 Good afternoon, or good morning, or good evening, we're delighted to have such a great audience joining us today from such a wide areas from around the world. Welcome to the spring meeting of the National Academies Committee on Earth resources. My name is Jim slutes. I'm the chair of the committee. I'd like to just say a few words to about our exciting program today cover a few housekeeping items, introduce our committee. Before I turn things over to john Marsden, a member of our committee who will be serving as moderator for today's webinar. First, let me just just for anybody that's new to the committee, let me just share that the committee on earth resources. It was established in 1991. So this is our 30th year. It is the standing committee of the board on earth sciences and resources and serves the community by monitoring and engaging on issues relevant to energy and non fuel mineral resources. The committee examines issues related to the availability, supply, delivery and impacts of energy and mineral resources. The health and safety of the workforce engaged in resource exploration and production, and the management and stewardship of the lands on which they are located. The committee serves stakeholders with objective evidence based scientific and engineering information to help support decision and policymaking. Our committee has been working on the issues related to minerals, critical minerals and energy resources for many years. When discussing our virtual spring meeting plans earlier this year, we thought it was timely to draw these themes together. The need for mineral resources to support the energy transition as we look toward ways to address climate change. John will describe you were organized. We've organized the meeting into a three part webinar series with today's kickoff webinar helping to put into perspective different aspects of minerals critical minerals and the global and domestic supply chains related to energy infrastructure. We hope you're able to join each of the other webinars as well on May 17 and June 1 because we've arranged them to build upon one another, and we'll benefit and we'll all benefit from audience participation throughout. Now let me say just a few words on how you can share your questions and ideas today. For our committee, you'll be able to raise your virtual hands on the zoom and John will call on you when when we move into the Q&A part of the meeting. For those of you in the main audience of the webinar, you may share your questions or comments by using the Q&A function at the bottom of your screens. You can simply type your questions into that box at any time and the staff team will keep track of the questions and share them back to John as he moderates and and he'll keep the conversation moving with panelists on the committee. Please participate. These sessions are there. They're intended to be interactive and we count you as part of the part of the discussion and equation in this meeting. And well, in addition, we will be posting the webinar recording on the committee's website and we'll let you know when that's available probably in about a week or so after this meeting. Without let me introduce our committee members or I'll let me let me clear let them let me have them introduce themselves briefly with their name and affiliation and we'll ask them to turn on their cameras and unmute as I call upon them. So, we'll just run down the list quickly. Bridget. Hi everyone. I'm Bridget Eiling. I'm an associate professor in the Nevada Bureau of Minds and Geology at the University of Nevada Reno, and also director of the Great Basin Center for GFM Energy. My area of interest and research is understanding GFM systems. How do we explore for them more effectively and develop them in sustainable fashion? Thanks, Jim. Thanks, Bridget. Dan? Hello, everyone. I'm Dan Connell, senior vice president of strategy with Consol Energy out of the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area. We are primarily a coal producer, but a big part of my role is working on new technology development in mining energy carbon products and other earth resources. Thanks, Dan. Doug. Thanks, Jim. And I'm not going to turn my camera on since I'm in a car for the next five minutes. I'm a consultant with Moroie Holland, a technology partners. I'm a geologist by background with experience in mineral resources, geothermal energy, and long career, the oil and gas sector. So experience also both in the federal government and in the private sector. Thanks, Doug. John Leftwich. John, I think you're muted. Okay, let me go on and then we'll come back around to John. Debra. Thanks, Jim. I'm Debra Keacock. I'm a metallurgical engineer and a patent attorney. And I'm on two public company boards, one a copper mining company and another a graphite processing company, both of which are important critical minerals for the energy transition. And my background today is 0.99% pure graphite. So I thought that would be fun for this seminar. And I'm also on the chair of the Regents at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. Super. Thanks, Debra. And Thanks, Jim. I'm Ann Robertson Tate. I've worked at geothermics, a geothermal consultancy for almost 36 years. I started out in the geothermal industry and here I am. I'm a geologist by training. Very interested in developing conceptual models of geothermal systems from multidisciplinary data. And also very involved in women in geothermal. Thanks. Thanks, Ann. Tameka. I am Tameka Cersei. I am a petroleum system analyst for BP, which is based in the UK. In Texas, where I assist with petroleum exploration and production via geochemistry and basin modeling. Thanks, Tameka. David. Well, I'm David Spears. I'm the state geologist of Virginia based in Charlottesville, Charlottesville, Virginia. And as state geologist, I'm largely an administrator, but I have a science background. I'm a petroleum geologist early in my career. I worked in the petroleum industry. And now I'm involved in a little bit of everything geologic mapping, mineral resources and geologic hazards. Thanks, David. John Leftwich, let me come back around to you if we can't see if we can, if you're able to connect. Okay, let me, I'll take a stab and I'm, are you there, John? Okay, John, go ahead. Yes, my name is John Leftwich. I spent most of my career as a petroleum geologist, Exxon, Shell and other companies in the Gulf Coast. And I have spent time teaching structure and tectonics in, in the old main university. So I'm pretty much interested in all aspects of geologic sciences. So here I am basically I'm pretty much retired now, but I'm interested very much in all the new things we're about to do here in the coming years. Thank you, John. Let me, I'm, I have one more committee member to introduce, but before I do, I would be remiss. I just wanted just a quick thank you to the National Academy staff, Elizabeth Ada and, and Kala Rosenfeld and, and Eric Edkin and all those others that are helping that we couldn't make this work without. Now let me turn and the program. Let me introduce John Marsden. Also, one of our committee members, John is going to be our moderator today. John Marsden has been the president of Metal Alert GM since 2009. John has had a long career in the mining industry. And with a, with a, a significant stint at Freeport Macraman, where he, where he finished out as president of the company. And so, and, and John has had a variety of different positions in the in the mining industry manager as vice president of technology and development or manager of operations. And he is very notably he is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. So I'm very pleased that John's going to take over and we have somebody with great expertise shepherding the program today. So, John, I'm going to turn the question over the program over to you. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Jim, for that kind introduction. And welcome everybody to the webinar. I'm going to run you through a little bit of background before we, before we get to our speakers. And next slide please. So the objectives of the, the webinar series is to, to look at mineral availability across global global markets. And we want to discuss what needs to be done now and in the future to facilitate access to the available and availability of minerals. So we've got a forum. This is intended to be a neutral forum for an exchange of ideas and information across a broad range of sectors. And of course, to look at potential areas for further examination. Next slide. So this webinar today is, is intended to be an introductory series and looking at what are critical minerals and the practical needs for minerals and energy systems and infrastructure. And it's not a US centric view. We're looking at a global view here. Next slide. We've got three speakers this morning and I'll be introducing them immediately before they, they speak. We've got each of them giving a presentation for about 12 to 14 minutes. And then we're going to have a panel discussion for the second hour of the webinar. Next slide. We've got two more webinars planned one on May 17, where we'd be looking at the US mineral endowment and sourcing alternatives and new approaches and technologies for extraction and we've got four excellent speakers lined up for the second webinar session. And then the third webinar would be on June the first, and this would be looking at the regulatory legal environmental, economic and policy challenges and opportunities related to the supply chain, and particularly looking at barriers to bringing critical minerals to market. The speakers there will be finalized at a later date. Next slide. So this brings us to to why now, and the National Academies have previously published an excellent document, but it's now 13 years ago on minerals, critical minerals in the US economy and in many ways that was a very forward look and prophetic document. Since that time, we've seen an increasing number of very significant publications on the role of minerals and metals for a low carbon future. And I'm not going to go through all of these but you can see that that in the last few years, there's been a massive amount of interest developed. Next slide please. And of course, in the last just the last month and a half two months, we've seen some some pretty significant moves and and discussion within the news and in other forums about the importance of metals and minerals. As we as we move into an energy transition. And most recently of course last week was the announcement with the target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the US by at least 50% by 2030, which is a major target here. Next slide. Before I turn over to the first speaker maybe just give a little bit of context here and and discuss a little bit. What are critical elements. And, and this is a particular classification developed by the American physical society recently. And this this shows their view of critical elements broken down into into convenient groupings but the colored elements have been identified as critical elements. The point here that critical elements are different in different jurisdictions into different entities, and they can be viewed very differently depending on your on your particular perspective. And the next slide shows a different view, which is the Americans chemical society. Their view and they've, they've classified elements as limited availability or rising threat from use, and then a serious threat within the next 100 years. The point the point here is that there's a significant number of elements that are viewed as critical by different jurisdictions, and there's a huge amount of overlap amongst these elements. Next slide. This is an excerpt from the USGS looking at requirements of elements in integrated circuit chips and computer chips. And the reason this is important in the 1980s, there were just 12 elements required in the 1990s increased to 16. And, you know, in the 2000s, we're up now around 57. So 45 elements more than were required in the 1980s. And this in many ways reflects this, this energy transition. And so with that, I'm going to introduce our first speaker, which, and it's Karen Hank hoy, the director of the British Geological Survey. She's got degrees from the University of Copenhagen, including PhD, her honorary doctorate from Opsala, and prior roles listed down here but she's done a large amount of research at various institutions, both within Denmark, and also Woods Hole, Columbia, and has been a consultant to the mineral exploration exploration industry. So with that, I'll introduce Karen. Thank you very much, John. And it's a great honor to be here. It's great to to get the honor of being the first week on this excellent series of webinars. I think that it will be incredibly interesting and I really like the way it's structured with sort of starting with, with really with the rock, and then we are ending up and talking a little bit about how society is going to have to respond to some of these really issues. I'm going to share my screen there. I