Energy 101: We Ask The Dumb Questions So You Don't Have To

0:00 Welcome back to Energy 101. Today we have Robert Miles from Momentum, and I'm going to kind of cut into a little intro we had before the show here while recording, just getting a little behind the

0:11 scenes and a story building of what he's done. Cause this guy has done everything and been everywhere. It kind of my AI experience was a little early to the hype, but it was before AI really called

0:24 on it. I was using it in the oil and gas industry. Um, and it was a derivative It came from another company, which by the way, always my best stuff comes from something else that almost works,

0:34 but not quite. So I was doing this big database analysis for reserves, you know, doing reserve analysis and stuff for, you know, medium size to large size oil and gas companies using satellite

0:47 data. So that was kind of our niche using satellites to, you know, satellites were kind of getting more and more interesting. They could identify minerals. They could identify you, know,

0:56 hydrocarbons, leaking out, et cetera. we were able to combine all that in an intelligent way. It's actually using the SMU professor at the time. And then we got the idea of,

1:10 we're actually trying to sell, hey, we can find oil pretty well, we can identify it. And so we were going to investors going,

1:18 this really works, 'cause we made a couple of identifications, a couple of predictions, they turned out to be right. So let's cash in on what, you know, it's ridiculous And so, you know, we

1:29 met with oil and gas guys, they liked it, but they were so cautious, you know, it's always a multi-layer approval. you And know, when you're getting,, you know, you're purchasing land and

1:39 stuff, sometimes the clock's ticking, you gotta kind of move fast. And so I just got to a point where I was just frustrated. So I had a real good relationship with a bank and just took out a loan,

1:51 little gutsy, but, you know, I was pretty confident, you know, is working. And, you know, we literally tripled our money in less than 12 months. That's amazing. Yeah, and then it just kept

2:05 going. And it was a cash cow. It wasn't like, you know, we had this asset. You literally would buy something. We'd buy something and literally by the time we were ready to close on it, we'd

2:17 already, they'd already announced it, they'd already gone up in value. We'd already locked it in. You know, we'd have like 60 days pay for it and we'd turn around and sell it before 60 days were

2:27 up That's so cool. Yeah, this is nice. This is really where it works out. And it was using AI to just something simple, something stupid, just predicting where operators were gonna go next and

2:39 we used an algorithm, a number of algorithms, you know, we're looking at their past behavior. You know, they can always change direction and then you're gotta go. How long ago was that?

2:49 I think it started in 2016. Okay and kind of wrapped things around 2019. That's when I started to get more into the recycling. I kind of wanted to do something different. So it was, it was a

3:03 really, like I said, real just spit out cash. No one else in the land business. You know, you can imagine land guys aren't exactly the high tech type.

3:16 You know, it's just a predictive model that worked better than guessing. And we also found in the industry, there's all sorts of

3:27 pricing errors people would make. Like they'd go, you know, they'd go like, oh, well, the price of land over in this county or over in this township is X, but over here it's Y. And you're

3:36 looking at the reserves and you're looking at how the formation pans out. You're like, it doesn't stop at the township. It just kind of spills way over here, you know? And you know, and then you,

3:48 you know, you map it and you're like, yeah, I'll pay little for getting your property, you know? And yeah, it's just, it's just. one of those opportunities where it doesn't sound all that

4:02 challenging and it wasn't, but it's like, if everyone's using, if everybody's using, you know, glue and you discover nails, you know, you can build something better and that's what happened.

4:15 Everyone was just kind of, you know, putting their finger on the goin', yeah, this makes sense. You know, and we're like, or just literally just buying a whole bunch of stuff and hoping, you

4:27 know, using it a portfolio effect, hoping it works out. Yeah. And we're like, we're really targeted to say, okay, we're gonna buy these five and that one, this one, it just felt like cheating,

4:38 actually.

4:41 Yeah, I feel like when it's too easy. Yeah, but you know what, you gotta enjoy it too. It's really easy, it doesn't always last. Yeah. Yeah, so. So I think we go down a topic that is huge

4:52 right now and we got the perfect guy who knows a lot about it. This guy knows everything and he knows about this too. And that is everything from rare earth minerals to recycling batteries,

5:04 recycling metals, all that. I don't know what specifically, what niche we can go into, but I'm excited to hear about this 'cause we have not even touched near this subject today. Yeah, I feel

5:15 like I know nothing. So I'm excited to ask all the questions. Yeah, I mean, let's just start with a generalization. What is your experience with basically what I just said, maybe specifically

5:25 what momentum does. Sure. And let's break down this industry. Sure, so broadly what momentum focuses on is critical minerals. Critical minerals in the US. kind of falls into three broad

5:38 categories. It's basically energy related. It's also military related for safety, security. And then it's kind of what I'll call critical industries like semiconductors, things like that you need

5:53 for AI and everything else. On top of that, what also makes them critical is a what I'll call fragility in the supply chain, meaning, for example, it's all concentrated in China, for example,

6:06 China has a huge concentration in many of these critical minerals. So just the fact that they can control the supply chain and turn it on and off at any time makes it critical and important. So

6:19 again, momentum focuses on a broad range of those type of minerals, but to really kind of dive in a little bit more, which is also most important to the US. government and consumers is the battery

6:33 side, specifically lithium-ion batteries, which is in all the electric vehicles. It's gonna be in all the robots. They're gonna have tons of batteries. And those are coming, not replacing us,

6:46 but other people,

6:48 you know, coming down the pike and also rare earth elements, which are basically in all your magnets. Okay, and that's again, also in electric vehicles. It's a big component in the military. A

