Material World: The Key Resources Underpinning Modern Economies (TGS Archive)

The TGS team puts together these brief references and show notes for the learning and convenience of our listeners. However, most of the points made in episodes hold more nuance than one link can address, and we encourage you to dig deeper into any of these topics and come to your own informed conclusions.

This episode was recorded in May 2024. Since then the Strait of Hormuz has closed, copper has set records, China has dropped under a billion tons of steel, Britain has nationalized its last blast furnaces and stopped making ammonia and soda ash, and the AI buildout has become the largest new claim on nearly every material in the book. Updates are bulleted under their respective lines.

00:00 – Edmund Conway – Featured book: Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

• Upcoming Book: Trade World: The Ties That Bound Our Past and Could Unravel Our Future (3 September 2026)
• New podcast with Sky News: Stuff Matters (launched June 2026)
• Ed’s Substack: Material World

01:23 – Olivia Lazard (The Great Simplification Episode), Simon Michaux (The Great Simplification Episode)

05:53 – I, Pencil

06:52 – Invisible Hand

07:40 – Brexit

07:55 – Distorted gold export stats for the UK

• Update: It happened again, bigger. Roughly 393 tons of gold moved from London to New York between November 2024 and January 2025 on US tariff fears, pushing Bank of England withdrawal queues from days to four weeks.
• Update: It showed up directly in the trade data – UK goods exports to the US hit £11.3bn in January 2025, with precious metals alone up £5.9bn in a month, then fell back the moment the flow stopped. The gold has since returned: London vaults were above 9,500 tonnes by July 2026.

09:02 – The supply chain of gold

• Update: Gold has roughly doubled since we recorded, from about $2,350 an ounce to a record $5,589 on 28 January 2026, easing to around $4,400 by August 2026. Central banks bought 863 tonnes in 2025 and total demand passed 5,000 tonnes for the first time.

12:08 – History of glass

12:20 – What we use sand for today

• Update: UNEP reaffirms about 50 billion tons a year, rising 45% by 2060.

13:16 – How Silicon Chips are made

13:40 – 1915 Glass Famine

18:06 – The importance of concrete, CO2 emissions

• Update: World cement output has started falling – 3.8 billion tonnes in 2025, down from 3.9 billion, with China at 1.67 billion, down almost 8.5%.
• Update: Cement is the one material here Conway hasn’t returned to since the 2023 concrete crisis in UK schools.

19:18 – Chip War

20:12 – Silica, Wentworth Scale

20:57 – Hawaiian beach sand is parrotfish excrement

22:11 – Types of sand

22:58 – Constraints of mining useful sand, Yukon Delta

• Update: A July 2026 study isolated the damage in the Mekong: sand mining alone accounts for 25-30% of riverbed erosion and 16-30% of salinity increases in the Vietnamese delta, with extraction running six to fifteen times natural replenishment.

25:19 – Cement research

• Update: Heidelberg’s Brevik plant became the industry’s first industrial-scale carbon capture, at about 400,000 tons a year. America went the other way: DOE cancelled a $500m award and Sublime paused Holyoke.
• Update: CBAM’s definitive regime began on 1 January 2026 with cement in it, and US cement imports have nearly doubled to 25.4 Mt.

25:40 – Ancient cement recipes

• Update: An unfinished site at Pompeii confirmed hot mixing with dry quicklime in December 2025, and a July 2026 paper on a latrine at Hadrian’s Villa credits carbonation rather than lime clasts alone for the self-healing.

26:48 – Cement absorbs CO2 over time, research on this

• Update: The sink is now quantified. Carbonation offsets roughly 46% of cement process emissions over the material’s life, against 0.83 tons of CO2 per ton of clinker released in the first place – a real sink, not a wash.

31:40 – Global map of sand mines

• Update: The Marine Sand Watch team found that nearly half of tracked dredge operators worked inside marine protected areas at some point in a single year – and the platform only sees about 60% of the global fleet. Indonesia’s Supreme Court struck down its sea sand export provisions in June 2025.

33:26 – Limestone availability

35:02 – Ultra high purity quartz, crucibles, Spruce Pine, NC

• Update: Hurricane Helene flooded the mines in September 2024, but Sibelco restarted within ten days and chip output was never disrupted. Conway wrote it up as it happened in What’s Happening at Spruce Pine…?
• Update: The lasting damage came from Chinese polysilicon overcapacity instead. Quartz prices collapsed, SAMR blocked the six biggest producers’ 50 billion yuan plan to idle a third of national capacity in January 2026, and The Quartz Corp shut its Spruce Pine processing plant in July 2026 – a decision it said was “not related to Helene.”
• Update: Washington has since put a 15% duty and minimum import prices on the polysilicon chain from December.