hope everyone sees that. And so, basically, I being the first speaker, I get sort of the privilege a little bit of waving my arms around and, and talking about the big picture of things and so my, my semi lame title reflects that a little bit minerals and metals in the energy transition, criticality, demand and supply and circular economy and I'm not going to cover any of those in great depth but I'm just going to introduce a little bit some of those concepts that that we need to to talk about when we talk about how earth resources are going to enter into the energy transition going forward. So, John introduced this as well. This, this work this book from 2008 by the National Academy of Science was really, I think a milestone in the way that we think about this and the way we, we discuss it and also in the way that the, that earth sciences is engaging with this whole discussion. Basically, there were six objectives to this study when it was commissioned back 1015 years ago, and it was identify critical minerals and mineral products. Excuse me, assess the trends in sources and production status of these minerals, examine the potential constraints I mean what's actually sort of playing into this. Is it geology is it economy what is it identify impact disruptions in the supply, describe and evaluate the current level of information for decision making, and identify types of information that may be needed to better understand that. And this was the figure that was really used to do pretty much all of those things in that study is very simple idea and concept but it really has tremendous sort of power in in dealing with this problem. Basically what you see on the, on the left is the is the principle that on the y axis you have the impact of supply restriction. How important this and how bad is it if you can't have it. And on the x axis you have the supply risk. What is the chance actually that there is going to be a limit to supply. And on the right hand side, you see basically the result of a very careful analysis of this, trying to quantify those two ways of looking at different minerals and you can see on the right the 11 elements that were studied in in this particular study, including some mineral groups such as the rare earth elements and as you can see here for example, not very surprisingly something like copper tremendously important so if we couldn't get enough of it it would be a huge problem but the supply risk is actually not that great because it's something that's being produced in many different places. So basically, this map out the study, the different, the different elements and how we could think about criticality and these are some of the conclusions that came out of this study. And the ones that I perhaps think are sort of most important for discussion here today, and maybe especially the two first ones, all minerals and all mineral products could become critical. This is really important. And also a critical mineral is both essential in use and subject to the risk of supply restriction that was shown in the figure before and criticality may change actually technologies evolve and new products developed. And that is also really, really important because what that actually tells us is that why we need to talk about criticality and find solutions to criticality. We really should talk about minerals in general, because we don't know what's going to be critical tomorrow. And as John just showed now there's also different criticalities for different sectors. So criticality is a hugely elastic and relative kind of term and so it's important that we're very precise about what we want out of it. And certainly the restrictions on supply so that that x axis in the diagram is typically due to significant increase in demand, thin markets, production concentration. So is it all produced in one country, for example, production is by product or lack of stock for recycling and or infrastructure required for the recycling. And then the conclusions that over the longer term these were sort of the restrictions of supply in the in the short to medium term in the longer term availability is really largely a function of investment, like pretty much everything else in this world, including of course the investment in understanding this so the in so the education and the research that goes into it. So that continues unbiased and thorough information and more information needs to be collected more research needs to be conducted on the full mineral cycle so not just where can we find these metals and minerals, but actually how do they move through society. How do we understand the full cycle. So that was sort of a summary of criticality. And again, remembering that almost anything could become critical. And this figure here is just really to illustrate why minerals as such. Why are minerals really important that they are of course important because we use them for everything that we do. And when we talk about the critical minerals or the minerals that we need for the energy transition you can also see them in this, this diagram here you have a wind turbine in the background there. You have lots of transportation on here getting that green getting that electrified. It all requires different types of raw materials. And so sort of a Europe, Europe centric view here again of why is this so important. Basically in Europe, there is not a lot of primary production of metals and minerals. But once you start moving downstream the value chain into the sort of manufacturing, the processing industries and the actual industry, the Apple's and Audi's of this world, then you see that the number of jobs and the value added to society is increasing tremendously. These figures from from JRC, and probably almost 10 years old now, but still very valid and interestingly again we can put almost any sector superimposed on to this. And it would be twofold of them they all actually start with the raw materials that go into the products that are produced. So again, it all starts with the rock starts with identifying the minerals finding the minerals mining the mineral. And then we have a whole value chain that comes after that. So if you look at it historically where do we get the metals from if you go back more than 100 years almost 200 years now. The user in the world was Europe here in the blue stipple line, overtaken by the United States around 1900, not through the World War years, but from around 1970, several other regions across the world are coming in to the production so that we today see a much more balanced you could say production actually across the world, but quite interestingly, you see Europe and United States at the bottom now. So around now we are down to in Europe down to something like three to 5% we're consuming perhaps 15 to 20% and maybe even higher than that I think 25 to 30% and similarly for the US we are down around 5% of the global production. And we all know a much, much lighter proportion of the actual consumption or the user metals and this of course creates import dependency and import dependency alone does not make something critical but it's one of those things that can play into criticality, because if it is the import dependence from areas that are for some reason, subject to geopolitical turbulence or monopolies, then it can actually become a risk and here what we see is the import dependency for Europe for a variety of elements and you can see on the right hand side you have iron ore, zinc and copper or chromium. So some of the ores that we've been using for a really long time, but on the right hand side you see a lot of these speciality metals that actually go into new energy technologies. And similarly for Europe we have an import dependency of 100% for all these. So this is a huge issue that sort of means that we have to look at how we're going to make sure that we will have a secure supply. So if you Google circular economy and images on Google, this is what I did here and this is just a tiny tiny sort of field of view from what comes up on Google, you literally get hundreds and hundreds of things that look like this. Many of these sort of ways that we think about circular economy. Many of them are green because that makes them look more attractive. Many of them are completely closed loop. And it is brought forward as one of the solutions to securing minimal supply. Let's close the loops. Let's recycle so that we can just get everything that we need from things that we already have in the products that we are using. And so is this actually a viable option. And of course there's two things that sort of mainly interest into this and one is what is actually the demand of what we need. And the second one is how good are we actually recycling and I'll say just a little bit more about those two. So demand. What we are seeing is that we have a population increase across the globe. And so while it is still uncertain exactly what this is going to look like going forward, it is pretty certain that we're going to be more and more people. So what we are going to see are we going to be more and more people. We actually also use more minerals and metals per person. Historically, and this is a figure out of the gradles group at Yale University. But around 1900, there was, if we normalize the use of certain metals at that time and then look at how much we actually using today on the y axis on a logarithmic scale. What you will see is that there's maybe a handful of minerals that we're using almost the same as we did 100 years ago, things like lead silver and 10. And if you look at a wide variety of other metals. Again, for example, iron sink and copper, we are looking at between five and 10 times as much per person, remembering that we are three times four times as many people today, as well as we were back then so and just out of the sheer volumes that we all using is a huge delivering a huge demand increase on minerals in general. John sort of alluded to this as well. Another thing that plays into this is what is it we're using them. Well, if you go back long enough we just use Flint but when you go back you know 300 years, 400 years. We were using metals but we weren't using very many different metals and as our technologies have become more advanced. We are using more and more different metals and on the right there you can see pretty much using the entire periodic table as john also pointed out today. And we're using them for these energy technologies. And quite interestingly, of course, if we didn't use it before. It's not actually going to be there for us to recycle. If you look at the transition that's exactly what has happened. We're going what we want to do is we want to go from a brown economy of combustion type energy technologies to a green economy where we have functional materials and e motors and energy storage and energy conversion. And we're looking at those elements that you saw that import dependency as well it's cobalt is lithium it's the platinum group metals, rare earth and so forth. So there is an enormous need for these metals today and we didn't have that need if you go back just 20 or 30 years. And this illustrates that and this is out of the report that came out of the World Bank that john also mentioned. As you can see on the left here you have a variety of metals again in sort of the vertical column starting with aluminum and ending with sync. And then you can see sort of boxes check against different energy technologies at the top here. And you can see where we need the different types of metals and minerals, and we need them a lot. And in this study, they've also looked at what we think actually the demand is going to be as we move forward, and looking towards 2050. This is only 30 years away. This is what it looks like for those exact same elements. What we're seeing here is an increase, for example, for something like graphite lithium and cobalt of more than 400%. There's more times as much demand as we have today for those metals and even the ones where we're not predicting very large increases we are talking about increase in demand of all of these metals as we go forward. The next aspect of the circular economy, of course, is how good are we actually recycling how good are we at retrieving the metals that we're using. And again, want to go back to Gradle's group and I'm trying to try to go through this one fast one can speak about this one for 20 minutes alone. What Gradle's group did was they looked at pretty much the entire periodic table, not everything, but many metals in the periodic table, and they looked at what enters into production manufacturing. And then the dark blue of that that gets into products, how much is actually going into real products and what is actually lost off to the wayside here. And that's the next blue color you have here in use products. So these are our cars and our computers and everything that we're using. And then on to the next blue that's actually what is potentially recyclable. What can we actually recycle because there's things we can't recycle we don't have the technologies to