Moving from The Great Stagnation to Abundance
- Feb 11
- 8 min read
By Cody Finke, CEO of Brimstone
Human civilization is built with cement, steel, and aluminum.
These materials are the foundation of modern infrastructure—from housing and transportation to energy and defense systems—and the building blocks of human prosperity. They account for over 2% of global GDP, more than the entire software industry.
Yet despite their massive importance, innovation in these industrial sectors stalled by the 1970s, or even earlier. This inertia is part of what’s driving a phenomenon the economist Tyler Cowen calls “The Great Stagnation”—a five-decade-plus run of weak economic growth.
Brimstone offers the solution.
How progress has stalled
Between 1920 and 1970, U.S. productivity gains translated quickly into economic and social progress.
Very few Americans in 1920 owned cars or had flown on an airplane. Nuclear power did not exist. No human had ever seen the Earth from space. Five decades later, that had changed.
But after 1970, the link between productivity and broad economic gains weakened—and the future promised in the mid-20th century failed to materialize.
As J. Storrs Hall argued in his book, Where Is My Flying Car?, one key factor inhibits human progress: Although the U.S. continued to revolutionize the world of bits (computers, the Internet, and now AI), innovation in the atoms making up the physical world—such as cement, aluminum, and steel—has stalled.
Even some of the most transformative advances in the digital world have not been enough to drive growth because these markets are simply too small. Today, GDP growth hovers around 2-3%; pre-Great Stagnation, it was 4-5%. Global GDP is approximately $100T, and the U.S. accounts for about 1/3 of that. Driving an additional 1-3% of growth quickly means we need to innovate in $T—not $B—markets.
Consider the scale: While consumer electronics may be a $1T global market, it comprises hundreds of thousands of markets. Therefore, the level of innovation required to drive economy-wide impact would be statistically unlikely. Meanwhile, just a few breakthroughs can generate $1T in growth in the concrete, steel and aluminum markets. We need bigger, consolidated markets.
Just three products make up a $2.4T market: concrete, steel and aluminum. By reducing costs across these materials, Brimstone could unlock more than $1T in savings—enough to move the needle on global economic growth and break out of The Great Stagnation. No innovation since 1970 has attacked a market where so few products could have such an outsized impact (not even cars).
By transforming how we make the most-used materials on the planet—and disrupting one of the largest markets on Earth—Brimstone is bringing the catalytic opportunity to the physical world that AI is promising for the digital world.
Why materials matter
The only way to end The Great Stagnation and usher in an era of abundance is to create trillion-dollar markets, unlock trillions in savings, or dramatically expand existing trillion-dollar markets. Software and consumer electronics are not large enough to meet this need. We require individual products that themselves constitute trillion-dollar markets—much like oil and gas. This is where materials come in.
Energy and materials are both fundamental to human progress, but materials correlate even more strongly with GDP. Concrete, steel, and aluminum alone represent more than 95% of all mined materials and roughly 80% of the value of extracted materials globally.
Figure 1. Materials and energy versus GDP
Cement, steel and aluminum are among the most widely used materials on Earth. Yet the way we make them has barely changed in decades.
A new primary steel plant uses the same core technologies used in the 1970s: a blast furnace turns iron ore into pig iron, which then feeds a basic oxygen furnace. Cement production has seen no major breakthroughs since the 1950s, when the far more efficient “dry” process replaced the “wet” one. And the Bayer process for producing alumina, which relies on the ore bauxite, was patented in 1887 (!).
Brimstone is bringing innovation to high-bound industries. Our Rock Refinery® uses some of the most common rocks on Earth to manufacture the materials and critical minerals the world already relies on. Instead of using separate, capital-intensive processes to produce each material, Brimstone co-produces multiple materials in a single refinery.
The result is a step change in both productivity and economics. Higher material yields. Lower energy use. Shared capital costs. Dramatically reduced emissions and waste. High profits.
Because nearly every part of modern infrastructure relies on cement, steel, and aluminum—which together account for 2.5% of the global economy—and current processes are already close to the physical limits of their feedstocks, this lack of innovation is a drag on growth.
Beyond simple economics, these markets are indispensable to human flourishing. Population growth and rising infrastructure needs only increase the importance of these materials; demand for aluminum alone is expected to grow by roughly 40% by 2030. The U.S. and Europe both list aluminum and its derivatives as critical materials, underscoring their indispensability to military and economic power.
Commodities compared to rare earths
Nothing comes close to cement, steel, and aluminum in economic impact. Although rare earths have received wide attention lately, the size of that market, $7B globally, is a tiny fraction (0.3%) of the size of the market for Brimstone’s products ($2.4T+).
Perhaps paradoxically, rare earths—which are important to certain technologies—are not even especially rare. New rare earth deposits in the U.S.—including in California, Wyoming, and Montana—allow for domestic supply at sustainable prices (likely >2X existing costs). Even at 2X the cost, there would be a negligible impact on the economy.
Similarly, if traditional steel and aluminum production were located in the U.S., high-grade ores would still need to be shipped in, also increasing costs by roughly 2X. However, unlike rare earths, these markets are so big that a 2X cost increase would eclipse any economic gains.
The bottom line: the economic importance of rare earths pales in comparison to concrete, steel, and aluminum.
First principle advantages expand access to commodities
It starts with physics. Four physical constraints govern the cost of producing any commodity:
Mass consumption per unit product
Time needed per unit product
Energy consumption per unit product
Space needed to travel per unit product
Industrial breakthroughs throughout history have relaxed one or more of these constraints. For instance, when Standard Oil of Indiana figured out how to co-produce kerosene with gasoline via thermal catalytic cracking, the mass consumed per unit of aviation gasoline decreased by 50%, and the cost of gasoline fell dramatically.