7:00 lot of, for example, our submarines, our aircraft, particularly the higher tech ones, use a lot of magnets, which use very earth elements. So governments really woke up to this. And I think a

7:15 lot of people are getting an education too, just being exposed to the news that US specifically is vulnerable to people turning off the spigot for a lot of these rare earths. So that's kind of how

7:30 you focus in the industry. So that's kind of the broad brush of rare earths. And the other way to think about it is kind of the last thing I talked about was fragility of the supply chain. So what

7:42 is in a real simple way, what does the supply chain look like? Well, usually it's mining, okay? And it turns out the countries that don't care about environment much at all. AKA China, but

7:57 there's others all around the world, places in Africa, they do a lot of the mining and a lot of the dirty mining and it gives them lower costs. But there's so much minerals in different places that

8:10 are rich in different things that it's hard to corner the market in mining. So while China has a lot of the mining and a lot of industry, it's usually no more than like 70 of the mining for any

8:22 given mineral because it's just, you can't corner the whole world, right? It's impossible. Particularly Australia has a lot going on. The other key, and two other key parts is what I call the

8:33 refinering part, refinering,

8:36 and then you make the product, actually make the metal. So where momentum focuses on is the refining. So you get the mining, you concentrate it, and then you refine it into its individual metals

8:51 And that's where China really dominates. Okay, and I mean, they have like 90 of the world's refining capacity in, let's say,

9:05 rare earth elements. I mean, just dominates, and particularly heavy rare earth elements. And again, heavy rare earth elements allow you to use, for example, magnets when the temperature gets

9:17 high in the industry. So cars, you have magnets for the brakes, et cetera But it gets hot, you know, in aircraft and, you know, in subs and all these applications and even in robots, you can

9:31 imagine, you know, the temperature's gonna rise. And so you need these heavier rare earths and that's where China really, really dominates. And that actually puts the screws to, you know, auto

9:45 manufacturers in the US, military around the world,

9:50 you know, to limit their ability to make stuff. And it's kind of scary. But you know, like I said, a lot, at least we woke up, right? And you know, at least, at least the, the world, not

10:07 just the US, but the world even Europe and other places are really trying to diversify their supply chain, you know, and kind of D Chinese it Yeah. That is a word. It is now. I'll trade market,

10:24 you know, kind of the whole industry. So, and yeah, wanted to let you give you a chance to jump

10:31 in. Yeah. You're the refining part. Is your facility here in Houston? It is not in Houston. It's in Dallas. Oh, cool. But we're building. Oh, you're from Dallas.

10:41 Yes. Oh. Is that where you're from? No. Okay. Well, it's close You know, you know, it's the Southwest Airline, you know, triangle. Yeah. It's quite part of the triangle. So, you know, I

10:53 can get anywhere. an hour. Yes. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. So we have a, what I call demonstration plan. Okay. In Carrollton, Texas, you know, just outside the airport. And that does

11:07 batteries. And we're also building a parallel line, which should be going live in a month or so to do rarers. So you don't currently do rarers, you're about to start Well, we've done what I'll

11:21 call pilot plant size. This is going to be kind of our largest scale. Oh, cool. Yeah. So we're talking to and working with almost every player. I don't want to say in the world we're not working

11:35 with the Chinese type, but we're working with almost every certainly every North American player, as well as European player, to not just refine rare earth, but specifically the interest is to

11:47 take out the heavies from the lights. And that's where China dominates the one. So we have one big mind. the last, gosh, 20 years, 30 years in the US that's a mountain pass, a mountain pass

12:02 mine, which is really light, rare earth, it's like Nevada. Yeah, it's Nevada. Actually, I think it's over on the California side, it's Nevada, California. It's that Tahoe, Nevada,

12:13 California. Yeah, yeah, you got the right area. Yeah. And the company that owns it and works at his MP materials. Again, great company. We're working with them. But, you know, it's a

12:25 basically a light, rare earth mine. So then that's the only one in the US. Yeah. Okay. And then Elon went up there, right? Is that, did he officially get that role in Tesla, like doing her

12:37 own lithium mining? Well, so kind of old news. No, no, it's because so Tesla kind of actually got a lot of that stuff from both Korea, LG, and

12:49 from China. So they were, you know, they still dominate the processing part. Panasonic.

12:57 LG, those guys kind of make more of the batteries. So there's all sorts of, like I said, I was breaking down very simply on the supply chain. You got mining, you got refining, then you got the

13:07 product. The product has like four or five steps on it, but you know, you're just building it up bigger and bigger for like cars, what you need. So that's one of the issues that Elon has to

13:18 address is as you make these batteries for cars, where you're going to get the materials, and for example, lithium is one of those metals. It's very, very light that will probably end up having a

13:37 shortage of literally next year. So this year, there's actually a slight oversupply. It's because demand was a little bit under what people thought, and there's a little bit more mining going on,

13:48 but next year, there's almost definitely going to be a shortage and then in the shortage gap opens, pretty wide.

