Speaker 1: With Laurent Segal and from London and Gerard read from Berlin.
Speaker 1: This is redefining energy today.
Speaker 2: On Really Think Energy tod We're going to talk about
Speaker 2: the eertrometals like lethium, copper, silver that are going bananas.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Absolutely, Ron, It's incredible. What's going on? And I
Speaker 3: suppose I have to ask the question, I don't know
Speaker 3: if this is just volatility because of geopolitics or really
Speaker 3: does a big change in demand. I have no idea,
Speaker 3: So I'm looking forward to this conversation.
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Speaker 2: Back to the show, so we bring a real expert
Speaker 2: that we've been following for quite some time, a new
Speaker 2: friend of the show, and it's Matt Firmleay.
Speaker 3: Yeah, looking forward to having this conversation with a bad
Speaker 3: time with them.
Speaker 2: On a bit of background on Matt. He is managing
Speaker 2: director at Battery Metaios Review and he's also partner in
Speaker 2: the equity firm called air K Equity and he's been
Speaker 2: following all those metals for the past twenty five years
Speaker 2: and he has some extraordinary revelation to make.
Speaker 3: Well, let's bring him on the show then, Matt, this
Speaker 3: is great to have you on the show. Looking forward
Speaker 3: to this conversation.
Speaker 4: Thanks for advising me. I've been looking forward to this
Speaker 4: for a long time.
Speaker 3: Maybe just kick off and it's just give us a
Speaker 3: sense of what's going on. And I got to call
Speaker 3: it electricity. Commodity is for anything to do with electricity,
Speaker 3: whether it sill of our copper, the.
Speaker 4: Electric metals we used to call electrica metals.
Speaker 3: Just a crazy world of volatility and a space tell
Speaker 3: us what's going on.
Speaker 4: It's a really interesting space. Dumb materials are going crazy
Speaker 4: to the moon, lithium, silver, copper to some extent, some
Speaker 4: materials haven't budged, things like graphite and materials not doing
Speaker 4: anything at the moment. So it really is a very
Speaker 4: very differentiated market. But obviously it's the copper's, silver's, lithiums
Speaker 4: of the world that are attracting the most column inches
Speaker 4: at the moment. And it's nice to see because we've
Speaker 4: obviously come off a period of two to three years
Speaker 4: when prices, particularly in lithium are very, very weak and
Speaker 4: for other battery materials, so it's nice to be in
Speaker 4: vogue again. In terms of what's happening, we have a
Speaker 4: secular demand event, and there are periods when supply catches
Speaker 4: up with that secular demand event, and their are periods
Speaker 4: when we move into oversupply, and then obviously we have
Speaker 4: a price correction, and that's where we were coming from
Speaker 4: off the back of in lithium over the last couple
Speaker 4: of years. And then there are periods when supply growth
Speaker 4: drops away and perhaps demand accelerates and we then move
Speaker 4: into a positive commodity price environment. The situation in lithium
Speaker 4: has been exacerbated by the fact that we are seeing
Speaker 4: a change in leadership in the battery markets from EVS
Speaker 4: to ESS and my numbers I see ESS dominating EVS
Speaker 4: as a user of batteries by the early part of
Speaker 4: the twenty thirties and being really significant long term event
Speaker 4: for battery demand.
Speaker 2: Yes, Matt. Currently the EV market in term of Relgium
Speaker 2: consumption is six times bigger than the best. But in
Speaker 2: two twenty five the EV market has grown by fifteen percent,
Speaker 2: whereas the best has grown by fifty. Yeah. Clearly, at
Speaker 2: some point if base continue, those two charts may converte. Now,
Speaker 2: if you analyze in general any community market, you have
Speaker 2: two school of thoughts. The one which is from Jeff
Speaker 2: Curry talk about supercycles, and I hear him a lot
Speaker 2: well on the foothiels of the Imalaya, But the thing
Speaker 2: he has said that for a very long time and
Speaker 2: most of the time got the timing wrong. And on
Speaker 2: the other you get the school of Ed Moss, who
Speaker 2: says the market are very elastic and within two three
Speaker 2: years they tend to rebalance themselves. So in what camp
Speaker 2: you see yourself?