Similarly, when Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch discovered how to make synthetic fertilizer from nitrogen in the air, it meant that any country could make as much fertilizer as it needed using a virtually inexhaustible resource. This eliminates the months-long shipping step and reduces the time and distance, or space, needed to be traversed per unit product—dramatically lowering fertilizer costs.
De-constraining access to commodities like fuel and fertilizer has led to explosive growth in productivity and quality of life. De-constraining the space (by using a rock available in every country), time (by eliminating trans-oceanic shipping steps because the rock is available in every country), mass (by making more product per tonne of rock mined), and energy (by using a higher energy, more common feedstock) required for cement, steel, and aluminum is poised to turbocharge human progress. That’s what Brimstone aims to do.
How Brimstone is different
Brimstone unlocks the power and efficiency of co-production. Brimstone’s process shares CapEx and OpEx, reducing mass mined and energy consumed per tonne of product—cutting unit costs, increasing revenue and profit, and reducing waste. This is the groundbreaking strategy that turned Exxon into an oil powerhouse, led to Freeport McMoRan’s success as a copper juggernaut, and accounts for the profits of the world’s leading fertilizer producers.
Brimstone is compatible with virtually any energy source. Brimstone is electrifiable yet flexible in its energy use. By using thermal energy, which is inherently cheaper and can be generated from any energy source, Brimstone can optimize its energy mix for cost, availability, and other factors.
Brimstone is entering high-demand markets. Brimstone’s Rock Refinery is producing a new source of supplementary cementitious materials (SCM)—a scarce market with rising demand. Brimstone will also deliver the increasingly sought-after light metals and other critical minerals, which are essential inputs for technologies such as electric vehicles, aircraft, defense equipment, batteries, and advanced manufacturing.
Brimstone stands to benefit from macro market trends, such as AI. Data centers and AI are creating new demand and enabling technologies highly applicable to Brimstone’s business. For example, data center scale is expected to lead to cost reductions in heat pumps and captive power generation.
Brimstone will take advantage of economies of scale and modularization. Because construction is the highest cost in a plant build, Brimstone intends to modularize construction. These modular facilities will be large, not small, to profit from economies of scale.
Brimstone uses an ultra-cheap, globally abundant feedstock. The ubiquity and low cost of Brimstone’s rock allow it to avoid both high mining OpEx and shipping costs. It also offers a strategy to disrupt the traditional economic and geopolitical hierarchy in industrial materials, strengthen supply chains, reduce geographic risk, and increase access to Earth’s most essential minerals and materials.
Brimstone uses electrochemistry when economically warranted. As a matter of first principles, single-product electrochemistry can never compete on price with the single-product, uncatalyzed thermochemistry used in many existing industrial processes. Brimstone’s strategy is to deploy electrochemistry where it makes economic sense, not as a default.
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Brimstone is delivering a step change in energy and mass utilization, doubling energy efficiency and increasing mass efficiency by 7X. If Brimstone is successful—and 100% of the world’s primary cement, steel, and aluminum production uses Brimstone technology at half the price—this could lead to world-changing, semi-utopian outcomes.
1. Reduced geopolitical risk
Wars are often fought over natural resources. But even in times of relative peace, resource dependence raises tensions and imposes diplomatic costs. Today, China has large, high-quality iron ore and bauxite reserves, whereas the U.S. has neither. The U.S. is also at a disadvantage with respect to titanium, magnesium, vanadium, and niobium. This unequal distribution of resources leaves supply chains vulnerable and exacerbates geopolitical uncertainty. Brimstone’s cheap, globally abundant rock means that factories in virtually any country can produce essential commodities and critical minerals, reducing the global scramble for limited resources.
2. An end to scarcity
Brimstone pairs globally abundant rocks with the efficiency of co-production to dramatically reduce the cost of manufacturing essential commodities, unlocking the potential to produce some of the most widely used materials virtually anywhere.
3. Lower poverty
Nearly a billion people live below the global poverty line, earning less than $800 per year. These people cannot afford high-quality building materials for constructing stable shelter. More broadly across low-income countries, material costs limit access to public infrastructure—roads, schools, and hospitals needed to lift entire communities out of poverty. Reducing costs could improve housing quality and expand access to infrastructure for billions of people.
4. A healthier planet
Cement, steel, and aluminum account for 15% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and 20% of the world’s mining waste. By advancing a technology that can eliminate GHG emissions and mine tailings, Brimstone is moving the world toward a hyper-efficient, hyper-abundant future—with a much-reduced environmental toll.
5. Technological progress
When the basic building blocks of the world get cheaper, the economic engine roars. Lowering global costs will make buildings, power plants, data centers, airplanes, drones, electric vehicles, self-driving cars, and other human-made systems more affordable. This will push down costs, thereby accelerating the development of novel technologies and increasing their availability in the market.
Brimstone will move civilization from stagnation to abundance
The most consumed mined materials on the planet are made from just five elements: oxygen, silicon, calcium, aluminum, and iron. These are also the most abundant elements on Earth. Silicate rocks are their richest natural source.
If we want to enter an age of abundance—where prosperity is de-linked from geographic luck—we need to align what we consume with what the planet provides most abundantly.
The path forward is clear: produce the most-consumed materials from the most abundant sources, with as little waste as possible.
By leveraging co-production and a cheap, globally abundant rock, Brimstone can solve two urgent, related problems—material scarcity and The Great Stagnation—while helping build a more efficient, sustainable, and more prosperous future.