35:12 – History of salt

35:39 – Mark Kurlansky

36:21 – Importance of salts to pharmaceuticals

37:01 – Salt’s importance to batteries

37:22 – Salt use in petroleum products

37:41 – Indian independence and salt production

38:55 – Salt is used for so many things

• Update: The Runcorn cell room Ed describes is still making chlorine, but half its ownership is insolvent. The plant is run by Runcorn MCP Ltd, a 50/50 joint venture between INEOS INOVYN and Vynova Runcorn, and Vynova Runcorn entered administration on 16 December 2025 with about 90 jobs at risk. MCP’s 2025 accounts say it “remained operational and profitable” and now tolls only for INOVYN; the administrators are still trying to sell the neighboring EDC plant and the 50% stake in the cell room.

39:33 – Salt for water purification

41:02 – Sand mines under the Mississippi River

• Update: It didn’t happen. Amrize withdrew the proposal on 12 February 2026, abandoning plans to mine about 200 acres of Mississippi riverbed to a depth of 200 feet after Dakota County and the Metropolitan Council challenged the environmental review.

42:11 – Sodium batteries

• Update: CATL and Changan launched the first mass-production sodium-ion car in February 2026. In America it has gone both ways: Natron Energy shut down, and Peak Energy took the slot with a 4 GWh Sacramento plant.

42:30 – Soda ash U.S. deposits

• Update: Britain makes neither ammonia nor soda ash for the first time in a century – Tata stopped Lostock in January 2025 – and salt may follow. Conway took the case to Sky as the final nail in the coffin of an industry that was once Britain’s pride, having already watched a cracker die quietly at Wilton.
• Update: USGS has world soda ash output at 71 Mt, China at 38 Mt, and prices falling on oversupply.

44:41 – Lithium scarcity, lithium uniqueness as an energy storage medium

• Update: The price has been a rollercoaster: 600,000 yuan a ton in 2022, 58,860 in May 2025, back above 200,000 in May 2026, then around 143,000 by late July.
• Update: Supply grew 31% while prices fell 31%, and then capex was cut 40%. The swing factor is a single mine: CATL’s Jianxiawo took its final safety permit in July 2026, with restart guided to September, though reporting still conflicts on whether it is producing. Codelco and SQM cleared their last regulator in November 2025.

47:25 – History of lithium batteries

• Update: Conway’s own battery attention has moved down the cell to the anode – silicon-carbon, and the ~300% swelling problem.

48:19 – Copper importance and availability

• Update: S&P now has demand reaching 42 Mt by 2040 while mined supply peaks around 2030 – roughly 27 Mt at the peak, falling to 22 Mt by 2040.

48:52 – Copper substitutability with aluminum or silver

• Update: Conway hasn’t gone back to copper since the book, but Hang on, are there ANY lost minerals? revisits the argument: we never ran out and we barely substituted, we just got much better at digging bigger holes.

50:19 – Peak Copper

• Update: Copper passed $12,000 a ton for the first time in December 2025 and traded above $14,500 intraday in January 2026, with the annual smelter treatment-charge benchmark settling at $0. China’s CSPT smelters agreed to cut 2026 output by more than 10% in response.
• Update: Grasberg, El Teniente and Cobre Panamá were all disrupted.
• Update: Section 232 put 50% on semi-finished copper and left refined metal exempt. The promised refined-copper review is still unresolved.

50:29 – Julian Simons and Paul Ehrlich bet

52:08 – Energy and water intensity of mining copper

52:28 – Declining density of copper in the crust available for mining

53:47 – Chuquicamata

56:45 – Social push back against mining projects

57:52 – Health effects in mining towns

59:21 – International Energy Agency, net zero models and anticipated country development

• Update: The peak-demand framing has reversed. The IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2025 reinstated a Current Policies Scenario in which oil and gas demand never peak, and OPEC’s World Oil Outlook 2026 projects 124 mb/d by 2050.
• Update: Then Hormuz closed. The World Bank calls it the largest oil market disruption in history, with Brent up 65%; the EIA has 4.9 mb/d transiting the strait against 21.6 mb/d before, and about a fifth of global LNG trade went with it.
• Update: IEA members released 411.9 million barrels, the largest collective action in its history, which Conway judged extraordinary and still not enough. His Postscript to a postscript is the one to read alongside this episode – Ras Tanura and Ras Laffan both shut, the book’s own scenario arriving.

1:01:43 – Russia is one of the richest countries in natural resources

1:02:53 – Brandauer

1:05:24 – Fukushima Earthquake effects on ford truck supply chain

• Update: The modern version arrived in October 2025. Nexperia, which supplies roughly 40% of Europe’s automotive chip needs, was cut off after the Dutch government seized the company and China blocked exports from its Dongguan plant – halting Volkswagen Golf lines at Wolfsburg and shutting Honda plants in Mexico, China and Japan.
• Update: Ford’s turn came earlier the same year, when it idled its Chicago Explorer plant for want of Chinese rare earth magnets. Jim Farley: “It’s hand-to-mouth right now.”