13:55 How do you know that? Like how do you know, how can you forecast

13:60 lithium? Well, where's my crystal ball? Yeah, I don't know how to ask that question, but like how can you forecast that, like you have oversupply this year, next year, undersupply? Yeah, so

14:10 what you do is not to get too businessy, you make supply demand curves, and you project them out over time, and you look at how much time it takes to bring a supply type online So, you know,

14:25 there's different sources for lithium, you have brine, which actually is what they use in South America, that's kind of the big. And if you see these big pools sitting around, they're brine pools

14:36 with lithium in them, and they can take up to two years to a constant, to basically evaporate. You're just sitting there waiting for the thing. So you have to wait. And if it rains, you're like

14:44 back to square zero. You have to wait for it to evaporate, to get the lithium? Yes. That's the only way? Well, that's the cost-effective way. I mean, you could boil it, but you're talking

14:56 huge. Right. It's like boiling in a lake. Yeah, I'll share an image in the edit now of it. But like, that's even in Nevada, you'll see it. You'll see like, and it's like almost pretty. It's

15:07 like pink and green and blue. Yeah, yeah, cool colors, you know. And it's environmentally friendly, you know? But it takes years to do it. So, you know, it's not exactly, you can't turn it

15:19 on a dime. Now there's what's called hard rock I'm going to mispronounce the name of it. It's like spongy gym or something like that. That's what's the rocks called. That has lithium in it, but

15:31 you got to crush it. You got

15:36 to dissolve it. It takes a lot of energy to leach out the unwanted parts of the lithium, you know, what's holding the lithium inside. It's matrix or inside the metal. So, again, those things

15:49 are not, and that's less environmentally friendly unless carbon footprint friendly.

15:55 So, and people are trying to come up with other ways. If you ever heard the word DLE, direct lithium extraction, that's kind of the new, I'll use the word new technology that's out there. A lot

16:07 of startups are trying to do it, where you use membranes to kind of help you separate. And actually we're doing some work in that. What does that mean in the water and the brain? Yeah, so what

16:17 happens is, yeah, exactly. Instead of,

16:22 instead of just leaving in a pool for two years, like a giant puddle, you can accelerate the process a lot by putting it through membranes that select out certain metals and leave others in. And

16:34 we've done a lot of testing on that. And we're actually working with a couple of DLE companies to help them accelerate. 'Cause we use membranes for everything in a unique way. So where are you

16:45 getting all your lithium right now? Like, 'cause you're refining it, right? So you have to get, like, it's supplied to you Yeah, so we're getting on. From China. You just did it. Korea,

16:58 yeah, glassware, what I eat at home, China.

17:02 I'm joking.

17:05 So we actually get it from recycled batteries. Recycled batteries are manufactured, manufacturing waste or making batteries. So again, batteries come, they're basically

17:19 made with lithium, cobalt, nickel, and manganese Those are the four main components. I could go into a whole lot more detail on batteries, but I'll leave it kind of somewhat simple. So when we

17:31 process

17:34 basically a ground-up battery, ground-up battery in the industry is called black mass. And surprise, surprise, what color is it? Black.

17:44 And it has mass. So it's black mass.

17:48 So we basically process that, We dissolve it and we take out all the other unwanted metals and then we extract the cobalt, which is worth a decent amount of money. We take out the nickel, which is

18:00 worth a bunch, and then we take out the lithium.

18:04 In the lithium, we take out it's highly, highly pure, it's battery grade. You get it

18:10 as a byproduct of the whole extraction process. That's where we get the lithium right now, but we're also working with other companies to connect more into the mining side Got it. Yeah, so that's

18:22 actually how our technology is evolving. Again, it was pretty much focused purely on recycling and the life or manufacturing waste or something like that, and that went for rare Earth as well. But

18:34 now we're found out as we get better and better at it, we can help accelerate bringing mines online, for example. Mines can take somewhere between 10, let's say, 7 to 15 years on average about 10

18:49 to come on the lines.

18:51 Well, you got to qualify the mine. So permitting can take years, by the way. So there's still places, like, is this in the US? It's almost, so the only places you can do it really fast are the

19:02 places that really don't care about the environment and can get their capital super cheap. So they're willing to just blah.

19:13 So China has several big mines. The US. actually has a very big, I mean, mountain passes actually a pretty big, I mean, globally, rare earth mine So we're kind of lucky to have that. And it's

19:23 like our least populated part of the country. Like literally nothing's there, no one's there, right? Yeah. So there's no like nimbyism. It's just kind of like the Wild West. I mean, we're in

19:34 the Wild West when it comes to - Yeah, and if you look at the permitting process, it is kind of like the Wild West. I mean, that's why the companies locate there instead of California, is 'cause

19:43 California is like, they have all these, you gotta look at every hurt around the planet to make sure they're not impacted.

19:52 You go in the middle of the Nevada desert and, of course, there's no animals there, or at least a couple of lizards, so, you know, the number is really small, and what you have to worry about.

20:03 Yeah, so, yeah, so anyhow, the mining part takes a long time, not just, not just the permitting, but bringing it up to speed. So, when you mine, just get a little bit more in the details,

20:17 you're not just moving dirt around Obviously, you grab the dirt, but you got to at least remove some of the, you know, crappy stuff. You know, so that's where you have to end up leaching it.

20:30 That's where you end up sometimes having to cook it a little bit roasted. And you do that to take out some of the stuff you don't want, like oxides. So, like mountain pass, for example, they

20:41 have a lot of cerium Well, you've got to roast it, you've got to leach it out. Once you do that, now you've got a much more valuable concentrate, where now you can do something. You know, every

20:53 mind's like that. So you gotta kind of spend years tweaking the process, making sure it works. The problem is you end up with a process. It's really only good for that mind, for the most part.