Speaker 4: I do believe in supercycles, but similarly I do think
Speaker 4: that Ed is correct as well. If I look back
Speaker 4: to the sort of China led supercycle in the early noughties,
Speaker 4: by two thousand and two, two thousand and three, that
Speaker 4: that supercycle was kicking off at the time, we said
Speaker 4: that the Chinese fixed acid investment event would last ten
Speaker 4: to twelve years, but the supercycle didn't last that long.
Speaker 4: We did start to see substitution in key commodities. We
Speaker 4: did start to see supply catch up. So I do
Speaker 4: believe that we'll see a supercycle, but I also leave
Speaker 4: it's not going to last for ten years or something.
Speaker 4: It'll last for two, three four years before supply catches up.
Speaker 4: There's enough substitution out of the areas for prices to
Speaker 4: catch up as well.
Speaker 2: Let's probably before we go deeper into lydium, let's talk
Speaker 2: a bit about copper, because God, I love and respect
Speaker 2: Aba Friedland the greatest miner since Cecil Rose in my opinion,
Speaker 2: or it's been pumping copper like never. We went from
Speaker 2: ten thousand dollars a ton to thirteen fourteen, which is
Speaker 2: a lot. And of course there's you know the Grasberg
Speaker 2: mine Indonesia that's underwater, win Panama, which has been stopped.
Speaker 2: But on the other hand, after a while copper and
Speaker 2: people are going to switch to aluminium, which is what
Speaker 2: two thousand dollars a ton. How do you see the
Speaker 2: copper market going forward?
Speaker 4: I agree with you on aluminium substitution. I think the
Speaker 4: other thing that people don't necessarily think about when they
Speaker 4: see those big supply demand charts with the gap going forward,
Speaker 4: So they don't necessarily think about recycling because obviously, as
Speaker 4: copper prices go higher, it's more economic to recycle more.
Speaker 4: And historically in periods when we have seen that big
Speaker 4: supply demand gap, a recycling has come along to fill
Speaker 4: it in, not totally but to some extent. The big
Speaker 4: issue with copper is that we're not discovering enough. We're
Speaker 4: not discovering enough big operations. So in the medium to
Speaker 4: longer term there is certainly an issue in the market
Speaker 4: in the near term. What worries me about copper is
Speaker 4: from a macroeconomic standpoint, the world ain't great at the moment.
Speaker 4: From a top down standpoint, a consumer demand isn't great.
Speaker 4: There's not a lot going on a fixed acid investment,
Speaker 4: so the world isn't brilliant at the moment, and inventories
Speaker 4: in copper actually increasing.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 4: I've been looking at the price inventory relationship in copper
Speaker 4: since two thousand and two thousand and one. On a
Speaker 4: weekly sometime as a monthly basis, you see a very
Speaker 4: close price inventory relationship. But generally what happens is that
Speaker 4: as inventry's full, prices increase. And that's indeed what we
Speaker 4: saw in the supercycle in two thousand and two, two
Speaker 4: thousand and three, when the first sign that's something really
Speaker 4: important was happening was because inventry is just dropped away.
Speaker 4: We're not seeing that in this cycle. In fact, we're
Speaker 4: seeing inventories increasing. And if you look at global inventories,
Speaker 4: so what's there in the US, in China and on
Speaker 4: the LME, they've actually been increasing at the same time
Speaker 4: that price has and that's very atypical. I've never seen
Speaker 4: that in a cycle before. So there's a lot of
Speaker 4: speculative excitement about the medium to longer term in copper.
Speaker 4: I'm really worried about the near term and if we
Speaker 4: have any sort of economic correction globally, there's a big
Speaker 4: risk for copper prices in my view.
Speaker 3: Matt, can we talk maybe next about silver and they can?
Speaker 3: I understand last year it was like one hundred and
Speaker 3: twenty five percent and if I look in terms of
Speaker 3: the biggest industrial use so that it's now solar panels,
Speaker 3: is that what's driving it or is it just the
Speaker 3: fact that it's a pressure's metal like gold or whatever.
