina, a ground down sand of aluminium oxide (refined from bauxite, much of which is mined in Guinea and Australia) is poured into a cell, alongside molten cryolite - a kind of flux which lowers the melting temperature of the metal. Large carbon electrodes are lowered into it and a massive electrical current is run through it. Via this process of electrolysis, the oxygen atoms are wrenched off the alumina, and the molten, pure aluminium sinks to the bottom of the cell.

Having seen a few electric arc furnaces in my time - the electrical process whereby steel is made from scrap these days - the most striking thing about seeing the Hall–Héroult process in person is (and I realise this might sound odd) how quiet it is. Electric arc furnaces are so loud you can hardly hear yourself - which figures - the electrodes are creating a lightning storm (the arc) in their cauldron - but the cell room at Lochaber had at most a low bassy hum as the enormous electrical current did its business.

To get anywhere close to these cells you have to wear quite a lot of protective equipment. Not just the steel toecap, heat proof boots and the flame retardant clothes, but a full face helmet with a ventilator so you’re not breathing any of the air inside the room. Why? Because the chemical reaction inside those cells (especially the one between the cryolite and the alumina) generates all sorts of toxic gases you really don’t want to inhale.

Anyway, you can see the whole thing in the film I made for Sky. Cell room moment at about the 3:30 mark but do watch the whole thing if you have time. It’s the product of many weeks of work from me and a brilliant team at Sky, led by producer Aoife Yourell.

But here’s one nerdy detail that might appeal to anyone who has read Material World. What I hadn’t quite realised about aluminium is the defining feature of the cells you use for the Hall–Héroult process is that you can’t ever really turn them off. An electric arc furnace can be switched on and off at will (blast furnaces, as you will know from the book, are much harder to shut down). Anyway, the upshot is, when electricity is expensive or there’s no demand for steel, you just leave the arc furnaces off. You simply can’t do the same thing with aluminium smelters.

Have a look at these two charts below, both of which cover the same period (apologies for how shonky they look - I’m trying to do this on my iPad - a mistake, it transpires). On the left is US steel production, on the right US aluminium production each month going back to 2017. The key point here is that smack bang in the middle of each chart is the pandemic.

Can you spot the critical difference? In 2020, when lockdowns hit and global demand suddenly dropped, so too did US steel production. Why? The steelmakers simply turned off their electric arc furnaces. But look at aluminium - it never dropped during the pandemic. The line only drops when a smelter is mothballed permanently.

This might all seem like a small point, but it’s pretty massive. If you lose the power to an aluminium smelter then you have roughly four hours until the metal in those cells freezes and then the whole operation is dead. It’s a total disaster - the worse-case scenario for any aluminium plant. You’d have to rebuild the entire “pot line”, as they call the cells.

That helps explain why aluminium plants are always, always located near a reliable source of power. You cannot power an aluminium smelter with wind or solar. So historically they have been plugged into hydroelectric plants on very, very big rivers with a massive flow that will never dry out, or nuclear plants.

All of which brings us back to what make the Lochaber plant so interesting. Because while Scotland has plenty of rain, it doesn’t have the enormous roaring rivers of the kind you find in Canada or Russia. So the designers of this plant did something rather unusual. Instead of putting a dam in the way of a river and using it to create a current (as is the case for most hydro dams and most aluminium plants plugged into them) they created a complex series of dams and tunnels, all of which are designed to do one thing: to channel the rainwater from across a set of watersheds towards a single plant.

So they dug a long set of tunnels all the way through the flanks of Ben Nevis, connecting a whole series of different valleys. This was no mean feat. The tunnels were, at the time, the longest underground water tunnels in the world. It was a scheme the likes of which had never been seen anywhere else in the world. Go to one of these dams, the Laggan Dam, and you see a plaque commemorating the achievement.

Anyway, all those tunnels and dams are there for a single, simple reason: to ensure the water never, ever runs out - so the hydroelectric plant can always generate enough power to keep the cell room going, so the molten aluminium never freezes. And here’s the remarkable thing: it succeeded. Save for when the cells were being rebuilt and upgraded a few decades ago, the plant has never been shut down - not since 1927.

This is, in other words, an extraordinary work of human ingenuity. There are other “diversion” schemes, as they’re known, which pass water from one watershed to another. There’s the Snowy Mountains scheme in Australia as well as the Fjarðaál Aluminium Smelter in Iceland and the Kitimat Smelter in Canada. But none have been running as long as the one in the Scottish Highlands.

It’s a remarkable place, amid breathtaking scenery. And, most remarkable of all - even as much of British industry has cratered in recent decades, this place has survived. It survived bombing raids from the Luftwaffe in WWII (the site was a target for the German air force since it produced 80% of the aluminium in British spitfires). It survived energy price shocks (mostly because it has its own supply of power and doesn’t have to rely on fuels imported from elsewhere). It survived the onslaught of cheap Chinese competition, which took down most of its counterparts. Now, however, it faces a new threat, the imposition of tariffs by the United States.

I’ve written in more depth about this for Sky News. Do, if you have any interest, have a read of that piece. And do, if you find yourself in Fort William, go have a look at the Lochaber plant - you can see those pipes coming down from the mountain from far away. They are the end point of an extraordinary network of tunnels that serve a crucial industrial purpose - for the time being at least.

I wrote a piece this weekend for the Sunday Times on the Ukraine minerals deal - you can read it here. I won’t bother to repeat anything from there, but I did want to discuss one aspect there wasn’t space for - about the rather fascinating historical echoes this episode summons up.

Read much of the coverage of this story and you might have been left with the impression that this deal, in which the US would gain the rights to a stream of profits from the sale of Ukrainian minerals - everything from rare earths and lithium to other newly-mined resources, is totally unprecedented. Some frame this as a form of expropriation or extortion, imperial in its scope. Others ask questions along the lines of: “would Franklin D Roosevelt ever have asked something like this of Churchill?!”

To which the answer is: very possibly, yes.

We know as much because something quite similar did happen before. So let’s travel back in time to early 1941 - Britain’s darkest hour. As most of the continent succumbed to Hitler and Churchill clung doggedly on, a handful of men gathered in the White House to discuss what they could expect to plunder from the UK in exchange for economic support.

One idea was to take possession of the Crown Jewels. Another was that Britain should be forced to share Hong Kong with America. FDR went so far as writing a memo to his Treasury Secretary asking him to look into getting hold of rare books and paintings from the British Library for the Smithsonian or the Library of Congress.1

The President was formulating Lend-Lease, the set of loans and support that would keep Britain afloat and fighting over the coming years - a package described by Churchill as “the most unsordid act in the whole of recorded history”. Yet there is a forgotten side to that history, one which is worth recounting today, as Ukraine gets close to signing this deal with America - committing it to vast repayments for aid, in the form of mineral contracts in future years.

In case you think I’m making this up, below is the memorandum FDR sent to Henry Morgenthau, his Treasury Secretary, about taking books and artworks from the British Library in exchange for Lend-Lease.

Nor were the Crown Jewels and precious books and artworks the only items to come up in the discussions about “considerations” for Lend-Lease aid. Another asset pondered by the Americans was the Magna Carta. Actually, British officials, conscious at the extraordinary generosity of American aid, actually pondered volunteering the Magna Carta themselves. One copy from Lincoln Cathedral was on tour in the US at the time. “May we give you – at least as a token of our feelings – something of no intrinsic value whatever: a bit of parchment, more than seven hundred years old, rather the worse for wear,” wrote a Foreign Office official in a memo. “You know what it means to us; we believe it means as much to you.”

Of course, the Lincoln copy of the Magna Carta was returned to England. The Crown Jewels stayed in Britain too (some of the prize gemstones stored in biscuit tins in Windsor Castle). But don’t be fooled into thinking Lend-Lease came entirely for free. The UK was forced, under some duress from the Americans, to sell one of the prized corporations of the chemicals sector. American Viscose, the man-made fabric company, was forcibly sold off by its owner Samuel Courtauld for around $50 million: less than half its estimated value.

But perhaps more significant than any strict repayment agreement were the principles Britain agreed to sign up to when taking Lend-Lease support. Most significantly, the UK signed up to Article VII of Lend-Lease which committed it to free trade and to helping repair the international monetary system after the war. And since this meant dismantling the imperial preference system, that made it nearly impossible for Britain to maintain its empire after WWII. Most people have forgotten about Article VII these days but at the time it represented an extraordinary economic sacrifice for Britain, signed up to with gritted teeth and bemoaned for much of the war.

In the event, Lend-Lease was structured in a way that gave the president a wide discretion about actual repayments. Broadly speaking, it was left up to FDR. And so on the war went, Lend-Lease playing a key role in helping Britain defend itself from the Nazis. But then, in 1945, FDR died and everything changed. Harry Truman had a very different attitude. Within days of the Japanese surrender, Lend-Lease was cut off - far more abruptly than anyone in the UK had expected. Suddenly any support for Britain, now a civilian country, would have to be repaid, something that was pretty disastrous for the war-torn country.

When, eventually, the UK negotiated a post-war loan with America, the terms were far more onerous than expected. This might have had something to do with the fact that the main negotiator for the British side, John Maynard Keynes, was in such poor health he was dosed up on a heart medication whose main side effect was that it was a truth serum. But it was just as much a product of a more hostile White House, determined now not to provide any more financial assistance to the UK than was necessary.