21:05 They're all tweaked and if the ore changes too much, then you gotta change the process significantly. And that's actually where we come in. So this is one of the reasons one of the ways we can help

21:17 minds is we have a whole lot more flexibility So they'll design it for, excuse me, for really tight criteria, like within 1, or 2 of this metal and that metal and everything else. And again, as

21:34 long as everything's kind of homogeneous in the mind, it all works great, but it's never homogeneous. So, at least given enough time and it's not. Yeah. So we actually make a great bolt-on where

21:50 they can take what I call their main processing and do kind of their down the middle of the fairway or, and when they get things that are out of spec, that's what we do. We handle the out of spec

22:02 stuff. And over time, the out of spec stuff gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

22:09 And that actually helps the economics of the mine, helps to get online faster.

22:16 Yeah, and kind of in this market, in this geopolitical environment, speeds import. I'm pretty sure Trump just signed a deal from his meeting, which is you paying in China to give us access to

22:29 rare earths for a year. So the bet is how far can we get in a year? So now they have a whole lot less leverage. So now you're seeing all these deals from the US government, which usually the

22:42 government doesn't get involved in any deals, right? Like, you know, huge investment in Australia, which by the way, does have a lot of heavy rare earth mining. really nice. You know, they

22:53 gave MP materials that gave, gave them a loan, 400 million, you know, to help ramp up their plant from like 1000 to 10, 000 tons. They just, US government, I'm not sure if it's a DOE or DOD,

23:11 gave a another big loan to Vulcan, about 14 billion So the US government has really put money out there to make this happen, because they realize the clock's a ticking, you know, and they may

23:26 avoid a bullet right now, but a year from now, they got across the same Rubicon again, you know, with the same country, but they better be in a better position, you know, so it's kind of a foot

23:39 race right now. It's kind of geopolitically, you know, intriguing. Yeah, it turns out well. Yeah. Yeah, you can't talk about the batteries and the rare minerals without talking about China,

23:54 talking about Africa and just like the, you know, they kind of have a choke hold on everyone because they literally have the minds, but because they have the unethical practices that we would never

24:07 do here, you know, in a million years. Yeah. And so you got to bring that stuff up. Yeah. I mean, it's like the DRC you're talking about The Congo, yeah. The Congo, you know, they have a,

24:20 I think they mind like 70 of the cobalt. Well, that was a big issue just a couple of years ago because, you know, they're pretty much at war constantly, you know, so you got the rebels against

24:32 the government and they're fighting back and forth and, you know, huge amounts of money involved in plus world supply, right?

24:41 Well, as it turns out, the whole industry, and this is something that's also interesting in batteries, is materials. change. So there used to be, gosh, it's like three or four years ago, the

24:57 cobalt content in a battery used to be like 10, 10, 12, 15. It's quite a lot. Same amount for nickel. Now, the ratios have changed. Now, they have what they call an

25:11 MC811, which means nickel is a ratio of eight to one to cobalt. So now you got like, you know, 20, you know, let's say 27, 28, nickel, and you got like 3 cobalt, sometimes two. So when we

25:29 process stuff, we see 2 cobalt, 1 cobalt. What that means is cobalt supply is a lot less riskier than it used to be. It's all because the industry moved away from it, both from a supply risk

25:44 standpoint, but also cobalt was the most expensive middle mineral by far. It's like twice as much expensive as Nick.

25:54 I was about to ask if it was intentional because of the practices. They're like future-proofing the industry. It's like, if cobalt's hard now, imagine in 10 years, 20 years. Oh yeah, it was

26:04 their forecast on cobalt where it'd be. Let's not get used to this shit. Well, everyone's like, this is not gonna go, this is not gonna end well. You know, we're gonna end up, you know, we're

26:14 gonna end up with a big cobalt shortage and the batteries are gonna be double the price they are and no one's gonna buy them, it's gonna hurt Do we eventually run out of minerals, like rare earth

26:25 minerals? So

26:28 peak minerals, yeah, peak oil, peak rare earths. Think about rare earths, they're not all that rare. I know they sound, oh, we don't have many. It turns out they're just hard to get out and

26:42 extract. So

26:46 I would say we're not gonna run out Okay, 'cause again, there's mines in there, y'all. Australia has a bunch of rarers and, you know, they only live on like, I think 05 of their landmass. It's

26:59 like three cities and then nothing. Russia does as well, even though Russia doesn't do a lot of mining, I

27:09 mean, China as well, but a lot of the mining occurs in Africa, wide open space. So a lot of places to open up mines that have some viable concentrations.

27:22 But a lot of it isn't very economic, right? So if you only have, if you have like one or two percent or less, it's not really, you know, the mineral you're trying to go for, it's really not

27:34 worth directly mining for that. Now, a lot of mines you have byproducts, you know, where you'll mine for nickel and then you'll get some rarers coming out at the tail end. You say, hey, let's

27:45 use that for something. So that's one thing.

27:50 we're trying to get into or trying to push more is the recycling part. 'Cause you wanna keep opening up

27:55 dirty mines, you wanna keep worrying about the environment. And up until now, for example, batteries is like, only a couple percent ever got recycled. I mean, there are places in the US

28:08 actually, in Texas, where there's warehouses full of just used electric vehicle batteries that no one knows what to do with. And you can recycle them. Yep. Send them to you Well, yeah, I mean,

28:22 we, I mean, we want somebody to grind them up first, even though we could do that through a third party. Okay. At my point is, yeah, we could do that. But I'm just saying is there's kind of a

28:33 whole legacy of old batteries that are just sitting around. And not just batteries for cars. I mean, batteries for cell phones. You know, batteries, we're actually working with Apple,

28:45 to recycle the batteries in their phones. You know, and they're working with another company, which I already mentioned. It actually, it's public with MP materials, send a500 million deal to

28:57 recycle the magnets. Wow. You know? So, Apple's trying to really close that loop.

