 Good afternoon and welcome to today's energy seminar. Our speaker today is Alex Grant who's out of state and he's a principal at Jade Code. Jade Code partners if you read his bio you'll see this is I think his fourth clean tech startup and despite that he was able to be named an honoree and energy 30 under 30 at Ford's magazine last year which is pretty impressive. I should at this point acknowledge the person who suggested the last two speakers and this one Dennis Morjani so I know Alex knows him. He was a kind of early mid-career person in the class last year and has helped us a lot with you know refining topics and picking good speakers and so far we've been extremely successful. So besides getting into into Forbes in this talk Alex is going to describe another dimension of the kind of battery ecosystem that you've heard about last week a little bit and if you were here last spring from another speaker on supply chain logistics. For but I understand Alex is a innovator in the extraction which I think means mining and processing of lithium and concerned about doing that in an environmentally sustainable way but also as we've heard that could have implications for international supply chain and international security issues regarding large-scale deployment particularly of lithium ion batteries. So I'm quite pleased to announce Alex today as our speaker kind of fits in nicely. We will transition from our four clean tech entrepreneur talks at the beginning of quarter more to policy and systems for the next few seminars. So with that said Alex take it away. Well thanks so much for the intro. Somehow tell me if you can't hear me correctly. But yeah so just to start off the reason why I am not there in person is extremely characteristic which is that I am working on a lithium brine exploration project in central Nevada about eight hours drive from the Bay Area and a bunch of schedules got mixed up so I was going to come back to San Francisco yesterday but had to stay an extra two days unfortunately. So that's for the audience members who think you're in the casino in Las Vegas. Good to hear your heart at work. Oh no yeah definitely not at the casino. I'm in tone upon Nevada. I don't know if anyone's ever been there. It is a very small town but it's the biggest town between Vegas and Reno so it's got a supercharger which is kind of interesting. But yeah so I have a very good and characteristic excuse. And yeah so I regret not being able to kind of spend time with you guys in meat space but if anyone wants to chat later on I'm very easily found on the Internet so feel free to reach out. Always happy to make new friends and learn about what other people are working on. So yeah so that's the frame. I'm going to share a couple slides with you today that kind of summarizes a little bit about how I think about lithium ion battery supply chain impact mitigation and how to really make sure that the energy transition as worth it really as much as possible to make sure that the CO2 emissions in that new paradigm that we're building right now are just as low as humanly possible and we're able to achieve the deepest decarbonization that the laws of physics allow without compromising our high quality of life since in the next decade. So just really there you go. So just really just on my background real quick so I'm from Canada. I did my undergrad at McGill at Montreal studied chemical engineering and philosophy in undergrad mostly focused on wastewater treatment and water chemistry research at universities and at startups in Montreal. Went for PhD in chemical engineering at Northwestern in Chicago. I was kind of tired of cleaning up other people's messes doing wastewater treatment research and wanted to help build a new energy system. So I went to study heterogeneous catalysis for CO2 conversion to methanol as part of a solar fuels concept and when I was there I built a high pressure high temperature reactor designed and built a gas chromatography machine like really super hands-on hard core kind of mini pilot development and hated it. So I was really not well suited for academia. Never going to finish my PhD I don't think and you know wasn't particularly happy in the Midwest. So I ended up leaving my PhD with a master's and moved to the Bay Area to co-found a technology startup called Latinx Solutions. So I started working on this company in early 2016 so about six years ago now kind of well to think and that was kind of you know another nail in the coffin of my PhD was the opportunity to go help build this company. So Lilac is a lithium extraction technology company that uses kind of novel ceramic ion exchange materials to take lithium out of unconventional natural resources like low-grade brines like geothermal brines which you may have heard about in the Salton Sea in Southern California for example and oil fuel brines and other types of resources to make lithium chemicals faster with lower land footprint. And I was full-time at Lattoc for about a year and a half kind of covered in salt building mini pilot rigs similar to what I was doing in grad school fully automated kind of robotic ion exchange systems to test our technology on different types of brine resources left just under three years ago in 2019 and kind of accidentally stayed in lithium one of our customers just kind of wouldn't let me leave. So I ended up starting my own consulting company which is Jacob Partners which is still kind of my you know official title is principle of my consulting company and I've been consulting on lithium natural resource projects all around the world for the last three years and trying to understand