recycle them or the other means to actually collect them. These are things like rare earths and polishing materials and aluminum and steel making. So, of what actually enters into the production stream. It's only a portion of it that we actually potentially can recycle. So what do we then perhaps recycle because we are recovering it, and that is sort of shown here in green. So again, we're losing a lot to our drawers back at home and putting things into the wrong bins when we actually trying to collect our waste. And also what's missing on this figure of course I'm a geologist is the mining. And if you know about mining and you could hear a lot of the people are certainly in the in the panel here knows about mining. This is the place where we introduce an enormous amount of waste that's always going to be a waste rock that's going to be rock that has has lower concentrations of what we're wanting. And we're not going to process that and so a lot of material actually gets lost already in the mining phase and in the tailings when we're doing mining. This is the result of the study and coming out of this back from 2015 and as you can see, there's a lot of metals here in blue, which are the ones that we actually fairly good at recycling again potentially recyclable. There's quite a lot of yellow on it on here. This is the stuff that we cannot currently recycle. So a lot of the rare earths on here as you can see and a lot of other specialty metals again. These are the ones that we want so badly we actually really really bad recycling them. And when you look at what we actually do recycle that is actually reflected in the numbers here. This is coming out of a resource panel, a UN resource panel report from 2011. And it has not improved very much in the 10 years since we are pretty good at the ones that were also blue and the other in the other figure. But the reds on here signify that we are actually only recycling up to a percent one percent of something that in some cases, we are going to see doubling or tripling of this the demand of those. And finally, I want to return to this figure as well, because back to this thing of what we're using now what we're using in the past. Part of the circular economy concept is also that we want to, we want to design things for reuse and we want to design things to last for a long time. Well, if we're designing a wind turbine to last for a long time, it's not going to be available for us to recycle for a long time either. So as long as things are in stock and as long as we're using them, they're not going to be available for us to recycle. This is a recycling plant in Ghana. And so just sort of to to summarize that even though we have this tendency to sort of want to see things as closed green loops and thinking then then we can all support and then we can all before it is actually not that simple. It's extremely complex how we're securing our access to minerals, and especially the minerals that we need for this energy transition. So rather than think about these closed loops, I'd like to advocate for this way of thinking about the raw material value chain the mineral value chain and the circular economy, we do need to get things into the loop. Even if we had a case of a falling demand of something we have some point in time, we had to put them into the loop by extracting them from the ground we should not lose sight of that we should continue to have the conversation about how that portion of the value chain can become more sustainable. And what we need in this part of the value chain to be able to secure the greens transition that we actually want. So we need to focus on this as well. We need to focus on the entire understanding of the value chain, going from the exploration and mining into processing into the design and production of things as we mentioned as I mentioned before. We need to get into the use into the collection into the recycling and we need to acknowledge that there's leakage along this entire value chain is waste everywhere we go people talk about zero waste. But in reality, it is almost impossible to imagine that we can do that, but we need to look at where we have waste and where we can minimize waste. And that's how I like to advocate for us to be thinking about securing the supply of this and I'd actually like to just throw in there maybe for the discussion that what about these guys here I mean in the past it's only been, you know the geologist and the minus up here that worried about where the raw materials came from from these guys down here again the apples and Audis and Siemens for them they've been buying it off the shelf at market value, and they have not necessarily pay too much attention to where did it come going. Actually, there's been good business model in designing something for breaking fairly quickly so that they would have you'd have to buy a new one. What if we can get these guys to take some responsibility for the sourcing of raw materials, and also for the recycling of raw materials then I think we have some chance really talking about a sustainable supply chain for everything that we need. And we do need a sustainable supply chain for this reason here again, the one we'll be talking about very much in this webinar series is the affordable and clean energy. That's what we want. We're going to need raw materials to go into that we're going to have to talk honestly and openly about the complexity of getting them there. So with that, I'm going to say thank you for listening. Thank you. Thank you very much, Karen. Excellent presentation. Really, really interesting and stimulating. So now we'll move on to our second speaker that's Nadel Nassar. And Nadel is the chief of the material flow analysis section of the National Minerals Information Center of the USGS. He's got a BS in chemical engineering, his MBA in sustainable global enterprise from Cornell and PhD from Yale. He's a member of the US National Science and Technology Council's critical minerals subcommittee and he significantly was the 2019 recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for scientists and engineers so welcome Nadel and please go ahead. Great. Thank you. Thank you for that kind introduction and for the opportunity to share some of the research that my group and I have been doing it at USGS. Let's see if I can get this going. Okay, so I'm really fortunate to be here and talk to you about this and also to follow up from Karen's presentation because I think it really builds off of that discussion. So, I'll just briefly talk about the demand side but then quickly jump in to talking more about the supply side. In terms of demand, you know, for mineral commodities, mineral commodities are really essential for both conventional as well as renewable energy technologies including solar photovoltaics as we talked about wind turbines especially offshore wind turbines with the rare earth, but also things like oil drilling with barite as oil and gas drilling mugs and as well as petroleum refining such as platinum and medium as reforming catalysts. Gas turbine blades, they require super alloys for industrial gas turbine blades and they require a number of different alloying elements there. And of course, the technology that everybody's talking about with electrical vehicles and energy storage with lithium ion batteries, really probably one of the largest if not the largest transition that's going to happen to the energy system in the last few decades. And this is obviously a big deal for mineral commodities and the demand for mineral commodities. A lot of the concern however is on the supply side. And the reason for that is because production for many of mineral commodities is highly concentrated in a few countries. And so you have countries like Brazil the dominate niobium production. South Africa dominates the platinum group metals Chile is a dominant player for rhenium DR Congo for a cobalt and tantalum Australia and Canada provide a lot of different commodities. And China I think is the big story, producing much of everything else. And if you look at this data over time which you see is that this is a relatively new phenomena. So this is showing China share of global production, primary production of various mineral commodities. You can see things like the rarest have been dominant since the 1990s this is showing time series from 1990 to 2018 antimony same tungsten as well. But for some of the other commodities, their share of global production has really increased just over these last couple of decades including the news and metal gallium and cobalt refining. And so, as was alluded in the previous presentation with this has resulted in as many developed countries are increasingly import reliant. So this is a metric of net import reliance that our center has been measuring for many decades. And when you look at the number of commodities for which the United States is at least 25% import line, meaning, at least 25% of us consumption is based on foreign imports, that number is increased from 21 commodities in the 50s to almost 60 commodities today. Now, in a recent executive order we were asked to examine well where are we getting what's our foreign reliance where we getting these mineral commodities. And then these three different periodic table figures with the overall periodic table figure shown in the three three colors. So we get a lot of mineral commodities either from domestic sources, or from what Department of Defense calls security supply countries. There are few commodities including the rare earths, and many of the metalloids that are used in, for example, solar photovoltaics, we do get from what Department of Commerce labels as non market economies, namely this is China. And then we get some of the other commodities from, from elsewhere. And so you might, you know, the viewer might look at this and say well that's not too bad it's just a few, you know, commodities. But what this picture does not show is import reliance on semi finished and finished goods right so you might be importing a flat panel display, or finished vehicle, and that's not that would not be shown here here it's really talking about the raw materials but we're investigating this embedded demand to understand our foreign reliance more completely to understand the dependency on not just the raw materials but raw materials contained in finished goods. One thing we did a couple years ago was to examine us reliance relative to Chinese import reliance and we know China has a lot, but they don't have everything that they need so we put this relatively simple matrix to try to understand where things fall. And so things in quadrant one are things for which the US and China are less than 50% that import reliant libs in them falls in the bottom left quadrant because both China and the US are net exporters quadrant to our commodities for which US is highly import reliant but China is not so the rare earth. As least as of this writing in 2014 data. The US was highly import reliant China is not other minor metals like indium gallium business fall into that category. The converse of that situation is in in quadrant three. So you have here a brilliant where the US is the largest producer and not by accident there's significant effort on the part of Department of Defense through the title three Defense Production Act to make sure that there's a strong reliable brilliant supply chain. You might be also surprised to see iron and copper in this quadrant. China is a big producer but their consumption is even greater than than their production so it falls in that quadrant quadrant four is perhaps the most interesting because these are commodities for which both the US and China are highly net import reliant so the platinum group metals are in mind in South Africa fall in this quadrant, niobium in Brazil, niobium in Chile, lithium in Australia and Latin America. Now, you'll notice here cobalt is sort of in two spots, you might have noticed that there's cobalt with a subscript R and a cobalt with a script M in quadrants two and three, respectively. Now ours stands for refined production and the M stands for mining production. And what's why they're in different quadrants is because China, while they don't mind a significant quantity of cobalt, they are a major refiner and we can see that through our data from our data, what's shown here is from 1980 to around 2018 2016 world production by country, and you see global mine production for cobalt is dominated for in the DRC, but global refinery production is really dominated in China. And of course cobalt's important because it's used in lithium ion batteries it's one of the key components in catheters. And this is not by accident. If you look at what's going on. A lot of Chinese firms have gone to the DRC in Central Africa to make sure that they have equity stake in those mineral assets and processing facilities, so that they're able to ship a lot of that cobalt to China for further and ultimately processing and incorporation into lithium ion batteries and vehicles and electronics, etc. And it's not