the rising sea
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A nation's heavy industrial base is its mines, wells, refineries, power
plants, chemical plants, etc.
We're building a *complete* heavy industrial base within a 5km radius.
Why operate a power plant *and* a mine instead of specializing in one thing?
Because if you vertically integrate all the way down the natural resources,
you don't have to pay for any of your ingredients: nature doesn't charge. But
that means you need to own the industrial stack for *every* input all the way
back to the geology.
Ultimately, any physical product does not really cost dollars, it costs
joules, kilograms, cubic meters, and seconds. From a physical point of view,
the economy is not really about money. It's about stuff: food on the table, a
roof over your head, a car in the driveway. And everything in the economy can
be understood in terms of energy conversions, because money is really just a
very poor, very approximate, very lousy denominator for energy flows. (c.f.
the work of Vaclav Smil and Charles A. S. Hall.)
We believe that in the long, long-term, steel does not really have to cost
money. Its cost is only constrained by the availability of high-quality
energy flows and the geochemical concentrations of the requisite ingredients
in the Earth's crust.
When you get close to zero opex, a great deal of the pressure to produce
revenue is removed. Ultimately it should be possible to build a company that
sidesteps the markets entirely: it sells nothing, and produces only the
products and technologies it needs for its own physical projects and growth,
paid for with energy but not with dollars.
This would be a sort of "pure-play" or "economically sovereign" company.
That's our goal.