29:04 And to me, that's the responsible thing to do. And it's also, by the way, the best economic. Because, you know, again, opening a mine takes a huge amount of capital, takes a huge amount of

29:17 time, you know, again, 10 years And the other thing that, by the way, comes into play is everyone kind of wants to have their own security for supply. You know, no one want to have, I mean,

29:28 once you look at what China can demand and how they throw their weight around on, not just batteries, but rare earths and everything else, everybody's like, hmm, maybe we should have some

29:38 critical material security for our country. So the US is obviously woken up on that. Europe has as well. I mean, Europe wants to have their own recycling units inside. Right, I mean, they're

29:51 not gonna mine and. No, I mean, yeah. I mean, yeah. Mine in Paris. Europe's always shooting ourselves in a foot when it comes to their energy sources and a lot of people in our community love

30:01 to bring that up. But yeah, I mean, they can rely strictly on recycling Europe. So the short answer is no, of course.

30:10 But they can mitigate some of it. And I mean, the other way to think about it is if you don't recycle it, you got to landfill it. You know, and you either got to put in your backyard or you're

30:22 shipping it over to Asia for them to do something. When you don't want to keep, 'cause they'll actually recycle it over there. So you don't want to send something valuable overseas, but you also

30:36 don't want to bury something toxic in your back. Right. Flammable. Oh my gosh. So yeah, I don't know if you've ever taken a battery, a lithium ion battery and kind of.

30:46 Oh, I've seen lots of videos you like pour water on it and like blows up We all know what happens with the old Samsung galaxy that one line where they were blowing up in people's bags and airplanes

30:57 and stuff Oh my gosh. Yeah, I mean things on planes. I mean, I literally just did test one took one took a little packet And just broke it though the lithium contents crazy and I couldn't hang on

31:07 to it. It was so hot It would burn you. I mean it would burn you seriously. It's insanely reactive and Get a little air. Yeah in the lithium and I mean, yeah, it's dangerous and you know Yeah,

31:22 I didn't have a thermometer or you know a thermal gun with me or anything But it was too hot to touch at all. I mean, I don't mean I mean like a second like touching a stove So really dangerous and

31:36 so you know, so you got lithium which is really dangerous And then you got the other stuff which is toxic. You don't want to get cobalt leaking out in your water or anything like that. So we're

31:47 even nickel for that matter. Yeah. I've heard that's why like the aluminum industry is still kind of, you know, hanging in there because it's not so reactive and the aluminum batteries can be

32:01 technically used in cars and larger scale, maybe military and stuff like that. We think of them at a consumer level as like the cheaper AA batteries who put in remotes and stuff. But we just had

32:13 Jason and Nada just had someone in their podcast who he has a whole industry just off of aluminum kind of piggybacking on what the big boys are doing. Yeah, aluminum actually is part of all the UV

32:25 batteries. I think it's part of the, so you have two strips. You have copper and aluminum kind of as an old cathode strips, exactly, the strips to carry the electricity. So everything we see,

32:37 we got aluminum in. We don't recover it in high purity because we're recovering so many other things that are worth it. way more. But we, it's part of our byproduct. And we actually sell that.

32:51 So we actually recycle the aluminum back in the industry as well. Same thing with the copper. So they're valuable, but they're not that valuable. So, but we make sure we don't get rid of it and

33:02 recycle it back to whoever wants to buy it. And again, kind of keep a closed loop, but that closed loop is really, it's called a circular economy. If you want to get the buzzword where, you know,

33:13 you buy it, you use it, you don't, you know, you don't throw it away. You basically recycle it, you grind it up, and then you make a new battery or a new magnet out of it or whatever, and it

33:26 just kind of goes in the lifecycle. Yeah, exactly. So it's important. That's where kind of the whole world is shifting and start to, excuse me, start to wake up about, was trying to keep as

33:38 much things circular and also circular on a country level, because no one wants to be held hostage. You know, hey, we ran out of this, you know, and I think you even saw in the news Norway, you

33:51 know, on semiconductors, you know, Norway actually took over a company that was Chinese because it was critical to their country's manufacturing. You know, it was more as I was a semiconductor

34:04 company, but it just tells you that it's going to happen It was critical,

34:12 countries are just going to take it over for national security reasons. You can't really blame them. I mean, I'm kind of a capitalist, you know, through and through, but, you know, you got to

34:24 make sure your grandma's safe, where your kids are safe. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I'm getting like this whole like big picture moment where, you know, we kind of like we invented like

34:36 electricity and like cars around the same time. And the petroleum hydrocarbons are is what fueled that till to stay basically. And now we have the same thing happening with EV cars and high

34:50 performance computing. You keep saying semi-conductor. So I'm basically saying that. So, you know, 100 years later, we're doing good with the hydrocarbons and stuff. So is this just a repeat

35:03 scenario, you think? And like in 100 years, it's all gonna work out. Or is it a little bit different if you zoom out, right? 'Cause yeah. Yeah, you're asking a real futuristic point Still

35:15 boggling in. Yeah, so there are critical, so industries go through, we went through the industrial revolution, manufacturing, and in the US, manufacturing was like, well, we can't do it

35:27 cheaper than

35:30 the guy down the street or the guy across the ocean or whatever. We did have a few decades of LA being smog ridden and a few hiccups, but - And I lived there, I was actually in the late '90s, late

35:43 80s, early 90s where you could see you on a bad day, you couldn't see the mountains. I actually lived near the mountains. So I was like, this is not good. So industries go through cycles, right?

