 Hi, this is Jack Lipton, and this is Critical Metals Corner, and today's topic is going to be BAM. That's what I designate as battery and motor materials. I think that the people who are talking about battery materials full-time are minors, and I understand that. But the automotive industry is concerned with two things about the electrification of cars. One, batteries, of course. Two, electric motors. Before the electric car transformation even began, the idea it wasn't is to reduce the weight of the vehicle so that the energy of the motor, the engine, is not wasted carrying dead weight. This has been a monitor as long as I can remember in the automotive industry. Therefore, they were glad to go to rare earth permanent magnet motors for accessories. They really reduced weight. Before that time, the only possible power for an accessory was a ferrite magnet motor, and these were very heavy. They really were for any series of applications. So rare earth permanent magnet motors just took over immediately in the 1980s, as I recall. In any case, today there is an additional weight issue and performance issue. That is that rare earth permanent magnet traction motors that actually drive the car are more efficient than any known AC technology. But I admit that efficiency is only in some cases 5%. But the fact is that the type of electric motor that is not a rare earth permanent magnet motor being used in a large application is complicated and complex. And that leads me to a point I'd like to make. One, don't worry about the demand for battery and motor materials for lithium-coval nickel rare earths. That demand is growing. It's my opinion that it's already in deficit and it's going to remain in deficit for some time. Because there simply are not enough of those materials mined to meet the even the lowest current projected demand in let's say 2025 for battery-powered electric vehicles using lithium-ion batteries. But keep in mind we're talking about both battery materials and motor materials. And this is where it's very important for you to understand that the automotive industry, it has been and is a manufacturing engineering problem. Because engineers have to figure out how to integrate 6,000 parts into a car and how to make one every minute or so. You know it takes more than a minute to make a car, but they do come off the assembly line at rates like that, 60 units per hour. Even if it's taken 10 hours to produce the individual unit. So automotive engineering is a thing. It's not just a title that somebody gives. General Motors Institute, the original school that General Motors founded in Flint, Michigan to train automotive engineers on the job as well as in class. And then I believe they gave a degree in automotive engineering. I believe Purdue was next and now you can get such degrees in most engineering schools in the world. But the point is automotive always addressed the problems of making a car as a manufacturing engineering problem. The sales department always is concerned with the price of the car and the size of the market. So today, the automotive industry is in a bit of confusion because they really don't understand and don't want to understand battery technology except in terms of engineering it into the system and figuring out how to set how to price this so that the the market they understand can afford to buy them. The problem is now that government has intervened in the market so that the decree from on high in many governments. The US included is that thou shalt make so many electric cars as a percentage of your total production by such and such a year and and that so let it be written so let it be done. This works in China and China is way ahead of us on this they've they've decided that they will be 25% BEV by 2025 and 50% by 2030 and they've been as I've written before they've been working on this project for years and they've acquired all the raw materials they need all the processing they need and quite frankly all the car makers they need. I want I want to now make a particular point. There's a call that's going to happen among the world's automotive companies now call means in agriculture that you reduce the size of your herd of food animals for example, because you cannot afford to feed them all. You have too many right now. If we're going to go only with electric cars. We have too many manufacturers and this this is not new. The last time transportation changed power sources was when muscle power, ie forces gave way to chemical power, ie internal combustion engines that that was a great call, but who went out of business. Carriage makers, people who raised horses, those things that work out, but it's hard, hard believe today, but New York in 1910 had 150,000 horses used for transportation, you can imagine the mess that was left over. That was one of that was one of the problems that the the internal combustion engine and originally also electric and steam drive were intended to solve and I guess they did. But the point is that this transformation was very dramatic. Think about it. Horses had been motive power for human beings for at that time about 5000 years. And in just a couple of decades. They were gone and and we had the internal combustion engine for another for for the next century. Now we're looking to not to get rid of cars as we got rid of horses, but to get rid of internal combustion engines and change them over to battery electric vehicles. This is is again an engineering problem. I love it when people say well, you know, they're less moving parts. Yes. There are only 4000 or so parts in an electric car as opposed to 6000 and a turn on combustion engine powered car. And yes, the difference in parts are internal parts of internal combustion engine, but you still have to engineer. Integrate 4000 parts. Yes. One of them is a very complex lithium ion battery, which is not not just a bucket filled with lithium. It's it's an electronic device. It has many computer chips in it and it weighs half a ton for example in a Tesla that putting that into the power train in place of the internal combustion engine. It's an engineering problem. No one in the automotive industry was prepared for the resource problem. That's the real problem. Because mining is is is not to produce cars or magnets right now. Mining is to produce mineral concentrates that are transformed into metallic or chemical forms of elements that are then processed into end forms that are used by manufacturers. The manufacturers traditionally don't pay any attention to this to those things at all. And they assume that their top suppliers will supply them with the parts they specify and need. These suppliers in turn keep going down the their supply chain until until ultimately it gets to mining. Normally, I did this for a long time. Maybe I hate to say this. I was trying to sell things to automotive for the best part of half a century. And I can tell you that they knew nothing whatsoever about the origin of their supplies. They if you'd show them an iron mine and say this is where steel comes from. They know it's it's nice. You know, can I can I get a frame copy. They don't care. They didn't care. And now they have to care and the system is in chaos. They are now just saying what we're going to produce with Cadillac will be all electric by 2025. I think Volkswagen made the same statement about 2030 without taking one second to think about where are the resources for the components to come from. You see, because that's not that's not they don't buy those resources. They buy the components. So I see a glimmer of understanding happening. Volkswagen, I believe, and I think BMW have actually engaged with Glencore mining, and so others to to pre purchase cobalt concentrates, I guess, because that that just means they're going to be going to agree to buy those things and then can sign them to wherever in their supply chain they're so that ultimately they take delivery on a lithium a large lithium ion battery and more companies have invested in lithium because of this. But again, I think these people are asleep at the automotive industry, because, as you know, my position is that there simply isn't of these raw materials to go around. And I'm sure I'm right, so that I can tell you that some of these companies that are asleep right now will disappear in the near term, near term being five or 10 years. So, I guess that I don't I don't there is demand there's a demand for much more lithium cobalt nickel manganese works, then we can possibly produce. So it's going to be a seller's market for some time. The end game. I'll leave it to you younger people to figure out but I'm telling you that it's going to be a game of haves and have nots. Some nations like China will electrify their transportation fleet. Other nations will try. I don't know if they'll be successful. I really doubt it. But as far as raw materials go, it's it's absolutely a seller's market. And so good luck. Thank you.