In a sense, this mirrors the experience Ukraine has had in the past six months, as one president, inclined to provide almost limitless amounts to the country, was replaced with another president with a different international policy and a determination to withdraw American support.

This time around in Ukraine the amounts given by the US are a tiny fraction of Lend-Lease, as I discussed when talking about this for Sky News (video below)

Nor are there any Crown Jewels to barter, so the US is instead aping China, which has for decades been trading aid and infrastructure for investments in mining companies, especially in African nations like the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Ukraine has minerals (albeit, perhaps less world-changing amounts than some might assume). So in much the same way as the greatest assets the UK had to trade back in the 1940s - beyond the Crown Jewels - were its international businesses like American Viscose and the Empire, Ukraine’s best assets might be seen as its minerals and its NATO ambitions. Both are now on the block.

None of this is to say the deal is proportionate, or to guess who it most benefits (it will be some time before we learn that - and much depends on the contours of any eventual peace deal). Certainly, it’s worth saying that while FDR was much more interested in repayment than is remembered these days, Lend-Lease was nonetheless extraordinarily generous - far more than the support America has provided to Ukraine.

Still, this whole episode is yet another reminder, if it were needed, that even in a world getting less enthusiastic about net zero, minerals still matter enormously. If the US and other nations are going to deliver all the infrastructure we need in coming years for green technology or data centres for artificial intelligence, they will need enormous quantities of battery minerals, not to mention old-fashioned stuff like copper, iron and sand too. They have to come from somewhere - be it Ukraine or Greenland or, for that matter, America itself. We’re all living, more than ever before, in a Material World.

As Donald Trump wages trade war against his nearest economic neighbours and biggest trade partners, there is one small but significant detail we should briefly ponder. What is the main thing the US actually imports from Canada? No, it’s not fentanyl. It’s crude oil.

I realise dwelling on this might seem a little like a sideshow in the face of the extraordinary events of recent days, but I promise this is worth contemplating. In part because it’s actually rather interesting and counterintuitive. And in part because, well, if you follow this thread far enough, it leads to even more unsettling conclusions.

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Now, on the face of it, it’s actually a little odd that America is quite so reliant on Canada for its oil. After all, as is by now quite widely understood, these days the US is a massive oil producer - the biggest in the world. The biggest of all time, even. This is a consequence of the shale oil revolution - arguably the most underrated economic story of the past 50 years.

Having bewailed its enormous energy deficit for decades, America now produces far more oil than it consumes, making it a net petroleum exporter. Yet it continues to suck in vast quantities of Canadian crude.

Indeed, that reliance on Canadian oil has only grown in recent years. Look: right now, Canada accounts for a staggering 61 per cent of all imported oil to the US. That’s a pretty extraordinary degree of reliance (and explains why one of the few concessions the White House has made on the headline 25% tariff rate was for oil, which will face a lower but still significant tariff of 10%).

This outsized reliance on Canada is, it’s worth adding, a relatively recent thing: at the start of Donald Trump’s first term in office, America was importing about the same amount of oil from OPEC members, primarily in the Middle East, as it was from Canada. Up until the imposition of these tariffs, America’s energy story was becoming considerably more North American. Considerably more Canadian. So: why’s this happening?

For the answer, the best place to look isn’t economics textbooks but somewhere else: look instead at the crude oil itself. I mean, literally look at the crude.

Canadian oil is thick and gloopy. Much of it comes from tar sands and some comes from viscous deposits in the middle of the country. It doesn’t gush; it oozes, a viscous, black substance that’s somewhere between liquid and solid.

The technical term for this kind of oil is heavy oil. It takes considerably more work - more processes and technology - to refine. It’s not easy. And many of the breakthroughs in how you take this heavy oil and refine it into petroleum, kerosene and other products happened in the US, since Californian crude was mostly heavy stuff.

And since this has long been America’s expertise and since America has long been surrounded by supplies of heavy oil - in California, Canada and Venezuela - most American refineries have tended to specialise in heavy oil. This specialisation has actually intensified in recent years: look at crude imports to the US broken down by how heavy they are (the unit of weight of oil is known as API Gravity, and the lower that number is, the heavier the oil).

Look at how the darker segments of the chart have become the dominant type of import in recent years. That’s heavy oil. And, yes, most of it comes from Canada. But crude comes in many different thousands of different flavours and varieties, each one a product of the geological and organic processes which formed it over millions of years. As I wrote in Material World:

Most American refineries are set up for the kinds of heavy, sour crudes you get from Canada, Mexico and Venezuela. That made sense when it looked as if the US was running out of domestic oil, but then came the shale oil revolution. American shale oil, it turns out, is typically light and high quality, meaning it is not best-suited for domestic refineries. The upshot is that while arithmetically America is energy independent – producing far more oil than it consumes – in practice it is anything but. It must keep sucking in heavy oils from elsewhere to feed its refineries while sending Texan crude off to Europe and Asia to be refined.

Here, courtesy of this fascinating piece from Business Insider is what some shale oil from the Dakotas looks like.

Not only is it a lighter colour than the black stuff in Canada, it’s far less viscous too. It flows more like water. And since light oil is usually much purer when it comes out of the ground, it’s very different to refine. You don’t need all the clever technologies they have in American refineries. Indeed, American refineries simply aren’t equipped to deal with oils with an API gravity lighter than 30. And it turns out this is most of the stuff coming out of the US right now.

There’s a crucial irony here. While, statistically at least, the US is energy independent, producing far more crude oil than it needs, the variety of crude it produces isn’t compatible with its refineries, and hence it gets shipped off elsewhere and the US remains reliant on the rest of the world for that heavy oil.

Now, in the long run it’s not unfeasible that the US could begin to refit its refineries so they’re compatible with domestic shale oil. But up until now no-one thought that was worth doing because a) it’s very expensive b) it would take a long time and c) anyway, the US industry makes comparatively more money today from importing comparatively cheap oil (the heavy stuff sells for less) and selling their expensive, light oil overseas.

So, in the short run at least, the US will remain dependent on thick, gloopy heavy oil from elsewhere around the world. And since Donald Trump has decided to put 10% tariffs on Canadian heavy oil, the thick gloopy oil is about to become considerably more expensive which, all else equal, will push up gasoline prices pretty quickly.

Casts your mind ahead (no easy task these days), and you can probably imagine at least a couple of possibilities. The first is that the trade war ends about as quickly as it began. That, after all, was what happened with Colombia the other week. But what if it doesn’t? What happens if US refineries need to look elsewhere for their heavy, gloopy oil?

Here’s where things get, well, a little ominous. Because it turns out actually there aren’t all that many countries out there producing enormous amounts of heavy oil. There’s a bit of it in the Gulf - but most of the stuff coming out of Saudi, for instance, is too light for US refineries. There’s a few heavy oil fields in the North Sea (including the controversial Cambo field). But other than Canada, there are really only two other serious contenders for heavy oil production worldwide. Have a look:

That’s right: it’s Venezuela, or… Russia.

All of which is to say, the logic of Donald Trump’s plan to slap tariffs on the democracy directly to the north might well be to send him into the arms of two not-exactly-democracies. Raising another question: is it just a coincidence that the president has authorised a hostage handover with Venezuela? Come to mention it: what does this all spell for negotiations with Vladimir Putin over Ukraine?

All rather unsettling. And a reminder that often it’s quite enlightening to look at the world not from the top down, but from the vantage point of the materials we need for civilisation.

Did you know that the battery inside your smartphone is literally changing shape - at this very moment?

Observe it for a moment. If it’s currently plugged into its charger you might notice an area of the phone getting hotter. That’s probably the battery. But what you can’t feel or see is that as well as heating up, the battery is swelling ever so slightly, gaining as much as 13 per cent in volume along the way. If the phone isn’t plugged in, that battery will be slowly and imperceptibly shrinking, all the way until it gets plugged in again.

This idea - that the devices we carry around with us are not inert but actually pulse; breathe, almost - is one of the more magical notions I encountered while researching Material World. In the sometimes spartan world of physics, every so often you find yourself colliding with poetry.

And the reason the shape of the cell changes comes back down to physics. Now is not the time to go through the full rigmarole of what the inside of a battery looks like (for more on that go here) but the main thing you need to know is that lithium ion batteries - which is to say most batteries inside our smartphones, our laptops, our drones and our electric vehicles - are all about the lithium ions.

Essentially, when the battery is charging, lithium ions (charged atoms) are shuffling across from the positive electrode, the cathode, to the anode, the negative electrode. In the book I likened this movement to the trudging of workers from one building to another. I’m not sure this is the best of all analogies but I find it helpful, since it underlines that somewhere beneath the surface, movement is happening.

When your smartphone is plugged in, electrically-charged lithium atoms are migrating across from the cathode where they live to nest inside the graphite matrix on the anode. When they reach the anode they sit alongside the carbon atoms. This is known as intercalation and working out how it could work in batteries was one of the breakthroughs for which Stanley Whittingham was eventually awarded a Nobel prize. Here’s a helpful diagram from Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.

The battery is swelling because those graphite layers are being filled up with lithium ions. It’s heating up because a stampede is happening from one electrode to the other. Now, you don’t tend to see this because it’s not a massive swelling and, anyway, it’s happening under the casing of your phone and beneath the shell of the battery itself. But it’s still a physical transformation.

