B (2:33)

Welcome to Maren Talks Money, the podcast in which people who know the markets explain the markets. I am Maren Somerset Webb, and this week I am speaking with Ed Conway, the economics editor of Sky News and author of Material World. The six raw materials that shape modern civilization. Now, we have had Ed on before, just after he published his book, and we talked about that at great length. It was absolutely brilliant. I'm quite sure you've all read it by now, but the world is moving very fast in Ed's direction. There is a clear understanding now that it is the commodities, the materials that he wrote about that are the most important thing out there. And we are seeing a shift in the investment world away from thinking that you can simply make your returns out of digital stuff, software stuff, and in fact, you need to be at least adjacent to the physical world. So I've asked Ed back on again to talk about this and in particular to start off by talking about a recent video that you made, Ed, about the chemicals industry and how it is disappearing from the UK and how incredibly dangerous that is. Anyway, welcome, Ed.

C (3:34)

Thank you. Thanks for having me on. I mean, this. This started. So we. We talked about this years ago, but. And, and I wrote this book all about how physical stuff matters. And we clearly, it's not everything, but we underplay the extent to which everything. Pretty much every piece of economic activity out there depends one way or another on some form of physical stuff coming out of the ground being turned into a product we need. Maybe it's kind of cement. You still need cement to make a data center. Maybe it's copper, where you need lots of copper for data centers, you need it for all of those wind turbines, you need it for conventional power as well. All this stuff doesn't actually kind of account for a very big part of gdp. But because it's not Nvidia and it's not AI, but you need to make the things. Nvidia doesn't make a single chip. They design the chips and they come up with the architecture, but then it's another company that makes them. And the point of the book was just to say, actually, the making of stuff is pretty important and the physical materials are pretty important. And I think this is the critical kind of juncture. We've lived for a while in a world for decades and decades where you could kind of not have to think about physical things, because you could always assume that if you ordered some copper anodes that they would turn up from Chile in a ship, or if you needed some concrete, then you'd be able to get it, or if you needed chemicals, then you could find them. But that world may not be the world that we're living in in the coming decades. You know, whether it's the fact that people are kind of competing for this stuff. So there's a big race on for both AI and for renewables that increases demand. So you've got a big kind of demand side thing or just the fact that shipping is not as safe as it used to be and your ability to get stuff is not as kind of assured as it was. So that's the kind of backstory and I was kind of banging on about a bit about it. And also part of the backstory of that is to say if you're pursuing strategies like net zero, well, you really ought to think about what that means in terms of how you physically get hold of stuff. Because again, the materials matter doubly triply when it comes to something like that. When I wrote the book, I visited a lot of places in this quest to try and understand, okay, what are the physical things we need to sustain our standard of living. I visited a lot of like chemicals plants and oil refineries and blast furnaces. And I live in, like you, I live in the uk. I kind of always assumed that of, you know, as countries go, we had de industrialized basically faster than anyone else. And we had, we had up until that point de industrialized faster than any other kind of major economy in the world. So surely the plants that we've got will probably, you know, they've been tested through that. We'll probably hang on to them. But in the intervening period, loads of the places I visited to research that book have shut down. You know, you've got blast furnaces that no longer, you know, are there. Port Talbo being one example. And then there's one that almost shut down in Scunthorpe. You've got chemicals plants that are shutting down as well. The point of this film that I make for Sky News is I just visited some of these chemicals places and you would be staggered at the speed with which we are shutting things down. And it's just, it's not just a UK story across Europe, I think in the last three years, there's just some data that just came out about this just recently. I think in the last three years or so, about 10% of the entire chemicals production ability of Europe has gone. It's just gone. And people in the same way that they don't really think about whether you need concrete for a data center, they don't spend that much time thinking about the chemicals you need for our day to day lives. But you know, without something as simple as salt, you don't have 90, you know, 90% of the pharmaceuticals that are out There that are kind of life saving pharmaceuticals. They, one way or another have salt or chemicals derived from salt inside them. You don't think about ethylene as a really important building block for the rest of civilization as we know it. But without ethylene, you don't have the most important plastic in the world, polyethylene. And without that, you don't have a lot of the surgical equipment that we need in hospitals to keep people alive. And our ability to make this stuff in Europe has just diminished at an unprecedented rate in recent years. And I would have thought that something we should be talking about. And yet the surprising thing is, I mean, we're trying to make a bit of noise about it on Sky. And I know you talk about it, but I'm just shocked at the extent to which this is all happening and people aren't more kind of nervous about it, really.

