Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Steel: Thinning Supply Lines" video.

@peakz8548 World demand, but mostly the Chinese construction boom. People seem to forget that the Chinese have lifted around 500 million people out of the peasant class into the lower middle and middle class. India is also moving in that direction. Then there's the rich oil states of the middle east, they have also been building over the past decade. Back around 2002/03 I was told the Australian iron order industry was planning to double from around 200 million tons to 400 million tons a year. In 2017 we produced over 885 million tons. I think that's backed off a little to around 820 million tons. There's a little heard of economic indicator called the iron consumption rate. Its so rarely heard of I might even have that name wrong. Back around 2003 the Western world consumed between 70 and 85 kilograms per person each year of iron. It was through stuff we bought but also through construction. At that time China was around 8kg and India 7kg per person per year. You don't have to move populations that large much to have a big effect.
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Your right but then Peter's not always on target with technology & engineering issues. He's close on most things but typical on non-engineers he gets his information twisted around at times. On things like political strategies, politics and demographics he's a wiz.
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I'm Australian but did my degree in aerospace at U. Illinois (2hrs from Indianapolis). I ended up working the Australian iron ore industry. Back around 2002 I met Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) and at that time he was a proponent of Helium-3 mining on the moon. So I went off to our mining industry for experience at building & operating remote mining sites. Around 2010 there were people trying to fund a pig iron smelter in Australia's lesser known iron ore region - the Gascoyne in Western Australia. The Kimberly region further north is where most of those Japanese, Korean and Chinese cars start. The Kimberly is known for very high grades of iron ore while the Gascoyne has lower grades. This company had come across a new version of pig iron manufacture that was suited to lower ore grades and they were telling people that the future of pig iron looked very promising because they predicted a shortfall in supply particularly in high quality pig iron which this new process was for. So I know there were some people talking about the future of pig iron at least 12 years ago. The problem was it was during the aftermath of the 2008 GFC and the industry was trying to deal with the issue of no money for anything and low prices. There were several major projects (port & rail) in the Gascoyne that died. On growth when I first went into our mining industry (circa 2005 - yeah it took time to get there) there was a growth spurt going. They wanted to increase the output from about 200 Mta (million tons per annum) to around 400 million tons. By 2005 they were up to 250+ so it finally made it possible for me to get my chance. We are now producing OVER 800 Mta. In fact in 2017 it was 885Mta. I think its back around 820Mta at the moment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emm5aHAifMg So on growth you're 1/2 right. People thought it was bonkers when they wanted to double our output. We are now more than double that and showing no signs of stopping. In fact with Ukraine off line its the best we have ever had. This is the first I have heard anyone discuss pig iron in a while. It does and doesn't surprise me. It surprises me that nobody listened 12 years ago because it made sense and doesn't surprise me that nobody listened because who listens to common sense. And yes I do have some very blunt discussions with the clowns who want to mine asteroids. They're so dumb. They really can't tell the difference between science fiction and science fact.
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As an engineer I can say that's so damn true. I'm Australian but did aerospace at U. Illinois just over the border from Indiana. By chance in 2002 I met Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) and he was pushing to mine the moon for Helium-3. So I went off to Australia's remote mining industry for experience. One of the major learning lessons from that was how to do basic engineering in remote places. One of my personal is "How do we build a workshop & foundry on the moon?" The simple fact is we never built a moon base because its just to damn hard to fly everything there. Its at least 10x the cost to land anything on the moon. It really comes down to some incredibly simple things like How do you make pipe on the moon? How do you make electrical cables on the moon? How do you get the raw stock from local ore to make pipe, cablesand other stuff? To actually get information on the subject I have taken to watching the amateur machinists here on YouTube, because they have to make do with less than what the professionals have. I watch the pros as well because they show how to do stuff properly, but its the amateurs with little hobby lathes & mills I watch the most. At the start of off world their will be people doing things like black smithing because we just wont be able to take the processing hardware. We just wont be able to take an industrial lathe or mill or the tooling or a blast furnace. All the skills the amateurs with help from the pros have kept alive will enable a moon base. NASA are skull stuffed on the subject, while Musk & Bezos are so far into fantasyland it makes you wonder what drugs they're on.