just for cobalt Chinese firms that have invested in mineral assets for niobium in Brazil, lithium in Australia and Chile, rare, and of course Greenland and the mountain past mine in the United States. So what China is doing they're making sure that they're able to secure their resources for their manufacturing sector you might be wondering well what is the US government doing. We do have a standing committee that's been around for more than a decade under the US National Science Technology Council. It's a critical mineral subcommittee that's co chaired by both Department of Energy and Department of Interior. The US has representation from across the federal agencies, and this subcommittee has really been at the center of a lot of the efforts for the federal government on the executive branch side to, to help develop a strategy and deliver it. And it's, it's also been following on a lot of the executive orders have been coming through in the last couple of years. I'll just go through those really quickly. Some of the ones that have come down in the last couple of years, including executive order 13817, which really set up the language to suggest that we need to develop a critical minerals list for the United States. So we've come up with the Defense Production Act Title three, several five presidential determinations that required the Department of Defense to secure rare supply chains. That was in 2019. In September 2020, there was another executive order that looked at addressing the threat of domestic for domestic supply chain on foreign reliance. That language also in that executive order required that the critical minerals list be updated and reviewed periodically. Even more recently in December of last year, the Energy Act of 2020, which was part of the omnibus included a section on mineral security that put into legislation the requirement that the US provide a critical minerals list and updated every three years. And finally, most recently just in February, the Biden administration put out executive order 141017, which looked at American supply chains including one on critical minerals but also on semiconductors lithium ion batteries or batteries in general, and pharmaceuticals all of which require mineral commodities. And so there's been a lot of action within the executive branch and legislation to help resolve some of these issues. One of the central things that that our center has been working on is to try to define that critical minerals list and so this is a publication that we put out in 2020 that try to address well, how do you define criticality and how do you measure it. And really what we honed in on was to look at supply risk. And here we define supply risk using a conventional risk modeling framework where there has to be a hazard. In this case, a supply disruption, a high degree of supply disruption, you have to be exposed to that hazard, and you have to be vulnerable to an idea there is all those components are necessary for there to be risk. And conversely, if you think about it, you need to reduce only one of them for the risk to go away. And so we went about developing indicators for each of those components of supply risk, and we're able to measure semi quantitatively what the supply risk would be across 50 plus mineral commodities over a decade. And the things that came out on top are things that you would expect the rare earth elements and cobalt graphite antimony tantalum tungsten etc. What we also are able to do is identify not only the leading producer, but which applications which uses are these is really driving the vulnerability. Now we're not standing still we're looking at improving this methodology and updating it will be updating it to include data up to your 2018, hopefully in the next week or so that those results will be published and they'll directly feed into providing the technical input document for updating the critical components for the US government. We're also looking to enhance the methodology as we are able to do more and more on each of the components so for the vulnerability component we're looking at figuring out how can we look at the ripple on effects to understand how does supply disruption impact the end user and the economy overall. And on the hazard side we're looking at other hazards so right now our focus has been on man made hazards right so political instability and a producing country, but there are other hazards including natural hazards which can affect supplies. This is a work we did a couple years ago, looking at earthquakes apply disruptions for copper in Latin America to try to understand well, what's the expected annual disruption to the earthquakes, you can imagine expanding this. So we are expanding this globally and we'll have that result hopefully later this year, but expanding it to potentially other commodities and and other hazards natural hazards as well, and ultimately reincorporating that back into our criticality model. Now once you identify a commodity is critical, you know what what can you do about it or how can you think about what's what what are ways to reduce it. So as I mentioned earlier, there, you know you can reduce any one of those three components together reduce the hazard, you can reduce the closure or you can reduce the vulnerability. If we think about just the exposure piece of it, which is essentially our import reliance right you're more exposed to it if you are more import reliant. What we can do is we can develop scenarios we'll stick this out sort of scenario so our domestic demand, maybe is increasing our domestic supply is decreasing the difference between those are import reliance or net import reliance. And if we develop different scenarios. We can see you know how might that change over time, and then you can develop these wedges to understand well how can different tools that are in our toolkit might be able to reduce that import line so we can develop manufacturing improvements such as 3d printing, or near net shape forging. We can develop substitute materials on the supply side perhaps we try to increase domestic supplies, a primary or secondary through recycling. Of course there are limitations to each of these strategies. We can, you can have our Department of State Department of Commerce work on securing those supplies through trade ties, and once they've over maybe can be secured through government or industry stocks to buffer against any, any supply disruption so this sort of illustrative ideas. So this is how we can get there if that's our policy go the question of course then becomes well how big are each of these wedges for the different commodities, and they'll be different right. And so that's one thing that we hope to do and with a few minutes I'll have left I'll just show you a little bit of illustration with what that might look like. So, for example, this is entered data from the energy information administration. And this was before the latest announcement from the Biden administration but we know that solar for example is going to become is expected to become comprised the largest chair of globally installed electricity generation capacity. Other things like natural gas will continue to grow wind will grow as well. Let's talk about just solar for a second. We know that there's many different solar technology PV technologies, the most dominant of which is crystalline silicon the requires silver for example, of the other technologies the thin film technologies cadmium telluride is the most dominant the United States, comprising somewhere between 50 to 30% of annual installations. And the question is, you know, is tellurium potentially a bottleneck so this is something that we're investigating we've pulled together an international group of researchers to try to understand, could you increase tellurium supply, given and knowing that it is a byproduct of copper production, how much could you increase tellurium supply without having to increase copper production significantly. So watch for that coming in the next few months. So mineral commodities are essential for renewable and emerging technologies, the United States is highly import reliant for large and growing number of those commodities. As Karen mentioned, import reliance by itself is not necessarily a cost for concern or, but it is a component of risk. And when combined with other factors such as production concentration and unable or unwilling countries that might be unable or unwilling to supply the United States and industries that might be vulnerable. We have a situation where there is risk. We've developed this risk based assessment for the United States, we will use that to update and prioritize the critical minerals list. There is a federal strategy out there that the NSTC critical mineral subcommittee is is implementing. We believe scenario analysis can help us identify which of those strategies will be most effective at reducing both import reliance and supply risk overall for the United States. Thank you very much, Nadal. Great presentation. Excellent. We'll move on to our third presentation. And this is Eris Isiloff. He's the managing director of Traxxas Group and specifically a legacy investment arm Traxxas projects and the new battery materials and ESG focused investment arm Traxxas battery holdings. He's has an LLB from Tel Aviv University and an MBA as well. His try rolls with deputy CEO of the global furrow nickel group. And he has a focus on investment projects in the metals and mining and metals sector, obviously focused around the emerging electrical revolution. Eris over to you. Hello everyone. It's a pleasure to be here and it was great to listen and watch the previous presenters which I think by providing both the more academic angle and the executive arm point of view. Kind of allow me to lead it a little bit more to the, you know, how we do it on the ground. Traxxas is a company that builds and provide services to supply chains historically to aluminium to the stainless steel supply chain super alloys, chemical industries, etc. And in the past few years, we think we kind of saw the writing on the wall. And we realized that, you know, green green supply chains and a new way of doing things will also require service providers and commodity houses that, you know, that work. Ethically and conscientiously and, you know, make sure that that we can help people care and entities can now where things are coming from and where they end. So we, you know, that's that's how we're doing that thing today and we shifted more and more towards the towards these materials. Some of them we've been, you know, been part of previous supply chains but you know have transitioned in terms of how they are used. Cobalt is a good example already I think 40% or 50% of the cobalt produced every year is used in batteries and if you scroll back 1015 years ago with the number was much smaller and it was much more of a super alloy and stainless and specific alloy type of type of material. And we teamed up in the past couple of years with the Pallinghurst, which was a legacy mining investment fund, and also transitioned in parallel into investing in the materials that will enable the transition into mobility and renewable energy. And the way we see it basically, you know, dive into the presentation right away is that in order to really change the world within this century, there are a lot of things that need to happen. And the UN targets are some of them, of course, but you know, we need to plant, plant more trees, release less methane, eat less cows, change the cooling systems and RACs and fridges, and and obviously develop our onboard lithium lithium battery and other storage systems which enable electromobility, clean green, no noise, no pollution and and the switch to renewable to renewable energy and we asked ourselves, as Traxxas, as we do our 10 year plan, moving forward, where can we make a difference. And the place where we can make a difference is on the materials. So we chose to focus on on battery material and building the supply chains and investing in the, in the projects that will lead both to primary extraction and to recycling. So invested in, you know, graphite project in Quebec called New Vermont and lithium project called Namaskar and recycling company called Lifecycle and and we'll do a lot more. I'll share my screen with you now. Let me know if it works. You're on. Can you see me. Can you see the screen. Yes, great. So I won't repeat that, but as I was mentioning, we're a global commodity commodity house. We've been founded in 2003, our main shareholder is the Carlisle group, the Blue Chip American Fund, and the Lewis Bacon funds also have a piece and they are shares with the management and employees we have more than 100 partners in our firm. These lithium ion, ion batteries and the materials that are used for them, which are at the moment, pretty much all defined as pretty much as critical materials in all standards. So we're looking at lithium graphite the nmc lithium cobalt manganese and of course copper, which is the most important material for enabling