B (8:08)

Yeah. I mean, it is shocking, isn't it? Because, I mean, your book was very well received. Everybody read it. I'm pretty sure a lot of politicians read it. But somehow they haven't moved forward to acting on those ideas. And one of the things you talk about in the film at the very beginning is you look at salt.

C (8:20)

I didn't have the impact, Maren, that I thought I would have.

B (8:23)

Yeah, I think. I think you did. It's just very hard for them to, you know, they have to confront reality in a bigger way than most politicians would like to in order to take action based on that kind of thing. Let's start with salt, right? I mean, you talk about this in the film at the beginning. And we look at the beginning, in the beginning of your film at a salt plant, right, and it's incredibly old. It's rusting all over the place. And what they're doing here is they're taking brine and drying and drying and drying and drying until you're left with salt. It was a very simple procedure. And so it's very hard, I think, for people to see that and go, well, this rusty old factory churning out these big piles of salt is absolutely vital to a variety of industries across the UK and also probably to national security in the end.

C (9:08)

Yeah, it is. Without salt. We are in big trouble without salt. Obviously, you know, we as humans need salt in order to stay alive. It's part of our kind of physiology. We need salt. But then on top of that, you have. We have, you know, quite a big chemical sector and a pharmaceutical sector in this country, you know, making drugs. You can't do that without salt because there's various kind of, you know, sodium chloride, various compounds derived from that that are absolutely essential to making drugs. We have some, actually, there's, there's a place up in Cheshire. So the backstory here is, you know, not every country in the world has lots of salt under the ground. It just, it kind of depends on the geology. You know, was, was there 200 million years ago, was there a sea that dried up underneath where your country is now? For many countries, the answer is no. Germany has quite a lot of salt. There's a bit in France, but not an awful lot. But it so happens there's really rather a lot of it in the uk. And the upshot of that is we have for all of our history and obviously the interesting thing about Britain is we had the Industrial revolution here before everywhere else. And so we were kind of taking different compounds and different products and making them using coal in a way that other countries, you know, only learned to do kind of later on. For all of this time, the UK has never had to depend on getting salt in from overseas. Basically, since the beginning of civilization, we have been self sufficient for salt. And the point of this film was to say right now quite a few plants have shut down. Right now there are two plants left. There's two. I've now visited both of them and this one of them, this one that we showed in the film, is kind of on its last legs. What they do is there's lots of salt deep underground. You don't send people down with pickaxes these days. What you do is you pipe down some water and that comes up in the form of brine. So kind of 20, 30% salt solution and then you evaporate it away like you were saying. And that's kind of quite energy intensive. So part of the issue that these plants are faced with, like everything else, and I think a lot of what is going on on the chemical sector in Europe is the same, is the fact that it is super energy intensive to do chemical reactions most of the time. And then when you're talking about like petrochemicals, which is, you know, another thing we might come to then, also your feedstock is literally, it's oil and gas and all of that stuff is more expensive right now in Europe than it was before. And this is obviously a kind of post Russia, post Ukraine thing that's kind of, you know, I wouldn't say terminal, but a massive, massive problem for Europe. And it's, it's semi existential for chemicals. But you've got these two Plants going. One of them is kind of on its last legs. This is the salt that we are consuming right now in this country. If you're, if you're sprinkling salt on your chips in, you know, England or Scotland or, you know, anywhere in the uk, it comes from one of these two plants, the vessels in there that they're using to do this evaporation. They are more than 100 years old. And if you see the film, you will see that it looks old. It is old. And one of the things that I'm kind of trying to scratch my head about is, you know, Britain kind of had the industrial revolution early and there was this massive boom time for a lot of the kind of particularly kind of 19th century, and a lot of stuff got built. And you would be kind of quite surprised at the extent to which some of that machinery is still being used today. I kind of spent a lot of time kind of traveling around going to various plants in, you know, whether it's chemicals places or manufacturing plants, I was really struck a few years ago. I went to this, this car plant. They were making, I think, handles that went into Nissans or Hondas, I can't remember. And the steel pressing kind of machine they were using to press the steel was, I think, 1940s. And that is part of the infrastructure. And I've always kind of wondered to myself, we had this massive capital investment in the UK kind of almost getting on for a century ago. And we've been able to some extent to just live off that capital investment for a long time. And that's the thing. Now we're kind of getting to the point where you need to put money in, to invest in this stuff. And a lot of these decisions are coming due. And in the case of the salt plant, they need to invest a lot in this salt plant. You can see how rusty it is. I think there are some really legitimate and profound questions about, oh, why did they let it get onto its last legs? What's going on with INEOS right now? Shouldn't they have been keeping it better? Why can't they put the money in? All of those questions are all legitimate, but nonetheless, we're at this point where money needs to be put in. And if it doesn't get put in, then Britain has the very real chance that in the next few years we are going to become dependent on imports of salt, the most important of all chemicals. I would say we're going to potentially be dependent on imports for the first time in civilization and extraordinary. And yet no One's kind of talking about this. Well, at least very few people are kind of talking about this. And I just feel that's partly because we don't think about the fundamentals as much as perhaps we could do as.

