Jef Caers: How better mineral exploration makes better batteries
today on the future of everything the future of mining when we think of mining we think of deep tunnels leading to valuable deposits of gold or coal or diamonds we may also think of the search for other precious metals that shaped so much of the western united states california and alaska especially but one of the main targets of mining today are the metals needed to create batteries nickel cobalt lithium with the increased emphasis on renewable energy sources the problem in many ways becomes how do we store energy that is episodic the wind only blows sometimes even in windy spots hydropower is probably much stronger in the spring during a big melt when and of course for solar power the sun is not up all day so batteries become critically important as consumers we see them in our cell phones and our computers and increasingly in our cars but we need methods for storing electricity and we need better batteries and more of them so we need a large amount of the basic ingredients required to make batteries and that's where nickel cobalt lithium and other elements come in where are the world's stores of these metals and how can we efficiently find them extract them in the most environmentally responsible manner while also ensuring the safety and fair treatment of the miners who do all this work professor jeff cares is a professor of geological sciences at stanford university and the director of the earth sciences resource forecasting jeff how urgent is the need to find new sources of these metals thanks russ yes absolutely right one of the things i want to emphasize on what you said is that basically to address this climate change problem we need to go from basically burning liquids to moving to an economy that's based on solids some materials and so right now the problem is that most of these minerals particularly cobalt uh is only found in the democratic of congo and about 60 percent of the world reserves and much of the world production is coming from there as you know congo has a lot of issues the mining that happens there is uh severe poor human conditions often artisanal mining by children poor environmental regulations and so this is a huge problem what we're essentially looking at russ is that we are creating a new resources curse we're going from this big pool of oil in saudi arabia to this big pool of metals that are in the in in this country and that's a problem that needs to be addressed so there's a there's a risk of having much of the history of the end of the 20th century repeated just in a new part of the world and with a new set of players absolutely we're also lacking uh still if you think about you know i i've made this small simple calculation where imagine that every car in the world right uh about one and a half billion cars to turn them into teslas so let's say you know elon musk's pipe dream is being fulfilled uh i calculated that's about need about six and a half million metric tons of cobalt just to to charge those uh to have those cars right now we have about the same amount discovered but the problem today is we're only producing about 150 000 metric tons so we're way way behind in this curve and there's what you're mentioning is urgency of doing this is is today it's not sort of a pipe dream in the future where you can say oh let's develop a much better battery without all these polluting metals uh essentially we need to do this today because you know the tipping points in the climate is or they're happening in the next two decades so i want to go back to something you said at the very beginning of your comments you said we're moving from fluids to solids could you unpack that for me what does that actually mean to for uh i just i want to explore that a little bit because i i don't i haven't heard it stated that way previously right so the our problem often in sustainability is that of waste what do we do with waste we're humans reproducing all the waste so right now we're taking these uh oil and gas and we're burning them and so the waste we're creating is gases so gases are stored basically our atmosphere is a waste dump for the gases that we're producing so uh and one of the issues with that is gases are just difficult to capture when people are talking about co2 sequestration but to do that you have to go this huge huge fast amount of infrastructure so with mining of course mining is very polluting but it's also very local so there's a more ability to to control and the second thing is that we don't put any more liquids or gases into our cars now we have this battery uh that's there i you know um the uh i collaborated company in berkeley called cobalt metals and and kurt house uh the ceo told me that you know even in california if you would charge your battery produced with coal burning electricity it would still be better than with natural gas electricity so so there is in terms of the waste products in terms of the waste product and uh being generated i think people would find that is surprising it is very surprising yeah so so okay so i want to go back a little bit to these metals so um you might need to give us a little uh a metallurgy 101 101. i mentioned in my introduction mostly because i read some of your papers and and watched some of your talks that nickel cobalt and lithium are their major players and i think everybody recognizes lithium and to some extent nickel batteries um can you just tell us what's special about these metals and what is the status of the you said i think that there's probably enough cobalt around but it's in the ground still and it hasn't been extracted so give us a little bit of a 101 tutorial about these metals and their roles in these batteries right so the most uh popular rechargeable battery today is the lithium-ion uh battery and so to to have a battery as you know you need an anode and a cathode and an electrolyte right so the anode is easy that's just stuff that sits in your pencil it's called graphite uh the cathode you you're looking at creating uh are using essentially metals that create that create batteries that have a high um energy density that is really the key you want density and you want power and those things are it's like a bathtub right you fill up your bathtub there's a lot of energy and you drain it if you drain it fast there's a lot of power so cobalt is just that particular sweet spot and metals that creates that energy density and also has the safety issue because you may have heard about planes you know having lithium batteries that catch fire and so you don't want that you don't want your tesla car to catch uh be on fire so so cobalt has these innate properties uh that are there so cobalt of course is not found in a natural form and it's in elemental form it's found in minerals you know cobalt and linea there's all these kind of minerals that are around and there are