Exploring The War Below by Ernest Scheyder

What The War Below teaches us about the metals and minerals at the heart of our energy future

My energy book club just finished reading The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives by Ernest Scheyder.

Of all the words in the title, the two that best encompass the book’s thesis are “war” and “battle”.

The book is all about the tensions that exist around mining and processing the metals and minerals that are increasingly at the center of our modern energy ecosystem.

Image created by Google Gemini via the prompt “a copper mine”

In this post, I’m going to share the lessons I learned from reading The War Below.

I’ll also share some of the prompts that I gave our book club to provoke discussion on specific topics.

Mr. Scheyder does a great job of presenting mining-related dilemmas, then exploring the differing perspectives of the most deeply involved stakeholders.

As a result, the book gives us a lot to talk about, which is particularly helpful in facilitating a book club discussion.

If all the recent critical minerals-related news has caught your attention, then The War Below is very much for you.

Sit back and relax while we take a journey through the world of mining – a world that may decide just how quickly our global energy systems actually transform in the decades ahead.

Part 1 of 3 – a macro view of the global mining landscape

I divided The War Below into three parts, which is how we managed the discussions in our book club.

The first part of the book offers a macro view of the global mining landscape.

On page 12, in the introduction to the book, Mr. Scheyder gives an anecdote that aligns with much of what we know about the processing of metals and minerals: