It's Material World Week!

The book is coming out this week. This is where things get a bit weird for me.

The Lithium ponds at the SQM site at the Solar de Atacama, Chile

Writing and selling a book is a weird process, especially if, like me, you are a journalist rather than a salesperson. To start with, it’s odd for us to spend years locked up in a room, working away at something which won’t see the light of day for ages.

No journalist likes to sit on a story they’re going to break or a piece they’ve finished writing, knowing that in the meantime it’s quite possible someone else writes the same piece or breaks the same story. I had something like that feeling throughout writing Material World - desperately wanting to share these fascinating stories I’d been researching but doing my best to keep it all buttoned up.

But the other odd thing comes when the book is actually released, which in the case of Material World happens this week (though the American edition will come in November). All of a sudden you are expected to go into active sales mode, hawking the book at every opportunity. Actually it’s worse: you do it of your own accord. Danny Finkelstein, who also has a book out at the moment, said on Twitter the other day that “when you are hoping people will read your book you are (I find) willing to overcome personal embarrassment and actually post the following on Twitter” - the following being a flattering book review.

All of which is to say, I will be doing plenty of that in the coming weeks. I will be shamelessly promoting Material World on any platform which will have me to speak. You might find form of personal abasement tiresome or peculiar - possibly even distasteful. To which I can only say: I get it.

But here’s the thing: as Danny indicates, when you have a book out which you want people to read, then all restraint tends to go out of the window. And for my part, I really, very passionately believe, with an odd fervour I don’t usually feel, that you should read this book.

When I began writing Material World three years ago I had a good feeling about it. I had a feeling it would be an interesting and somewhat unfamiliar perspective on something very familiar - the modern world of products and services we all rely on. But in the course of the writing and researching, a couple of things happened.

First, I found that the stories I was encountering were even more fascinating than I expected. There was too much material in the Material World! I had to cut vast stretches to keep the book down to a reasonable size. I even had to cut one of the materials I was originally planning to focus on.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, in the course of those three years the subject matter of the book has become far, far more politically sensitive and far more newsworthy. When I began writing about them, semiconductors and batteries were a worthy and fast-growing set of industrial sectors but they rarely graced the front pages on either side of the Atlantic. Now the race for lithium or to build enough battery factories or semiconductor fabs is a mainstream topic.

When I began writing the book, Donald Trump was still president; now, Joe Biden’s various pieces of economic legislation, from the Inflation Reduction Act to the CHIPS Act, have completely changed the weather. Industrial strategy is no longer a dirty word or, in the case of the UK, a meaningless phrase. Tensions between the US and China have heightened. The Material World I was researching was at the very heart of this. This book is considerably more newsworthy than it was when I first conceived of it.

So yes, I feel passionately that you should read this book, if only because the more copies it sells, the less aggressively I have to go out and promote it. Buy it so I can stop going on about it.

Anyway, the Sunday Times just featured an extract of one of my chapters on lithium in its magazine over the weekend. It’s slightly pared down from the version you’ll find in the book, since the original chapter included one or two other threads woven in there which wouldn’t make sense if you hadn’t read previous chapters, but I think it stands up alright. If you want a sense of what you’ll find in the book, have a read.

I’ll have more stories to come in the coming days and weeks, once I’m finally able to start talking about some of this material and once I go into full-blown publicity mode. But I’ll also be posting regularly here.

The point of this place was never just to publicise the book - strange as that will sound right now - but to be a place where we can all discuss the wider issues. For instance, check out this astounding chart posted the other day by Noah Smith showing the staggering rise in spending on factories in the US.

Thanks in no small part to the CHIPS Act and Inflation Reduction Act, the US is re-industrialising at an extraordinary pace.

Or, another recurrent theme, have a look at these stylised charts showing the mineral supply chain for a few key green technologies. Here, first of all, is solar panels and wind turbines. Note how many raw materials you need.

And here’s the same thing for e-fuels. If you’ve been following the topic you may recall an opinion piece in the Guardian not long ago by Rowan Atkinson arguing that we should be considering e-fuels (created from carbon sequestered from the atmosphere or from chimney exhausts) which could then run in conventional engines. After all, he pointed out, before the article was heavily corrected, “many rare earth metals and huge amounts of energy are required to make” the batteries that go into electric cars.

Leaving aside the fact that there aren’t rare earths used either in batteries or to make batteries, the deeper issue is that one could lodge these very same criticisms at e-fuels. They are considerably more expensive and energy inefficient to make than batteries, these days at least. There’s also a slight perversity to going to extraordinary lengths to capture carbon only to emit it straight back into the atmosphere. But, ironically enough, you also need lots of minerals for the plants in which you do it. It’s not just batteries which need cobalt and lithium, it turns out. So too do e-fuels!

My point, by the way, is not to damn e-fuels. Not in the slightest. Squint and you can envisage a future where people who want to keep their Porsche can indeed do so and run it on carbon neutral fuel - though the running costs will be incredibly high. The world won’t be run entirely on batteries. One of the problems with the way these debates are conducted is they give the impression that it’s winner-take-all, that one technology will shoulder out all the rest. That seems unlikely. One thing you’ll hopefully take from Material World is that the future is much more likely to be a patchwork than a monoculture.

Finally, a note of optimism. INEOS, the chemicals firm, announced last week that it’s come up with a low carbon way of making acrylonitrile. That might sound somewhat dull on the face of it, until you realise that acrylonitrile is a key ingredient in carbon fibre and we’ll need enormous amounts of carbon fibre to make the wind turbines and super-light cars and planes we’ll be making lots of in the coming years. And right now the only mainstream way to make acrylonitrile is from crude oil and natural gas.

There are lots of question marks about the INEOS “breakthrough”, but at the very least it’s a sign of things to come. The logic of the Industrial Revolution we’re in right now is that we need to come up with all sorts of new innovations which will reimagine the bones of the modern economy. Some will be duff. Some will be bogus. But some will work, and they’ll change the world forever. Amid the difficulties we’re all facing, there are still some things to get quietly excited about.