It’s worth keeping this in mind. When most people think about batteries they think of them as a kind of uniform little device but in reality there are two critical components inside them. The anode and the cathode (actually there’s more to it than that because there’s also the separator that keeps them apart and the electrolyte solution that lubricates the electrochemical reaction as those lithium ions commute from one electrode to another - but that’s for another day) are both equally important.

But invariably when you hear folks talking about batteries and why one kind is better than the other, they are usually banging on about the cathode. That’s the sexy part - the positive electrode. It’s the place where those lithium ions “live”, and by playing around with the cathode chemistry there are all sorts of clever things you can do to change the behaviour of the battery. You can add nickel, manganese and cobalt to increase its energy density. You can pair it with iron and phosphate to make it more stable and to improve its longevity.

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The anode, the negative electrode, is generally ignored because it’s “just” graphite. But this is an enormous simplification. The way that graphite is produced and applied has a direct bearing on how good a battery it will be. You need the graphite to have the perfect molecular structure to allow as many lithium ions as possible to nest within it. You also need the graphite to allow those lithium ions to come and go as they please as quickly as they please.

So the anode, and how it’s made, is actually very, very important. To complicate matters further, there are different types of graphite, with different characteristics. There’s the natural graphite you mine out of the ground and the synthetic graphite you make from crude oil. Most battery anodes are a cocktail of the two, but the proportions of each can vary.

Broadly speaking, natural graphite is better at “holding on” to charge - so if you want a battery with decent resilience and long life, you want a generous proportion of natural graphite. Synthetic graphite, on the other hand, is particularly good at allowing those lithium ions in and out of the matrix, so is the key ingredient for fast charging batteries. If you have a smartphone with a fast-charging function - that’s partly a consequence of synthetic graphite (which is to say, petroleum-based carbon).

All of which is an incredibly long-winded way of building up to what I really wanted to talk about today - the most exciting thing happening in batteries today: silicon carbon anodes.

If you’re into new tech you might have heard of silicon carbon; it’s gradually surfacing in high-end smartphones, most notably the Honor Magic Pro range and the OnePlus 13. And it means those phones have batteries that are far more energy dense while remaining incredibly thin. Look: here’s a review from Marques Brownlee correctly pointing out that these batteries are the Next Big Thing we’re going to see a lot of in the coming year.

What’s exciting about these new batteries (and actually it turns out the ones you find in smartphones are only the tip of the iceberg) is that the anode is made not just of graphite (which is to say, carbon) but of a composite of graphite and silicon.

That matters when you think about what the anode is there to do - to provide a place for those lithium ions to nest when the battery is charged. The more hospitable you can make that nest, the better the battery will work. And silicon has properties that make it particularly attractive.

For one thing, silicon is much better at accommodating lithium ions than carbon. While it takes six carbon atoms to hold one lithium ion, a single silicon atom can hold four lithium ions. Or to put it another way, if your anode is made of graphite, six atoms of the anode will hold a single lithium ion; if your anode is made of silicon, six atoms will hold 28 lithium ions. That means you can theoretically hold far more lithium on a far smaller anode, which allows you to store much more energy in a comparable space.

Nor is that the only advantage. Silicon anodes can also enable far faster charging than in current batteries. Smartphones are an early adopter of the technology but these manufacturers are mostly using only a small fraction of silicon, nano-deposited onto the carbon.

But according to Benchmark, the potential could be even greater. Imagine an electric car you could charge in as little as 15 minutes (some producers even claim the technology will allow them to get to five minute charging times). All of a sudden, when you can charge an EV nearly as quickly as you can fill a petrol car, one of the last remaining objections to the technology drops away. So what’s the catch?

Well, first and most obviously, this is a nascent technology, so it’s considerably more expensive than standard graphite anodes. But the bigger obstacle comes back to physics.

Think back to all those lithium atoms clamouring to migrate across from cathode to anode, looking for somewhere to nest in the graphite matrix of your smartphone battery. Well, the reason graphite is typically used as an anode material is that those sheets of carbon are just very good at housing the lithium without too much degradation and too much swelling.

But the way it works with silicon in an anode is somewhat different (technically this is alloying rather than intercalating) and the upshot is silicon anodes swell far more than graphite anodes when they’re being charged. Indeed, they can swell up as much as 300 per cent more than a graphite anode. All of a sudden that magical breathing we talked about up at the top becomes a kind of all-encompassing wheezing that’s hard to accommodate inside a smartphone or an electric car.

As Rory McNulty of Benchmark says, the swelling: “can cause serious mechanical degradation (particle cracking, pulverisation, delamination from the current collector, etc.) which often results in poor cycle life and cell failure. Traditional silicon materials have had to find a balance between increased performance, but reduced cell lifetime."

These are not trivial challenges. And they’re part of the explanation for why it’s taken so long for scientists (who’ve long known about silicon’s potential as an anode) to come up with decent silicon anodes. They’ve had to engineer ways around the problem, either nano-sizing the silicon particles to a small enough size that gives them room to expand, or creating a kind of molecular “scaffold” within which they can do their thing.

In the very long run it’s possible we’ll have all-silicon anodes, and there are a few interesting companies working on precisely that, places like GDI and Nexeon not to mention many of the big battery firms.

But that swelling is a tricky challenge to manage. And so for the time being think of silicon as being something that’s kind of sprinkled into standard anodes to make them more effective. That’s what those new generation smartphone batteries typically have.

Alongside other big battery goals like solid state cells and lithium metal, silicon anodes promise to revolutionise batteries. But in the Material World, nothing is simple. Physical challenges are not always easily surmounted. Physics matters. And breakthroughs (when they come, which they often do) are the product of a lot of hard work and iteration.

PS I nearly forgot to add: if you’re wondering where the silicon in these batteries actually comes from, the short answer is from much the same place the silicon in silicon chips comes from. It’s mined out of the ground in the form of quartzite before being smelted into metallurgical silicon and then purified further. More on that in chapter three of Material World.

Glance at a satellite map image of María Elena, an old mining town in the Chilean desert, and two things leap out.

The first is the strange way the streets are laid out, almost like the lines on the Union Jack. This is because they were indeed designed to look like the Union Jack, a tribute to the fact that much of the industry here in Chile used to be financed by Britain.

The second thing that leaps out is that the town is surrounded on all sides by an extremely bizarre topographical feature unlike anything you’ve probably seen before. Instead of a flat desert landscape, eroded by the wind, you see hundreds of little ridges running perpendicular to each other for miles, all the way into the distance.

These ridges, and the enormous pile of waste rock to the north of the town, are a testament to what this town exists for: mining. Specifically, Maria Elena was the epicentre for one of the most important businesses in the world. This was where much of the world’s mineral nitrates were mined.

A short history of nitrates

The story of nitrates is recounted at length in *Material World* - so feel free to skip the next bit if you’ve already read it - but in brief, it goes something like this. Back in the 18th century, the great and the good began to fret about an impending demographic crisis - the crisis Thomas Malthus became famous for. The population was growing but our ability to feed ourselves was limited by the ability of the soil to carry food. This was, to put it lightly, a Very Big Deal.

One way to increase the carrying capacity of the planet would be to find more fertiliser to help grow more crops but getting hold of fertilisers was, up until the mid-19th century, fiendishly difficult. In particular, getting hold of nitrogen was very hard indeed.

Nitrogen is, alongside potassium and phosphates, one of the three key plant nutrients (NPK). But of these three, nitrogen is by far the most important - the agent of biological growth that helps crops flourish. Moreover, nitrogen is also the critical ingredient in explosives. But for all that it is the most plentiful gas in the earth's atmosphere, there is, or rather was, no easy way of getting hold of the physical, solid or liquid nitrogen you might want to sprinkle on fields. So, for most of human history we have had to make do with "organic" fertiliser, which is to say animal manure.

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But in the mid-19th century, Europeans discovered a set of islands off the coast of Peru called the Chincha islands. These were uninhabited bird colonies with an unusual feature. Because of the dry climate on the Pacific coast of South America, the birds’ droppings had built up over thousands of years, lithifying into a deep strata of what became known as “guano”.

And guano, it so happened, was a rich source of nitrogen, phosphates and potassium. It was, in other words, the answer to everyone's prayers.

So: cue a mad rush for the guano - a bone fide gold rush (poo rush)? Tonnes of droppings was shipped around Cape Horn to Europe - and within a few decades it was gone. Exhausted - at least until, in a few hundred years the birds have produced enough droppings to create new layers all over again.

However, shortly after this geologists realised there was an even more plentiful source of mineral nitrogen to be found in the Atacama desert, across on the mainland. Caliche, as the source of this nitrogen became known, isn't a relation of guano - it's a mineral rather than a fossilised bird dropping. But, like guano this rock is rich in the nitrogen you need for fertilisers and explosives (it would spark if hit hard with something metal) and, like guano, it was only found in large quantities in this part of South America.

So the guano gold-rush was followed by the caliche gold-rush. Wars were fought over the rock (wars of great consequence, as it happens, but sorry, you really *will* have to read the book for more on that). And Chile rapidly became one of the wealthiest countries in Latin America. Towns like Maria Elena were constructed and capital flowed in, from dynasties like the Guggenheims, who staked their future on the caliche trade.