Speaker 3: And you know, just how do you.
Speaker 4: See that silver is right on the edge of my
Speaker 4: comfort zone. I'm an industrial metal strategist to always have been.
Speaker 4: I can pick growth cycles and understand where demand is
Speaker 4: going for all of these commodities. Gold and precious metals
Speaker 4: have always been in an area where I haven't really
Speaker 4: been able to understand what's going on. But in silver
Speaker 4: at the moment, most of what's happening is because of
Speaker 4: the industrial demand situation for solar panels. Obviously, solar panel
Speaker 4: demands gone ballistic over the last two to three years,
Speaker 4: and that's really tightened out the physical market. So we
Speaker 4: have on a physical basis a very substantial supply demand
Speaker 4: imbalance really over the last seven or eight years. And
Speaker 4: when I look at the supply demand chart, there's a
Speaker 4: big deficit. And if I saw that for an industrial metal,
Speaker 4: I'd be hugely bullish on it. What we have exacerbating
Speaker 4: the silver market is obviously there's a lot of undisclosed
Speaker 4: stocks people with silver jewelry and silver photo frames and
Speaker 4: silver stuff in their house that can potentially come out
Speaker 4: into a ball market. And then one of the other
Speaker 4: things is because on top of the industrial demand for silver.
Speaker 4: We have a big speculative slash investment elements in the
Speaker 4: silver market as well. Really is an astoundingly complex market
Speaker 4: on the physical side of things. There's a big imbalance
Speaker 4: on the paper side of things. People are betting multiples
Speaker 4: of the physical size of the market almost every day.
Speaker 4: I mean, as we record this yesterday, there's reports of
Speaker 4: a massive short position on the SHFE in Shanghai, which
Speaker 4: is bigger than the existing physical market for silver in
Speaker 4: a year. You are sort of sitting there scratching your
Speaker 4: head and going, well, the paper markets seem to they're
Speaker 4: not too much resemblance to what's going on in physical
Speaker 4: markets at the moment.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And to add to your argument, we're talking about
Speaker 2: aluminium two thousand dollar paton couple thirteen thousand paton and
Speaker 2: of course SiO we took in answers, but if you
Speaker 2: took put it's two million dollar a ton. It's very
Speaker 2: very expensive, and I know it must have some extraordinary
Speaker 2: electrical property also that they're put in cellar panels. But
Speaker 2: I know the Chinese and I'm sure they're working very
Speaker 2: hard for substitution here.
Speaker 4: We've seen thrifting in silver in solar over the last
Speaker 4: sort of four or five years, and in fact it's
Speaker 4: a recurring thing and it's built into my models that
Speaker 4: we will see lower silver loadings going forward. It's definitely issue.
Speaker 4: I was reading a piece of research that said at
Speaker 4: one hundred and thirty dollars an ounce, it's no longer
Speaker 4: economically viable to use silver and solar panels. If you
Speaker 4: want to look at a physical markets, at industrial markets,
Speaker 4: that's got to be the glass ceiling. But obviously if
Speaker 4: you're looking at as an investment vehicle, similar to gold,
Speaker 4: then things can go higher than that.
Speaker 3: Matt, I can ask you about a really niche market commodity,
Speaker 3: and that's just electrical steel and obviously this is used
Speaker 3: for transformers and stuff like that. It's pretty critical and
Speaker 3: there's a shortage of transformers up. What's your view on that.
Speaker 4: It's a really difficult market. And if I hadn't worked
Speaker 4: to the Hedge Fund for the last five years, I
Speaker 4: would have had to say I don't know anything about
Speaker 4: that market. I do know a little bit about that
Speaker 4: market because I'm aware of the huge global shortage of transformers.
Speaker 4: But the problem is it's a very opaque market because
Speaker 4: it's buried the electrical steel divisions are buried in the
Speaker 4: big steel makers and it's a tiny part of their markets,
Speaker 4: so you don't really get a lot of information about
Speaker 4: electrical steel. But it is a market where demand for
Speaker 4: transformers is growing very, very rapidly, and it is a
Speaker 4: market where we're struggling to keep up supply. But the
Speaker 4: problem is that there are no pure play ways to
Speaker 4: play that. It's like a sort of one or two
Speaker 4: percent share of the big steelmaker's business.