really really just ultimately trying to understand how can we make lithium chemicals faster from natural resources and how do we make them better with lower CO2 emissions lower freshwater use lower lower land footprint etc that's really been my my mission the last couple years and a big part of what I've been doing the last couple years which we're going to talk a bit about today is working with a company called Minvaro in London doing life cycle assessment so two years ago we actually published the first ever life cycle assessment of lithium hydroxide manufacturing from natural resources no one had ever published numbers on it before and that became kind of a benchmark for the industry and we've since done probably between 20 to 30 different natural resource project LCA's for making lithium chemicals so we've built up sorry my mom can sort of call me we've built up the the best database that anyone has ever had anywhere on the CO2 emissions involved with making lithium chemicals from natural resources every single type of resource every process pathway every technology you can imagine so it's been a heck of a lot of fun building that building that company as well and kind of along along the side when I when I have time I really like doing independent research and I really like writing so on my website if you guys ever want to go check it out I've published a ton of articles on different topics that I think are interesting and in those publications really what I'm doing is like kind of working through topics that I think are are true and are interesting or relevant to the energy transition in the lithium natural resource space mostly also what I do is make memes so if you guys fall if anyone follows me on twitter you probably saw my memes already and if you are in the market for more spicy lithium and hard tech memes like I'm a one-stop shop so you know just you know follow me on twitter and you'll you'll get plugged in anyways this is why we're here isn't it so you know september 2020 was not a very nice day in in the Bay Area I'm really I'm I've been working on kind of energy and climate and water related projects for a decade like my entire adult life and in the last you know probably two or three years two things have happened one acute severe kind of weather phenomena have really ramped up in a big way that I don't think anyone was expecting to happen so soon globally of course I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here but but two people also started really caring about climate change like two years ago like the the the bankers decided we had to solve climate change in 2020 for whatever reason so now this is like an incredibly exciting space and anyone who was already working on it is probably you know up to their up to their eyeballs and work the they're doing um why you know why is it why should we solve climate change you know climate change I think of climate change as um as as kind of a great filter kind of phenomenon um you know climate change could really set us back hundreds or you know I mean dare I say thousands of years of in terms of progress on our planet as a species and I think that's really terrifying um so um so yeah so this is why this is why it's so important to be working on these types of questions and really trying to like solve actual problems I I see you know kind of just to start talking about the thing that I'm actually talking about today um I see working on decarbonization of the battery supply chain as really kind of like a like a 22nd century type problem like you know we kind of just got the world over over the the hump of electrifying transport and you know try to now make a lot of batteries um I use the word try because it is of course very hard but um but but going all the way back up to the mine and pulling out all the fossil fuel infrastructure all the way back up to mine up up to the mine is um is is is really like so much harder than building a battery pilot plant in in Fremont or whatever have you um like it is it is such a it is such a gigantic global like multi stakeholder task um and it's it it's really it's really just like a subset of decarbonizing industry in general right and decarbonizing kind of all of industry is really important because it underpins our high quality of lives right like it's us rich people in rich countries who are mostly driving climate change um so we need to be able to like produce the things that that we need whether it's materials or energy or whatever have you in a way that that isn't isn't making this happen anymore um so anyways this is a quote I stole from JB's trouble um from a talk he gave uh on campus in 2020 I thought it was a great quote so he said the embodied emissions of the materials that used to make batteries are significant and need to be understood if you were to power all your ED manufacturing using coal it would make no difference at the end of the day one thing we did when we built the gigafactory was to make it all electric there's literally no natural gas line so there's little to no local emissions at that factory when we when you weave natural gas to your facility it makes it much harder than chase it out the emissions all the way back up to the minor certificate too when we look at terawatt hour scales of production we need to make sure we are not creating unintended consequences as we go through the industrial shift that is why we are in the situation in the first place and we need to rapidly remediate that so in this presentation I'm going to use this quote as kind of a template for jumping off of um on each of these five different points um so so why why do the