35:58 And you see that, you know, if you're an oil and gas, heck, you've probably seen a dozen cycles, you know, and peak oil predicted probably five or six times, you know, in my lifetime

36:11 You know, now for semiconductors and certain things, what you got to be semiconductors where there's always substitutions that are coming up, right? So for example, you know, you got AI. Well,

36:26 AI with, you know, high density chips coming up from some of these key semiconductor players. Well, you know, quantum computing may end up eating into that market I was waiting for that. I was

36:40 baiting him.

36:43 That book

36:45 just real me in.

36:48 So there's substitutes.

36:51 Something I didn't mention, for example, graphite. Graphite's also supposed to

36:57 have a shortage of graphite. But one of the things that's mitigating that is now Silicon's being sub-students place a graphite. So all of a sudden while graphite was kind of a big issue, at least

37:02 among a

37:11 couple of geeks tracking it, it's not that big anymore.

37:18 Petra, again, petroleum, oil and gas.

37:24 The US went to a whole big thing before we did horizontal drilling and fracking and everything else, where we were importing a ton, we were held to the Middle East, 80s, the shortage, the gas

37:38 science, crazy. And then we figured out, new technology, you know, fracking, and we just unlocked a ton of additional oil. Now the Permian, it's just, you know, it's all horizontal. Off to

37:50 the races. Off to the races. It's just salve a major geopolitical problem. Yeah, so whether it's an industry going through a cycle because there's substitutes or new technology comes along, it

38:02 almost always does, at least for how you source it. Now, oil and gas have been really robust in, you know, basically holding its market share, you know, for example, you know, it was a

38:14 hundred years that all cars were pretty much oil and gas, you know, gasoline or diesel. You know, the EVs just started to kind of knock on the door and the 2000s, you know, 2005, there was a

38:26 big misfire, but what was it, the bolt or the whatever, something like that. The lead, the bolt. Yeah, they, I think the bolt was on the early ones, yeah which is interesting enough because.

38:40 That's where Elon started, Tesla was right after that. So good timing, lucky timing, both. Yeah. You know, so I wouldn't make predictions 'cause I think everything's gonna change.

38:55 For example, this is kind of a crazy semiconductor example. When I was at McKinsey, I did a thing for TI, where TI made a lot of the chips that went into cell phones. And TI was going, well,

39:07 you know, maybe we should do some software that fits on our chips, you know, kind of the operating system. And if we're gonna do the operating system, let's do some apps. And so we all got in a

39:18 room and said, okay, well, is the app market for cell phones? Is that gonna be small or big or medium? You know, and God, we were horrible at predicting the future. I mean, we're like video

39:30 and maybe a little streaming. No, no one's gonna TV on a phone, you know, get outta here Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, and now you could literally probably, I don't know how many apps there,

39:44 but probably in the order of a million or so. Oh yeah, easily. Yeah, no, we were horrible in vision in the future, so.

39:53 So anyhow, any prediction I make in light of that. I

39:59 always had this like, thought where EVs like really just worked. And you brought up the bolt, which was like, I guess like no one really cared when it happened, but like a Tesla was a big moment

40:12 where, you know, it could have went so wrong, but literally because it was so sexy and so cool, it like everyone loves EVs. Like everyone's switching from big gas trucks to like cool EVs, like

40:28 is what you would, like I didn't really predict that. Like, but people are kind of doing both things. Everyone's driving like the biggest trucks and the biggest cars possible. and are also like

40:37 buying a cyber truck or a Tesla and they'll have both. Like I would have never assumed this. I would have thought it would be like big trucks versus like hipster Tesla drivers. But everyone is like

40:48 together and agrees and loves it. And I think a big part of it is because Tesla's like fucking cool. Autopilot. And

40:57 they're faster and they're sexier. It's autopilot. Like I think we're all predicting picturing like Homer Simpson's car, like that weird one he made, sorry, old reference But if they were

41:06 literally ugly and didn't go like zero to 60 in two seconds, like we would be in a whole different world right now. But like we literally made them cooler. Yeah, so we talk a lot about technology

41:16 and we talk a lot about industry, but something we don't talk a lot of, which has a huge impact is the culture. So to your point, you're just saying is, Hey, it was cool all of a sudden, don't

41:26 it Tesla? And you could actually get someplace, I think at once it hit a certain distance, a couple hundred miles. I can use this to get to work. Not even 80. They're like 80 miles, hell yeah.

41:40 I'll just charge it. Yeah, I mean, there was some kind of number where all of a sudden it could substitute in for the car. And it was cool and it saved money. And people were putting some, you

41:52 know, rebates on it. You know, so the government thought it was useful too. So that was great. So I think as we look forward, you know, obviously AI is going to make a big transition. It's

42:06 already starting to impact a lot of companies, but you're going to see a seed in customer service all the time now. You know, you go through drive-throughs and stuff, someone taking your order,

42:14 it's AI. You know, I'll take this or that. So you're going to see a lot of big changes with AI, but I also think adding onto that is going to be robotics, which is going to either have a lot or a

42:27 medium amount of AI. And you know, you're going to get more and more robots that can do physical things. you know, interact with the environment. And that, by the way, is gonna drive the demand

42:39 for batteries up, drive the demand for rare earth elements up for the semiconductor minerals, like again, gallium or germanium, those are kind of the two critical ones in semiconductors, it's

42:53 gotta drive that up. That's not really figured in that much in the industry. I mean, you have Amazon announcing, I think they're gonna announce they're gonna replace all their warehouse workers

43:05 now with robots. And they're gonna make them pee in bottles.