Speaker 2: Great, let's pish to litium and its consequences on the batteries.
Speaker 2: The price of litium is more than doubled. Is it
Speaker 2: going to impack batteries? And I know a lot of
Speaker 2: listeners investing in batteries and they enjoyed the prices going
Speaker 2: down on stop for the past ten years. But now
Speaker 2: all of a sudden, maybe there's going to be a
Speaker 2: difficult wake up call. So are we entering in a
Speaker 2: short phase of lytium?
Speaker 4: I think it's a slightly longer phase of strength and
Speaker 4: lithium prices. Lithium prices obviously went up very strongly. That
Speaker 4: went up to just shy of twenty five dollars a kilo.
Speaker 4: They've come back down again.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 4: I'm pleased that they came back down again, because I
Speaker 4: think they'd run too high too fast. For the battery industry,
Speaker 4: we don't want volatility and raw material prices. We want
Speaker 4: raw material prices to go up gradually, consistently and not
Speaker 4: be jumping around all over the place. And if prices
Speaker 4: go up very rapidly, and that leads to an increase
Speaker 4: in sell prices, and potentially that can be damaging to
Speaker 4: THEESS business, It can be damaging to the EV business,
Speaker 4: and it can be damaged to the manufacturers as well,
Speaker 4: not just the consumers. For the industry, I'm pleased that
Speaker 4: prices corrected slightly. For lithium producers. A year ago, we
Speaker 4: wouldn't have even thought or dreamed about lithium prices being
Speaker 4: this high. So I think the lithium producers are pretty
Speaker 4: happy with the prices that are in the market at
Speaker 4: the moment. My gap feeling is that there are a
Speaker 4: few risks this year, particularly around ESS, where we started
Speaker 4: to see inventary build in the last days or nine
Speaker 4: months or so, and potentially ESS might be more elastic
Speaker 4: to lithium prices than the EV market is. But beyond that,
Speaker 4: at the moment. If ess continues to grow as it
Speaker 4: has been growing, we would likely see quite a significant
Speaker 4: supply demand in balance over the next couple of years.
Speaker 2: Because when we had the spiking and or twenty two
Speaker 2: and lettium briefly went to eighty don apukilo, there was
Speaker 2: a lot of people going on the media and hypie
Speaker 2: either a new technology or a new mine. I'm not
Speaker 2: going to go over Lake Resource, which has been a
Speaker 2: bit of a disgrace. The stuff went from zero to
Speaker 2: I don't know, ninety eight dollar or share and down
Speaker 2: back to ten cents or something. But also we had
Speaker 2: a lot of discussion about Daly directly tium extraction, which
Speaker 2: has vanished all of a sudden, and now it starts
Speaker 2: to reappear. And on the top of that, Sorry, my
Speaker 2: question is a bit long, but now there is the
Speaker 2: sodium battery thing. So between the new mines, between the
Speaker 2: new techniques of extraction and between sodium, how is it
Speaker 2: going to play in the region market.
Speaker 4: My feeling is that we'll see slightly shorter cycles. And
Speaker 4: the reason I say that is because prior to sort
Speaker 4: of twenty eighteen twenty nineteen, we hadn't really explored for lithium.
Speaker 4: We obviously knew the salars in Latin America orchu in lithium,
Speaker 4: but outside that we hadn't really explored for lithium. Since
Speaker 4: the mining industry has got to act together over the
Speaker 4: last six or seven years, we've actually seen better expiration
Speaker 4: for lithium, and a lot of expiration hits on lithium,
Speaker 4: particularly hard rock lithium. There's hard rock lithium in Canada,
Speaker 4: in the US, in Africa, and more in Australia than
Speaker 4: we perhaps thought there was, and in China, in Tibet
Speaker 4: in places like that. So it's not that difficult to
Speaker 4: find lithium. But we are still stuck in this situation
Speaker 4: that it takes a long time to get new minds
Speaker 4: in processing well not so much processing plants, but minds
Speaker 4: into production. The cycle and lithium will be shorter, that
Speaker 4: upsiple will be shorter in the medium term, for instance.