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@raymondrumsey1097 yep and right now its a matter of which of the worlds super powers will collapse first or start a real war to avoid collapsing. Russia is already 1/2 way there. America is involved in Ukraine which is a great distraction from other things. China is trying to fix more leaky holes than they have fingers to stuff in them. Meanwhile Europe doesn't know if its speaking German, Italian, French or Spanish and the Brits don't know if they will still be able to launder Russian money next week to pay for the soccer players..
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@mabamabam If your going to ask my opinion on economists I'll warn you up front that I think they are a clueless pack of insanely overrated clowns to put it as simply as I can. I started looking into economics a couple of years ago because I go tired of clowns with economics degrees interfering in projects. They are like seagulls the fly in, flap their wings make lots of noise and SHlT on everything before flying off and leaving a mess behind for others to clean up. The biggest issue is that economics education has become an incredibly narrow field of academia. A lot of very wealthy people started funding the leading universities to teach what they wanted taught and to publish papers that favored their profits. It really started a long time ago when John D. Rockefeller helped fund and create the University of Chicago to produce "more of him." Its also where Milton Freidman taught for decades and also where John Mearsheimer currently teaches. I really can write pages on them. I can explain in detail how Milton Freidman's acolytes have caused the current energy crisis. The War in Ukraine didn't cause it, but it did exacerbated the issues already present. We are actually in a situation that's been almost 30 years in the making and will take 10-25 years to fix depending on which country and how bad you have screwed up. I'm Australian and we have screwed up badly but we might have a way out, but its going to be damn hard work.
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@mabamabam I don't know what's happening at your end but I can still see it here. there is some real insanity with the YT algorithm. It hides all sorts of stuff. I go accused by someone the other day of deleting my own comments which wasn't true.
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It could be I mention specific people and one specific university in Chitown that was in part funded by a rather ruthless person who thought the world needed more of him. He was a rock fellow sort of person. Bottom line is we (as in every developed nation has some very serious issues with energy that are the direct result of economics ideology mostly formulated by a person who thought "greed was good."
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@mabamabam In a nutshell when the economists told every one that privatisation would provide competitions and competition would provide better services at cheaper prices - THEY LIED. Because uncle Milton said corporations have one duty and that's to provide profit to owners and that does NOT EVER produce better services or lower prices. SO THEY LIED
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@mabamabam But worse than that it also stifled any new investment in base load power ANYWHERE. its pretty simple if you did Econ 101. If the population goes up then energy demand goes up. If you DO NOT build any new baseload power stations to cover the increased demand then prices go up. So if you were lucky enough to buy a 1/2 used power station from a government there is zero incentive to build anything else. because if you build additional power stations then supply will go up and prices will go down. So from a corporate perspective you run that old 1/2 used power station as hard as you can with the least amount of maintenance you can until the day it drops dead. And then you move all the money off shore and claim there's nothing left to clean up the site. That buckaroo has been going on everywhere and there is now a lot of very old poorly maintained power stations that will over the next decade simply die and when they do you will see energy prices go bonkers as they have done in a few places already.
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@mabamabam One of the reasons I say the acolytes of uncle Milton have caused the energy crisis is based on the fact that they have no idea what it takes to physically generate and distribute energy as well as make the equipment to use it. It doesn't matter if we are talking about electricity or gas or even coal when people used it to cook with and heat their homes. Worse when you put it to them they don't care because all the care about is their farking "sophisticated markets!!!!!!" They have no idea what it takes to build anything or maintain it. They see numbers on a page and they do is ask 2 questions. 1) How do we get certain numbers smaller? 2) How do we get certain numbers bigger? And they are experts in everything else - just ask them.
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Never forget that the acolytes of uncle Milton promised everyone that privatising state functions would provide better service at lower prices. Name a country where that actually worked? There's a Rand Corp report that says the top 1% of America made $47 Trillion. When Time magazine wrote about it they simply rounded it up to $50 Trillion and by some estimates its now up to $55 Trillion and climbing. More recently the Congressional Budget Office released a report on family wealth. So far the only person who I have seen mention it is Richard Wolff. You can find it easily by googling "congressional budget office family wealth." Go look at the main graph to see how well the bottom 50% of America has done. I checked on Australia's data. Its presented in quints (20% increments) so the numbers are different but it tells exactly the same story. The people at the top have made of with vast sums of money while the rest have paid for it.