1:06:10 – Comparative Advantage

1:07:57 – Richard Baldwin

1:09:11 – Invention of GDP

1:10:30 – Semiconductor industry war

• Update: The chip war has become a minerals war. China put seven rare earths under export lisence in April 2025 and added five more, plus lithium-battery and graphite controls, in October 2025. Those measures and America’s matching affiliates rule are both suspended only until November 2026.
• Update: Conway’s What can we learn from the latest Rare Earths crisis? is the companion piece, and the Stuff Matters AirPods episode follows the same elements through a consumer product.
• Update: On reshoring, TSMC Arizona has been in volume production since Q4 2024 and Intel’s Fab 52 since late 2025, but Samsung’s Taylor plant is not expected in volume until 2027.

1:11:37 – UK no longer domestically producing fertilizer, Haber Bosch

• Update: Britain now makes no ammonia and no soda ash at all. Conway’s The End of Salt? (January 2026) reports this is “the first time we haven’t made them in this country in more than a century.” European nitrogen prices ran 71% above the 2024 average by April 2026, prompting an EU Fertilizer Action Plan.
• Update: Britain still makes fertilizer at Billingham, but from imported ammonia. CF Fertilizers UK’s 2025 accounts state that it “continues to operate the Ammonia importation model,” and record the sale of its former Ince works.
• Update: Substitution stories still disappoint – Chile mines caliche nitrate a century after Haber-Bosch.

1:12:07 – Fertilizer plant shut down causes crisis for CO2 canister for pig farms in the UK

• Update: It happened again, and worse. Britain’s last two bioethanol plants – a major domestic CO2 source – shut in 2025: Vivergo ceased production on 31 August 2025 after the US trade deal removed tariffs on American ethanol, and Ensus went dark that September.
• Update: In March 2026 the government directed and funded a restart of Ensus to keep abattoirs, hospitals, water treatment and nuclear supplied, since extended to the end of October 2026. A June 2026 call for evidence states that “the majority of UK demand for CO2 is imported.”

1:14:53 – Wassily Leontief, input/output tables

1:17:45 – Camborne Mining School, shut down their mining course

• Update: Camborne took its first undergraduate mining engineering cohort in five years in 2025. IOM3 records zero new UK mining engineering undergraduates between 2019 and 2024 against a need for 60+ a year, and Exeter is recruiting again for 2026 entry.

1:22:50 – Recycling rates

• Update: The IEA’s July 2026 outlook puts average recycling rates for key energy minerals at around 10% today, rising to only about 20% by 2040 on current policies, with China holding 90% of the world’s battery material-recovery capacity.
• Update: The industry has had a shakeout. North America’s largest lithium-ion recycler, Li-Cycle, filed for creditor protection in May 2025 with its billion-dollar Rochester plant never having opened, and was bought by Glencore for $40m that August.

1:23:15 – Steel per nation per capita, 15 tons for a developed nation

• Update: World crude steel output fell 2.0% to 1,849.4 Mt in 2025, with China down 4.4% to 960.8 Mt – below a billion tons for the first time since 2019. World Steel in Figures 2026 puts apparent use at 209 kg per capita globally, 843.7 kg in South Korea and 29.2 kg in Africa.
• Update: Britain nationalized British Steel on 16 July 2026 after the NAO found £377m spent in nine months to keep Scunthorpe’s blast furnaces alight. Conway called the endgame strange and unsettling the morning Parliament legislated, and has since asked what we are going to do about steel.
• Update: Section 232 went to 50% with the UK held at 25% – Tinned Soup and Tariffs is why that reaches a can of soup – and the EU replaced its safeguard on 1 July 2026 with an 18.3 Mt duty-free quota, 47% below 2024, and 50% beyond it.

1:26:11 – Lagom

1:26:28 – Conway’s Jevons Paradox Thread, Jevons Paradox

• Update: The IMF has formalized the argument in The Generalized Jevons Paradox and the Future of Energy (WP/26/157, July 2026), co-authored by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz.

1:27:10 – William Stanley Jevons

1:30:10 – AI and increase in energy consumption

• Update: The IEA now puts data center electricity use at 485 TWh in 2025, roughly doubling to 950 TWh by 2030 – about 3% of global demand. Its April 2026 update has demand up 17% in 2025, with turbine, transformer and grid-connection queues now the binding constraint; GE Vernova’s backlog alone is 116 GW.
• Update: The WEF puts 60-75 tons of minerals in every megawatt of data center capacity, and PJM’s 2027/28 auction cleared at $333.44/MW-day, with about 5,100 MW of the year’s load growth attributable to data centers.
• Update: Conway reported from Loudoun County and called data center alley the biggest story in economics right now.

1:40:52 – Resource per capita vs standard of living

1:42:15 – The Summit, Bretton Woods Conference

1:43:48 – China’s dominance in EVs

• Update: China now accounts for nearly 75% of global electric car production and 40% of the trade, with exports doubling to a record 2.5 million cars in 2025 and NEVs passing 60% of new car sales at home in July 2026.
• Update: BYD overtook Tesla as the world’s largest EV maker in 2025, 2.26 million cars to 1.64 million, and Chinese brands have doubled their share of EU registrations to 6% despite tariffs of up to 35.3%.

1:45:16 – Global imbalances of debt and surplus