The Metal With The Most Mysterious History

[00:00:00]A few months ago, I was doing some research on the history of metals and I came across something that I thought was really strange. Turns out about 140 years ago, there there was a metal that was more valuable than gold. And this metal wasn't a rare metal. It wasn't a hard to find metal. Quite the opposite, actually. It's a metal that's most common. It's the most common metal in the Earth's crust.

[00:00:27]And yet it was more expensive than gold.

[00:00:31]When I came across this, I didn't really think of it as a fact. Uh I thought maybe it's an exaggeration. You know, online there's a lot of nonsense. Uh and I decided to dig more into it. And the the story just got weirder and weirder and weirder. And somehow even though this story is really bizarre, almost no one seems to know about it. This is a story that involves Napoleon and how he treated this metal to be more valuable than gold. Uh the circumstances around how they discovered how to make it at commercial scale is really strange. And today this metal requires some of the largest industrial operations on Earth. And the more you look into this, it just gets weirder and weirder. Trust me. So this is the reason why I decided to start this YouTube channel. It was the inspiration for all of this. And I've prepared a video for you guys. So why don't we just dive into it and let's start with Napoleon. In 1855, the emperor of France hosted a banquet. The most important guests, royalty, ministers, and heads of state were served their food on aluminium plates. Everyone else ate on plates of gold.

[00:01:54]Aluminium or aluminum, the metal in soda cans, foil wrap, and window frames, once more valuable than gold.

[00:02:06]This is one of the most extreme transformations in the history of modern economics. How did one of the rarest, most expensive metals on Earth become one of the cheapest and most disposable in today's society? The answer lies in a chain of events that transformed aluminium forever.

[00:02:24]A story driven by scientific breakthroughs, industrial ambition, and a discovery that collapsed the value of an entire metal commodity.

[00:02:35]It begins in a backyard shed in Ohio, and it ends with some of the largest machines ever built by human hands. This is the story of how aluminium is made and how it went from being the world's highest priced metal to one of the cheapest.

[00:02:55]Here is something that sounds almost like it couldn't possibly be true.

[00:02:59]Aluminium, the 13th element on the periodic table, is the most abundant metal in the Earth's crust.

[00:03:08]It makes up more than 8% of the ground that you walk on. It's in the clay beneath your feet, the rocks in your garden, and the dirt on a hiking trail.

[00:03:19]And for the entire history of the human civilization until 1825, no one could extract a single gram of it. Aluminium is not hard to find. The real obstacle is the bond to oxygen, a chemical intensity that makes it essentially impossible [music] to separate using heat alone. Let us dive into why that matters.

[00:03:45]For thousands of years, humans extracted metals the same way. You take ore and you heat it alongside with charcoal and the metal separates.

[00:03:57]The intense heat weakens the chemical bonds holding the metal to oxygen. At the same time, the carbon from the burning charcoal eagerly bonds with that oxygen, carrying it away as carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide.

[00:04:13]Iron works like this. Copper works like this. Tin, lead, silver, they all work like this. The carbon grabs the oxygen.

[00:04:23]The metal is left behind.

[00:04:25]It's not really easy, but it is pretty straightforward.

[00:04:30]Aluminium ignores this [music] entire process. Heat boite aluminium ore to 1,000° C and the aluminium will simply stay bonded [music] to the oxygen.

[00:04:43]The bond is too strong. No amount of heat, no type of furnace, no clever bellows design changes the chemistry.

[00:04:52]So over 10,000 years of metal energy from the first copper smelters in Mesopotamia to the factories of the industrial revolution, aluminium sat invisible inside the ground, completely inaccessible.

[00:05:08]Humans built empires using iron and bronze while literally walking on a metal they couldn't reach.

[00:05:16]The solution would come from a place you probably wouldn't expect. In 1880, a chemistry professor at Oberlin College in Ohio told his students something that stuck. He said, "If anyone could figure out how to produce aluminium cheaply, they would become rich and famous. One of his students, a 17-year-old boy named Charles Martin Hall, heard those words and decided to become that person.

[00:05:44]Hall had no obvious advantages. He wasn't wealthy, well-connected, or part of Europe's scientific elite. His greatest asset wasn't money or status, but his tenacious endurance.

[00:05:57]After graduating, he set up a laboratory in a woodshed behind his parents' house.

[00:06:03]He built his own batteries. He wound his own electrical wire, and he crafted crucibles from clay. His older sister, Julia, took notes and assisted with the experiments.

[00:06:15]Hall's approach was methodical. Mix aluminina with different mineral compounds, dissolve it, then run a strong current through it. And he tried again and again. Different salts, different mixtures, different currents.

[00:06:33]For months, every experiment ended in the same way. A cooled crucible with nothing useful inside. But Hall refused to walk away from the problem.

[00:06:45]On the 23rd of February 1886, Hall ran [music] a current through a cryolyte aluminum mixture in a homemade crucible.

[00:06:54]When the crucible cooled, he cracked it open.

[00:06:57]Several small silvercoled pellets fell into his hand.

[00:07:02]He [music] ran into his house and showed his sister, screaming, "I got it." Those pellets were pure aluminium, the first ever produced cheaply enough to be practical.

[00:07:15]Strangely, across the Atlantic in the country of France, another 22-year-old came with the same solution completely independently. They solved the same problem in the same way using the same methodology, same chemistry in the same month of the same year. Neither knew the other one existed, but now their names are permanently linked. The Hall Herald process. And here is what that process actually looks like in practice.

[00:07:47]The modern Hall Herald cell is one of the most extreme [music] industrial environments on Earth.

[00:07:53]Picture a steel swimming pool the size of a small bus. Its sides lined with carbon blocks. Above it hangs a carbon anode, a block of baked petroleum coke, and a cold tar pitch roughly the size of a refrigerator.

[00:08:10]The pool cell is filled with cryolyte, a mineral that in nature only exists in significant quantities in one place on Earth, a fjord in western Greenland.

[00:08:22]Today, most cryolyte is made synthetically, but the chemistry is the same. The cryolyte is heated to 960° C, roughly the same temperature as lava flowing from a volcano.

[00:08:37]Aluminina, the white powder refined from [music] bulk site, is poured into this molten bath. It dissolves like sugar in coffee and then a current is switched on.

[00:08:50]A typical Hall Herald cell runs at approximately 150,000 to 300,000 amps. For context, a typical house draws about 100 to 200 amps at peak load. So, one cell uses roughly the same as a,000 homes worth of electricity. This current tears the oxygen atoms away from the aluminium atoms at a molecular level.

[00:09:19]The freed aluminium, now liquid, denser than the kryolite [music] bath, sinks to the bottom. Workers siphon it out every 24 to 48 hours using a vacuum crucible.

[00:09:33]This is metal production at a scale that is hard to comprehend. A row of these cells stretches for hundreds of meters inside a building called a pot room.

[00:09:45]One pot room might hold as many as 200 cells.

[00:09:49]One smelter might hold four pot rooms.

[00:09:54]The noise is constant. A low industrial hum from the current, the hiss from the gas, and the rumble of overhead cranes delivering aluminum.

[00:10:06]The heat is oppressive.

[00:10:09]The light from the molten metal is bright enough to leave after images in your vision.

[00:10:15]This is how every gram of primary aluminium on Earth is made. The process that Hall invented in his backyard shed in 1886 has been scaled up but never fundamentally replaced.

[00:10:31]But the smelter is only half the story.

[00:10:34]Before aluminium reaches the pot room, it has to be mined and refined.

[00:10:39]So, how is aluminium made from boite?

[00:10:43]The journey from boite to aluminium starts in a place that looks nothing like a factory.

[00:10:49]Western Australia, the darling range.

[00:10:53]Red dirt stretches to the horizon.

[00:10:56]This is boite country. Boite is a reddish brown rock [music] that contains aluminum oxide mixed with iron oxides, silica, and other impurities.

[00:11:08]It looks like ordinary dirt.

[00:11:11]It is in a sense ordinary dirt, just concentrated enough to be worth processing.

[00:11:18]The mining here is not what most people picture when they're thinking of mining.

[00:11:23]No deep shafts, no tunnels, no explosions.

[00:11:28]Instead, it's open cut mining so shallow that the pits are rarely more than a few meters deep.

[00:11:36]Bulldozers scrape away a thin layer of top soil. Excavators scoop out the boxite underneath.

[00:11:44]Trucks then carry it to a crusher.

[00:11:49]Two tons of this red dirt will eventually become one ton of aluminium metal. This ratio defines everything about the industry. where mines are built, where refineries are located, and why smelters cluster near cheap power.

[00:12:07]The crushed bulk site is loaded onto conveyor belts.

[00:12:12]In Western Australia, those belts run for kilometers from the Darling Range mines down to the refineries on the coast. At the refinery, the boxite meets the buyer process.

[00:12:26]The bop process dissolves aluminium richch ore of boite into a powerful bath of hot sodium hydroxide under pressure.

[00:12:36]The impurities, mostly iron oxides, settle out as red mud. What's left is a white powder called aluminina, pure aluminium oxide.

[00:12:49]This white powder is then shipped to the smelters. Australia is the largest exporter of aluminium.

[00:12:57]Giant bulk carriers take it from ports like Gladstone and Bunbury across the oceans to smelters in China, Middle East, and beyond.

[00:13:07]And this is where the energy question comes into the larger picture.

[00:13:13]Aluminium smelters are not built near box mines. They're not built near refineries.

[00:13:20]They are built near the cheapest available electricity.

[00:13:25]This is the most critical part of the operation to make it economically viable to produce.

[00:13:30]Electricity is 30 to 40% of the total cost of producing primary aluminium.

[00:13:36]A single smelter can consume as much power as a medium-sized city. The Tomago smelter in New South Wales, Australia, the largest in the country, consumes roughly 10% of the entire state's electricity. That's one factory, onetenth of the state. This is why countries with abundant hydropower, Iceland, Norway, Canada, Russia are major aluminium producers despite having no boxite deposits. The boxite is mined in Australia or Guinea or Brazil. It's refined into aluminina near the mines.