Speaker 4: I'm not too worried, but I do think that we
Speaker 4: will see hopefully see less cyclicality going forward. Then on
Speaker 4: to your other question about new technologies, Well, dly did vanish,
Speaker 4: but it has been bubbling under for a long time
Speaker 4: and lost of companies have been working on it for
Speaker 4: the last four or five years. But certainly, as with
Speaker 4: all these new technologies like solid states, it takes a
Speaker 4: relatively long time to bring into commo usage. The first
Speaker 4: dex China DLE project, which is being operated by Aramet
Speaker 4: in Argentina, went live last year and it's starting to
Speaker 4: sort of hit its target. But the problem with DLE
Speaker 4: is it's not a sort of one size fits all technology.
Speaker 4: Your salar briane project is very different from your gear
Speaker 4: thermal briane project, and then each gear thermal brind project
Speaker 4: is different because it got different solid loading in your
Speaker 4: brinds and all sorts of things. So just because DLE
Speaker 4: works on one project doesn't mean it's going to work
Speaker 4: on another. DLE has certainly taken longer to roll out
Speaker 4: than we would have thought, it costs more, capital intensity
Speaker 4: is really high for DLE projects, and in fact operating
Speaker 4: costs are coming in in the second and third quarter.
Speaker 4: So it's not the promised land that we APPS were
Speaker 4: promised five years ago.
Speaker 3: MA Can I maybe just follow on the other part
Speaker 3: of the rands cart, which is the substitution effect in
Speaker 3: other words, that we move all the best projects from
Speaker 3: lithium mind to soldier mine, have you a view on that?
Speaker 4: Yes, I do. And when lithium was sort of going up, up, up,
Speaker 4: I was really worried about it because I get the
Speaker 4: impression that best projects work according to the IRR of
Speaker 4: the project. That's sort of what investors are looking at.
Speaker 4: And if I look at the impact of the higher
Speaker 4: lithium prices on cells and batteries and ess projects. So
Speaker 4: the lithium price basically doubled up to about twenty five
Speaker 4: dollars a kilo, that's adding something like fifteen dollars a
Speaker 4: killer what hour in terms of the sell prices increase.
Speaker 4: And then for a four hour duration best which is
Speaker 4: doubling up twice on lithium ion batteries, that's a thirty
Speaker 4: dollars per killer what hour, And that's pretty substantial impact
Speaker 4: on the cost of your best system. If you know
Speaker 4: in China it's seventy dollars a kilowater hour at eight
Speaker 4: dollars a kilogram lithium. So that's what worried me. That
Speaker 4: IRR of the projects is going to be affected, and
Speaker 4: therefore you would see best consumers flipping into sodiumin or
Speaker 4: potentially into long duration text like flow batteries now at
Speaker 4: the moment, flow batteries are very expensive, so they're like
Speaker 4: two hundred dollars a kit or what hour. If lithium
Speaker 4: prices go up, and I spoke to a number of
Speaker 4: people about this, and you get a very different answer
Speaker 4: in China to what you get in Europe and the US.
Speaker 4: So in Europe and the US transportation costs, insurance taris,
Speaker 4: et cetera. They contribute to a higher cost for best
Speaker 4: which means that your raw material cost is lower. But
Speaker 4: in China your raw material cost is still a big
Speaker 4: chunk of the battery. So it is a concern for
Speaker 4: me that if lithium prices go too high, too fast,
Speaker 4: we will see substitution out of lithium mine into sodiumin
Speaker 4: And the other point to make is that, coming back
Speaker 4: to your new year outlook call as well, if lithium
Speaker 4: prices continue to rise and they drive best sell prices up,
Speaker 4: then you're going to see higher best costs as well.
Speaker 2: Will Yo Tinto just budged for the fifth time is
Speaker 2: merger with glen Core a few years ago invested almost
Speaker 2: ten billion dollars in lithium in a retrospect. Was it
Speaker 2: a good move?
