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chief executive of Severstal North America, the United States subsidiary of Russia’s Severstal Group, which now owns the Rouge steel operations.

At Severstal’s Dearborn factory, for example, carmakers including Ford and others account for 70 percent of sales,

The shift to aluminum is gaining momentum. Automakers are under increasing pressure to meet strict new fuel-economy standards by 2025

United States Steel has invested $400 million in a joint venture with Kobe Steel of Japan to make advanced high-strength steel in a Leipsic, Ohio, factory expected to produce 500,000 tons annually.

Inside Severstal’s steel mill on a cold January day, hissing heavy machinery removed oxides from steel sheets, reducing their thickness to the equivalent of five human hairs.

For nearly a century, Ford’s River Rouge factory and its neighboring steel mill have worked in close harmony

new federal fuel-efficiency standards that will require a fleetwide average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, a significant boost from the roughly 25 m.p.g. that vehicles average today.

“Sometimes there is a push from the aluminum side, and they win over with a particular model, and steel tends to be the comeback kid, with more innovation,” said Felix Schuler, a Munich-based partner in the Boston Consulting Group’s metals and mining practice.

What seems certain is that ordinary steel is likelier to lose out to its new and improved cousin than to aluminum, Mr. Schuler said.

Novelis is investing nearly $550 million to upgrade plants in Oswego, N.Y., and Nachterstedt, Germany, and to build a new factory in Changzhou, China, to triple its capacity from a year ago to 900,000 tons annually.

Alcoa, the country’s biggest aluminum producer, is investing about $670 million in its Iowa, Tennessee and Saudi Arabia facilities.Continue reading the main story

“Henry Ford was a control freak, and he wanted to control as much of the manufacturing as possible,” Mr. Casey said. “He made the steel, he made the glass, he made the tires.”

Russia accounts for 13 percent of Ukraine's iron and steel exports, and the political crisis has already hit shipments from Ukrainian steelmakers this year.

Sales of rebar - a steel bar or mesh of steel wires used in reinforced concrete - to the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a bloc of former Soviet states, fell 70 percent to 45,000 tonnes in January compared with the average monthly export figure in the first half of 2013.Russian steelmakers have aggressively lobbied their government to implement measures to defend domestic producers from Ukrainian imports.

Tough competition on the international steel market makes the chance of (steelmakers) expanding their export market presence very low," Eavex Capital metals analyst Ivan Dzvinka said in Kiev

Manufacturers of train carts and turbo engines, which together account for 2.5 percent of Ukraine's total exports, will be hit particularly hard.

"Re-orienting these industries to Europe would be nearly impossible without very heavy investment,

"The point of the FTA is not to make it possible for Ukraine to export Soviet-era tractors to Europe. That's not going to happen. But it could eventually lead to Ukraine becoming a producer of Peugeots, Volkswagens, fridges or Nokia telephones," the EUISS's Popescu said.

Daimler’s stripped-down vans travel by cargo ship to Ladson, S.C., where a token portion of assembly occurs to avoid a costly American tariff.

It was first imposed on European light trucks during the 1960s in retaliation for German and French trade restrictions on American chickens.

The importance of European-American auto production, meanwhile, was highlighted by Volkswagen’s announcement on Monday that it would open a new production line in Chattanooga, Tenn., to make sport utility vehicles.

In Europe, discussion about the economic benefits of an agreement has been overshadowed by fears that more open trade would expose the Continent to what are widely perceived as less stringent safety and environmental standards in the United States. (And once again, chickens play a big role.)

Trucks, cars and other transportation equipment such as airplanes make up the second-biggest category of merchandise traded between the United States and Europe, just behind chemicals.

n the first three months of 2014 alone, the United States exported $2.6 billion in motor vehicles and parts to the European Union, and imported $12.3 billion worth.