Which brings us back to those strange ridges stretching all the way into the distance as you drive in and out of María Elena. These are the piles of waste rock left behind when, nearly a century ago, the earliest diggers began scraping away the surface of the land in search of caliche. I’m not sure how long they will stay there, but perhaps the same South American climate that helped preserve the guano on the Chincha Islands will also preserve these odd ridges, so thousands of years from now, future civilisations try to work out what happened here, like today’s archaeologists puzzles over the Nasca lines further north in Peru.

Because in the first decades of the 20th century, along came an innovation that, in the world of nitrates at least, changed everything: the Haber Bosch process. Helped by Carl Bosch, Fritz Haber came up with a way of doing what everyone up until then had struggled to do: he turned atmospheric nitrogen into the physical stuff you can sprinkle on the ground. It was arguably the single biggest scientific discovery of the modern era. And it meant all of a sudden there was a nearly limitless substitute for the rocks in the ground here at María Elena.

The Conventional wisdom about caliche

And that brings us to the conventional wisdom about the caliche trade, which is, in short, that it is a historical artefact. Most of the miners are gone. The gold rush is over.

María Elena isn’t quite abandoned, but driving around it feels a little eerie. When I visited there a few years ago, a guest of SQM, the lithium mining company, we stayed in the old Guggenheim Residence, which is very charming, if somewhat less grand than you might have thought from the name. The whole place feels like it’s from another era - which, of course, it is.

Flicking through the guestbook I discovered, a few pages back, that another person to have stayed there was none other than Fidel Castro, in the 1970s.

On the north side of the town is the old Guggenheim caliche refinery. It was abandoned some years ago and, when I visited at least, was shrouded with fog - the camanchaca that comes in from the Pacific across the desert. The effect was to give it a woebegone appearance.

Some distance away on the highway, past miles and miles of those old ridges of discarded rock, is an abandoned mining town, Pedro de Valdivia. It’s an eerie place, the homes still left more or less as they were when the residents abandoned it. It’s a little like an old Wild West set, there in the middle of the desert, a testament to a bygone era when caliche came out of the ground here and helped feed the world.

But here’s the thing about that conventional wisdom about caliche: it’s not quite accurate. Because while caliche mining certainly isn’t talked about as much as it was a century ago, it turns out it hasn’t stopped. On the contrary, in 2023, Chile was still mining more than 720,000 tonnes of caliche - comfortably more than for most of the 1970s, back when Fidel Castro visited.

Why? Because - this is a lesson you’ll hear a lot in this series - once we start mining something, we humans very, very rarely ever stop. In the case of caliche, those ghost towns are mostly a testament to the fact not that mining has stopped, but that it no longer employs half as many people.

Further down the road at the Coya Sur refinery, SQM is turning out enormous quantities of mineral nitrates, much as the Guggenheims did here a century ago. What’s changed, aside from the number of people working here, is that they are using far more advanced processes to squeeze ever more minerals out of the caliche. The old Guggenheim plant, which boiled and bubbled the rocks, has been replaced by heap leaching systems and by advanced plants - massive juddering towers turning out millions of prills - the little ball-bearing sized particles of fertiliser, which will be shipped around the world to be sprinkled on fields.

According to the conventional wisdom, this place shouldn’t really exist. There is a perfect synthetic substitute for the nitrogen made here. The Haber Bosch process should have killed the caliche business. And it certainly accounts for the vast, vast majority of nitrogen produced around the world.

Yet the key thing about this chart - the thing that’s often ignored - is that the old fashioned mined stuff never went away. Look very closely at the black. Yes it’s piddling in comparison with the blue. But it’s still there. Somehow, by cutting costs and improving their efficiency, the caliche mines are still running.

In one respect, you might find this a little depressing. The desert is still being carved up by diggers and caliche ripped out from the surface - long after it was supposed to have been innovated out of existence. But now ponder how those Haber Bosch plants actually work. They take hydrogen out of gas or (in many Chinese plants) coal and use it to fix nitrogen from the air. In the process they are responsible for significant greenhouse gas emissions. In practice, this old fashioned mineral way of getting fertiliser is - even once you take account of all the trucks and energy used in the Chilean desert - more environmentally friendly than the modern methods that didn’t quite displace it.

But it turns out caliche is far from the only forgotten material we’re still mining plenty of, decades after we were supposed to have stopped. The next substance in this series is, if you can believe it, even more noxious and pollutive than the much-maligned greenhouse gases. Yet we still mine it in astounding quantities. For better or worse, the human appetite for minerals and mining rarely diminishes.

When, the other day, Donald Trump signalled that he’s prepared to take back control of the Panama Canal, his remarks, on social media and at an event prompted predictable derision in many quarters.

Could there be a more preposterous idea?! Well, I’m here to tell you that: yes, there is a more preposterous idea. And I want to tell you about it. Because as preposterous ideas go, it’s actually quite interesting.

But before we get to my preposterous idea, first let’s talk about the president-elect’s. Because in some senses his comments aren’t quite as preposterous as some people are suggesting.

The Treaties of the Panama Canal

Trump’s beef goes back to 1977, and a treaty signed by the late Jimmy Carter. The 1977 Torrijos-Carter Treaty pledged that Panama would gain control of the canal after 1999 - which was indeed what happened.

But the Carter treaty is best seen as a revision of another treaty, the original canal treaty which dates back to 1903 and gave the US a perpetual lease over the Panama Canal Zone, a six-mile zone surrounding the canal across the isthmus.

Panamanians were furious about this treaty from more or less the moment it was signed in late 1903 - and for good reason. It was done more or less at the barrel of a gun.

To see why, it’s helpful to begin the story in early 1903, some months before the treaty in question was signed. At this point, Panama was not an independent state but a province of Colombia.

The Americans, set on building the canal in Panama, had tried to negotiate yet another treaty (sorry, there are lots of treaties going on here) with a Colombian representative called Tomás Herrán. This precursor to the precursor to the Carter treaty had one critical difference: the Americans would get a one-hundred year lease on the canal - with the option of renewal.

Had this treaty been signed then - who knows? - perhaps there’s a parallel universe where America would have given up the canal in 2014 (a century after its completion) and maybe Panama would still be a part of Colombia. But what actually happened was that the Colombian senate refused to ratify the Hay–Herrán Treaty, disgusted with the idea of giving up control of some of their land.

This was, in hindsight, a terrible miscalculation, for a few months later they would lose control not just of the six miles surrounding the canal but the entire province of Panama. Because, furious about being rejected, America, under President Theodore Roosevelt, encouraged a local junta led by Manuel Amador, to secede from Colombia. Bunau-Varilla (we’ll get to why on earth a Frenchman was so involved in all this in a moment) wrote Amador a $100,000 cheque to fund the independence movement. By November, the rebels had declared independence in a bloodless coup (that it was bloodless owed at least something to the looming presence of American gunboats neaby).

Anyway, before the dust of the revolution had settled, Bunau-Varilla, who in return for his $100,000 cheque had promptly been appointed as Panamanian ambassador to the US (that he wasn’t Panamanian seemed not to be a problem), rapidly did a deal with the Americans. Together with US Secretary of State John Hay he drafted a newly-revised treaty for the canal. But this time there was one key difference versus the one the Americans had previously attempted to agree with the Colombians: instead of leasing the canal for 100 years, the American lease would be perpetual.

Naturally the newly-independent Panamanians were outraged. Why on earth should their first major diplomatic deal upon winning independence be to sacrifice the sovereignty of a key slice of their country? Well, the answer was: they were strong-armed into it. The best account of this is to be found in David McCullough’s magisterial history of the canal:

[Bunau-Varilla] sent a 370-word cable to Minister de la Espriella that struck an entirely new note of fear. If the government of Panama failed to ratify the treaty immediately upon the treaty’s arrival at Colón, then the almost certain consequence would be an immediate suspension of American protection over the new republic and the signing of a canal treaty with Bogotá.

The mention of Bogotá at the end is the key bit. If the Panamanians didn’t agree then America might turn back to the Colombians. The independence movement would be over - a few weeks after it began.

It was blackmail of the highest order. As far as anyone can work out, this threat came not from the White House but from Bunau-Varilla himself. As McCullough writes:

In any event, it was the ultimate knife at the throat and wholly spurious. The notion that Roosevelt would abandon Panama at this point, that he would leave the junta to the vengeance of Colombia, that he would now suddenly turn around and treat with Bogotá, was not simply without foundation, but ridiculous to anyone the least familiar with the man or the prevailing temper in Washington. Nothing of the kind was ever even remotely contemplated at the White House or the State Department. “This time I hit the mark,” Bunau-Varilla was to exclaim. “The Government of Panama was at last liberated from the morbid influence of its delegation.”

So, thanks to the perfidy of their French ambassador to Washington, Panama signed the treaty and the rest is history. America got its perpetual lease. Panama got its independence. And the festering wound of the Canal Zone continued until the 1970s, when it was finally lanced by Jimmy Carter.

But Republicans have been dismayed by what they see as Carter’s treachery ever since. They believe that since the canal was built by American workers (many of whom laid down their lives) and would never have happened without American capital, the country should continue to control the canal.

The fact that fees for passage (which American vessels had to pay due to another treaty - the Hay–Pauncefote Treaty - but I think by now we’ve all had enough of treaties haven’t we) have risen so much in recent years is a further insult. All of which brings us to the president-elect’s comments. Preposterous they might seem, but they are rooted in a historical story which goes back a long way.

