03 March 2018

Yes Ore No

To paraphrase Orange Julius Caesar, "if you don't have iron ore and bauxite, you don't have steel or aluminum". And, one might add, to turn bauxite into aluminum eats prodigious amounts of electricity.
CSIRO calculate that the embodied energy (all the energy used to make the material) for aluminium is 211 GJ per tonne, compared to 22.7 GJ per tonne for steel.

Not for nothing, our economy would rather burn all that electricity on bitcoins. Make sense to you?

As to base ore endowment, the USofA has nearly no bauxite and has depleted iron ore to about the noise level. Without imports, we don't have industry.

Here's iron reserves. And, bauxite; you're not missing something, the USofA isn't listed.
However, since 1981, none of the bauxite mined in the US was used to make metallic aluminium. US bauxite is instead used for abrasives, high-temperature refractory materials, and as a high-strength proppant for hydraulic fracturing of oil and gas wells.

Besides announcing tariffs while "unglued", there really, really isn't viable US supply. Moron.

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