43:10 They may look like oil, but. Yeah, they're gonna get a little. A little in piss to cans oil oil cans to piss in.

43:16 That's funny. Yeah, see if there's any leaks being, look for the leaks on the floor. But that's kind of where the world's going. And that's, I mean, it's an opportunity and kind of scary,

43:30 'cause it

43:32 means that a lot of people going to have to change what they do. I'll be retired by then. I'm retired now actually. I'll please, you'll be like investing in like crazy robot or like rockets by

43:43 then. Yeah, yeah, I will. Your next venture. I will never, I will never not. But I mean, the world is gonna change in dramatically unique ways which no one can pick up. And like I said, my

43:56 experience when I was trying to forecast apps on a TI smartphone was horrible Maybe I wasn't drinking it, I think you have a mental stay, but yeah, anyhow, yeah. So it's kind of fun imagining the

44:13 future like that. You know, particularly when it comes to not just oil and gas, but all the other resource we're gonna use, you know, it's gonna pivot, it's gonna change. It's gonna change in

44:25 ways no one can pick. Yeah, yeah. So anyhow. Yeah, I think a couple more things we could talk about. This is really just like a broad spectrum batteries, metals, and I love it. So this is

44:36 great. It's kind of fun. And then we can start getting on people who are more niche now that we kind of got an understanding. One thing I want to talk about as we wrap up here is, do you know

44:46 about the metal company? The guys who are out in the Pacific, like Polynesia, digging up those, like sucking up those like weird rock creatures at the bottom of the ocean. They're actually

44:59 creatures? I think, are they alive? Or, yeah, there's like some kind of microbes. Let me check this. Have you heard of that? It's been covered in the last few years. I might have heard

45:08 something, but I need a little bit more. So they get these barge boats. It's literally middle Pacific, like one of the most pristine, untouched parts of the ocean. So it's controversial. And

45:19 they literally have a big hose, like tens of thousands of feet sucking up these rocks and are full of some kind of element. Oh, yeah. I mean, so it's called offshore mining sounds like what

45:30 they're doing. So what is in these rocks is probably, I mean, it could be something like palladium or something like something worth crazy amounts of money. And that's probably what they found

45:45 'cause mining offshore is not cheap. Having these hoses go down and suck up these rocks is not cheap. I mean, you've seen on TV where they mine for gold that way, right, they'll go into a bearing

45:59 straight and they'll just suck gold off or whatever. So to get these rocks that are in the middle of the ocean, you gotta go way, way down, obviously. My guess is it's something like Play-D-M

46:15 could be, it's one of the really rare ones. You got it? No, I don't know what you're talking about. Oh boy. It said, I mean, I found one little creature thing that was, they call it, they

46:27 call it Metallica and it says it lives among manganese.

46:32 nodules, which are rich in metallic elements, like

46:36 a corporate. Here I got it, I got it. Here's an AI overview. The metals company is a deep sea mining company that explores for critical metals from polymetallic nodules on a Pacific Ocean sea

46:47 floor. So they're called nodules. They're not creatures. Yeah,

46:52 nodules, it's the morphology. It means they're just small things. Polymorphic, you use the word polymorphic?

47:01 Polymetallic, and here's what's in them, the

47:09 nodules. They contain nickel, cobalt, copper, and magnesium. So like literally all the things we need. And there's just an abundance of these nodules on the sea floor. And the biggest, and

47:19 what's funny and what makes this, you know, half the audience roll their eyes is that the biggest concern is just the animal life basically the loud noises. like is so intense, it can kill or

47:34 disrupt the environment. So everyone's like, it's like, okay, we've got unlimited supply of metals, rarer metals. All we gotta do is suck 'em up and all these people are invested. Oh, but the

47:44 animals are dying. And you know, I care about animals, but you know, you can imagine the people who are just like screw those dolphins or screw those - Well, I bet that's why it's so expensive

47:54 too is all this. Yeah, it's pretty irritating. Yeah, I mean, now that I have heard about that, but I've also heard industry people say, that's not a very economic way to do it. The pipe dream?

48:06 Yeah, haha, yes, see, they use a pipe. It

48:10 probably interferes with the animal's mating cycle. I know it would do that with mine.

48:19 I've required total settlement. Okay, that's probably gonna be, I won't make the edit. But yeah, yeah, so yeah, it's a source that they can get. And I would say if you look at the marginal

48:34 cost, if you've ever done a cost curve, you have kind of different marginal costs of the next best option. That's probably way up on the cost curve, meaning it's probably like three times more

48:48 than the mining. Now, it may be a little faster, and it may come in high concentrations, but I can't imagine them moving 100, 000 tons with a vacuum cleaner. I don't know People are really

49:01 covering this. I'll pull up something now, a big YouTuber, Johnny Harris. He covered it, and then more mainstream people like, John Oliver covered it, actually, like a whole episode. So,

49:11 I'll throw those up, and you can look into it. This is one of those moments in a show where it's like, I hear something on YouTube, and I'm just like, this guy probably knows what it is, and I

49:19 say it, and you're like, Uh, not really, and I go, Okay, nevermind.