The (French) Back Story

Indeed, in some respects, this story goes back even further. Why, you’re probably wondering, was a Frenchman intimately involved in this treaty - a treaty Donald Trump would rather like to reinstate? Because the whole reason the canal came to be there in the first place was thanks not to the Americans, but to the French.

People had dreamt of digging a canal through the Central American isthmus, linking the Pacific and the Atlantic, ever since it was encountered by the first Spanish colonists in the 16th century. Doing so would save ships thousands of miles of treacherous passage through the Drake Passage and Cape Horn on the southern tip of South America. But no-one could quite agree on the best location for the crossing.

Some pointed towards the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico, others suggested a crossing in Nicaragua. Then there were two potential routes in Panama - one over the Darién Gap, a vast uninhabited jungle between modern day Panama and Colombia and another crossing from Limón Bay to Panama City.

The French plumped for the latter option - for not entirely rational reasons. Having just completed work on the Suez Canal, French entrepreneur Ferdinand de Lesseps decided he was the man to cross the Central American isthmus too. But he was determined that, as in Suez, this canal should be a sea level canal - in other words it wouldn’t have any locks to lift ships up and down.

This was a silly idea. It is silly today: Panama is far more mountainous than Suez; digging a canal at sea level would involve displacing a nearly impossible amount of rock; and while Suez doesn’t have to contend with much in the way of tides, there are enormous tidal differences between The Atlantic and Pacific. It was even sillier in the late 19th century, when the machinery wasn’t big or powerful enough to move the necessary earth to create such a canal.

So while the Frenchman pursued his silly idea, the Americans spent a long time thinking about where to build a canal and came up with a more sensible idea: build it not in Panama but in Nicaragua.

A canal there would have a few advantages. For one thing, Nicaragua is closer to America than Panama, so ships wouldn’t have to sail as far out of their way to get there. Even more compellingly, the amount of canal you’d have to dig would be considerably less, since ships could go via Lake Nicaragua. The downside was you’d have to build big locks to get them up and down from the lake, but a number of reports suggested a Nicaragua canal would be considerably cheaper and more practical than one in Panama.

However, one moral of history is: never to tell a Frenchman he’s being silly, especially someone like Ferdinand de Lesseps. Because America’s disapproval only encouraged him to double down on his plan. And between 1880 and 1889, he led a bold expedition to dig his sea level canal across Panama.

It was an utter disaster. The land was too challenging, the workers fell victim to tropical diseases. De Lesseps eventually conceded that his original plan was flawed, and that he would have to introduce some locks (in other words, that sea level canal - the whole reason he chose Panama - was a non-starter). But by then it was too late. Extraordinary amounts of money were lost - so much so that it caused a major political scandal which took down much of the French establishment.

Even after the French plan imploded, America was still set on building a Nicaragua canal. In terms of total cost, it was still the cheaper, more sensible option. But this is where we come back to Bunau-Varilla - the man who would eventually blackmail Panama into signing the Canal Zone to the Americans. He had been working as the general manager of de Lesseps’ canal company when it collapsed, and had been left with a lot of seemingly value-less stock as a result. In an effort to earn back some money, he spent years trying to persuade the Americans to complete the work the French hadn’t quite finished.

And he had a point. Once you adjusted for the work already done by the French, it was somewhat cheaper for the Americans to finish their Panama Canal than to build a brand new one from scratch in Nicaragua. So America decided the canal would be in Panama, not Nicaragua. And this is what brings me to my even more preposterous idea. Why shouldn’t the Americans go back to their original, original plan and build a canal in Nicaragua?

The Nicaragua Canal Mk III

You see, the Panama Canal has some pretty profound problems. One is that the locks aren’t big enough to fit the world’s biggest ships. Even more problematic is the fact that it is running out of water. That might seem like an odd thing to say about a canal, but this comes back to the fact that unlike Suez, a sea level canal, Panama needs locks to function. And to make canal locks work you need a lot of water in a lake or reservoir at the top - so that water can fill the locks each time a ship wants to be lifted to higher altitude.

The way this worked in Panama was that the fearsome Chagres River was dammed to create a massive artificial lake in the middle of the country - Gatun Lake. Gatun is massive, but so too are the water demands of the canal. The passage of a single ship necessitates more than 50 million gallons of water to be drained out of Gatun and into the locks. According to this article, “Every day, the canal uses two-and-a-half times the amount of water consumed by the eight million residents of New York City.”

And the challenge in Panama is, partly down to changes in rainfall patterns (possibly due to climate change), partly down to the large amount of traffic through the canal, water levels in Gatun Lake are falling. Indeed, a recent drought forced the authorities to limit the number of ships passing through the canal. This is a big deal - near existential for global trade.

All of which is why talk of a Nicaragua canal hasn’t ever gone away.

There are plenty of reasons to be sceptical about a canal through Nicaragua. For one thing, there are big environmental questions about churning through parts of the rainforest and Lake Nicaragua. But there’s also the promise of building a canal which doesn’t suffer Panama’s problems: which could carry bigger vessels and which wouldn’t face water shortages (Lake Nicaragua is far, far bigger than Gatun Lake).

Up until recently, a Chinese company had been planning to build a canal through Lake Nicaragua. That plan was cancelled last year. But Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega is still busy trying to persuade Chinese investors to build another canal across the country - albeit not via Lake Nicaragua.

On the basis of his social media posts, part of Donald Trump’s annoyance with Panama is the presence of Chinese soldiers there. Would he really be comfortable with China actually building a canal even closer to the US?

Of course, the most likely outcome is that the Nicaragua canal remains where it has done for a century and a half - a fantasy in a few peoples’ minds. A route via Lake Nicaragua - let alone the one being touted by Ortega today - would be eye-wateringly expensive. It is, as I promised, utterly, utterly preposterous.

But is it that much more preposterous than overturning a recent treaty in favour of a seriously dodgy treaty drawn up by a Frenchman more than a century ago?

There are many extraordinary creatures in the world, but few are quite as extraordinary as the sperm whale.

These vast, enigmatic mammals have long fascinated and terrified humans. Don’t take it from me, take it from Herman Melville. But in this case the reality is even more fascinating than the myths.

Capable of diving thousands of feet beneath the waves for over an hour at a time, the sperm whale has perhaps the most exotic diet on the planet. As the biggest toothed predator on earth, it feasts on mysterious bottom-dwelling sharks, skates and, most notably of all, the giant squid - another of the world’s least well-understood animals.

Superlatives abound. Sperm whales have the biggest heads (in proportion to the rest of their bodies) of any large animal. A typical sperm whale might be one-third head. And while much of what is to be found inside that head is brain (yes, sperm whales are also notable for having the largest brains on earth) even more space is given over to something else: spermaceti.

Spermaceti is the name given to this very unusual organ as well as the waxy oil it produces. Even today no-one is entirely sure what function the spermaceti serves. One theory says it has something to do with buoyancy, the other that it is for echolocation. What we do know is that it is one of those very unusual things - an organ unique to a single species (well, strictly speaking the three species of sperm whale).

The upshot is that that enormous head contains within it a vast reservoir - somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 gallons in a male whale - of spermaceti oil.

Sperm whale oil is a very special oil, comprised of long chained molecules known as fatty esters. These things are quite rare in the wild, to the extent that there are few other naturally-occurring substances which behave quite the way sperm whale oil does.

Humans are ingenious at devising all sorts of random uses for all sorts of random substances (come to think of it, that’s pretty much the subtext of Material World) and so it was for this oil. Sailors soon realised that it worked brilliantly as a lubricant for their clocks and watches (its viscosity doesn’t change much whatever the temperature - yet another unusual feature of this unusual substance). But eventually an even more popular use-case was discovered: as a fuel for lanterns.

This of course was long before the invention of electricity and most other light sources had severe drawbacks. Tallow and other forms of oil derived from animal fat burnt with a dim, smoky flame. Whale oil, by contrast, provided an excellent light and produced little smoke. While tallow burnt with a foul smell, whale oil produced no unpleasant odours. And so, in the early days of lighting, spermaceti became a sought-after fuel for lanterns.

If you have read much about the history of lighting - or for that matter Material World - you will know what happened next. Mankind began to hunt and slaughter sperm whales in vast quantities. People panicked that they would soon be extinct. Then, in the middle of the 19th century, humankind worked out how to make kerosene from crude oil, and it rapidly replaced whale oil in lanterns. Since kerosene burnt six times brighter, there was no need any longer to kill whales for lighting.

As William Nordhaus, the Nobel prize-winning economist, put it in his seminal paper on lighting, as well as interviews since, kerosene “saved the whales”. It’s a great, counterintuitive story: look! Fossil fuels saved the world (until they threatened it a couple of centuries later)! And so this Nobel prize winning version of history has been trotted out pretty much everywhere ever since, including, I should acknowledge, in my own book. It’s become a part of the conventional wisdom.

But there’s a problem with the Nordhaus version of events. It is plain wrong.

Crude oil did not save the whales. While it’s true that whale oil fell out of favour as a fuel for lighting after the discovery of kerosene, the number of whales being killed in the following years didn’t fall to zero. On the contrary, it rose. A lot. Look:

The chart tells the story. As you see, it’s pretty stark. Far from dropping to zero after the widespread adoption of kerosene, whale oil catches only fell a bit before picking up dramatically in the 20th century. Many multiples more died in the 20th century, long after Nordhaus suggested they had been saved, than in the 19th. Why?