B (14:03)

Much as we should. And I suppose the obvious question here is we're getting to the point when, as you say, salt and maybe various other industries, they really need to put up a lot of money, a lot of capital expenditure to move themselves into the new age, or at the very least to continue doing what they're doing. But they need to do that at a time when their costs are rising very dramatically and in particular when energy costs are rising very dramatically, the highest electricity bills in the Western world, et cetera, et cetera. And that makes it impossible to do that investment. Is that what's happening?

C (14:34)

Well, energy is much more expensive than it used to be, and that is a structural problem for Europe. And the difficult thing we're faced with in Europe is that it's not easy to see a way out of that. And for a long, long time, for decades and decades, we were very complacent about it. We thought that we kind of transcended energy as a fundamental force, which was totally delusional. We, I suppose, had deluded ourselves into not kind of thinking about the fact that we were completely reliant on Russian, cheap Russian gas. I mean, not directly in the uk, but indirectly, because it's all coming in, in the pipelines and we all are part of one kind of gas network. And in this new world where we want to rid ourselves of that dependence, then there's not an easy, cheap source of energy from elsewhere except coal. And we've forsworn coal. And so as a result of that, we are much more dependent on buying stuff from overseas. And to be honest with you, it is very hard to see an easy way out of that.

B (15:38)

The obvious immediate way out is to shift back from. Pull back from net zero and to allow the North Sea to be fully explored and developed and to take quite a lot of the climate taxes off industrial electricity bills and personal electricity bills. I mean, there, there are ways, they're just ways that the government is not keen to. To take, and probably much of the population is not keen on either.

C (15:58)

The paradox I would posit is this. You know, look at China. Just how fixated is China on net zero? Not particularly, if at all. And yet China is where the vast, vast majority of development is happening when it comes to, you know, solar panels being made, wind turbines being turned out as well, batteries being made. And why is that happening? It's happening not because China is fixated on trying to get its carbon emissions down low. I mean, yes, they would like to have better air quality, for instance, in Beijing, but it is not about fixation on a particular kind of target of carbon emissions. It is because they see this as being a massive industrial opportunity. And also, critically, they want energy security, so they don't want to have to rely or depend on Middle Eastern oil, which is primarily the kind of the main source. And so they are making crazy amounts of solar panels and batteries right now powered by coal.

B (16:54)

I was going to say this is the point. They are still using a lot of coal, increasing amounts of coal, increasing amounts of oil, increasing amounts of gas. So they're seeing everything go up at once, both the clean side, to the extent it is clean, and the absolutely filthy side as well. So they'll use any type of energy.