these particular types of deposits because because it's a metal uh the mythology as you say it's very important the formation of these is very specific you know you don't find just in a sandstone or or just a basalt you don't find it has to be concentrated in the earth and there are some very complex processes that going on so this basically resulted from the formation of the earth you know a couple of billion years ago well yeah uh so it is indeed is often associated with magmas uh magmatic sulfides for example they're found in canada uh where these fluids that are concentrated in the metals coming up and they then get deposited at the surface so this has been going on for much of geological history uh these are processes that are keep going on but of course they go on just like oil production at a very vast millions of of years of time scale okay great and so um where do are we moving from lithium batteries to cobalt batteries or is it more complicated than that no no it's we will be having the listing will be that main metal because it's a light metal so that's why but the cobalt is the associated elements that creates the safety and the energy so you're mixing in the cobalt would my typical battery and my laptop or cell phone have cobalt in it today or is that an emerging it has so your cell phone will have cobalt but but it's not an essential important element in the sense of the cost performance issue because your phone is very expensive so that small amount of cobalt is not gonna matter but it's gonna matter a great deal in electrical vehicles of course where you need a whole lot more energy and so the cobalt amounts about four and a half kilograms into a tesla that you find so these amounts and then also your home charging stations you know they're going to have all that a cobalt needed for that this is the future of everything i'm russ altman i'm speaking with jeff cares about batteries metals and mining okay so we we know that there are these geological processes that are forming especially cobalt which seems like it's a especially uh uh stressful stressful metal to find these days and and you made a reference in your comments that uh that there are spots in africa and in fact perhaps not the most stable uh governmental situations where a lot of this cobalt is found and i know that you've done a lot of research in methods for identifying potential locations where you could then dig and look for so what is the um outlook in terms of discovering new sources or stabilizing existing sources that have been recognized already so the uh the project and then the ideas that i'm working on also again together with this company cobalt metals is really to find these battery metals in countries with stable regimes and environmental regulations work regulations and so that's going to be very important this is a huge challenge because half of the reserves are in the congo so we are lacking a lot of in in countries where we need regulations where we have regulations the problem we have today middle exploration is it's an extremely slow process this is very expert driven you know geologists go look at rocks and analyze it and you know they have their fun outdoors uh i'm the indoor geologist they just do the software modeling uh you don't get to do the field work i don't get these exotic places yeah i just go camping in the desert on my own you know on vacation so the here's the thing russ the discovery rate right now is almost zero we have if you look at the history of copper deposits cobalt is often associated with copper okay i've been about 200 something major deposits found about 15 have been found i think in the last 10 years and only one has been found in the last last year and the reason for that is that all the major easy things to discover they have been discovered so now we need to go look subsurface means under a cover of sediment where you have no idea you're standing on that on the ground let's say you're standing in death valley and you want to know what's under your feet and so we need technology that is much faster than this expert driven kind of geology driven or geologist driven expert exploration two more data driven and also ai driven type of exploration right so a lot of those what you were referring to as easy discoveries the the humans discovered patterns they were probably pretty good at noticing patterns of the types of geographies and the types of and so they they were able to capture those but now if you go to a whole new regime of types of deposits all of their experience is without being disrespectful irrelevant to these new potential sources so how does data science and ai help you yeah so i mean that expertise is still very relevant right understanding the data that you're getting um i see it uh as a as a as a play in chess with nature right it's you it's it's it's one move it's not one move at a time what you're gonna have to do is use geophysical techniques like remote sensing techniques but they go underground and there are many types uh things that look for magnetic anomalies or density anomalies gravity anomalies etc little signatures that the metals might send you every probe but we're looking at the area at a say the scale of ontario canada oh so it's not like let's go fly a plane over canada and we'll find them this is like uh essentially a set of sequential decisions you're going to have to make you want to go there and if you did that what would you do next and what would you do next so what i'm working on is basically the same ai as deep mind is is is trying to use to play chess against something but our chess is much more difficult because it's very uncertain where the pieces are so to speak of nature nature is laughing at us right now and saying i'm holding my secrets but what are the moves we need to make and what are the data acquisitions that we need to take and what are optimized data acquisition we need to take in order to have major discoveries i see so your metric of success there is um reducing the false leads so i i guess it's a loss if you say we should dig here and forgive my language and you dig and you don't find any cobalt and you would like to enrich so that on for a hundred tries you get a much greater uh yield exactly yeah how is it going and is this something that is done in industry or academia i could imagine arguments on both sides the industrialists they have the ability to scale i mean you said it's the entire area of ontario that makes me think okay i'm not sure an academic can do that much on the other hand you have kind of access to the latest technologies in terms of ai and so how do you do that balance that's a good question uh russ and this is typical for a lot of the earth's resources industries the old industries oil industry mining industry they typically have great expertise in geophysics you know a geology but but but they're lagging behind in in the new