electrification there's about four times more copper in an easy than there isn't an IC and of course all the charging of the infrastructure is going to be a lot more cobalt needed. And then these, these batteries go into energy storage to station a grid scale micro etc. And into the electron mobility of the these and, but not only forklifts, drones, trucks, and so on. The interesting thing. I think is that there is somewhat of a circular aspect here because we will be more and more charging our electric vehicles with renewable energy, renewable or energy produced by renewable sources. And this answers to some of the critique that was heard five and 10 years ago when people were saying, what good are you doing when you're driving an electric car that was charged by a cold fired electricity. In the back end to some extent you're only pushing the problem backwards in the in the energy supply chain. To my mind, this was not 100% true because having, you know, getting rid of exhaust pipes with all the effects it has on pollution and health and just think about the level of noise and some of the city centers and so on. Knowing electric has a lot of value, regardless, but but when you combine the two, and you will be driving you will be moving around on that way it's obviously a perfect solution. And one of the things that's also developing but that's part of that's part of improvements on grid level on grid management and there's a lot of software. It is mass data and AI driven on how you know you're, you're staying at home because you're only going to work 50% in the office from next year onwards. And you charge your car during the night and during the day it returns the because you're not going to the office on that day. And it uploads the power back into the grid so actually these on board mobile solutions also act as some kind of a balancing solution for for sort of micropeakers if you will. In terms of growth. Everyone was talking about the huge surge in demand and how the supply side will need to answer so I won't go too deeply into that but if we're looking at at stationary storage solutions and and grid solutions we can see here that there's going to be There's going to be a huge, a huge number of good about our about our batteries installed. This is from from blue and Bloomberg and this includes pump storage hydro. This is really all the other all the other solutions and most of them are obviously the lithium ion batteries. You can see which is interesting here and this is something that a narrative that that was pointed to before but we'll see as we as we continue that in terms of where the markets are in terms of installing stationary storage solutions or buying cars. We sort of have China, Europe, North America and rest of the world, more or less equal and very round numbers here in this slide the rest of Asia was broken away from from China. And I and other slides. It's not. And as you scroll to ease. We see here that we expect within this decade and adoption rate growth from approximately 2.5% last year to about a third of the new passenger cars and light duty vehicles so at the end of the day kid being electric and most of them will be battery easy and some of them will still be plug in hybrids but not a lot. So, these two trends will create obviously a huge increase in the demand for the materials that that these batteries are made of again just looking at it from from from the market perspective and this will help us when we kind of superposition again. Everything from the upstream to the downstream. We see that in terms of vehicles sold. Again, we have more or less a major markets and the rest of the world. Now, going to the to the to the to the downstream and upstream and how these how these things are made. We see that by the end of the year benchmark manner of which is the main information collection agency for for these materials and for these supply chains. We'll have about 200 giga factories up and running in the world by the end of the year. Definitely this is becoming part of the mainstream. See the everyone remembers I guess the, the welfare commercial from the from the Super Bowl. And what we can see here is that, although as we saw earlier, the markets are distributed in one way the customers are where they are. When you look at at cell manufacturing and OEMs where where do these things happen. We see that approximately 75% is in China, only about 5% in the US and 10% in Europe. And Europe, although it's only 10% at the moment it's going to grow and a lot of good brands are already represented there and more more coming coming into into production. And if you look at China and Japan, Korea, mainly if you kind of add these two together we're talking about 85% of the production happening in the Asia Pacific supply chain, if you will, while the color pan Atlantic is only about 15%. So it's about 50% of the consumer markets and installations of stationary story but it's only about 30% of the of the final downstream at the moment. Drilling down a little bit into the into the materials I'm sure you'll do more of that in the next seminars with people who are more qualified than a lawyer with an MBA, but basically the battery has you know the two electrodes the positive cathode and the negative anode and a separator, which has to be porous to allow the lithium ions to carry electrons from side to side and and charge in discharge. The chemistries of the of the cathode the popular one that everyone's talking about now is the NMC, which is nickel cobalt and manganese and and of course lithium. We'll talk about it later but lithium in that context is consumed mainly as lithium hydroxide because in the baking process of the precursor materials as we call them. We're reaching higher temperatures and lithium carbonate cannot sustain them so you need lithium hydroxide. NCA is basically what Tesla is using. And that's a nickel cobalt aluminium, again with with lithium with lithium carbonate and LFP is lithium iron phosphate which is a cheaper more stable way of producing the the cathode it's very popular in China. Tesla is actually going to use it for its Chinese model three and people thought it was going to go away in favor of the nickel rich chemistries and that within the nickel rich chemistries will get rid of the 532 and 62 and shift to the Holy Grail of 811 which means eight units of nickel to one unit of cobalt and one unit of manganese. But it turns out that it's that it's not really the case there are improvements on the LFP. There are improvements on how to make nickel rich but less nickel rich type of type of chemistry and see later I guess there's no one size fits all and it will be depending on the application and entry level urban vehicle doesn't necessarily need what a weekend sports car needs and so on. On the other side at the moment, the dominant technology is a graphite anode and graphite is as a combination in this respect of natural graphite and synthetic graphite and some silicon. There's an attempt because of cost and availability to to increase the amount of silicon but there are limits to that because silicon tends to expand, which, which causes the problem so there's sort of a cap at the moment to how much you can use it and at the moment it's somewhere between 100% might push higher but not a lot in between the natural and synthetic. The effort is to increase the natural component because synthetic comes from from the it's a byproduct of oil refining. Needle co basically, but, but there are also caps on that everyone's talking about solid state and the lithium metal anode but but that's going to take a while and it's probably going to be again application specific specific. The most popular electrolyte obviously is the is lithium ion with human solution which works in essence as a stevedore carrying the anode from from I'm sorry the electrons from side to side. We'll talk about the supply chain from mining to initial refining and conversion, then making of cathode anode electrolyte, putting them together in battery cells and then ultimately into into batteries that putting the batteries into the electric vehicles and into the storage system. We'll talk about it in a minute but what we see that there is a lot of investment and a lot of investment announced on the downstream side, and there's definitely a gap on the upstream and the midstream. Again, this connects a little bit to what we spoke of earlier so I'll run through this quickly, but this is a map. And from Bloomberg research, explaining where in the world are the various chemistry made up so if you look to the, to the left you will basically see Tesla with its NCA Panasonic cells in in the United States. And you can see that in Europe. Most of what is made is is NMC. And you can see that in the in China, China and rest of the Asia Pacific, let's call it China Japan Korea cluster. They're pretty much making everything and rather dominant on that. And what we are seeing now is that, because it's not one size fits all and because there's a realization that you to some extent need to customize your chemistry, not only to the availability of materials but also to the specific application. Between a drone, a forklift, a taxi, you know, and a sports car. There's, it's very important to figure out and to optimize relatively quickly your composition and how you're going to get to it. And we're seeing now that there are some interesting startups that are currently surfaced later this year that want to provide provide that angle and enable the producers and the, the OEM the brands, the designers to be able to relatively quickly optimize the recipe if you will for the battery that they need for their application or product, and then transition that into into design into procurement and so on. Again, connecting to the to the whole to the whole narrative if you just look at at the big four let's call it lithium graphite, nickel and cobalt. We see that through this decade. We're going to need to quadruple if not more our natural graphite production, and we're going to need another million tons of nickel. This last one nickel nickel sulfide or nickel that can be made into nickel sulfide and actually go into a battery. When you see in 2020 343,000 tons of nickel in this in this graph. This is the nickel that was used in battery, but 2.3 million tons of nickel are produced per annum, but just accumulative annual growth rate, which has to do mainly with population growth and infrastructure stimulus etc. Would would not take us to this incremental million in five years in 2025 if you add this extra million will have 3.3 million in total. And at that point in time will have more than a third of that already going into batteries and if you go to the end of the decade. Once again about half the nickel that will produce be produced at that time will go into batteries at the moment it's going mainly into a stainless steel. Look at lithium lithium is going to need another 2 million tons of LC by the end of the decade. That's again, five-fold five-fold jump. And in order for these materials to actually for the supply to actually meet the demand. As I think everyone understands recycling is an important part and we invest in recycling. But the definition of end of life is not exactly clear because there's an effort made to actually make these batteries last for a very long time. So part of it is scrapped in production. A lot of it is electronic scrap, but it's going to take a while before a lot of these ease will retire to a level where they can be substantially recycled and then of course, there are all the limitations on what could actually be recovered and how efficient we are on recovery. But it's all part of the same picture and the good thing about recycling I think in this supply chain is that it's happening hand in hand with the growth of the primary resource extraction and conversion. Previously, you know, the primary extraction or primary construe conversion led to huge mountains of tailings and slag and and which were basically left left on their own and needed to be to be managed and from time to time were tapped with some ideas on how to recover, because a lot of the first extractions was not very efficient, how to do something with them. Some of them are even polluting some are not, depending if it's vanadium or copper. But recycling was to some extent, an after, you know, an after sight of sometimes decade after primary extraction, where someone said look there's something that's either valuable or hazardous let's let's take another look at it. Today it's totally different. We see that recycling and the whole circular model is growing hand in hand we saw that the EU already created hurdles for using recycled materials in a growing percentage in the supply chain and we see that both an independent recycling capability with independent recycling capabilities are emerging. And let's call it in house or spin off the sun link capabilities are emerging. So north of all, for example, it's going to be a huge cell manufacturer in Sweden and Germany, working closely with