embodied emissions of value metals matter um they they are quantitatively objectively important um if you run an lca on a on a lithium-ion battery so so most lca's I've seen of a lithium-ion cell compared or kind of an electric vehicle on whatever grid compared to an internal combustion engine shows something like 50 to 75 percent decarbonization for the EV versus an ice vehicle um that's honestly like not as good as you would expect you you know I mean maybe other people have different expectations but um we're it's it's it's going to be a heck of a lot of work to to kind of overhaul all of our trans our transport infrastructure and it seems like kind of um kind of sad to be doing it for only you know cutting the CO2 emissions of transport by half um part of part of part of why the emissions of the kind of EV from from you know cradle cradle to grave or kind of wherever you want to cut off your accounting um is due to the the materials used to make the battery um and of course other materials in the car like aluminum and stuff um and something something we have found doing life cycle assessment of battery metals and enviro is that um the the embodied CO2 emissions of making these chemicals from different types of resources in different ways with different types of energy inputs can vary tremendously so there are lithium hydroxide products you can buy today that have kind of a you know nine x difference in their embodied CO2 emissions um that's massive so those those high embodied emission products kind of you know hurt the um the CO2 the overall CO2 mitigation opportunity of the electric vehicle um because we're emitting CO so much CO2 upstream and shifting the environmental burden if you will um so if you were to use like just kind of dirty you know honestly quite typically Chinese battery metals um versus kind of cleaner lower carbon ones the delta in a an mc811 cell of the embodied CO2 emissions would be 55 kilos of CO2 per kilowatt hour um at three terawatt hours per year that's equal to the the CO2 emissions of um Ireland Switzerland and Portugal combined and that's just the difference in the embodied CO2 emissions of battery metals not even the aluminum in the car um so that's really significant um and for context you know you might not have any data points in your mind about like what is 55 kilos of CO2 per kilowatt or high or low um there are battery manufacturers who say that they're going to have an embodied emissions of 10 kilos of CO2 per kilowatt hour in their batteries by 2030 um that's basically unachievable and it's definitely not achievable if they don't decarbonize their supply chains and there's there's kind of a um really interesting conclusion here that I've I've kind of more operationalized over the last couple of years which is to realize that really the power to choose those battery metals that goes into the EVs that the rest of us drive is in the hands of a very small group of people just a couple companies um so um you know helping people understand this is really important for the people making those decisions of what metals to buy this is okay so quote quote sub subsection number two um if you were to power all your EV manufacturing using coal it'd make no difference at the end of the day um this uh you know this this this I can't I can't think of any word besides meme because I call everything a meme now um this this meme here um is from a sustainability report of a Chinese lithium company um I find it very funny that uh if you compare 2018 to 2019 uh embodied emissions of their lithium carbonate equivalent lithium chemical product they um they reduced it 0.9 percent um and and the the bars look like you know at least five percent maybe almost 10 percent of the delta um and and this this meme was originally green and I removed the color because I didn't think it was appropriate to use the color green um for to talk about you know how much how much coal and how much energy that you seem to make the lithium chemical um the point I'm trying to make is that there's an absolute like massive quantity of re-washing happening in the space um and it's it's pretty troubling um does it go all the way to the top I don't know but um you know in in the lithium ion batteries supply chain there there's historically been a tremendous amount of kind of deception and angry washing so I guess I'm kind of used to it now but um you know I just find it really important to like make sure we are actually talking about things like accurately right that's been a big part of a lot of my publications and a lot of my work um you know Tesla does not buy lithium hydroxide from Australia like hasn't bought one gram of lithium hydroxide from Australia you know it all comes from China um and it all comes from that lithium producer in China who's burning quite a bit of coal um to make lithium hydroxide um I'll skip this because I don't want to go into it but basically I think that emphasis on minimizing CO2 emissions and decarbonization is that kind of has geopolitical um you know kind of tangents associated with it but you know but that's another day I'm sorry for another day um so the Nevada Gigafactory has no natural gas line once you once you start assuming you can use fossil fuels in a in a battery metal production process um it gets a lot harder to to decarbonize it if you're kind of walking yourself in right um so so it's really it's really critical that people who are who are designing and operating battery metal plants like lithium chemical plants for example like mines chemical plants etc um need to be very deliberate about the technical decisions they make to achieve