bauxite

" Except it's coke, and he doesn't go past bauxite.

Your first point is false -- in some countries bauxite is processed with power from coal-fired plants.

Lots of bauxite is shipped from Australia to Norway to be smelted.

But not too many of those countries also have bauxite mines, coca plants and kola nuts.

The only reason why this toolchain is global is that the bauxite is cheapest in Australia.

[27]Vanadium is also present in bauxite and in fossil fuel deposits such as crude oil, coal, oil shale and tar sands.

Most of the energy is spent reducing the bauxite, an ore of aluminum that is the world's main source of aluminum.

Before we could use electric furnaces and electrolysis to turn bauxite to aluminum, it was one of the most rare and valuable metals on earth.

But of course this completely overlooks the massively greater amount of energy it takes to produce virgin aluminum from raw bauxite!

So the cost of shipping mined bauxite and iron ore to Japan, Korea, China, then manufacture, then shipping it back with the concomitant margins for all the players in between.

Aluminum isn't hard, just potentially more expensive.> While I'm nit-picking...Me too, Pinjarra is where the refinery for the largest producing bauxite mine is.

Rather, it is because electrolytic smelting of bauxite is enormously energy intensive, compared to the melting of sand, glass, or aluminum.

The Australian bauxite mines are the richest and cheapest mines to operate, which makes other sources of aluminum not worth exploiting, but aluminum is still the third most common element on Earth.

"creating an aluminum can out of recycled materials requires only 5 percent as much energy as creating a brand new can from bauxite ore"That's 95% energy savings for aluminum.

I was going to mention that much earlier...aluminum/aluminium wasn't easily separable from bauxite until electricity could be generated at industrial scale.

For a counterexample, note that other "building" processes are parallelizable and standardized; it takes quite a long time to turn bauxite, sand, and rubber into a car, but the intermediate steps are not specific to the final product.

I'm not even sure what it would mean to run out of iron ore or bauxite -- a large fraction of the Earth's crust is iron- and aluminum-bearing rock, and the definition of "ore" is "the particular chunks of rock and dirt that are economically viable to extract metal from".