VW. They're all already developing an in house capacity for recycling, which is important. And then again looking at, you know, this disparity between where the customers are where the upstream is the midstream, and so on. Just quickly, the lithium that goes into these batteries if it's, if it's hard rock as we call it. A lot of it comes from from Australia, some of it will come from Brazil when Sigma lithium opens up next next year. This is spodium in concentrate basically crushes pegmatite. And then, and then concentrates them to a level of 6%. This happens with a with a. In terms of efficiency, if you use only a DMS, what we call it's probably 60 70% recovery if you also crush everything and float you can reach probably 90% recovery in terms of, you know, what you're leaving in your, what you're leaving as a slag and what you're recovering into, into, into spodium in but again that's a trade off because crushing requires energy and floatation requires consumables and there's always, there's always a trade off there. Then the 6% material needs to travel to another part of the world, typically it goes from Australia to China where it's further converted mainly to lithium hydroxide and in chemical plants and then, and then the lithium hydroxide or lithium carbonate that you can go into a can of in Chile and in Argentina it's mainly it's Brian's, which are pumped and historically evaporated the huge evaporation points for many years but now there's an effort to work on on direct extraction of lithium which basically means you filter the line relatively quickly and return it back to the to the salar to some which is basically a salinated equifer and so there's a lot of tech work and we're talking about all kinds of improvements that can also make the supply chain more efficiency so it's not only primary recycling but also new technologies and better ways of doing things so potential potentially in the lithium triangle of Chile Argentina and actually Bolivia as well. These technologies and it may also reflect on on the lithium basin in Nevada will perhaps allow tapping more resources at the moment have their environmental and water balance issues. And again, nickel. Most of the nickel some of it comes from from the north from from Canada and Russia that's the primary nickel nickel fall effect mainly. But most of the nickel is still at the moment that's mine is the laterites Indonesia and the Philippines are are the biggest ones in Indonesia. They were just mining and shipping nickel laterite or which has about 35% moisture and only about 2% nickel talk about moving around a lot of waste and a lot of water. And that also has a carbon footprint obviously now, since 2014, there are rules that require local and increased component of local production. So they are producing the nickel pig iron which goes mainly to stainless steel, and sing Shan the Chinese producer has announced recently that they developed a way to convert MPI into nickel math and nickel math is something that can be converted into nickel sulfate, which is ultimately what you need in a battery. Australia also produces some, some nickel and in essence what you need in order to go into a battery is nickel sulfate and nickel salt. The easiest way to make it is from a hydroxide nickel hydroxide or an HP, which is mixed hydroxide precipitate precipitate also has some cobalt. We see now the emergence of some independent nickel sulfate producers which basically want to rely on buying nickel hydroxide or MHP, converting it into nickel sulfate and then selling it to the to the category of manufacturers cobalt again as was mentioned until here before the DRC is very dominant had some issues that have to do more with the with the material in terms of quality and quantity is obviously very good. Cobalt is converted then in China. So cobalt hydroxide becomes not cobalt sulfate mainly in China, and you can also take cobalt metal and dissolve it into into cobalt sulfate natural graphite is mined crushed concentrated. And then it's it's a high grade concentrated. It's in the high 90s. So when you actually move it as a concentrate, you're moving a lot of material because it's a it's a material that you need a lot of the biggest battery material but in terms of at least the tendency of moving the concentrate, you're not moving a 6% material or 32.5 material in weight if you're looking at manganese and so on but you're actually moving something that's that's highly that's more concentrated, which, which is a little bit more efficient and has a lesser footprint in terms of carbon emissions associated with just moving a lot of things from side to side around the world. Just looking again at the where where things are made of mind where things are produced and where things are ultimately consumed. We can see again that most of the anode cathode and and materials that go into them, the conversion happens in the Asia Pacific supply chain, if you will. And here in the pan Atlantic, whether it's Europe or the the North America is that it's a much smaller component, but it is it is growing at least in terms of the of the downstream. And here we have again from benchmarks really great research in their in the recent presentation. They're actually showing how things how things move around and where are the, where does the extraction of the key materials happens where there's the chemical processing here. Where do you put it into a canada or a cathode or a cell and where do you actually make the applications a car for that matter and and use them. And again, we see the with the same picture if you look at it for a minute from a from a US centric perspective, we're about 25% of the markets, and we're very little of the in between. We're somewhat more represented and will be somewhat more represented on on the downstream on the on the on the Gigafactory part and then put in the assembly actually putting these cars together. But very little chemical conversion happening at the moment and very little extraction nearly nothing and everything that's that's along this that's this critical path. One thing to think of is that a lot of these resources are actually available in Canada, and we have taxes are investing in Canada and we do see a good opportunity to to develop a combination of upstream and upstream conversion between the US and Canada and we also see a pan Atlantic narrative store where between between Europe and between North America. There could be a lot of a lot of synergy and a lot of cross pollination. And I'm not talking about this from a political perspective from but from a practical perspective of trying to keep the supply chain short. There's the various risks that have to do with with collecting materials from a lot of countries moving them around a lot of places and the inefficiencies of and then carbon emissions of the of the process. And then, I think we can hop to our main main conclusions and mainly points to think about. So, we see that the rapid adoption of the disease and the deployment of stationary storage will create a huge increase in demand, and we're asking ourselves how will the supply side response. There is no avoiding massive expansion on the primary production that means we're going to need to extract, meaning to mine, all these material, and quite a lot of them. But we're going to have to do it in better ways than then was done in the past. And again, I'm not objective because we invested in even one graphite but one of the reasons we invested in them because they will be using a electric yellow fleet to mine. And they will be regrass stacking their tailings in a very safe way, and they will be using hydropower for their purification process. So, they're basically a carbon neutral process making a graphite, a natural spherical coated and graphite. And this can happen with other processes as well so the thing is not to stop extracting or to or to avoid it. There's simply not enough material and security and for us to say, that's it for stopping and we're only going to recycle. We need a lot of investment, and we need a lot of new projects actually happening on the chemical conversion plant side and on the on the mine site recycling. Definitely important definitely something that we need to do a lot more and to get better and better in doing. And just like anything else will the graph that that was shown earlier about the diminishing efficiency. If you run from, you know, from from your, from what you insert into the supply chain into what you actually reuse again, hopefully these percentages will get better over time. And what will enable that will be technological advantages, advances I'm sorry, efficiencies learning curves and so on it's a young supply chain and so long it's a young process, and I'm sure we'll get better and better in that. This is the time before dimension into into all of this. Just to understand we're talking about all these growth patterns on the demand side by the end of the decade. It takes at least five to 10 years for a mining project to actually reach its commissioned capacity, sometimes even longer. It takes two three years to license and build and stabilize a complicated chemical plant. So we need to start doing it now or rather, we should have started a few years ago, because at the moment availability of materials is really the, that's the only cloud kind of casting a shadow over this and computation potentially rain on our parade. I think people's hearts already probably in the right place the executive is definitely on board. There's an academic consensus regulations are in place, legislature, everything that you need is there. And I'm really concerned that the materials what will not be be there if we don't move quickly. We see that there's a lot of investments already and a lot of investments announced in in the downstream but really not enough on the on the upstream, you would have thought that there would be a gold rush and everyone would rush to build a nickel, nickel mines and expedite any plans for, you know, for for building the the graphite projects lithium projects but but it's not it happening as fast as we would like it to happen. Talk about capital intensity we're talking about big amounts here to give an example if we need 2 million tons more of of LC of lithium grade of lithium of battery grade lithium. The capital intensity if you go through the hard rock route is something like $25,000 for annualized time. So that's on its own about $50 billion. Even if you space it over a few years we're talking about a big amount. The capital intensity for nickel and if you need another 1010 2 million tons of that. It depends on the methodology it varies substantially anything from 20 to $120,000 but if you just use 50, then you see that you're at $100 billion and, and so on, graphite and copper are potentially less capital intense but we need a lot of millions of tons of more copper. So, really the world needs to start investing and to start investing rather quickly. Another observation we had and I think it went across across all three presentations I'm sure they'll be talking about it more is that if you superposition all the maps you will see that the upstream is in one place. The upstream is in another the markets are distributed sort of more, more or less evenly between the three parts of the of the developed world, and that creates it creates its issues challenges to the supply chain, and companies like Traxxas. What we do is help sort of grease these frictions and, and smooth them these things and enable the supply chains to move as efficiently as possible. And avoiding situations where you know materials arrived to earlier don't arrive at all, or there's all kinds of timing and sequencing issues. There's a lot of working capital involved we were just talking about the, about the CAPEX but there's, there's a lot of that a lot of that as well. And so, Traxxas and companies like Traxxas provide the liquidity to some extent to connect the various links in the, in the chain. Again, as this supply chain develops and seeks to define the best practices of anything on everything that's done there. A lot of the processes consume a lot of energy whether crushing, calcining, thermal purification, and so on. Using renewable energy sources to, to, to actually provide energy to these parts of the, of the process is important. And that's something that we see already in Scandinavia and on both sides of the Niagara Falls but as soon as we'll see more and more of that and perhaps in other areas of the world it's going to be more solar more busy but but that's very important as well. Yeah, last but not least some of these processes are complex, complex from, from, from a chemical perspective. If you take nickel for example you need to take, you need to sulfurize your nickel you take a nickel hydroxide or a nickel metal and then you turn it into a nickel sulfide but then when it goes into, into the castle that has to be hydrated again so it's the hydroxide and then you have a sulfur waste at, at that point which you need to recycle and whatever you can and