Boring things can change the world by increasing lifespan and productivity:

  • Glass ⇒ people can work even if visually impaired.
  • Concrete ⇒ clean surfaces, less disease.
  • Electricity ⇒ can work longer and better.
The bet that underlies the world
  • We need finite resources (iron, copper, …) to do everything. As population grows and time passes, total and per-capita consumption tend to rise, and easy, rich deposits get depleted, so extraction gets harder.
  • Larger populations can also discover smarter, more efficient extraction and use. Humanity’s bet is that innovation outpaces depletion.

To pull energy out, you also need energy. You can calculate ROI (how many joules you get per joule invested). In the 1900s crude oil was ~100:1, now ~5:1.

Price is not the same thing as valueGDP measures what people pay. Raw materials are often cheap in price but can have huge strategic importance.

Sand

Glass has historically been hard to manufacture well (e.g., Murano artisans were banned from leaving to protect process know-how).
Glass underlies tons of important experiments (lenses for astronomy, glass beakers for chemistry, prisms for light refraction, …).

Glass: silica (SiO₂) + flux (lowers melting temperature and helps purify silica).
Cement: limestone/chalk + sand. Calcium + silicon + water ⇒ bind.
More than 80 tons of concrete per person; ~8% of all emissions.

Many sands have many different propertiesYou can’t just pick any sand. Example: very pure sand for lenses; un-grainy sand for land reclamation, …

Quartz to Wafer

Quartz to Silicon (metallurgical-grade): Take high-purity quartz from a few specific mines, notably the Spruce Pine mining district in North Carolina (IOTA-grade quartz; producers include The Quartz Corp and Sibelco). Reduce SiO₂ with carbon in an electric arc furnace: SiO₂ + 2C → Si + 2CO.

Silicon to Polysilicon: Convert metallurgical-grade silicon to trichlorosilane (Si + 3HCl → SiHCl₃ + H₂), distill to ultra-high purity, then deposit high-purity silicon via the Siemens process (CVD on heated rods) or fluidized-bed reactors to form polysilicon.

Polysilicon to Wafer: Heat polysilicon and use a seed crystal to grow a new, perfectly regular silicon crystal (Czochralski or float-zone). Cut into ~1 mm-thick slices (wafers) and polish flat. The crucible is made of ultra-pure quartz; quality depends on Spruce Pine, North Carolina quartz → single point of failure.

Wafer to Chip: Processing at TSMC, etc. Most important is photolithography with ASML tools:

  • A stream of tin droplets is laser-zapped to make EUV light (tiny wavelength).
  • Light bounces through mirrors and hits the wafer to etch patterns.
  • Repeat many times (hundreds of transistor layers).

Most silicon is for solar panels, not chips.
For chip manufacturing, short term it’s unrealistic to in-shore the entire process, especially since much relies on primary resources.

Salt

Energy- and time-intensive to make salt ⇒ hard to do at small scale. Early traded commodity (fungible, preserves food, useful as currency).
Monopoly on salt trade ⇒ huge political power (e.g., ancient China; large share of revenue).

To make salt:

  • Evaporate from seawater.
  • Salt mines (e.g., Pakistan). This is done with miners.
  • Pull it from the ground as brine by injecting pressurized water to dissolve underground salt deposits.

Most salt is used in the chemical industry today: once you have brine, pass electricity to split into chlorine and caustic soda. Mass-producing salt ⇒ mass-producing chlorine ⇒ soap, detergent, clean water ⇒ big life-expectancy gains.

Saltpetre / caliche: salt plus stuff you find in guano (nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus — the NPK trinity of fertilizer). Alternative to guano. Same use cases: gunpowder and fertilizing.

However, the Haber-Bosch process lets us pull nitrogen from the air, so super-cheap fertilizer (huge achievement; big reason malnutrition has been largely tamed).

The only limit to how much fertilizer we want is how much energy we are willing to spend in exchange

Potassium still needs to be mined. The British exhaust their potassium veins and discover deeper polyhalite, which turns out to be really good for fertilizer.