C (17:09)

That's the point. It's kind of. They are. It is not as straightforward as saying it's either net zero or the other. And I think America's strategy has always seen slightly more kind of feet on the ground, to me, because even during Biden's time in office, they were putting a lot of money, a lot of investment into, through the Inflation Reduction act, which had some bits that were pretty ugly, but some bits that were kind of interesting. They were putting lots of money into batteries and solar panels and so on and so forth. But at the same time, there was a lot of kind of investment going into fracking. And if we are going to get to net zero, then you're going to just have to kind of have enormous amounts of energy and resources and metals and a whole lot of it. And it just feels like in Europe we've kind of forgotten that you need that part of it. And we're just aiming for the kind of the net zero part of it. And if that is the case, fine, but you are just going to become incredibly dependent on everyone else. And you're going to be buying your solar panels from China, made of coal. They are literally, by the way, they're made with coal in order to make the silicon that you have in the solar panels. And also then there's the power that goes into the coal. You're going to be getting your kind of wind turbines. You've been getting your chemicals from China, which again, are made from coal. Like the way that we make fertilizer, we don't make it in the uk. When I wrote this book, Material World, I talked about how there was basically one plant left in the UK making fertilizer, ammonia, which you. The way you make it is you basically, you take natural gas and you want to get the kind of nitrogen out of the air and you use the hydrogen and the natural gas to kind of, you know, to do this incredible chemical reaction, the Haber Bosch process, and you end up with a physical form, a solid form of nitrogen. It's amazing. It's one of the great leaps forward in scientific history. It's part of the explanation for how we are able to support, you know, 8 billion, 9 billion people on this planet. It is. It's crazy. There is no way we should be able to be able to have that many people on this planet. And yet we can. And yet they are better fed than ever before, thanks to the Harbour Bosch process, which we in this country had one plant doing. When I wrote the book, we just shut it down. We just shut it down and we shut it down because natural gas is too expensive and obviously there's all sorts of consequences to that because partly we're not able to make our own fertilizer. Also, by the way, what's the other thing that you use nitrogen for? It is also explosives. So there's a lot of talk at the moment in the UK about whether we're going to make our own explosives. Again, you can't do it if you don't have those fundamental ingredients. But if we're going to start importing this stuff from China instead. In China, when they're making fertilizer, when they're making ammonia, they don't make it with natural gas, they make it with coal, for the most part. And so you have dirtier chemicals coming from the other side of the world than the stuff that we would be making here. And yet, because we are shutting down these plants, it means that our domestic emissions of carbon are lower, but the world as a whole will be greater because we're getting them from a dirtier plant somewhere else on the other side of the planet. And like I say, it's a paradox and it's from the design of some of these targets that we have. And I think even if you. Even for those of us, and I'm one of them, who thinks, listen, we should be thinking about carbon emissions and we should be thinking about a way of making the planet more self sustaining in the future and we should be kind of trying to cut down on pollution. This does seem like it's a slightly perverse way of doing it, if the net result of it is actually to raise planetary carbon emissions rather than to lower them.

B (20:40)

So it'd be much more responsible on a planetary level to keep our plants going here than to let them shut down.

C (20:48)

All else equal. Yeah, it would. And then that's before you get to the national security thing, which I think is just as, if not even more profound, because BAE recently said that it wanted to start making certain types of explosives in the uk you can't. I don't want to go into how to make a bomb on this podcast.

B (21:05)

Otherwise, that's not the takeaway we like to leave people with. We like investment advice.

C (21:10)

But here are two ingredients everyone, you know, that you definitely need. If you're going to make any kind of explosives, you need nitrogen. Okay. So the same stuff that you're using to make fertilizers, part of the reason it helps plants grow is nitrogen. It's this extraordinary kind of expensive, expensive element. Nitrogen is also the thing, the main thing in tnt, the N, is nitrogen. And you also need sulfuric acid. It's another one of these things that you like. The thing about chemicals is basically the chemical helps you either break something down or combine it. In this country, we used to have a plant making sulfuric acid. We've shut it down. We used to have a plant making nitrogen. We've shut it down. These are the two main things we need to make the explosives that supposedly we're going to start making in this country, and yet they're gone. And the thing that is, I think, a little disturbing is this stuff happened without anyone even noticing it. You go to Whitehall and talk to civil servants. They're mostly oblivious that this stuff has even happened in the first place. And so the worry for me is, will there be some points, you know, in five, ten years time in the future where it's like, okay, well, that was a silly thing that we allowed ourselves to do. Let's rebuild this. Oh, it turns out actually it's going to cost kind of 3 billion rather than the kind of, you know, £500,000 that it might have done before. So I'm nervous. I'm a little bit terrified about where we're heading on this, but frankly, to say, happening in the rest of Europe as well. The rest of Europe is shutting. Germany is going even faster on this as well. And it's going even faster because all of a sudden, the spigot of natural gas from Russia has been kind of shut down. And basically, most of the chemical sector in the industrial sector on Germany was totally dependent on that. And without that, what you're going to do just if you're, if you're an international company, of course you're going to look at your locations and you'll say, well, I'll just expand my plant in America where the gas is cheap and I'll expand my plant in China where energy is cheap. And that's kind of what's happening right now.