The story features in Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s brilliant book More and More and More, which I highly recommend as a companion piece to Material World. As he explains, it turns out lighting oil wasn’t the only use we found for spermaceti.

As I mentioned earlier, right from the start whale oil had other uses, beyond lighting. It was used to grease naval clocks, as well as being deployed in pharmaceuticals, paints and explosives. And when added to conventional petroleum oil, spermaceti transformed a good engine lubricant into the world’s finest engine lubricant. Thanks to those esters, whale oil-infused lubricants were incredibly good at reducing friction. And so while whales were no longer hunted for lighting fuel, they became even more prized in the 20th century for a somewhat more obscure use no-one spent much time thinking about.

And since whaling technology had come along so much since the 19th century - with powerful diesel engined vessels equipped with ever more lethal harpoons and even onboard processing plants, allowing sailors to drain the spermaceti out of their catches at sea rather than having to bring them back to land - sperm whale populations were ravaged long, long after the discovery of kerosene.

Indeed, that chart above slightly understates the full scale of the onslaught in the 20th century, because quite a lot of the whaling fleets from Japan and the Soviet Union weren’t declaring all their catches to the International Whaling Commission. Adjusted estimates are somewhat higher.

Fressoz’s point is that far from saving the whales…

Actually, petroleum increased the demand for whale oil: top-of-the-range lubricants for gearboxes and machine tools used to contain between 5 and 20 per cent whale oil. Until the mid-1970s, aircraft turbojet engines were lubricated at least in part with whale oil.

But this story ends somewhat happily, because that chart really does show a dramatic fall to close to zero in recent decades. So what really saved the whales? Well, the answer is first, the whaling bans which, across most of the world, made it illegal to hunt these whales (a few countries refused to sign up, but catches have nonetheless dropped dramatically in recent years). And, in the face of this enforced shortage of whale oil, lubricant manufacturers and other users of whale oil had to try to find a satisfactory substitute.

Lo and behold, in the 1970s there was a sharp rise in research and development spending on esters. Chemists worked out how to create synthetic alternatives. Eventually, however, it was the natural world that provided the best substitute: the oil from the jojoba tree, which has most of the same properties as whale oil. All of a sudden, an obscure plant, never much cultivated, helped fill the gap left by spermaceti.

So in one respect, Nordhaus was right: technology did eventually save the whales. But a) it happened more than a century later than he suggested, by which point whale stocks were much lower than in the 1860s, b) the technology in question wasn’t derived from crude oil and c) it was only developed in response to a government-enforced ban on whale hunting.

These might seem like minute distinctions, but they all matter, and perhaps it’s worth reflecting on this in the 2020s. After all, here we are at another inflection point, with a lively debate between those who believe technology, left more or less to its own devices, will deliver the solutions to climate change and those who believe nothing will happen without government intervention.

For a long time that Nordhaus-fuelled conventional wisdom, that kerosene saved the whales, left one with the impression that technology alone could save the day. But now ponder the corrected story of the whales and you’re left with, well, if not the opposite impression, then a considerably more nuanced conclusion. And I’ve been taught another lesson: always fact check Nobel laureates!

Anyway, as promised, this was the first of a series of posts about “forgotten materials” - substances we convinced ourselves we had stopped exploiting even as we were mining massive amounts of them. There’s quite a few other interesting examples to come in the weeks ahead.

UPDATE 31 Dec: A couple of readers have pointed me towards this absolutely excellent paper on precisely this topic from Richard York a few years ago. I hadn’t read it, but I wish, in hindsight, that I had. Please do send me further thoughts/links via the comments or social media.

A few months ago I promised to write a series of posts documenting the world’s lost materials. I was quite excited about it; over time I was hoping to build up a catalogue of all of those substances humanity once used to mine and extract from the earth’s crust, but have now been exhausted.

All of which is why it’s about time I informed you, dear readers, that I failed. After a single post (Malachite) I’m taking the decision to retire the Lost Materials series. Why? Because in trying to hunt around for minerals we have run out of, I came to an unexpected conclusion. So far, we haven’t really, meaningfully run out of, well, pretty much anything.

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True: as I wrote in that first post, it’s getting harder to find decent chunks of malachite, but then again, it’s not like there’s no malachite left. Not in the slightest. Many of you kindly sent in suggestions for other minerals I should investigate. One reader suggested Silphium, an ancient much-vaunted Roman plant, but the problem there wasn’t so much that it is or isn’t exhausted but that we don’t really know what silphium actually was.

There were some very useful suggestions of stones we used to have lots of in the UK but don’t seem to have much of anymore - things like Whitby jet or Serpentine or Blue John. But in each case I had to conclude that while we don’t find all that much of these rocks we line on our shores anymore (or, perhaps it’s more accurate to say, we regulate their mining much more) there’s no shortage of similar geological specimens elsewhere in the world. They are certainly not “exhausted”.

I kept looking for exhausted things. Given a fair few species of animal and plant have become extinct in recent centuries, I figured I might have more chance finding a type of wood or herb we don’t have anymore. But even here the commonplace suggestions weren’t quite as compelling as you might have thought.

For instance, in Bill Bryson’s magnificent book At Home, he writes of the particular kind of mahogany used by Chippendale for his extraordinary furniture

Chippendale and his contemporaries were masters without any doubt, but they enjoyed one special advantage that can never be replicated: the use of the finest furniture wood that has ever existed, a species of mahogany called Swietenia mahogani. Found only on parts of Cuba and Hispaniola (the island today shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in the Caribbean, Swietenia mahogani has never been matched for richness, elegance and utility. Such was the demand for it that it was entirely used up – irremediably extinct – within fifty years of its discovery. Some two hundred other species of mahogany exist in the world, and most are very good woods, but they have nothing like the richness and smooth workability of the departed S. mahogani. The world may one day produce better chairmakers than Chippendale and his peers, but it will never produce finer chairs.

But here’s the thing, as far as I can tell (and do write in if I’m wrong about this), Bryson’s not quite right about this. Because there’s actually plenty of Swietenia mahogani out there. True: it’s a protected species, so it’s much harder to get hold of (which, when you think about it, sounds perfectly sensible). But it’s certainly not extinct. Don’t believe me? Look at wikipedia!

That being said, I know for a fact one cannot always rely on Wikipedia. Because another of the wild goose chases I found myself on in search of lost materials - indeed, it was going to be the next in the series of posts on this topic, as I hinted at the end of the last one - was a very particular type of marble. Look at the Wikipedia page for Carrara marble and (at the time of writing at least), the second paragraph declares that the very finest grade of Carrara marble, known as “statuario” is exhausted:

The pure white statuario grade was used for monumental sculpture, as “it has a high tensile strength, can take a high gloss polish and holds very fine detail”. By the late 20th century Carrara’s highest-grade marble had run out

Perhaps, I thought for a moment, statuario was the thing I’d been looking for - the material humankind has indeed exhausted. After all, the marble in Carrara is the product of a very particular moment in geology, when ancient seashells and marine creatures were compressed into an incredibly pure, white vein of stone. Statuario, which Michaelangelo used for some of his great sculptures, is particularly special, because it has an incredibly fine grain, enabling you to carve tiny, beautiful features out of it. Perhaps it was plausible that we might have run out?

But then I did a bit of thinking. If statuario marble were really exhausted that would mean it would be impossible to carve intricate white marble sculptures these days. But I literally know sculptors who are still doing just that. Consider the work of an old friend of mine, Nick Hornby, an artist who has made works out of precisely that supposedly no-longer-available marble.

So then I did a bit of research. I spoke to a couple of people in the marble trade, people involved in quarrying marble in Carrara too. And I discovered that far from being exhausted, there’s enough statuario marble still left in Carrara to last the world four hundred years or more.

The apocryphal story probably found its way to Wikipedia because the vein of statuario rock wiggles its way through the mountains, with the upshot that it might very plausibly be exhausted in one quarry, only to show up in another part of the mountain. But Wikipedia is wrong. It has not run out.

Perhaps if there’s a bit of wisdom to be extracted from this whole wild goose chase it’s that while we like to tell ourselves humankind has exhausted this or that resource, we are much better at talking about it than actually, well, exhausting said resource.

Perhaps I ought to have known this sooner. After all, I gave over quite a large chunk of the copper section of Material World to documenting why, contrary to a lot of doom-laden articles and analyses at various points in history, we never actually ran out of copper. We didn’t even do all that much substitution (we use aluminium a fair bit for things like high voltage power lines, but in part that’s because aluminium is light). We mostly just got a lot better at mining copper.

The flip side of that “getting better at mining” was much bigger holes in the ground. But while there’s no shortage of people fretting about how we are about to run out of copper or oil or gold, there’s also no shortage of people ready to come up with new wheezes in refining, or new locations to find the stuff.

So while this particular series is cancelled after a single episode, in its place I have a plan for a new series of posts. This time, rather than looking at materials we have run out of, I want to look at something else. The underlying message (or one of them) from Material World is that human beings have a pretty healthy, possibly insatiable, appetite for digging stuff out of the ground, this series will focus on the minerals we are still extracting (in some cases in record amounts) even though most people thought we stopped doing it long ago.

The Lost Minerals series is dead. Long live the “Forgotten Minerals” series. Next post coming soon(ish).