Iron

Steel = iron + ~2% carbon (carbon fills gaps in iron atoms; stronger).
Cast iron (bad!) = iron + ~4% carbon, more brittle.

Everything is not made of steel, but nearly everything is made with machines made of steel

Strong and malleable ⇒ can make it into all tools.
kg of iron per person is a meaningful predictor of a country’s wealth.
Steel ploughs ⇒ less maintenance; farm time drops (from ~7 minutes of labor per kg of grain with wooden tools to ~30 seconds with a steel one).
Blast furnaces are designed to run perpetually.

You need coal to make cast iron: fuel and carbon source.
Coal is great; before, we used charcoal, which is not very energy-dense.
Then you take cast iron, blow oxygen to lower the carbon %, and you get steel.

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

Side thing: low-background steel (uncontaminated with radionuclides, used in medical devices) is impossible to produce due to atomic bombs, so we get it from wrecks of pre-1945 ships.

Australia is super iron-rich (red dirt ⇔ high in iron oxide).
Modern iron mining uses explosives and earth-moving, not tunnels and pickaxes.

~1/2 of steel is recycled (hard to make high-grade steel from scrap; scrap often used for rebar).

Copper

Copper is good because it is:

  • Cheap.
  • Flexible (can make cables).
  • Conductive.
  • Easy to recycle.

Magnet + copper coil ⇒ electromagnetic resistance from rotation ⇒ kinetic to electric.

Better to have processing facilities next to coal rather than copper mines (≈3 tonnes of coal per tonne of copper ore). Today a lot of copper is pulled from, say, Chile but processed in China.

  • Historically: used for bronze, weapons, boats.
  • Electricity era: used for motors, generators, and wires; needs purer copper, so electrolytic refining.

Less copper in ore compared to iron (~100× less), so more dirt moved. More energy and water than processing iron.

Copper is getting harder to extract (e.g., ~16× more dirt and power for the same copper now vs. early 1900s), yet copper’s price has gone down.

Solar panels and turbines need a ton of copper. Smaller carbon footprint ⇒ higher copper footprint.

Likely that mineral reserves under the sea are larger than terrestrial ones for many elements (e.g., cobalt and copper).

Oil

Crude oil has been known for millennia, but only with kerosene did it become a fuel.
Ghawar: biggest reserve in the world. Formed because volcanoes ⇒ lots of CO₂ ⇒ lots of plankton ⇒ organic remains settle and get compressed. The layer where it forms (“source rock”) is not where it stays; it migrates into a reservoir near the surface with higher oil density (porous rock capped by hard rock).

Kerosene is powerful, ~2× the energy density of coal.
Electricity demand is elastic with respect to supply. More clean energy does not automatically mean less fossil fuel use.

Mid-20th century: most oil from Saudi, Russia, Venezuela.
Then fracking: instead of pulling from reservoirs, pull from source rock. Now the US is the largest crude oil producer. Fracking is more expensive than classic reservoirs.

There are many flavors of oil (sulfur content, viscosity). Refineries specialize.

Refinement: distill and separate crude into diesel, petrochemicals, kerosene, asphalt, …

Through hydrogenation you can make coal into oil. Not economical versus crude, but useful for energy independence (e.g., Germany in WWII). Fuel is strategically crucial; a few plants supplied most fuel.

Plastic is popular because it is a byproduct of petroleum. ~90% of crude oil and natural gas go to fuel or heating; ~10% to plastics and pharmaceuticals.

Agriculture: progressive substitution of natural energy (soil, sun) with fossil energy (fertilizer fixed from air using oil; artificial sun in greenhouses).

Energy is the currency of production. If energy price goes up, everything goes up. Bad for low-margin, high-energy sectors like farming.

Polyethylene is useful: good electrical insulator, flexible, heat- and water-proof, suitable for mass production.
With polyethylene, radar became light enough to fit on a plane.
Why polyethylene is strong: long molecular strands tangle. Changes in length and intermolecular stickiness give different material properties.

Gas is even more energy-dense than oil, but infrastructure is harder. It is overtaking oil as the main energy source.
The Ras Laffan refinery accounts for ~4% of global energy.