Speaker 4: To tell you the SITH. I didn't think so at
Speaker 4: the time, but the more I have had the chance
Speaker 4: to think about what they acquired, I think it's a
Speaker 4: cracking move. They've actually acquired optionality in the lithium market.
Speaker 4: So they bought some really low cost Brian assets, some
Speaker 4: world class Brian assets in Argentina. And the way that
Speaker 4: Rio operates is it wants to be at the bottom
Speaker 4: of the cost curve in everything. So by going in
Speaker 4: and buying those undervalued Brian assets in Argentina, they've given
Speaker 4: themselves the ability to dominate the bottom of the cost
Speaker 4: curve by going in and buying the assets in Chile,
Speaker 4: again bottom of the cost curve, and then if prices
Speaker 4: go up, they've got the slightly more expensive hard rock
Speaker 4: in Canada to bring on as well. So actually I
Speaker 4: think it's a great acquisition by One of the issues
Speaker 4: that could dole down volatility in an a lithium space
Speaker 4: would be if we could get more majors into the market.
Speaker 4: If we had more majors in the market rather than
Speaker 4: smaller single asset companies, it would give the supply side
Speaker 4: the ability to manage itself better.
Speaker 3: I actually go back to almost what Lauren said at
Speaker 3: the very beginning, really, is this a supercycle or not?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I believe it is. I believe it's a supercycle
Speaker 4: in terms of demand. There's all these charts out in
Speaker 4: the market that say we're going to have to mine
Speaker 4: more copper in the next fifteen years than we've mined
Speaker 4: up to Here, we're seeing demand for a lot of
Speaker 4: these niche commodities, niche products like antimony and tungsten and
Speaker 4: whatnot that we really haven't seen demand for. So it's
Speaker 4: a supercycle in as you said at the beginning, electrical commodities,
Speaker 4: electrical metals. But it's very different from the last supercycle.
Speaker 4: So the last supercycle was the fixed ass investment supercycle
Speaker 4: because of China, and it was big and steel and
Speaker 4: iron ore and all of these sort of commodity commodities.
Speaker 4: This is more focused on specialty materials. But similarly, I
Speaker 4: do believe it is a demand based supercycle.
Speaker 2: Yes, And maybe to conclude last question, the US Administration
Speaker 2: has recently announced a project called Vault where they're going
Speaker 2: to put twelve billion dollars, which is a lot if
Speaker 2: you consider that the value of the US Strategic Petroleum
Speaker 2: Reserve is bulow thirty billions, so that's a lot to
Speaker 2: acquire a certain number of those materials and also rare
Speaker 2: earth and stuff like that. So what's your view on
Speaker 2: this project Vault.
Speaker 4: Yeah, my colleague had client has done a lot more
Speaker 4: work on strategic stockpiling than I have. It can work
Speaker 4: if its target is to minimize volatility in the market,
Speaker 4: if it's managed well and they bleed material into the
Speaker 4: market when prices are high and they buy it when
Speaker 4: it's slow, and we have to see if that can work.
Speaker 4: But it's nice to see governments being more proactive in
Speaker 4: the commodity markets. The jury's house in terms of how
Speaker 4: effective it's going to be.
Speaker 2: Well, Matt, thank you very much for coming on the show.
Speaker 2: I'm also an avid listener of the Recharge podcast you
Speaker 2: do with our friend Comma Coleiery, where I really learned
Speaker 2: a lot, so I advise our listeners are interested in
Speaker 2: that the pic to listen to Recharge and yeah, the
Speaker 2: story continues.
Speaker 4: Well, thanks very much for the invite. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 4: I read avidly the articles you guys put on LinkedIn
Speaker 4: and everything, So yeah, it's great to talk to you.
Speaker 3: Thanks a lot.
Speaker 2: Well, it's a treat to have. I guess like Matt,
Speaker 2: because I can feel I'm more intelligent than half an
Speaker 2: hour ago.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I agree with Janna, And actually, to be honest,
Speaker 3: I haven't been keeping close enough eye on what's been
Speaker 3: going on there in the commodity space, let alone the
Speaker 3: electrical commodity space, which is obviously the and while both
Speaker 3: of us are working. So yeah, great to have more.