PS if you think I’m wrong and in fact there is a lost mineral you can suggest, it’s not too late to pop up in the comments with your suggestions. Thank you to those who did last time and sorry I couldn’t turn those suggestions into an actual series…

The version I’ve borrowed above comes from this excellent Economist piece about solar power but it was originally made by Auke Hoekstra, and has been reproduced many times since. Here’s one from the folks at Carbon Brief.

Anyway, what the chart shows is powerful: year after year the International Energy Agency (generally seen as the global authority on this stuff) predicts that the amount of solar capacity around the world will soon plateau, or will only rise very gradually. But year after year something very different happens: the amount of solar out there has risen exponentially.

Hurrah! And if you put this chart alongside the other promising charts showing, for instance, that the price of solar panels is also going down rapidly, so much so that they are cheap enough these days that the Dutch are using them as fences, you might be left with the impression that technology has already ridden to the rescue here. In fact, you might be wondering, why on earth is anyone panicking any more about the energy transition?

But here’s the thing. This chart has what you might call an “evil twin”, a cousin that gets far less of an airing - but probably should. In fact, the only place I’ve seen it is in a newsletter from the excellent Rob West. Here’s what it looks like:

You can see it’s broadly speaking the same pattern. But this time we’re looking not at total solar output but something else: the total amount of coal being burned in China. Every year the IEA predicts that coal consumption will plateau or drop. And each year it turns out to be wrong. In fact, China burns ever more coal.

This is a big deal, a really big deal - and yet it’s often glossed over by policymakers. Since every year the IEA can predict that coal output will soon peak, politicians can continue to claim that the transition is happening - that coal is being consigned to history. Yet while some countries, most notably the UK, are ending their reliance on coal for power, those changes are little more than a rounding error in the face of the global picture - that coal is still powering much of the world.

I mention all of this because yesterday the IEA came out and admitted what has long been apparent to anyone paying close enough attention: that contrary to its recent claims, coal is not peaking. Indeed, for the first time in many years, it produced a forecast for global coal consumption that sees it rising slightly rather than falling slightly in the coming years (look at the 2024 line for China below). We are, in short, some way away from peak coal. This is a big shift.

But the broader point that’s worth pondering is the extent to which the two charts - solar and coal - are linked. Because most of those solar panels and electric car batteries we’re buying in Europe are ultimately dependent on Chinese coal.

As you’ll know if you’ve read Material World, making a solar panel (or silicon chip) involves the use of metallurgical coal. Making a car battery is an energy intensive process. And while it’s certainly the case that many Chinese plants are using ever more renewable power (and there’s a virtuous circle: more solar production means more panels which can power some of that production) for the time being most Chinese industry is still powered by coal. Albeit that they’re covering all industry - not just the green stuff, those aggregate coal consumption figures tell a stark story. As Javier Blas puts it, the green transition is powered by coal.

Our politicians might not like to discuss this. But in Europe in particular, the transition depends rather heavily on buying cheap Chinese technology to enable us to meet all those mandates for green vehicles and power. We probably couldn’t afford it otherwise. And that also means depending on Chinese coal. What else did you think was powering most of those factories?

True: a good proportion of the fall in Chinese green product prices (think: those solar panels so cheap you can turn them into fencing) is due to learning curves and enormous scale of production in China, at least some of it comes down to the fact that coal is still the cheapest form of firm (that is to say, 100 per cent available 24 hours of the day) power.

It’s all intertwined.

None of the above should stop any of us from being techno-optimists. It’s still possible to envisage a future with lower carbon emissions. That chart at the top is still incredibly inspiring. But it also has a dark side, about which we shouldn’t delude ourselves.

The more we in Europe come to expect ever cheaper Chinese batteries and solar panels (while ignoring the hidden story of how these products are actually made), the more coal will be burned in Chinese power stations and metallurgical silicon plants to give us those cheap items.

The charts are two sides of the same coin.

If you’ve read Material World you will already know all about Spruce Pine - a small town in North Carolina which, unbeknownst even to many residents, is one of the most important locations in the global economy, for a very simple reason. It is responsible for the production of the vast majority of the high purity quartz sand used to make the silicon wafers which go on to become semiconductors and solar panels.

This is not the time or place to run through the long, complex and actually quite fascinating journey a silicon atom goes through on the way from the quarry to the insides of a smartphone (or for that matter a solar panel). You’ll have to refer back to chapter 3 of the book for that.

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But suffice it to say, Spruce Pine’s role in this journey is very important indeed. Because when you’re taking ultra pure 99.99999999% silicon (polysilicon, as it’s known) and turning it into a silicon wafer (which is not just chemically pure but also atomically structured into a perfect monocrystal) you need a similarly pure quartz crucible in which to melt it.

And those crucibles, used in what’s known as the Czochralski process, need to be made of a pristine form of quartz sand - which is where Spruce Pine comes in.

As I wrote in the book:

There are a few micro producers in India and Siberia, but nothing to rival the consistency and quality of the two mines in Spruce Pine, which raises some unsettling questions. What if something happened to those mines? What if, say, the single road that winds down from them to the rest of the world was destroyed in a landslide? Short answer: it would not be pretty.

We may be in the process of learning the answer to those questions, because Hurricane Helene has caused terrible flooding in North Carolina and, to judge from pictures I’ve seen online and been sent by folks in the industry, it doesn’t look good.

At this stage it’s worth emphasising that we still know very little about the status on the ground and in the refineries at Spruce Pine. More to the point, human lives are still at risk, and so the most important thing to bear in mind is the human cost of a disaster like this. The town has only one major road into it and that looks to be cut off - so all thoughts are with the emergency workers, not to mention the people of Spruce Pine.

But the episode also underlines something that crops up again and again in Material World - the fragility of the economic underpinnings of our lives. Few people spend much time thinking about a place like Spruce Pine, until something like this happens and then all of a sudden it’s all important.

It’s a little like the fertiliser plant I wrote about in the book, which shut down and then all of a sudden the UK was out of another chemical no-one had spent much time contemplating. So lesson one is: these pinch points are everywhere. And we should really try harder to identify them before disasters rather than after them.

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Lesson two comes back to the question everyone is asking: what does this mean for the global economy? After all, roughly 99 per cent of global GDP depends, one way or another, on semiconductors. The pace of the energy transition depends on solar photovoltaic cells. And now a critical cog in the supply chain for these two products is in question. So what next?

That depends on two things. First, just how long Spruce Pine quartz output is knocked out. We know that Sibelco, the biggest producer there (the smaller being the Imerys-owned Quartz Corp) has announced that it is “temporarily halting operations”. If those operations can recommence in a few weeks - or even a month or two - that would not be especially disruptive for global semiconductor production.

The thing to remember here is one lesson that came from the Covid-era semiconductor shortage. Back then, the industry struggled to respond to the sudden increase in demand for silicon chips (as people started working from home in their droves). And in large part that was because making computer chips is a surprisingly slow process. It takes weeks - sometimes months - to turn some lumps of polysilicon into a perfect silicon wafer. It takes weeks if not months to turn that piece of silicon into a silicon chip. This is not, in other words, a “just in time” business like car manufacturing, where a part turns up at 10am only to be fitted into a car an hour or two later.

And in some senses that slowness might actually benefit the industry this time around. Because, unlike just in time supply chains, silicon wafer producers tend to keep decent stockpiles of both wafers and crucibles. As it happens, those stockpiles have been run down quite a bit in recent months, as the excellent Semianalysis points out. But still… you’re talking about months of stockpiles rather than days or weeks.

Even so, if the Spruce Pine facilities are down for more than, let’s say, three months, then that leaves a big gap between those stockpiles and new supply of high purity quartz. So what are the omens there?

Here we get into the speculation side of things, so treat the following with caution, but I did speak recently to John Walker, a former chief executive of The Quartz Corp - so someone who, unlike nearly everyone else talking about this (including me) actually has personal experience of working in High Purity Quartz production at Spruce Pine.

How long does he think the plant will be down for? He didn’t want to put a figure on it, but I came away with the impression that six months would be a good result. Why?

“Safety must be the number one priority at this time,” said Walker. “You’ve got to let the flood waters subside and water quality to return to normal levels - that may take several weeks. Then you’ve got to clean everything and ascertain what equipment you need to replace.

“If the damage is extensive, equipment lead time and availability of labour are significant factors how long it takes to get operations up and running. We must mindful that many people have lost their homes and been displaced, which is a tragedy.

“Several processing and refining facilities are right on the river. If the river has risen as much as six metres as reported, and what photos from the area suggest, then production facilities will have will have been flooded. Local sources have indicted that the railway tracks have also been damaged as has the road, power, water treatment and communications infrastructure in the area.

“Also, any finished goods inventories, or intermediate finished products, may well have been damaged by floodwater.

“If the river has risen that high, every pump and motor and gearbox will be underwater.

“And since this is high purity quartz, you have now got silt and soil in there. Cleaning and sorting it out will take time.”

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So that’s not especially encouraging. But that brings us to an equally important question: let’s say Spruce Pine is down for a while. How long until alternative sources of high purity quartz are located and brought online?

After all, as I wrote in the book, it’s not as if there’s no high purity quartz elsewhere. It’s more that Spruce Pine has a near unique combination of purity, availability and price. There are mines in Russia and Brazil, not to mention China, which already produce lots of high purity quartz. There are some companies which are able to make high purity quartz synthetically.