dispose of what you can't in a safe way. And that's true about pretty much, pretty much all the others. So, once again, if you can either avoid some of these processes, make them more efficient or just make them more regional and localized. You can either do this materials or you do that for a for short a period of time and less kilometers. That's also very important. And that's it that's a wrap. Okay, thank you very much. Very nice presentation. We've got a lot of questions coming in. And, you know, I guess just just listening to the three presentations. We're clearly on the startup ramp up curve whatever you want to call it of a major energy transition and I guess what's really unusual about it. Anyway, is, is that it's a massive transition on the electricity supply side, but also on the, on the demand side on the end use and this shift to EVs and of course that the requirements for storage and large grid scale energy storage and micro scale energy storage and clearly those are the factors that are driving going to be driving these metals and minerals requirements. I'm kind of left wondering if there's still a massive disconnect in an understanding of the quantities of some of these metals and minerals that are going to be required and whether we've done enough or doing enough to quantify it. But I guess I guess I'll jump to a couple of the questions because we've got some really good ones. The first one I think is for Nadal and it's, it's on phosphorus and several people on on the chat have asked about phosphorus. Does it mean more phosphate mining is, is the more phosphorus required in the EU versus the US. Maybe Nadal could you, you jump in and Karen if you want to add. Sure, I'm happy to. So I think I'm looking at the question, you know, there's, I think there's often a, you know, an equivalence of importance with criticality or supply risk and I think there, that's what we've sort of tried to avoid at the USGS to say okay, all the commodities are important to somebody at some point, but is it critical really for us means is there a supply risk and and you know phosphate rocks obviously very important really can't live without it. For the United States it's not on the critical minerals list for the United States, unlike it is for Europe, for several reasons one is that the US is a major producer there at least 10 mines in the US that mine phosphate rock, and we are less than 10% import reliant on it. And there are many, many producers throughout the world, especially in, you know, in North Africa and West Asia. And so we see it as a less of a concern for the United States, not to say that it's not important it's obviously important. And I think another part of the question was, could you reuse or recycle it I think it's, you know, potentially, but I think at currently it's quite difficult. Mainly because it's lost during use right so and a lot of the environmental impacts that happens like you certification is because of that we're not really collecting it have to use. And so I think, you know, there are some things that you can do a good job recycling but economics and ultimately thermodynamics plays a role in whether you're going to recover and recycle some of the stuff. And so one of the issues specifically with lithium iron phosphate batteries is that going to increase demand for phosphate I would imagine that it will obviously increase it is it significant I don't know relative to the market of phosphate rock, you know it's about 220 million tons produced annually. It's quite a large market in comparison to some of these minor metals that we're talking about. Is it going to make a big dent it's not clear LFP is really just now used in China, mainly for buses, because of the safety concern, but also now as was mentioned, you know more in passenger vehicles but still in China, where it is a lower performing battery. So it's not clear to me it's something that perhaps should be studied but I don't have additional information on that. Thank you. Thank you, Nadal. Maybe I can, I can go to the next question for Karen if you have any other comments on phosphorus but the next question is really for you and it's, it's other new opportunities and critical minerals rare earths production in places like Greenland. Yes, I was very, very happy to see that question I've the last picture I showed was actually a picture from Greenland, not from a rare earth deposit from a palladium deposit and but I've worked on some of the rare earth deposits in Greenland in my past and and it's a great question because it sparks a couple of interesting things that we can bring into this discussion because really important thing to of course to understand about rare earth elements is that they're not actually rare. And so the abundance of rare earths mineralization is is enormous and and far, far, far greater than our need for the next many centuries, to be honest so it is actually a good. It's a good example of criticality because it has not nothing to do with geological availability at all. It is a very, very thin market it's about as abundant geologically as copper. We're using, you know, orders of magnitude less than we're using copper so it's a very small thin market. That is one of the things that makes it critical and then really importantly, the value chain again. It is not so much digging it out of the ground that's the problem here. It is actually processing the minerals into the metals that we need for our technologies. It is incredibly complex relative to a lot of other more sort of say pedestrian commodities. So it's very complicated and it actually turns out that almost all of the downstream. So taking the rock and converting it into something that we can put into our things. And that happens in China. And that's why it is so important that we focus. Well of course we need to have expertise in certain parts of the value chain but we really have to zoom out sometimes and make sure that we integrate the knowledge of the entire value chain, because the problem with with rare earths is much more related to the downstream than to the actual mining. And while Greenland could turn in to a rare earth mining nation, they probably would not have the capacity just share sort of lack of population and an infrastructure to be able to do any of the downstream processing so the current projects in Greenland actually have as part of their plan to ship almost all of it to China for downstream processing. So, so that's that's one reality. Another thing I want to just pick up up very, very briefly that also connects to this is when Eris was talking about how long times it takes to open a mine. For most minds actually it's even longer than than Eris was suggesting for many minds, it takes decades from you have a discovery until you can actually develop it you know maybe 1520 at the best and rare earths there are particularly slow in the upstart because of this very complex metallurgy that is unique from each different occurrence, you have to basically reinvent the whole sort of downstream processing so that is those were important facts about rare earths. Great, great answer. Karen, very nice. So, next question, perhaps, can pass this to Eris to give us some comments on. One of the challenges facing producers and on the supply side is is how to project prices for these different metals and minerals in the future and the challenge being, you know, if the demand isn't isn't firmly established, and there's insecurity of whether whether technology is going to go one way or another. How does that affect producers ability to plan forward and justify what may be very large lumpy capital investments to bring bring more supply to market. True, there is indeed what we call the the incentive price projection of of of taking new product of adding supply. But we we are at the point today where I think it's it's consensus is that you can, you can already rely even on the, even on the the lower end of the, you know, of the of the curve in terms of of projected adoption rates, the rates to justify adding quite a lot more supply and capacity, the risk that, you know, that that someone will will end up building a nickel mine that produces, ultimately, 2030 or 50,000 times of of of nickel per annum, and, and end up without without a response from the demand side at the moment seems seems rather low. It looks like, you know, we may not see the prices we saw in 2007 of 50 something thousand tons of, you know, the $50,000 per ton of nickel, you know, perhaps even ever again and, you know, some of the, you know, the spikes that we saw with with cobalt historically with copper and so on. But I think they're really really good and strong signals from the demand side that a lot of people are crossing the point of no return in terms of their commitment to investing in the downside and transitioning to a level where they will need these materials, current supply is not enough current recycling is not enough. There's a need for a lot of supply and we're still far from a point where all kinds of marginal projects need to decide if they're hopping on or not and they might end up, you know, missing the bus or being the guys that are in the, in the highest cost quartile of the cost curve. There's a lot of work to be done still in the first second cost curve quartiles to bring on board and online. Good projects that will, that will have customers. They will, they will be economical, they will make money for the shareholders and for the other stakeholders and really the message at the moment is that we have to move forward. Procars today they're only going to cause damage. Yeah, great, great response. The next question is really for Karen and maybe it's a very specific question but maybe you can broaden it to, to the general issue of the circular economy but the question was asked about these wind turbine blades, blades, which has been in the press lately a lot about the inability to recycle them and where they're being disposed of. And of course wind power is, is probably not going to be as much as solar in the US but it's certainly going to be a massive portion of the renewable energy component. Yeah, I think it's again an excellent question because it really sort of puts the finger on one of the, one of the problems with with this. I want to call it actually greenwashing when we just sort of put on a green circle and say, you know, we can recycle it and then everything is good because the whole sort of recycling thing is extremely complex for another good example to broaden it a little bit is that a lot of companies are using light weighting of cars and other airplanes trains these kinds of things because if you make transportation lighter, you save energy so this is really green right we all like it that's a great idea, but it actually turns out that most of the light waiting you can do to a vehicle will make it harder to recycle. Everything would actually be to be to be to build the whole thing out of steel, be really good at recycling steel, but then it's extremely heavy and has it gets really really poor mileage. And it's a little bit the same with the with the wind turbines it's like you know it's it's unfortunately the complexity such that once you do something that is green and one aspect in many times has some some other aspects to it that we need to solve and it's also a little bit back to this thing of you know if, if, for instance, we all think we should recycle these right we should get all the metals out of them. But what if it takes more energy to recycle gold out of this one than out of out of my rock, which is the right one to do and also if we do for instance extract gold out of this one, we leave behind the other 55 metals that are in there because then such more quantities that it would be basically available to take it out. So this thing of lack of recyclability is real challenge. And I think that that what will most likely have to happen and I think companies already really struggling to do is actually to try to start getting better at designing for recyclability, knowing that sometimes that will affect how well suited a material actually is for what it's doing again back to sort of electronics you know allies are just optimized for that performance that we need to have. Maybe it's time that we sort of say well you know we are willing to be a little bit flexible on the performance side if, on the other hand, we can actually recycle it so I think that will see a lot of work going into development of new blades new types of blades for winter mines because that is going to have to be solved. Great. Yeah, really good. And we've got a lot of questions coming in there is no way we're going to get to all of these in the time available but I'm going to move I'm going to move right along to a question for Nadal. And thank you everybody for your questions. These are great questions coming in. The question you discussed executive order is in some of these things that have been made in the US recently. And the question is, you know, that's fine, but what's being done with those how is this helping