decarbonization goals it's easy it's easy enough to to greenwash and lie in sustainability reports um but eventually you know I hope I hope at least that it doesn't work forever um and I and I hope at least that investors start to kind of take it more seriously and and I and I and I also hope that you know eventually regulators take it more seriously as kind of um as a kind of a securities violation to be honest right um but really really like instead of getting stuck in a by violating securities laws and having a whole you know a heck of a lot of problems for management um it's just easier to to instruct the engineers to try to minimize their fossil fuel use in their in their operation um and and and really make deliberate decisions um to to do that right um just one example of kind of now now I guess in a modern sense kind of a easy way to decarbonize heat for example is to use mechanical vapor recompression for steam and for thermal processing um which which is usual for for a range of thermal processes for converting lithium chemicals and making other battery metals because really really what it does is it makes sense to that instead of burning cold or natural gas to generate all of the steam that you would use in a in a chemical process you're now probably 90 to 95 percent powering steam generation with electricity which can be much more easily decarbonized than a fossil fuel the emissions all the way back up to the minor significant um the mining industry actually knows this so the mining industry takes decarbonization relatively seriously in a way that I don't think oil and gas does um and the reason why is because it is it is fundamentally possible to decarbonize mining so mining does not need to emit co2 in the process of extracting minerals from the earth and and refining them um a great a great example is electric mining trucks so a lot of a lot of underground mining is already electric um so it's not at all a new idea um to to electrify you know transport of ore in a mine um and um you know uh kind of some because some types of mining operations that currently are mostly powered by diesel will eventually be electrified whether that's through green hydrogen or or directly batteries and I think it'd be pretty cool if it was directly with batteries and you're mining lithium with a lithium-mine battery-powered truck it'd be kind of like the lithium was mining itself um so this this stuff's happening you know it could it could happen a lot faster um but um I um I like I just want to make the point that like you know the mining industry is taking this relatively seriously but there's still there's still a lot of work to do and you really have to you have really have to choose decarbonization if you if you want it so what happens when what happens when we scale up the battery industry um and um and and it's dependent on on coal or you know kind of legacy processes that are less efficient or whatever have you if you think about if you think about that delta co2 that I mentioned earlier between kind of a high embodied emissions bill of materials versus a low embodied emissions bill of materials um that that delta is almost as is basically as large as the entire rest of the uh of the co2 emissions associated with making the battery so it's it's huge just kind of purchasing decisions can make a huge difference um I um I've been kind of like screaming this from the Rooftopster the last two years and trying to kind of convince battery and EV industry stakeholders to to take this seriously um part of the issue here that I've noticed over the last couple years is that EV companies and battery companies um are not mining companies and they don't understand mining and chemical processing for the most part um and what that means is that kind of the EV industry and the battery industry which has actually relied on LCA for probably at least a decade to understand the co2 mitigation impact of making electric vehicles compared to ice vehicles has been dramatically underestimating the embodied emissions of raw materials simply because they didn't know kind of what data to collect really um and they didn't know how to kind of do diligence on their suppliers to understand if numbers were right or not um so the the result is that most database values for doing electrical assessment on batteries are are are extremely inaccurate um but um the kind of database values aside every single battery bill of materials will be different right so if I'm uh if I'm a tesla or volkswagen I could theoretically have completely different suppliers of lithium hydroxide and that hydroxide can be made in completely different ways so it's important to kind of take like an asset by asset supplier by supplier look at and value emissions and um and and kind of make sure that that priority to decarbonize and track emissions kind of goes goes all the way back up to the mine um so yeah so it's kind of shocking but like it it almost like doesn't matter if you completely decarbonize or completely carbon neutralized a battery manufacturing process um or even or even cell assembly is not even that important if you if you don't pay a lot of attention to the sourcing of your raw materials it gets completely you know dwarfed by the embodied emissions of those materials um yeah so I this was this was more geared towards the the the lithium industry but um really the the place that this comment was coming from um you know why why would um why would an EV company care about um you know lithium mining cfg emissions um the reason why the reason why I talk about this pretty often is because in the mining industry people used to not take