Speaker 2: Now, what is very interesting is the substitution effect. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's the fact that both in copper, in silver, and
Speaker 2: in lithium, at some point the industry managed to reinvent
Speaker 2: themselves and reinvent its supply chain when the prices of
Speaker 2: or metals are too high. It's when nickel and cobalt
Speaker 2: when ballistic five years ago that lydium phosphate really took ofugh.
Speaker 2: Right now, prices of lidium are high, but they are
Speaker 2: not crazy. I but if the producers of batteries start
Speaker 2: to feel that it becomes tight, that's where the development
Speaker 2: of sodium batteries is going to come, and it's going
Speaker 2: to come fast.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's going to come craft as well, because at
Speaker 3: the end of the day, it could be equipped a
Speaker 3: lot of these letterumine lines pretty quickly and to make
Speaker 3: the mint sodium mine so un much on this you
Speaker 3: have to keep an eye on that lithium price. And
Speaker 3: I think there was another thing that I wanted to
Speaker 3: say as well about it. It's not just price as well,
Speaker 3: because the thing about sodium is it's got other benefits
Speaker 3: and a particular in around in safety, which might sort
Speaker 3: of make it more interesting. Particular I was thinking in
Speaker 3: a domestic area and stuff like that. So yeah, it's
Speaker 3: going to be very interesting to see what happens in
Speaker 3: the space in the next twelve months, but even beyond that,
Speaker 3: in the next two years.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, although sodium being less dense than lithium, the battery
Speaker 2: is going to be bigger, which of course is a
Speaker 2: problem for cars, but it's not really a problem for best.
Speaker 2: It's not a problem for best, right, Yeah, even considering
Speaker 2: I look at batteries done like three or four years ago,
Speaker 2: you know, like hundred mega what and now I see
Speaker 2: the footprint and it's crazy how much it can pack
Speaker 2: more in a tiny space. So you know, even if
Speaker 2: sodium you need to double the size, you'll still be
Speaker 2: less than some batteries done with litium five years ago.
Speaker 2: So yeah, that's good.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I suppose there's I think the other thing
Speaker 3: I took out of it really is it all goes
Speaker 3: back to the man for the end products, whether it's
Speaker 3: solar panels or bacheries or the grid. We're in a
Speaker 3: world where we're electrifying everything and these are key technologies.
Speaker 3: So I take away from it as well that this
Speaker 3: is structural, you know, and that this growth copy here
Speaker 3: for many years in front of us of all.
Speaker 2: Yes, But on the other hand, a lot of copper
Speaker 2: went into China real estate boom, which is not there anymore.
Speaker 2: So at the end of the day, there is so
Speaker 2: much lack of consensus, even among the best experts. Those
Speaker 2: guys took in their books that it's really hard to
Speaker 2: establish your consensus. Well, two things before we close up.
Speaker 2: The first is Accord by Jeff Curry that we mentioned
Speaker 2: in the podcast, but maybe you want to say something
Speaker 2: about him.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and Jeff Curry listen. At the end of the days,
Speaker 3: we had a commodities in Golmo's acts for many, many years,
Speaker 3: and he's now gone on the investment side with Carlisle.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and he produced a report last year which was
Speaker 2: very well received called the Usual effect. But he said
Speaker 2: this wonderful sentence spot prices, solve surpluses, long term contract
Speaker 2: solve shortages. Yeah that's good. Yeah, yeah, that's a good one.
Speaker 2: And before we leave, we want to salute our friends
Speaker 2: at the Volta Foundation who last months put their Bible
Speaker 2: out seven hundred and fifty pages on everything you want
Speaker 2: to know about batteries from supply chain to technology, to
Speaker 2: industries to government. It is online. We're going to put
Speaker 2: the link in a note. It is phenomenal. So thank
Speaker 2: you very much to the Volta Foundation.
Speaker 3: For the Bible of Batteries.
Speaker 2: Absolutely okay, Jah, was a great conversation and I took
Speaker 2: to you next week looking forward toard.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to Readefining Energy.
Speaker 3: Don't forget to read the show and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
Speaker 3: or the platform of your choice.