to shape the response within the industry and in the country in general. Sure, great question so there is a federal strategy out there. I was developed by the subcommittee of critical minerals and released by Department of Commerce. It has six calls to action that range from everything from, you know, doing research and to, you know, having better mapping of the United States to understand where these resources might be to, you know, having a more blind workforce, you know, with with actions for both NSF National Science Foundation, as well as Department of Education. It's a wide ranging federal strategy and you know it's just being implemented and I think just as the trend for the we've seen where mineral commodity production has shifted overseas has taken decades you know we're not going to be able to solve this problem within a year or two right it's going to take us a concerted effort over many, many years to be able to really turn things around so I think you know I think the criticism is there is like well what have you really done, but I think you know it's it, you know, we're moving in the right direction. Is it fast enough could it be faster, possibly, but these things do take quite a lot of effort, a lot of time. Yeah, great, great comment. I think we've got a question from committee member Jim. Did you have a question. I do. What I you know there's fascinating conversation and presentations today. Let me, I think okay there I am on. What I was wondering and would love to get some feedback from from the panelists on when you look at other energy markets oil natural gas coal. We have a phenomenal robust system of tracking supply demand and future outlooks with the U.S. Energy Agency that does it for for the OECD in the world, and I and the Energy Energy Information Administration, which is the U.S. agency that does the U.S. and the world that great detail. It just strikes me that that that are we moving to area where we really ought to have have either within existing or create new statistical agencies in the U.S. and the world that need that could be dedicated to to track the supply demand and outlooks for for for these minerals because and and it's it's nothing against like there's still a huge role for for consultancies and and others that track these things. But but the difference with things like the IA is the ability within the government context to do surveys of of all the supply and demand entities out there, and then and then combine all that data. So, so just are we at a point where we really ought to look at this in a much larger fashion and that might go to the question on on communicating the the the important aspects of this, this more broadly. I can make me jump in first. Yeah. I mean, that's a central mission of our of our center at the National Minerals Information Center at USGS. We've been doing it for over 100 years as part of the organic act and and and really the forward looking pieces is now in in legislation with the energy act of 2020. We track it we track 90 plus mineral commodities over you know 100 countries. It is difficult though because a lot of these commodities are very small markets right and a lot of them are opaque markets, where the information is not readily available it's not necessarily shared it's. A lot of times there's no market prices they're not traded on like LME. And so there's very little information about what is going on with these commodities. And a lot of the problem that we have is that, while we do send out 10s of 1000s of surveys. It's all on a voluntary basis. So companies, domestic and international choose or choose not to respond to our surveys to collect this information. And the biggest part of the problem I think the bigger part is, is that they're just small niche markets that a lot of the industry players are, you know, it's part of their competitive advantage and sharing that information is just not something that they're going to do. Yeah, I know. Yeah, go ahead. Follow up a few. Yeah, I'd like to come in as well as we so actually this thing about the mineral statistic a BGS also does this and we do it with a slightly different methodology. And I want to know that we actually sort of arrive at compatible answers I'd say or line answers with USGS and also of course communicate about it. Because it's always reassuring when two slightly different methodologies arrive at at similar answers but I also think I've actually was an interesting question today because earlier today and for the rest of the week I am participating in the in the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, which includes North and South America by the way, resource management week 2021. And this is actually an attempt to to coordinate how we deal with resource management on a global level. And one of the things that this program sets out to this expert group sets out to do is to introduce a UN framework classification program for mineral resources and this is actually work for energy resources, where we measure them the same way and we talk about in the same way in a global scale. And there is now this huge initiative coordinated by the UN to try to come up with a framework classification that works for minerals. It is much more sort of, you know, heterogeneous oil and gas there's a limit to how variable that actually is going to be for you, but minerals extremely variable and they're very many different kinds. So it's a little bit more complex, but it is actually working in progress and it's work that's leaning on some of that information and knowledge that's being collected by, for example USGS and also bgs. You want to go ahead. I was just, yeah, I fully acknowledge the complexity. I'm and and the doll what I what just like what I'm thinking is that is actually to help raise your profile and what you're doing so that you have a little bit. So today, when they do surveys that they have some teeth on that on the expectation of people replying to them, and also on the keeping keeping the data, the ability to keep all that data confidential and aggregated. So, and recognizing that with thin markets it's tough there isn't sometimes enough to aggregate for that so I get all that. I would also be interesting in air as his thoughts on that because he comes from it from come kind of that that you know consulting kind of tracking information point of view. Yeah, we as a global commodity house we can. Yeah, we can. We also have obviously our information sources and our ability to partially of course track some of these materials and trends and have our own projections on on supply and demand at least at least, you know, in the very short term in the very long term. And one thing that, you know, it's pretty parent is something that I was saying with some of these products, these are not really commodity. And some of them that are commoditized and even traded in, you know, in a market in a terminal market as we call it like the LME are not very liquid because they're just too small and too concentrated. So this adds to the complexity of, you know, of accumulating data and statistics. And, you know, there's a whole debate about what exactly is battery grade in pretty much all of these materials from from the field from the people that actually need to take something and convert it into whatever is the next. Link in a chain to a level where last year there were there was even some discussion in the in the lithium space and when it did the other materials the guys that were buying it to to make cathode and and and the guys were saying to the intermediates those sitting between the between them in the mind. You know what don't give me battery grade because it's not really battery grade I still need to clean it, even if it's theoretically meets the spec or do some work on the sizing and so on. I will short a little bit before that give me clean enough industrial grade or technical grade, as long as that there are no, you know, hazardous impurities and everything is sort of under control. We will actually do the final refining before and tweaking before we introduce it into our electrodes. Part of it might be a bit of an IP issue because then they can, you know, they can keep it more as a secret sauce. Part of it had to do I think with pricing and with the fact that many times you ended up with material that was rejected because it wasn't meeting the spec. They started arguing about who has to pay the cost of doing the final, the final cleanup and so on. It also reflects on the fact that it's in, you know, it's an industry still, if not it's in its real infancy, still it's, you know, it's a toddler stage, and, you know, and there's a lot will be learned along the way as it as it improves and expands and and the, you know, the back and forth between between the markets and the various links in the supply chain will will ultimately lead to some kind of a direction. So, you know, just scrolling back for a brief second to the to the first question from a materials perspective. No material wants to cost so much that everyone would make a huge effort to engineer it out of the supply chain. So, from a perspective, you know, you might think that, you know, people would who who control Cobalt would want it to be $150,000 a ton but that's not exactly the case because then the efforts to make a batteries without Cobalt or with us Cobalt will increase and we saw that to Nico, just before the global financial crisis when it wasn't reached 50,000 the stainless steel guys invented the 400 series without nickel. You want to make enough money but too much money and everyone should, you know, should fairly share the pie somehow and everyone grows together otherwise it's not sustainable and all stakeholders all stakeholders need to enjoy, and it's sort of a global crisis and I guess where everyone does his role gradually over the next few decades and hopefully we'll get there or children will get there. Thank you. You great. That's a great wrap up areas. Really appreciate that good concluding remarks, maybe just give Karen and Nadal maybe 30 seconds each for some concluding remarks and then we're at a time limit. Karen, would you like to that took me by surprise I didn't expect that so now I get to talk again. 30 seconds. Yes 30 seconds I just want to say again the I think the really important thing is, is again to understand the complexity and not have it be a value game it's almost a little bit as if they're people that are against mining and and and the ones that are for mining a sort of bad people who want to hurt the environment we need to make the discussion much much more complex than that we need to take the discussion to very very broad audience the general public the decision makers. And that is probably best done through really a lot of education and a lot of, of sort of targeted conversations about the complexity and acknowledging that again. Yes, we've won a wind turbine we're going to have a problem with the blade. Yes, if we want to do this green thing, we're going to get a problem with that and let's, instead of sort of pointing fingers and being good and bad. Let's talk about solutions. Great. You know I completely agree with this is absolutely correct point. I think, maybe stepping back a little bit. This is one of the biggest transitions that's going to happen with this energy transition as you mentioned john both from the supply side for electricity, but also on the supply side, the use side, and non feel manner commodities are going to play a key role in that. And I think the big question is, you know, how are we going to be able to meet that demand. And is is the US and other developed countries, going to have a significant role or are they going to be more of the users of the supply chains that are going to probably last for many, many decades and really transform transform the world. And there, there are I think targeted things that can be done to alleviate some of these risks that can, and help fulfill some of that demand and I think it, there's no single silver bullet, you'll have to look at recycling. You'll have to look at new developments you'll have to look at alternative materials. But I think the key question is, you know, which are these strategies or tactics is going to be most effective for which commodity, and that I think needs to be great. Well, that's excellent. I'd like to say thank you to our three speakers. There is Nadal and current, you did an excellent job. And it was great discussion we could have done with another hour, at least, and there are a lot of questions I'm sorry we did not get to. There are a few of those that I think are going to be addressed in the next two webinars. Several in particular that I see related to public perceptions and those sorts of things and regulatory environmental climate so thank you to the nascent staff and and the rest of the committee. And we'll look forward to seeing everybody hopefully on on May 17 for the second webinar. Hopefully all of you can make it. Thank you all for your participation. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.