What the War Is Doing to an Essential Metal

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.For true fans of Diet Coke, soda is sacrament, and reverence comes with strict parameters. The fountain version served at Mc Donald’s is thought to represent the peak of the form, but given the choice between plastic, glass, and metal vessels, conventional wisdom dictates that Diet Coke tastes best in aluminum cans.In recent weeks, those cans have reportedly been disappearing from shelves across India. Because the country’s Diet Coke comes only in aluminum-can form, Reuters notes, it’s at the mercy of ongoing supply issues stemming from the war in Iran. The Middle East has the capacity to produce 7 million metric tons of aluminum each year (75 percent of which is exported). That’s 9 percent of the world’s production capacity. And since the fighting began in late February, prices have continued to climb worldwide. The base price of a ton of aluminum surpassed $3,600 in April, a four-year high. The metal shows up everywhere in daily life: solar panels, MacBooks, airplane fuselage, deodorant, over-the-counter heartburn pills, cans of grocery-store cold brew. We’re nowhere close to mass shortages in the United States, but around the world, the price shocks are already here.The Middle East’s access to cheap, abundant power is part of what has made it a hub for global aluminum production over the past few decades. Aluminum is derived from a reddish mineral called bauxite. The process of refining and smelting the stuff requires an immense amount of energy, so facilities tend to be located in places where it makes financial sense to do so. When Iran began restricting ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, Gulf plants struggled to both import raw materials and export pure aluminum. Facilities in Qatar and Bahrain reacted to the uncertainty by shutting down smelters. Then, on Mar