Latest from the Material World

A brief update...

First things first, apologies for the loooong gap in posting. This was always going to be a somewhat occasional newsletter - but I hadn’t meant for it to be quite as occasional as that. But it’s been a somewhat busy time: I’ve been covering a big UK Budget, doing some investigations into whether UK sanctions on Russia are actually working and working on a fair few ongoing stories too.

However, the relevance of the topics discussed in Material World has only ballooned - and it struck me that while I’ve been posting quite a bit on Twitter/X in recent months I really ought to do a bit of an update for Substack, so here’s what’s been happening recently.

Just the other week we saw the (earlier than expected) closure of the coke ovens at Port Talbot, ahead of the scheduled shutdown of the blast furnaces later this year.

The Port Talbot steelworks featured in Material World, but in the coming years it could look very different: the blast furnaces are being replaced by electric arc furnaces. Something similar is planned with Britain’s other primary steelmaking site in Scunthorpe. Pretty soon, the country of Abraham Darby and Henry Bessemer, the place which invented much of what constitutes modern steelmaking, will no longer be able to make its own virgin steel.

I’ll post more on that in the coming months, but in the meantime below is a film I made about Port Talbot last year, which might give you more of a sense of what it feels like to be in the proximity of a blast furnace. And it also shows you what an electric arc furnace is like: imagine bolts of lightning one after another.

What else? Well, I wrote about sand for The House magazine in the UK, an article you can read here. The book was reviewed in a few more places, including a scientific journal! There was a nice review from Inside Higher Ed. I spoke to the Sydney Morning Herald for a piece they wrote on semiconductors (it’s really good - read it here) and to ABC Radio in Australia (listen here). Oh and I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times about the Jevons paradox, which comes up a few times in the book.

Now it’s worth saying there are many working in the energy field who are quite sceptical about Jevons. One of them is the legendary Michael Liebreich. I was lucky enough to appear on his podcast a few months ago. You can watch it here:

I also had a fascinating conversation with Chris Kiefer on the Decouple podcast. Definitely worth a watch too 👇

The book came out in Polish (here’s a review I’ve just seen posted - Polish speakers let me know if it’s positive!). It’s also out in Italian and German. Please do get in touch if you are reading it in other languages - I’m very curious to know how it is in translation. One of the great pleasures about writing a book is seeing how it gets interpreted in other languages and cultures. For instance, the Taiwanese edition is very different to the British and American versions, and so on.

Anyway, that’s about it (it’s not of course, there’s almost certainly stuff I’ve forgotten). But if any of this is of interest I’ll do another one soon. I also, in recompense for the length of time it’s taken for me to post this, promise to do another proper post very soon!