upstream scope three very seriously so if I was using sodium hydroxide in a process for example I would not report it in my co2 emissions accounting um but that's um that's not really a complete way to look at things like you have you have to understand your upstream scope three at least um in in in kind of co2 accounting um processes um really quickly a couple little case studies so there are there are reasons to think that the embodied co2 emissions are making lithium chemicals for examples actually going up so in the last couple years there's just been a shift to making lithium hydroxide from from australian hard rock process in china and that is um that is typically higher co2 intense than um than chilean brine evaporation process for example but um but there's there's so there's there's reasons to think that that those embodied emissions numbers can continue going up because um because grade and impurity profiles of new natural resources that we're tapping into to make lithium chemicals are are kind of declining right as you develop and produce a lot of lithium from natural resource assets that are that are already existing you obviously can't expand them dramatically you have to tap into new resources um so if you have a kind of lower grade or higher impurity concentrations you need to plow more energy and more materials into the system to to extract that lithium and make a lithium chemical but um but there's lots of interesting ideas of how to reduce emissions as well geothermal lithium is one so this this is the idea of building a geothermal energy plant kind of combined and co-developed with lithium extraction to make lithium chemicals using direct lithium extraction process um so that's um those are super interesting projects the the two main kind of hubs for geothermal lithium historically has been southern california and the upper end valley in germany in france um but uh but there's activity going on all around the world on geothermal lithium um and then a second little mini case study to share with you is um the sedimentary clay natural resources that you can find all the way from the border of oregon down all the way into mexico all across nevada there are probably like hundreds of millions of tons of lithium carbonate equivalent stored in clays um across the west united states um there's a couple there's a couple projects that are that are in later stages of development like facar pass in northern nevada and ryleigh ridge in central nevada kind of close to where i am right now um these these these sedimentary minerals are processed using mostly direct sulfuric acid bleaching and there's there's there's one little issue when you do that which is that sedimentary clay minerals tend to have a lot of carbonate minerals kind of mixed in with them so if those carbonates are not removed you end up liberating quite a bit of co2 when you acidify the carbonates mixed in with that mineral this this is something i'm a little bit nervous about i i'm actually not working on many sedimentary clay lithium projects anymore because i i find this this problem um very challenging and semi semi-intractable especially for lower grade resources um so um this is you know this this really like underlines for me the importance of kind of understanding drivers of CO2 emissions in a lithium chemical extraction process and using life cycle assessment to um to make sure what really matters because one of these projects could be acidifying a whole bunch of carbonates and releasing you know 30 kilos of CO2 per kilo of lithium carbonate but but uh but have electric mining trucks and and call themselves carbon neutral or something like this um that would be of course completely deceptive um a lot of coal is still used in making lithium chemicals um i think it would be cool if we stopped using coal and making in lithium chemicals and all battery metals for that matter um i uh i i kind of want i want someone to like start a a movement or something to weed coal out of the battery supply chain because i think it's absolutely bonkers that this is kind of still going on in 2022 um so just to summarize uh you know if we're gonna kind of get past the great filter and you know be a more advanced alien species and and develop kind of a 22nd century um battery metal supply chain uh everyone has kind of a part to play so you know i've talked a lot about kind of the role that engineers and technologists have here um because i because i am one of those people um uh so you know won't go too much to detail there but um but i would i would i would also kind of really emphasize the importance of of investors taking this seriously and kind of investing some time and energy and understanding embodied emissions of battery metals um i think it would be fabulous if uh if if there were some kind of moratorium in investing in in high cf2 intense battery metals um i know that's totally impossible i mean no one's gonna do that but um but but obviously you know buyers of these chemicals do have some sway over over which chemicals end up there in their battery um and um and yeah i just i just think like kind of all all of these from stakeholders across the the battery supply chain have to be using life cycle assessment to understand the embodied CO2 emissions of their product um and make the right decisions about about decarbonization to to achieve real decarbonization um so yeah that's um you know that's that's what i would say about that so um so yeah that's it um that's all i have to say i uh welcome your questions um if anyone wants to chat later on um you know feel free to reach out you have my email here um i'm very reachable