President Donald Trump can cajole and bully in trying to convince everyone there will be a quick economic rebound from his shambolic war in Iran. The reality will deliver something different.
The war not only humiliated the United States’ standing in the world but casually unleashed global shortages of critical fuels and materials, including those essential for generating renewable energy and building electric vehicles.
Although many commentators have predicted that the rise in gas prices spurred by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz will accelerate the so-called “green” transition, try building an EV without aluminum. Or without copper, which can’t be mined without sulphuric acid. And try producing either aluminum or sulphuric acid without fossil fuels. It simply can’t be done without producing markedly less stuff or at much higher cost.
The Spanish physicist Antonio Turiel asks us to see modern civilization as a complex system that “depends on an industrial megamachine that produces everything that is needed for the industrial production” of daily life — and that includes technologies we like to think are hastening a transition to a time when we can live our current lifestyles while producing far fewer emissions.
In fact, Turiel notes, because the manufacture of renewables depends on the consumption of fossil fuels, they represent just another embedded compartment of the megamachine. China’s global domination of EVs, solar cells and rare earth metals, for example, is a calculated industrial strategy to dominate global markets currently reliant on coal-fired power.
As a result, Turiel has two words to describe the economic road ahead, whether a country has invested in renewables or not: “no normal.” A new reality is coming, he says, and it may rudely slap us in the face.
Follow the aluminum
Aluminum, the light shiny metal that adorns electric vehicles and solar panels, has already delivered one slap.
The Persian Gulf processes nine per cent of the globe’s aluminum at six of the world’s most technologically advanced smelters and two alumina refineries — all powered by cheap and highly sour natural gas. It takes a lot of energy to make a sheet of aluminum. In fact, aluminum is the most energy-intensive of all metals, generating the highest carbon dioxide emissions at about 15 tonnes per tonne of metal produced. Fossil fuels, largely coal and methane, provide the energy for 70 per cent of the metal’s production.
Trump’s war upended production when Iranian missiles, in response to the bombing of Iranian steel plants, damaged two of the world’s largest production facilities: a United Arab Emirates smelter and another one in Bahrain.
As a result, seven million metric tonnes of the critical metal stopped passing through the Strait of Hormuz. So too did the raw product alumina, supplied by tankers from Australia. Which caused aluminum prices to rise to a four-year high at $3,672 a tonne on April 16 and even higher in June.
Aluminum is key to the construction of solar photovoltaic cells, transmission lines, windmills, batteries, military equipment and every smartphone.
A typical EV uses 25 per cent more aluminum than a combustion car, which means the war has just made these vehicles more expensive.
“The aluminum price impact is the most concerning coming from the war,” noted Alan Taub, a U.S. engineering professor, in the Wall Street Journal. “We are having an automotive affordability problem, with average sales prices north of $50,000.”
The United States gets about one-fifth of its primary aluminum from the Persian Gulf. Or used to. Automotive and packing industries are already scrambling and paying higher prices, which means more inflation for all of us.
Meanwhile China, which has a metals strategy and controls 60 per cent of the globe’s aluminum production, is buying more alumina and smelting more aluminum at premium prices. Coal-fired power dominates Chinese smelting.
The International Aluminium Institute now warns that global recovery from the aluminum shortage won’t be quick or tidy. “Even after an orderly shutdown, restarting a potline [the heart of a smelter] can take weeks or months, so supply chains may need many months to normalize. For facilities that sustained damage, recovery will take longer still.”
The sulphuric acid test
What about sulphuric acid? It is the most-produced industrial chemical on Earth — over 300 million tonnes a year. “The king of chemicals” was once so cheap and ubiquitous that the corrosive acid kept the technosphere humming in unexpected ways from water treatment to metal smelting.
But the chemical isn’t mined from the ground. It is the byproduct of other industrial activities. More than 60 per cent of the globe’s sulphuric acid is produced from raw sulphur that comes from refining of sour oil and natural gas. (Alberta’s tarsands make mountains of sulphur.)
The rest comes from mining and metal-making operations. The roasting of sulphide ores not only liberates…
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