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Politics : Rat's Nest - Chronicles of Collapse -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (7880)	6/18/2008 11:02:40 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24212

A Pretty Stunning Graph of World Cement Production (and China is Certainly Using It) Posted by Prof. Goose on June 18, 2008 - 5:00am Annual production of cement by country in billions of metric tons. Click to expand. Source: USGS 2006 report (PDF) and the USGS 2008 report (PDF). Cement is mainly used to make concrete, and is sort of the "active ingredient" in concrete - it is combined with sand and gravel in roughly fixed proportions. So cement production can be considered a rough proxy for the total amount of construction going on in a country. This post updates Stuart's post about this two years ago (and yes, it's still a graph that will blow you away!) with two more years of USGS cement data, 2006 and 2007. The growth in China, from 1 GT to 1.3 GT in two years is mindboggling, even India and Russia are interesting...and there's more to think about under the fold. edited to add: As a couple of folks pointed out--I have interchanged "production" and "usage" in this post incorrectly--however, China's 2007 cement exports were only 33 million tons out of 1.3 billion tons produced. So, at least for China, production is a good proxy for demand/consumption. My apologies for the mistake. theoildrum.com