i might i might not have time to chat um but um you know uh feel free feel free to reach out and hopefully we can link up at some point so uh thanks alex for that great um talk regarding your work actually find myself wondering exactly what you're doing there but you probably can't talk about about that and about it as a classic rocker your theme could be could be uh the old who song don't be fooled again is that kind of if i get your drift here don't think you're yeah you're solving a problem that you might not actually be solving i um yeah no what am i what am i doing here so i'm i'm involved with a lithium brine exploration project so um you know i'm an engineer i've worked on like tech startups like living in a city kind of person um i i never thought i would be involved with such an early stage project like this like literally the problem set that we're working on right now is shooting like sound waves into the earth to figure out where salty water might be and kind of in what thickness is and and and how extensive in kind of x y and then how many different aquifers you can find all the way down and then um in in two weeks from now probably on valentine's day we're gonna we're gonna poke a hole and um that will be the first time that we'll know the actual geochemistry kind of as you go down into the earth which is really what matters you can take surface samples easy peasy but um we're gonna we're gonna have to drill about a kilometer deep to to understand you know where lithium could be um kind of going all the way down and start to understand how much lithium there could be in this particular um exploration target and to understand if we have higher enough grade to extract it economically and build an actual operation that could make lithium chemicals um uh that could go in straight into a cathode uh for a lithium battery so um so yeah it's it's it's crazy it's literally crazy you know like this company i'm involved with is investing hundreds of thousands of dollars millions of dollars actually to drill holes in a salty pile of mud to see if there is lithium there we don't even know how much lithium is there we don't even know if it's a project yet so um so you know i i think it's a lot of fun i like being out in the desert i think it's really fun being out here um but um but it is it is a truly like that like kind of unprecedented like exercise like not very many people have worked on anything like that before where it's so risky um so bonkers i mean it's just it's just yeah totally kind of crazy projects um but i find that a lot of fun so if anyone has questions i'll just bring you the microphone so we can hear you so i was intrigued i guess i see the solution to this problem being entrepreneurs like you on the one hand and other players um particularly struck the last few years as you indicated by the buy-in from the financial um community uh finance banking insurance and whatnot and i know even there are you probably know this um really recently rolled up investment funds that have a sustainability in that kind of way of valuing investments in their portfolio so the question for me is are you talking to those guys i could see them trying to do kind of um quick quick uh simple life cycle but not going as deeply to what extent are you communicating with that community already um so the uh the investor sphere is vast right it goes way beyond silicon valley it goes way beyond new york um there are so many people i could be talking to who i'll never be able to talk to who control significant quantities of capital um which is partly why i publish actually really is to try to scale up my my message of my work right um but um am i talking to them yes a couple so like you know one of my one of my lca clients uh is is building a um a spodium mineral mine in brazil and um she she has uh black rock is i think her her largest investor in in her company building the spodium mine to make to make spodium concentrate for conversion to lithium hydroxide and um black rock black rock has solicited co2 emission data from my client um and i've helped kind of you know essentially fill in the excel sheet of what black rock wants right so i've had some experience um kind of feeding data uh kind of down the chain to to investors um to help them understand kind of what my what kind of what my client's co2 profiles look like um i've got i've got on my to-do list for tomorrow or the day after um filling out a kind of a co2 emission profile for for a major european auto manufacturer um so um so i i i have been in contact with a couple of really i mean globally relevant significant names um and um i can tell you that really the most sophisticated folks are mostly asking like pretty much the right questions um so so most of the major european auto manufacturers have internal lifecycle assessment teams already they do they do they build their own lca models like it's like a a little academic department within within the the renause and the Volkswagen's of the world um and that's actually like i mean i find really interesting so i've been helping those types of folks better understand battery metal processing because well why we've been so successful doing life cycle assessment in this space is that uh is because i'm a chemical engineer we have mining engineers on staff we have geologists on staff like we're deeply technical in natural resources sector um and and kind of legacy lca practitioners don't have that so they haven't been able to um to catch up with us i guess um so um yeah sorry long-winded answer but but yes you know i am telling to those types of folks um i uh i wish they would um i