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@mabamabam If you are interested a really great channel to watch is Gary's Economics here on YT. Gary Stevenson (a Brit) comes from the lower end of the spectrum but found his way to the LSE. He graduated top of his class and went to work for Citibank where (by his mid 20s) was their top trader in the world. He made billions and got paid millions. These days he's explaining how economics actually works. He's got a brilliant take on why so many commentators are wrong all the time.
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@nicholascarter9158 In terms of the planet its tiny amounts of nothing. But in terms of upsetting the natural systems its a different story. The oxygen used in iron ore smelting isn't destroyed. The oxygen still exists, but its shifted from being part of Fe2O3 (iron Oxide)or one of the other oxides to CO2. CO2 isn't a problem so long as there is enough plant life to consume it back into O2. Here's the longer story. I did my degree in aerospace and way back in 86 an alum who worked at NASA gave us a special talk one Friday. We were kinda exited because his last project was on terraforming Mars. The news wasn't good. He introduced us to what I now call "planetary mechanics" which is simply calculating how much stuff is involved. Making things like water cycles and oxygen cycles and carbon cycles work is what I call "planetary dynamics." Its sort of the difference between how many car parts and what they all weigh versus assembling all those parts into a working car. To give you an idea of the sorts of numbers involved the surface of the earth is roughly 500,000km² If you consider just the 1st kilometer of air above the surface of the Earth its pretty close to 500,000km³ in volume. In engineering there's HVAC (heating, ventilation & air conditioning) and HVAC works in meters cubed because that's practical for a house or an office block. That 1st kilometer of air in which 90% of humanity lives is roughly 500,000,000,000,000m³ that's 500 quadrillion cubic meters of air. At that's just the 1st kilometer there's at least 99 more on top of it although most of those are fairly thin. But then there' the oceans and water being more dense the weight of water is another damn big number. Bottom line is we live on a very big object with an insanely complex biological system powered by a big giant ball of plasma. Unfortunately science fiction (which I do love) has badly misrepresented science in many ways and the media have been no help either. In short we are NOT going to run out of stuff, which is good. The problem is we have upset the balance of that complex system we depend on for life. Added to that we don't understand enough of how that system works so that we can help nudge it back into balance.
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@nicholascarter9158 That's a great question and I don't have an answer. The thing with refining most minerals is that they are net oxygen producing processes not oxygen consuming. Most minerals like iron are oxides and the problem is getting rid of the oxygen. The reason they want pure oxygen for a blast furnace so they are not adding impurities. The reason that metallurgical coal is 2-3times the price of thermal coal is that it has almost zero impurities. Most coal includes sulphur sulphur when it burns produces SO2 which tends to become S03 and that likes to combine with water into H2SO4 better known as sulphuric acid. That's what caused the acid rain crisis in North America that was killing off their forests. They burned cheap coal from places like Southern Illinois that had a very high sulphur content. It was fine for power stations but lousy for steel manufacturing. For that you needed that nice clean black coal from places like West Virginia and Pennsylvania. hence why there were so many steel mills in Pennsylvania. Similarly if you just pump air into a blast furnace 80% of that is Nitrogen and Nitrogen does form compounds with metals (nitrides) including iron. Its great using air if that's what you want but lousy if you want just straight steel. For many other metals they dissolve the ore with acid (or similar) into a solution. Depending on the metal they will then get it back out of solution by various methods. A common way is electrowinning which is basically electrolysis in reverse. On a place like the moon all of that goes away. If you can get any compound hot enough it will breakdown. If done in a vacuum then the gases will just boil away and leave behind the metal. On the moon there's no shortage of direct sunlight and vacuum. It might be as simple as putting ore into a crucible and focusing light on it with mirrors. Its also know with lunar regolith (moon dust) that at around 800C before it melts that it tends to release oxygen and hydrogen that then forms water. So the whole, "how you do stuff" is a bit different on the moon because of what's available. Its really no different to various places here. Why do some countries have lots of Hydro power or lots of wheat farming or lots of fishing? Its what they have.
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