The engines and other components used in Freightliner heavy trucks made in Portland, Ore., are similar to those installed in Mercedes-Benz heavy trucks made in Wörth, Germany. But Daimler must design and engineer many parts twice — and submit them for regulatory certification twice — to meet different United States and European rules.

The reason that Daimler goes to the trouble of finishing assembly in Germany in the first place is that the vehicles must be test-driven before they leave the factory. It would be too costly to set up a separate testing operation in the United States, the company said.

Industries like chemicals and pharmaceuticals are even trickier, and food is a particularly emotional issue in Europe.

there is a fixation on American chickens disinfected with chlorine, which local consumers find repellent

In Japan, for instance, an environmental engineer has attributed a mysterious pestilence that is killing trees on Yakushima Island to pollutants from China.

But the proportion of China’s exports that are made in China has risen steadily in recent years as many companies move more of their supply chains, instead of just having final assembly work done here.

Shell is working with Gazprom on natural gas extraction in Russia; Exxon has a multibillion dollar exploration partnership with Rosneft, a major oil producer controlled by the Russian government, and BP owns nearly 20 percent of Rosneft.

"Shell and Exxon have physical assets in Russia," said Gheit. "But pound-for-pound, BP has the biggest exposure in Russia." Although BP may have the most to lose from an economic tug-of-war between Moscow and the West, tough lessons that BP learned in Russia—through a defunct partnership with Rosneft called TNK-BP—also make BP best equipped for any future fallout, said Nicholas Spiro, managing director of Spiro Sovereign Strategy.

Spiro said that several German firms have also steeled themselves for possible fallout from friction between the Russia and the West. "German companies are huge here," said Spiro, naming BASF, energy firm RWE, and Siemens as companies with operations in Russia. BASF is working to finalize a deal with Gazprom that would give it a stake in Siberian oil fields; RWE has reached a preliminary deal to sell its natural gas subsidiary to Russian billionaires Mikhail Fridman and German Khan, and Siemens has a partnership with state-run railroad monopoly Russian Railways. Late last month, Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser made a trip to Moscow to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin at his residence and voice support for a "trusting relationship" with Russian companies.

We know that if the West's resolve starts to crumble, it will almost certainly start in Germany,

"That's the canary in the coal mine."

"It starts with Germany and works its way down," said Hogan. "They have the most trade back-and-forth, and Germany gets the highest percentage of its energy from Russia."

Alcoa owns aluminum fabrication facilities in Russia, and Boeing has a design center in Moscow, as well as a joint venture with VSMPO-Avisma, the world's largest titanium producer.

Members of the Russian parliament have also proposed charging international payments companies like Visa and Mastercard with pre-emptive "security fees," with the stated aim of preparing for future financial disruptions.

Similar bridges existed in other mountainous regions of the world, most notably in the Himalayas and in ancient China, where iron chain suspension bridges existed in the third century B.C.”

The last existing Inca suspension bridge, at Huinchiri, near Cuzco, is virtually rebuilt each year. People from the villages on either side hold a three-day festival and gather stiff grasses for producing more than 50,000 feet of cord. Finally, the cord is braided into 150-foot replacement cables.

The Arctic Council's 2009 report estimated that the NSR offers from a 35 percent to 60 percent savings in distance for ships traveling between Europe and the Far East. Ships also can circumvent regional conflicts and the risk of piracy near the coast of Africa or in the Straits of Malacca off Malaysia.

Hiring charges for mandatory escort by Rosatomflot's icebreakers vary, but the average cost is about $200,000,

the cost of escort through the NSR is roughly equivalent to that of passage through the Suez Canal.

Because "container" shipping of goods, (as opposed to bulk shipping of raw commodities like ores and fuel), relies heavily on on-time delivery, Carmel thinks it unlikely the NSR ever will become a major pathway for this kind of global commerce.

primary focus on the 22 percent of the world's remaining undiscovered oil and natural gas resources to be found in the far north.

Just last month, Novatek signed a deal to supply China National Petroleum Corporation for 15 years with fuel sent from Yamal by tanker