wish well i mean i don't know i've been kind of surprised on the upside in the last like year two about the about capital allocation decisions to low carbon projects i have to admit in lithium at least um so i i don't know i'm pretty excited and optimistic to be honest but um but i i'm sure there's always more kind of permeation of these ideas into into the investors sphere that would be helpful um and um and yeah actually you know you know what one interesting comment to share before I stop talking um something i've something i've noticed people chatting about in in kind of in these topics of like natural resource decarbonization and and kind of investor kind of responsibility to investors of reporting sea of emissions and such is um poor performing assets like coal mines and things like that are being shifted into the private sector so private companies are buying coal mines and um and kind of natural resource assets that have environmental issues and then just continuing to operate them because they're not accountable to um to as many investors as public companies are and they're they're not as scrutinized so that's something i'm a little bit worried about actually um just to kind of hamper down my optimism um and then those private companies don't care about optics or having a cute sustainability report like they are just trying to make money um so yeah that's that's something to like kind of keep keep an eye on i guess any questions in the room here so i'll try another one so you started with this book with jayby strudel and teslan you got back into tesla know that tesla's off about a trillion dollars in market cap are you still working with him and if so what's the thing i actually have a friend who did with jb in the early eb versus internal combustion engine life cycle comparison and that was pretty advanced in the day maybe five seven years ago but not as advanced yeah talking about here so are you continuing to work with people like that um so i'm not no i just stole jb's quote that's a great quote i haven't met jb in person yet i've had a couple interactions with him um but um but i uh i don't know can i i haven't signed an nd i guess but um you know i was i was up at their offices like two two or three days ago chatting about lca just casually um so um you know i'm not i'm not working with them directly but i i understand that kind of sophisticated folks like redwood and and tesla and and the volkspeckants of the world are are taking life cycle assessment very seriously um principally because they actually do care about decarbonization for the most part but um it's it's also gonna it's also very soon going to be the law of the land in europe to have much more sophisticated carbon emission disclosures on on products sold in the european union um so they're going to be forced to take life cycle assessment very seriously um so i'm not yeah i'm less i'm kind of almost now i'm now over the last two years less worried about the teslas and the redwoods and the volkspeckants of the world um because i think i think those types of folks are doing a pretty solid job on on tracking their supply chain c of two emissions so yeah europe's europe's been big on this particularly on the finance issue you probably know the people running the european climate investor disclosure process were the same people that uk government hired to analyze the financial crisis in 08 and 09 and they were asked at the end of that what's the next big thing and this is what they picked essentially a financial disclosure regarding both uh transition risk and physical risk to companies that people are investing in i think i think you may again might might find some good allies there as well well i i just i think greenwashing should be a securities violation right yeah a lot a lie to investors is a lie to investors regardless of what it's about right no and especially if it's related to climate and environmental impacts that a company incurs in making its product investors need accurate information on that to make decisions um because of because of near future compliance reasons and you know just you know morals or whatever have you um so oh you know i mean oil and gas companies are having the hardest time of anyone right um they're they're really squirming but um yeah no i just uh event the amount of greenwashing in the world is is really incredible you know like you see things like um you see things like blue hydrogen right like i'm i'm very i'm very anti blue hydrogen i think it's an absolute like scam and just for context if anyone doesn't know like blue hydrogen so 95 percent of hydrogen today is made from fossil fuels right from from coal or natural gas um and um blue hydrogen is this idea of making hydrogen from natural gas and then capturing the ceo tune storing it in the subsurface um i see blue hydrogen as an opportunity simply to kind of retain the value of natural gas assets like natural resource assets in the share prices of oil and gas companies um that is by far the best explanation of why anyone would want to produce blue hydrogen um and um i'm i'm just like shocked by how how often blue hydrogen is kind of gets away with calling itself clean and you know there's mckinsey reports where you know blue hydrogen is labeled as as clean hydrogen and kind of lumps with green hydrogen made from water and renewables and um it's a crime really it's a crime because the ceo tune missions in um that the would result from making hydrogen that could be captured and sequestered um are not tracked today right so today when they make hydrogen they're just dumping it all in the atmosphere and um and the methane