So yes, in the long run, this will not be the end of the world. This will not “end” semiconductor or solar cell manufacture. Then again, as someone once said, in the long run we’re all dead. In the short run, actually ramping up that alternative production will take some time and, just as importantly, some cost.

All of which is to say, it’s quite hard to imagine this won’t have at least some impact (might be small, might not) on the cost of silicon wafers. Does that mean semiconductors and solar panels become more expensive or for that matter more scarce in the coming months? Hard to say. Very possibly. But let’s see. The folks I’ve spoken to in the industry in recent days seem relatively sanguine about it, but they’re certainly spending a lot of time checking their stockpiles and talking to suppliers. It’ll be a nervy few weeks.

In the meantime, perhaps the best thing to ponder is the extent to which capitalism has, in recent decades, concentrated large amounts of economic activity on certain pinch points.

Spruce Pine is one of them - but is far from the only one. What about the plant I wrote about in the book which provides nearly all of the chlorine for the UK - without which we’d be rationing drinking water in a matter of days? What about the metal pressing plant in Birmingham which provides more than 50 per cent of the global supply of electrodes for rear view mirrors in cars? Or the plants that went down following the Fukushima disaster, causing a ripple effect across the world economy?

Part of the reason Spruce Pine is so important is geological. But part of the reason is price: we like cheap things and Spruce Pine quartz is both cheap and really good quality. Getting equally high quality stuff from elsewhere might be more expensive. But if you’re also getting a bit more security and diversity for that price…? Well, perhaps that’s a price worth paying.

All of which is to say, when you take a step back and think about what’s going on here, you start to realise that if the world economy is going to become more stable in future, and to minimise risks of pinch points having crises, then maybe that might mean things are going to cost a bit more in future. Everything.

UPDATE FRI 4 OCT

Sibelco has posted the following update which looks promising, and suggests a more positive interpretation than the one from John Walker above. So that’s good news. Fingers crossed:

Recovery efforts in the areas around our operations impacted by Hurricane Helene have made significant progress. All Sibelco employees, and contractors who work for the company, have been accounted for and are safe. 

We are actively collaborating with the community, local authorities and businesses to support recovery activities. Our efforts have included road clearing and repairs, the provision of temporarily power supply to organizations in greatest need, the supply of fuel and working with the cities of Spruce Pine and Bakersville to establish temporary water supply systems for residents.  

Thanks to Sibelco’s long-standing commitment to sustainability, which includes measures to mitigate the impact of extreme weather events such as Hurricane Helene, our operations have shown resilience.

The initial assessment indicates that our operating facilities in the Spruce Pine region have only sustained minor damage. Detailed assessments are ongoing. Our dedicated teams are on-site, conducting cleanup and repair activities to restart operations as soon as we can.

Restoring power remains crucial to resuming our operations. The repair of power lines leading to our plants has progressed significantly. We expect to give a further update on the status of power supply in the near term. 

Our final product stock has not been impacted. We are working closely with our customers to assess their needs and plan the restart of product shipments as soon as we can. 

Our thoughts are with all those affected by Hurricane Helene. We extend our gratitude to our employees, the first responders, and the construction crews who are working tirelessly on recovery activities in the region.  

Leblanc was born in 1742, in central France, into what would today be considered a lower middle class family. His father was an official at a local iron works, but Nicolas had a good education and became a doctor. Working as a doctor in 18th century France wasn’t an especially lucrative occupation, so to make ends meet he became the surgeon to the Duke of Orléans, Louis Philippe II - a minor French royal.

Like many young, aspirational intellectuals, Leblanc used his spare time to carry out scientific experiments. This was the height of the enlightenment - the great era of the enthusiastic amateur, long before science or engineering were considered disciplines and occupations one could only aspire to courtesy of years at university.1

So when, in 1783, Leblanc heard of a competition launched by none other than King Louis XVI, he could hardly contain himself. The prize in question (2,400 livres, which equates to hundreds of thousands of euros in today’s money) would be awarded to anyone who could come up with a way of turning salt into soda ash - a special alkali chemical which was hitherto made by burning wood ash or seaweed.

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We don’t spend much time pondering soda ash these days but it’s one of the most important chemicals in the world. An alkali we use to make critical products: soaps, dyes, bleaches. Essential in the production of paper and glass. If you don’t have soda ash you’re in big trouble. And back in the 18th century France (and England and pretty much every other industrialising economy) was running desperately short of soda ash. This became known as the “soda crisis”.

Rapidly growing demand for glass, cloth, paper etc was outstripping the supply of soda ash, which was mostly made by burning wood or types of seaweed. Across Europe, there were fears about imminent deforestation, because of the sheer number of trees which might need to be chopped down to provide timber for buildings, masts for ships, charcoal for steel and, yes, ash to make soda ash. It was the great ecological panic of the day.

Scientists knew in theory that it should be possible to turn table salt (sodium chloride) into soda ash (sodium carbonate). It would mean a nearly infinite supply! The problem was, no-one could work out how to do it. So the King (also facing a dismal economy, desperate public discontent and the early sparks of revolution) launched his challenge.

Leblanc got to work. After some time, he came up with a way of using sea salt and sulphuric acid as raw materials for a chemical reaction. It was a dirty process, involving coal and limestone and a furnace running at 1000 degrees. But the end product was soda ash!

Actually there were lots of other side-products too. Billowing hydrogen chloride fumes which would kill anything close by, mounds and mounds of calcium sulphide (nasty stuff), not to mention the stench coming out the chimneys. Still, it did the trick.

With financing from the Duke of Orléans, in 1791 Leblanc built the world’s first plant turning salt into soda ash. He had won the challenge! However, by then the man who was supposed to provide the prize was on the run. France was in revolution. The King was about to lose his crown.

So despite having worked for years to come up with a solution to one of the biggest scientific challenges, and despite succeeding, Leblanc got no reward. Actually it was worse than that. His plant was seized by revolutionaries, because it had been financed by an aristocrat. The Duke was executed and Leblanc’s patent - for this method which he had slaved over and kept secret for years - was made public. Soda plants using the Leblanc process were built around the country. And worse, this French method soon made British industrialists millions.

Leblanc himself received nothing. Not only did he never receive the prize money, he lost his plant and any hope of making his fortune. The rest of his years were miserable, spent in and out of the poorhouse. In 1806, poverty-stricken and desperate, he shot himself.

But the Leblanc process still changed the world - in more ways than one. It was one of the first great chemical processes of the industrial age. The pure soda ash it produced out helped firms produce brilliant glass, perfect paper and cleaning products that helped improve living standards

Ironically, it was not the French but the British who most benefited from it. In Glasgow a complex of Leblanc plants were built, including one with the tallest chimney in the worlds. The plants are long forgotten - I went looking for them recently but there’s no trace left.

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Perhaps that’s to be expected. For while Leblanc’s process had (like Abraham Darby’s innovation of refining iron using coal rather than charcoal) helped save the forests, it ushered in its own environmental problems.

These plants were responsible for hideous pollution. Those tall chimneys were there to send the noxious vapours elsewhere. Even so, the impact on the local environment was terrible. So in the 19th century Britain imposed one of the first environmental regulations in history - the Alkali Act, a precursor to many of the emissions rules to come. But what really put those Leblanc plants out of business was the march of technology

In 1861 a Belgian man called Ernest Solvay came up with a much cleaner way of turning salt (in the form of brine) into soda ash. Today the vast majority of the world’s soda ash (we still use enormous quantities) is made using the Solvay process. Not America, which, due to a geological quirk, happens to have staggering quantities of mineral soda ash buried in the ground in Wyoming, though that’s a story for another day.

But while Leblanc might seem a footnote in history, the episode is perhaps a helpful reminder that throughout history technological advances haven’t come out of nowhere. Leblanc didn’t suddenly, accidentally discover that salt could be turned into soda ash. It was a widely-understood and oft-discussed goal. But actually making it happen took time and money. It took Leblanc and that prize to make it happen.

Something similar goes for all sorts of breakthroughs during what we call the Industrial Revolution. In the 19th century aluminium was among the most precious substances in the world because no one had yet worked out a way to refine it in large quantities. Everyone know about “the aluminium problem”. But it took decades (and the advent of electricity in large quantities) until someone worked out how to refine it.

That’s worth remembering because a lot of people assume when the Industrial Revolution happened it just… happened - that there was no architect determining or influencing it from top down. But this isn’t quite true. There were loads of challenges/prizes like Leblanc’s. It is thanks to a series of French scientific prizes that we have tinned food, turbines and, for better or worse, margarine.

Indeed, since we have charged ourselves with doing the industrial revolution all over again, perhaps modern policymakers could take a leaf out of 18/19th century France and introduce a few more grand prizes to help encourage innovation today.

After all, there are plenty of modern equivalent challenges to turning salt into soda ash: How to make zero carbon concrete. Nuclear fusion. Solid state batteries. More efficient electrolysis of water. Cheap fossil fuel free ammonia production. Higher temperature superconductors. Affordable, zero carbon steel. The list goes on.

Time to learn from the forgotten story of Nicolas Leblanc, and to recapture some of the spirit of the enlightenment. Just try not to make the mistakes Leblanc himself made…

Needless to say, Leblanc features briefly in Material World and needless to say if you enjoyed this blog you should really pick up a copy. Out in paperback in the UK now!