Good opening and closing sentences, but the paragraph as a whole is a bit stilted to me. It starts off conversational, goes into scientific explanation, then goes back to conversational at the end. If he's a school of experience type, would he use words like "homogeneous substance"? If he's a very literate individual, would he say things like "and a man that knew what was what could make billions"? The paragraph hints at interesting story possibilities, everything from "man vs. nature" to "man vs. corporation" to "man vs. man", but I think you need to find the tone of the narration to pull the reader in more. I hope we'll see more of the story and the narrator. Cheers!