[00:14:15]Then aluminina is shipped thousands of kilometers to wherever the power is cheapest.

[00:14:21]Iceland is the extreme case. This country has no boxite.

[00:14:27]It imports all of its aluminina, but its geothermal and hydropower resources produce some of the cheapest electricity in the world. So Iceland runs three aluminium smelters that together consume more power than the entire Icelandic population uses for everything else.

[00:14:46]Homes, offices, [music] hospitals, schools. Aluminium uses more Icelandic electricity than Icelanders do. At this point, you might be wondering, why go through all this effort? Why mine this red dirt in 40° heat, dissolve it in costic chemicals, ship white powder across an ocean, and then pump a thousand homes worth of electricity through a molten bath of lava temperature just to produce one metal?

[00:15:18]Well, because aluminium does many things no other common metal can do. It only weighs 1/3 as much as steel, but it can be alloyed to nearly match its strength.

[00:15:31]This ratio, strength to weight, is the single most important number in aerospace engineering.

[00:15:38]The Boeing 737, the most produced jet airliner in history, is roughly 80% aluminium by weight.

[00:15:48]Every time you board a commercial flight, the aircraft around you is predominantly made of the metal that came out of a Hall cell.

[00:15:57]Aluminium does not rust. When iron rusts, it flakes away. The metal is literally disintegrating.

[00:16:06]When aluminium oxidizes, it forms a transparent microscopic layer of aluminium oxide that seals the surface and prevents further corrosion. An aluminium facade, a bridge component, or a ship hull can sit exposed to rain and salt and pollution for [music] decades.

[00:16:26]It can be rolled thinner than a human hair. It can be extruded into shapes so complex that the cross-section of aluminium window framing resembles a geometric puzzle. It can be cast, forged, machined, stamped, and drawn. No other metal offers this range of forming options at this weight and this cost.

[00:16:49]And it conducts electricity nearly as well as copper while weighing half as much. This is why high voltage power lines are made by aluminium.

[00:17:00]Copper lines would sag dangerously between transmission towers. Aluminium lines stay up.

[00:17:08]All of this, the aviation, the construction, the packaging, the electrical grid traces back to two 22 year olds in 1886 and one of the strongest chemical bonds in nature.

[00:17:24]But there are also serious problems with the production of aluminium.

[00:17:29]If your smelter runs on hydropower, the carbon footprint is relatively low. If it runs on coal, as many Australian smelters historically have, the pollution footprint is enormous.

[00:17:45]The aluminium industry produces roughly 1.1 billion tons of CO2 every year.

[00:17:53]That's about 2% of global emissions.

[00:17:56]That's roughly the same as the entire aviation industry.

[00:18:01]And then there's a second source of emissions that has nothing to do with electricity.

[00:18:07]The carbon anodess.

[00:18:10]In every Hall herald cell on Earth, the carbon anode is consumed during the process.

[00:18:17]The carbon combined with the freed oxygen and becomes CO2.

[00:18:22]This is not a flaw. This anode is meant to burn as a sacrificial element that attracts the oxygen away from the aluminium.

[00:18:32]For 135 years, that was just the cost of doing business. You had to accept the carbon emissions because there was no alternative.

[00:18:43]But in 2018, something changed. A joint venture between the companies Alcoa and Riotinto called Elysis announced that they had developed an inert anode, one that doesn't consume carbon, one that instead of producing CO2, produces pure oxygen.

[00:19:03]The anode is made of proprietary ceramic materials. The exact composition has never been made public, but it works.

[00:19:12]Elysis has been producing aluminium with inert anodes as a pilot plant in Quebec since 2019.

[00:19:19]The technology is still in an experimental phase and is predicted to be rolled out globally within the next 20 years.

[00:19:28]Apple has invested into this project not for environmental press release but because Apple uses huge quantities of aluminium in every iPhone and MacBook and Apple Watch and the company's supply chain commitments require carbon neutrality.

[00:19:45]If Elisa scales, the aluminium inside the next generation of consumer electronics can theoretically be produced without a single gram of processed CO2.

[00:19:57]If every smelter on Earth adopts this technology, the industry's direct emissions would drop by roughly 70%.

[00:20:05]Combined with renewable electricity, aluminium would become one of the cleanest industrial materials on the planet.

[00:20:14]The same metal that was once invisible inside the Earth, now on a path to be produced with oxygen as the only byproduct.

[00:20:23]So, here is where we end up. Aluminium went from being more valuable than gold to being the most disposable metal in today's life. That journey took 135 years and required the simultaneous invention of a chemical process by two 22 year olds on the opposite sides of the Atlantic. The metal locked inside dirt for 4 and 1/2 billion years is now so abundant that we wrap sandwiches in it and we throw it away. But if we recycle it, and we do recycle it, because making aluminium from scratch requires 20 times more energy than remlting it, it never degrades. It never rusts. It can be melted and reformed an infinite number of times.

[00:21:14]The value of aluminium was never about scarcity. It was about energy.

[00:21:21]The cost was never about digging it out of the ground. It was tearing it away from oxygen.