49:24 But let's end with one more talking point that's kind of a favorite of mine and Julie's on a show, modular sources, like modular nuclear reactors or whatever, and reading about you, you have

49:38 something to do with modular batteries or something like that. Modular recycling. So our technology at Momentum, again, it uses membranes. So the membranes,

49:51 you can put them in series, put them in parallel. So you can literally match what I'll call the capacity of what you're trying to recycle to the supply. So in, whether it's in oil and gas or in

50:06 mining or whatever, you get large economies of scale. So everyone builds plants that process, 50, 000 tons, 80, 000 tons. You build these big monstrosities that cost half a billion dollars or a

50:21 billion, whatever. And that's how you get the economics to work. We don't have to do that So our economics, our economics. pretty much the same from a huge range of scale, whether we do 10, 20,

50:37 000 or whether we do 1, 500. And it's all because we do it with membranes and everything scales, the cost scales, the expensive, actually doing the processing scales with it. So we can make very

50:53 small processing plants and we sell them. So, you know, one of the niches we hadn't even dreamed of was printed circuit boards, okay? They print off, you know, they make the printed circuit

51:08 boards and they have hydrochloric acid with a bunch of copper and other stuff and then they're like, hey, can you help us recover the hydrochloric acid and take out the copper and we're like, sure.

51:18 And, you know, the plants like literally smaller than the table. I mean, it's really small, but that's what they need. And luckily there's like a thousand of them. It turns into a viable

51:30 business. doesn't. You know, we're selling another plant in India. You know, they're starting out small. They don't really drive a lot of EVs there, but they drive a lot of scooters. And you

51:43 know, they get a lot of, and I mean, a lot of scooters, you know, was at 14 or 14. I mean, it's just the way they're portrayed in movies and television, like, media, you just see it, yeah.

51:54 Yeah, there's, I mean, there's, you know, tens of probably more than tens, probably 100 million scooters there. You know, and they're just res, you know, they're trying to figure out what to

52:02 do with it because they can't just, they don't want to just become the dumping ground of scooter batteries. So, you know, we're working with one of the major companies over there setting up small

52:12 plants. And again, if you look around the world, you know, think about batteries as they're very distributed, right? They don't naturally, you know, everyone has their car, everyone has their

52:25 cell phone, everybody has their computer, you know, they're all over the place. So, Even if you aggregate them, you're only aggregating, you're only collecting like maybe 10, maybe 5. So you

52:37 wanna make sure that whatever you're setting up, whatever you're recycling matches the supply. And if supply of sun doubles, you wanna be able to double it without taking like two, three years to

52:47 do that. The other good thing about what we do is, again, chemistries change a lot in the battery world. It's changed, gosh, it's changed like four or five times since I've been involved And the

53:00 other thing that's really good about us is our same plant that we designed can handle a wide range, for example, of cobalt, whether it's 10 cobalt or 1 cobalt, whether it's 5 nickel or a 30 nickel

53:16 or whether it has aluminum, a lot of aluminum or a little aluminum or a lot of copper or a little copper, same plant handles it all, just a little tweaking. So to me,

53:28 You know, the whole world, particularly in oil and gas and these big capital-intensive commodity industries, you know, you build this almost a monument, you know, for production, where you've

53:42 got to get it. But you have to do it to get the economies of scale to actually make it pay off. We don't have to do that. And that's what the modularity brings, not just a smaller footprint and

53:53 not just full utilization, but

53:57 yeah, you can just build something much smaller that literally can fit in a room like this size and get the job done. So, wow, that's my pitch. I love that. Mind blown. What an episode. I know.

54:11 You got anything else before you wrap up? Kind of all over the place. Oh, yeah. I like your question about the mining, the mining company. I wish I'd prepared a little bit for that. Well, just

54:20 look into it. It's so fascinating I had a controversy, I actually heard about it, but I didn't quite recognize it when you said it.

54:28 It, there's environmental issues, but I kind of want them to suck up a few of those bad boys to see what happens. I mean, I think they already are something, I don't know. Yeah, that's funny.

54:38 It's a lot more animal style. No, I think it's more theoretical. I mean, you know, I think it's, oh, it has to bother the whales, you know, has to. Right. That's what gets the discussion

54:49 going. It's like, well, what is it actually doing? And when you talk about noise killing things, it's like, it's hard to process that just human on a human It's like, it's like, it can be

54:59 annoying. It's hard to understand. Right. Yeah. That's it killing something? Yeah. These things made out of paper. Yeah. Well, you know, now that I've said it, it's out in the public,

55:08 you're going to start hearing now frequency illusion. You're going to be like, you're going to hear like in a week and you're going to see a headline or something. And we're like, Oh, I saw that.

55:17 Gotcha. Oh, that's interesting. Any final questions? I don't think I have any. I think that was really great. Yeah. We, uh, we really went all over. So, uh, we'll have them Have you had a

55:27 good editing effort.

55:32 I'm sure what you said. No, no. We'll have to have you back on. You'll have to get us in a contact with people who can really get in a detail about stuff. I mean, there's, you can have a whole

55:36 episode about the purity of these metals. Oh, we have touched that. Just about recycling. It's all chemistry, you know, too, which personally, I like chemistry talk. I don't understand half

55:44 of it, but you can start naming off all those elements. It's like, I get a little excited for some reason. So it just a nerd of me.

55:52 Yeah, thanks. So Dr. Bob, your name is now. It started off Robert Miles, you know I'm a doctor, actually. Yeah, Dr. Bob. So Dr. Bob. Dr. Bob. Thanks for the laughs, thanks for the dad

56:02 humor. You did out dad humor in me, for sure. And, you know, thanks for coming in from Dallas. It was a great episode. My pleasure, really enjoyed it and hope to participate some time in the

56:13 future. Thanks guys.