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B (25:32)

Yeah. So what's the way back from this? What's the way back from this? We suddenly say, well we wanted to spend 5% of GDP on defense anyway. And it sounds like the best place to put a large part of that defense money is into our remaining chemicals plant. So we've got something left when the time comes.

C (25:48)

Yeah, I think a holistic conversation like that is where we need to be. I think politicians, they make lots of good kind of encouraging noises about this stuff. You know, Rachel Reeves, when she came into office, her kind of big neologism was securonomics, this idea that where something is made actually matters. And actually that's. I couldn't put it better myself. The problem is that it's not particularly evident that's what the government is actually kind of, that's their guiding principle. And if you talk to people who are within government, so kind of officials, advisors, I think the UK still leans towards the kind of principle of, well, if we're not making salt here, I mean, who cares, because you can just buy it in from overseas. And if you're not making soda ash. So the other one, the other one, which for me is I find destabilizing and a bit unnerving that we've stopped making soda ash is basically one of those chemicals which is the building block of so many other things. So basically soda ash is still at the heart of so many kind of manufacturing things today. It was at the heart of the chemicals revolution when that happened 200 years ago in the UK, in fact, one of the biggest chemical plants in the world was one in Glasgow where they had this. It was the tallest chimney in the world. This tenants. It was the Tennant family had this plant in Glasgow which has obviously now been destroyed. I went there recently to look at and see if there was a plaque anywhere to show where it was. Once upon a time, the tallest chimney in the world, biggest chemical plant in the world has all been destroyed. It's like a motorway underpass now. Slightly depressing, but anyway, there was, up until again, up until months ago, there was still one plant making soda ash in this country and it just got shut down as well. And so again, we are dependent on soda ash imported, I think mostly from America, but you also have some from North Africa to provide the. To make the glass that we need in this country to make the paper that we. We still make a fair bit of paper in this country. And again, that's relevant, isn't it? And if you're thinking about the nexus between national security and economics and also sustainability and then defense, you should be thinking about all of those things. And I don't think we've got that holistic approach in the UK and in the us I think there's slightly further on from that. But what I would say is that the challenge here is that we as a civilization, what do we like? We like cheap stuff.

B (28:25)

We do.

C (28:26)

And I think, you know, we've been able to enjoy a period for, you know, decades since fall of the Berlin Wall, where stuff has kind of tended to get cheaper. Not everything, obviously, but particularly physical manufactured products. We might now be at that period, might now be at an end, and things might be more expensive. And if you then want to have more national security and more stuff made domestically, then things are going to be quite a bit more exp. And are we ready to pay for that right now? And probably most consumers are not ready. And what Donald Trump is doing in America right now is a pretty good natural experiment in that, because things are likely to get more expensive given tariffs. And how are people going to feel about that? Well, they don't seem very happy about it right now and they better wait because there's a big lag on these things. And from my impression, the Tibetan 2, 3 suppliers in America to the car industry are only now starting to ratchet up their prices. So you're only going to see that car prices go up this year and maybe next year. So are we ready for that? I don't know.

B (29:30)

Well, I think, I mean, it's interesting that the conversation around national security and defence is definitely changing fast. And so it's a presentation as much as anything else. I mean, the most recent polls show that people, if you run down their list of worries, immigration is still at the top, but defence is now the second, second highest thing on the worry list for the population of the UK and strongly suspect that if you were to explain to most people what you've just explained to me, that without basic chemicals, our national security is constantly, permanently at risk, then maybe you would find more of an appetite for it.

C (30:01)

Well, maybe. But it comes in the end down to the question of are you okay to pay a bit more for your salt? If it comes from the uk.

