“Material World” exceeded all my expectations as it was jam-packed with interesting information and data points.

Ed Conway wanted to talk about the six raw materials that he thought were the most important in the evolution of our society, such as sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium. The author beautifully covered a brief history of how each material was discovered, how it contributed to the progress of our society and what the economic and geopolitical implications are. You can tell that he did a lot of research from the content and how he broke down some very complex concepts into digestible pieces. Writing a book on this topic is not easy, I imagine. Going too deep into the weed will make the text dry and you’ll lose the audience’s attention. Staying too broad and high will lose all the interesting points. Same outcome. Ed struck the right balance here.

I picked up this book because I wanted to understand, from the ground up, what are driving the significant developments around the world. People have been talking non-stop about AI and Large Language Models. To enable such technical achievements, we need the best possible chips. Which materials are instrumental to making those chips? Lithim, cobalt, nickel etc…Chips and servers consume a lot of power. What electricity runs on? Copper! Say what you want about renewable energy and how much we want to curb climate change, but the world still runs on oil, not wind or solar. Plus, can we live without salt? Can you imagine a world without glass which is made from sand? And how would we build anything without iron or steel?

I felt like this book served as a great starting point into this fascinating world of materials. I am no expert still, but I learned a lot from this book and I think if you pick it up, you will too.

Below are some interesting snippets I managed to jot down

In 1800, 95 per cent of Britain’s energy came from coal; at the very same point, almost all of France’s energy – over 90 per cent – still came from burning wood. No longer was Britain yoked to the organic limitation of how many trees could be grown on its landmass. And around this time, its income per capital, which for most of history had been more or less the same as France’s, began to soar. By the early nineteenth century, it was 80 per cent richer than France.

Around 70 per cent of the world’s niobium – a rare earth element that helps harden steel for use in jet engines, critical pipelines, superconducting magnets and the skeletons of bridges and skyscrapers – comes from a single mine in Brazil.

Copper is the great, unseen substrate that supports the modern world as we know it. Without it, we are quite literally left in the dark. If steel provides the skeleton of our world and concrete its flesh, then copper is civilization’s nervus system, the circuitry and cables we never see but couldn’t function without.

These days more copper comes each year from Escondida, another gigantic hole a few hundred miles south in the Atacama, and there is another old copper mine in Utah, Bingham Canyon, which is technically deeper. As its name would sugest though, Bingham Canuon started life as a depression while Chuquicamata used to be a hill, back before it became a hole so deep it has its own microclimate. But on the basis of perhaps the most comprehensive measure – the amount of copper extracted from the ground over the mine’s lifetime – nowhere else comes close. Over the past century and a bit Chuqui, as locals call it, has produced more copper than any other such mine in history. Of every 13 grams of copper ever minded and refined from this planet’s crust, at least one of them came from here.

The technical term for what it is doing is “block cave mining” and the concept of it is enough to induce a wince. While most underground mining involves digging along a seam of rock and then drilling or blasting the ore out, block caving is somewhat more brutal. Rather than following a seam, you dig a tunnel underneath the ore and then plant large quantities of high explosive into the rocks above your head. Having stepped back some distance, you blast those rocks and then let gravity do its job, collapsing hundreds of thousands of tonnes of rocks into that tunnel.

At the time of the Roman Empire, the price of a tonne of pure copper was equivalent to roughly 40 years of the average wage. Forty years of work for a tone of copper. By 1800, this has fallen to 6 years a tonne. In the following 200 years, it dropped to just 0.06 years a tonne.

When miners talk about the reserves they have left of a given material, that means everything they’ve got left in their mines or approved mine sites that could be economically extracted at any given moment. The reason why have about 30 to 40 years’ worth of copper reserves left is not because that is what’s left in the ground, but because that’s the kind of time horizon over which miners tend to make plans.

Between 2010 and 2020, we mined 207 million tonnes of copper around the wolrd, but far from falling, the total global reserves of copper grew by 240 million tonnes.

These dark, slightly crumbly stones, smooth on the top, rough on the bottom, later became known as polymetallic nodules. The little stony potatoes form over millions of years as minerals accrete around fragments of organic material that fall onto the seabed. What is striking about them, from a geologist’s perspective at least, is just how concentrated those mineral deposits are: nickel, manganese, cobalt and copper, in grades you simply don’t find up on the surface.

One study suggested that there is enough gold on the seafloor for every person on the planet to have 9lb of the stuff, equivalent to $170,000 apiece. Another study suggested that actually getting hold of that gold would cost more than double that, so don’t hold your breath.

There are 25 million tonnes of terrestrial cobalt resources, most of them in the DRC and Zambia. The total amount of cobalt identified under the sea, in those polymetallic nodules and another underwater feature called cobalt-rich crusts, is 120 million tonnes. There are around 300 million tonnes of terrestrial nickel resources. It is estimated that in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone alone, there are around 270 million tonnes of nickel, but given this is simply one part of the Pacific, the total is likely far higher.