emissions in the in the well field of conducting that natural gas from the subsurface to the blue hydrogen plant or whatever plant you know whatever you're doing with the natural gas are also not really tracks very well so there's there's just no there's no there's no compliance reason to do blue hydrogen right um and blue hydrogen is just one example i mean there's lots of examples like that where it's it's so obvious that someone's gonna someone's gonna call a product clean or green and that's gonna end up being a disaster in terms of ceo tune missions um and a lot of folks are kind of like sleek walking into this um because they because they don't really understand like the drivers of ceo tune missions and they and they kind of overtrust companies who who just make kind of simple declarations right so yeah lots of lots of emotions about um about green washing and um and you know those topics um i take it very personally really yeah well hang in there i do i do think there may be some win wins in here but if we don't have the right accounting framework and full transparency we're not going to even see those so i do agree with that part of it there's no kind of simple way to do it it's it's equally hard to what you're doing to make sure that the bit that you allow is actually going to get you to a better place through the big transition yeah so any other comments in the room i think we can now adjoin oh yes sir stand one sec i'm trying to do it better for decarbonizing for decarbonizing the the like like lithium chemicals or decarbonizing what uh just like the battery making process in general i'm thinking more like specifically towards like EV EV car like EV cars well um i think my clients are doing things right obviously but i'm biased of course one uh can you say who they are john's asking can you say specifically i'm trying to think if any of any of my my my cathode or cell lca clients are public um one one that's public is um is named frayer uh so they're building a uh they're building an lfp they're building a cell plant in norway um which has a very clean grid so they're off to a good start but um but yeah so we're helping them with with lca on their on their cell manufacturing process um that's just one of probably five different cathode or cell uh companies that were where he was at the moment that are they're all that are otherwise confidential um i will um you know i hinted at one person uh one company that was making kind of tenuous claims and has um kind of tenuous expectations for their body emissions um and i might as well just name them because there's i i don't really lose anything in in not in in any of them um north vault in in sweden um north north vault is is the company that um while they're planning to make to make cells for uh for for european auto manufacturers kind of in the next five to ten years and um north vault has published a target of total embodied emissions of 10 kilos of co2 per kilowatt hour of storage in their cell um i was showing you like i was showing you kind of some of the orders of magnitude of of kind of kilos of co2 per kilowatt hour of raw materials versus cell manufacturing etc and um you know based on those numbers where probably the average right now is something like 75 to 100 kilos of co2 per kilowatt hour um for lithium ion battery um you know that's you know almost an order of magnitude higher than than their target and um i i'm not aware of of north vault publishing relationships with any low carbon battery metal producers or developers for that matter um so so today i've seen no evidence that north vault is doing anything to to promote production of low carbon battery metals and um and i i'm you know i just find that disappointing to be honest like i'm sure i'm sure they've kind of got their heads on right you know i'm sure i'm sure that they you know i they have an lca team so that i i know that they they must know roughly at least the kind of drivers of emissions and making their product but um but what i'm not seeing is their procurement team kind of putting the pedals of the metal and like you know signing actual contracts to buy actual low carbon metals and chemicals um so um so yeah that's just kind of like a disappointment name i guess um so who's you know you asked me who's doing it right um i think i think my clients i think my clients are doing things right um so you know hired me to do your lca's but um i'm joking joking um i you know if i had to like kind of go through the list i don't know if that's interesting to you guys maybe that's excessive but like most of them are like kind of doing it right but like not really um but most of them don't as i said a couple minutes ago like most of them don't fully really understand the embodied emissions of their of their cell bill of materials so it's impossible to do it right if you don't understand that um so um yeah i don't i don't know if anyone's really doing it like perfectly or you know kind of up to my expectations and that's okay um hopefully hopefully some some more of them kind of get there in the next couple years but uh yeah so it's a bit it's a it's a bit of a mess um okay alex at this point we're just about that time here so we'll transition to the up close personal student session thanks very much for sharing your story with you i think it's a very very important one going forward with the clean clean energy transition thanks again yeah thanks for having me uh yeah sorry again couldn't be there you know stuck out here in the desert but um you know again if anyone ever wants to chat you know feel free to reach out so you'll get a few right now cool okay bye