Friends, I have got to tell you about aluminum. I recently did a big dive on how the fuck Iceland recently beat out the USA in aluminum production (which is very pathetic sounding), accounting for 2% of the world’s aluminum production despite being only 0.005% of the world population.
You might think, wow? I guess the mythological mining creatures in Iceland found some aluminum and went really ham on it? Wrong! They onlined some smelters in about 2009-2012 in Iceland and import all their ore from Australia, Brazil, and the USA. The big reason behind this move is that smelting is of course the most energy intensive process, and Iceland has a robust geothermal and hydroelectric grid with stable energy. It has created a bizarre web where finished goods are completed in Iceland by Polish migrants and bauxite ore (a precursor for aluminum) is imported via various resource colonies. Power is at a premium these days, and Iceland has one of the most robust power grids in the west currently (datacenters will carpet the island soon enough?).
What’s even weirder, is if Trump truly bans Canadian aluminum (and has been talking about messing with Iceland as well), we are essentially trying to decapitate our own vertical integration plans and making it impossible for American companies to import aluminum themselves. I think quite a big part of why they have been talking all this smack about annexing Canada, Greenland, and Iceland is not only the Northwest Passage opening up, but also because quite a lot of world aluminum production is smelted and headquartered in these areas. Maybe the USA will actually make a move on seizing these companies? Maybe there is a guy that controls smelters in the USA and wants no competition? Or maybe they are trying to kill off a competing heavy consumer of electricity in order to build more datacenters without overextending the powergrid?
There is a single aluminum smelter in Quebec (Aluminerie Alouette) that produces almost as much per year (600,000+ tonnes) as the entire Great Satan (670,000+ tonnes), and it’s entirely due to our cheap electricity.
“great” satan should include canada tbh, like “great” britain includes Scotland
wild that modern American manufacturing processes essentially recreate the trade-raw-materials-for-finished-goods-and-slaves economy of the thirteen colonies.
Its how modern capitalism functions too. Generally, the countries in control of the highest rung of the process reap the most profits. Currently, those refined goods are becoming more and more specific. Think things like designs to computer chips, ships that get things around, specific kinds of oils for specific kinds of motors. LLMs are another good example, high quality software and schematics were the previous top rung in the computer fab chain, now they are trying to make it LLMs. If this chain is longer and more profitable than the aluminum fab chain while competing for similar resources, the aluminum fab chain may be cut. But then it is a catch-22, quite a lot of computer parts require aluminum, so now we need to rely on the communists to do something ‘unprofitable’ like supply us with necessary aluminum while we pivot to profitable goods.
Europeans are building a massive port in Iceland. Its called Finnafjord Port.
This is wild because aluminum is still very expensive after all of the tarif shit. Cutting major sources when we don’t have the established infrastructure to compensate just means US manufacturers that use aluminum get screwed.