B (30:11)

People spend a lot of money on artisanal salts, don't they? Cornish salt, cottage salt, Welsh salt, same stuff, different shape. So maybe, I don't know. So when you speak to civil servers, government officials about this, where do you think they should be going? What should happen? Does this require intense government intervention or does it just involve finding a way to make electricity energy cheaper? What does it involve? What should a responsible government do right now to, at the very least halt the disappearance of these absolutely essential industries from the uk.

C (30:52)

Understanding what the building blocks are for our standard of living would be a good start. Just in December, the government stepped in and they. They put a bit of money into Grangemouth.

B (31:05)

Yeah.

C (31:06)

Which is, you know, this, this ethylene plant used to be a massive refinery, but now basically it's only the ethylene bit that's going and a few other little bits and pieces. And I think there was a realization that if that had gone, then.

B (31:21)

You.

C (31:21)

Would have seen this domino effect across the rest of the chemical sector, because the whole pipeline that have feeds of different plants. So I think there's some recognition that we're now at the kind of at the very end of what you can sensibly cut before you start losing the basic building blocks. But to some extent, a lot of it's already gone. Talking to people in the chemical sector, they're saying that basically 90% is gone. The last 10% was that ethylene plant. This is a really dangerous moment for the uk. There's the national security challenges and then the question of whether we are going to be able to defend ourselves in the future. And that's something that goes beyond economics. Are we going to be able to make the explosives that, God forbid, we don't have to use, but we might well need in the future? Well, right now the answer is no, because we have just shut down the plants making the feedstocks that can provide us with the explosives that we may need in future. And that, for me, is deeply unnerving. And the fact that so few people are talking about it, either inside government or out, is doubly unnerving?

B (32:39)

Yeah, incredibly unnerving. Listen, is there anything positive, you can say, any green shoots here? Anything that we can look at and say, well, this is terrifying and distressing and it's a grave concern that the government is not on it or doesn't appear to be on it at all. But is. Is there a positive way to spend any of this? I can't actually think of one at the moment. I'm just desperately hoping to end the pot on something vaguely positive.

C (33:05)

There's always positive. And I mean, we're at this moment where we have these incredible kind of tools, particularly things like AI, which can provide you with the ability to test new compounds and to devise new kind of material formats that we never kind of had before. And so the ingeniousness that happened during the Industrial Revolution, we should be able to do that again. And I'm actually kind of quite optimistic about the future because if you marshal all of those tools and use it to make it, you know, make us better at kind of getting copper out of the ground or making concrete, then that's amazing. And you know, the UK has always in particular been a place where we have come up with lots of exciting ideas about this kind of thing. I think we've just kind of forgotten a little bit that we have this engineering heritage. And I think that the fact that we are mostly running by people, PPE graduates, dare I say from Oxford, rather than people who have that kind of grounding in how to make the stuff that enables civilization to survive, that's slightly problematic for me. It used to be the case when ICI was this massive institution, all sorts of problems with it, but it had a big building which is basically where MI5 is now. So right in the middle of Whitehall that was ici, and you had at the heart of Westminster this institution that was thinking about how do we make the medicines, the pharmaceuticals, the chemicals, the explosives, the fertilizers, all of these things keeping the public alive and safe. And it was there. It was really close. We don't really have that mindset anymore and perhaps we need to try and rediscover our kind of inner engineer, chemical engineer, but also kind of mechanical engineer, because we still need that stuff enormously and if we don't think of that stuff, then other people will.

B (34:59)

Okay, Ed, thanks for that. Really appreciate it. Really interesting. Thank you for joining us again. And by the way everyone, if you haven't read Ed's book yet, do please get it, read it. And by the way, it's just been translated into French so you haven't got any linguistic excuses anymore. Thanks for listening to this week's Maring Talks Money. If you like us, show, rate, review and subscribe. Wherever you listen to your podcasts and keep sending your questions or comments to merrinmoneyloomburg. You can also follow me and John on Twitter or x. I'm at marionsw and John is John Underscore Stepek this episode was hosted by Me Marisamset Web. It was produced by Sam Asadi and Moses Andam Sound designed by Blake Maples. And special thanks of course, to Ed Conway.

D (35:47)

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A (36:17)

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Com.

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Stay unbreakable.