technologies uh data and and ai in particular and i think you're raising a very important question which is how do we do this now and how do you accelerate this you know sustainable energy future i think the collaboration between uh companies and the company i work on cobalt metals is a really visionary company it's a company that does not only do the data engineering the machine learning the iai but it's also a company that goes and actually does the drilling so they're facing their own uncertainty models and decisions and they also pay for it if it's a bad guess right exactly the bill they're footing their own bell the biggest challenge for us in mineral exploration is what you called false positives right this is the bias in the data that if you just do machine learning you run into a huge problem why because people have gone in areas where they looked for medals so you have a lot of positives but you don't have any negatives right so you don't find the negatives and you have this imbalance and the biggest problem that the mineral industry has in exploration is the false positive as you said you know you go somewhere and there's just nothing there and that is why ai comes in is to reduce this amount of false positives by leveraging data and machine learning and uh and so the the problem is today russ also is how who does that as you said is academia doing that right i was wondering how you see that it's really the synergy that we need if you want to accelerate this kind of sustainable energy i feel it's the synergy that we have between companies and academia where the latest newest thing is happening but companies also have 10 data engineers that can you know engineer the problem if i'm a pi i can just hire 10 students and you know make nice data sets uh so that's it that's where this synergy is really needed so for this collaboration with this particular company how has the labor been divided what are the things your team in academia is focusing on and what is the company focusing on so the company is really focusing on upscaling the things that are done in academia onto a continent scale right where you're leveraging cloud computing uh you're leveraging data engineering uh methods uh in order to make this just happen at this scale because i said they're not just interested in making a software they're interested in making an actual discovery and paying for it an academic side i've been looking for 20 years we've known that for a long time building up this all these ideas and and techniques of statistics i'm not really more on applied station uh to to say okay but with a buddha with the practice in mind to come up with those techniques that are required to do so and that's not just you do in two years either that is something that you do over a career no that's very exciting and it sounds like it takes advantages of both the strengths at the academia and pushing the new frontiers of algorithms and data science and then they're able to scale it up we're going to have more on the future of everything i'm russ altman more with jeff cares about mining lithium cobalt nickel and how to build better batteries in the future next on sirius xm welcome back to the future of everything i'm russ altman i'm speaking with jeff cares about mining geology batteries so uh in the end of the last section we were talking about these great challenges for using ai company and academic academic collaboration i wanted to ask you about this idea of energy independence um uh you've written about it you've talked about it what is energy independence and why should we care about it yeah i think it's a good question russ and if you look at the united states you know in the united states we like to talk about energy independence i like to come back to this car example that i i mentioned in the beginning about this one and a half billion cars so the united states has about 300 million cars a little less than that so if you look at again at this analogy where four and a half kilogram of cobalt just if you look focus on cobalt in a car that will mean about 1.25 metric a million metric tons of cobalt so i tell you today we are mining uh production 500 metric tons okay way way off way is like like zero it's essentially zero zero uh and we only have a known reserve of of 38 000 metric tons now when you say we this is the united states united states yeah so where where there's a number of problems with that of course cuba if you look at cuba itself it probably has probably something like twice or three times the u.s on its own of course we talked about uh countries like canada or as well uh morocco finland russia so it's it's kind of uh you know there it exists in many areas another problem are you saying that cuba has three times more cobalt reserves than i'm going to look at my numbers here uh i think in production it has about 10 times the united states wow and uh and it has about 10 times the number of reserves and this is basically just the luck of the draw about what's underneath cuba it is also a matter of exploration the united states has not invested united our government has not invested simply enough i can tell you an example uh if you look at the databases because when you when you're going to do this and you do data engineering the databases in canada are so much better than the databases in the united states when it comes to particular these metals all right there are of course great reports by the usgs united states geological survey but really to look at the next thing which is go look for it and explore drill get more data i believe we are we're way behind that with the relative to under others so so this is important so am i right in in then inferring that we have very low reserves right now but we really haven't looked so there might be good news underneath the ground there is uh there are several areas in the united states uh arizona even california if you if you look at you know all the states uh out there there are probably 25 states where you know there could be a cobalt deposits um and so so if we look better if we start to uh understand better true to physical imaging and surveying uh at a resolution where you can start to discover it because a deposit is not very big right you know it's like a kilometer scale thing it's not a 10 kilometer scale thing but we're looking at the size of the united states again we're looking at exploring on vast areas so that investment has has to come if you want to go and you know mine our own uh cobalt the second thing i want to talk about is the processing of the ore right as you know just like rare earth elements um you know a lot of processing i've done in china i don't know necessarily about battery models but processing metals is a big industry the metallurgy and so that's another one of the pipeline that you need to start thinking about if you go into this uh energy battery energy economy so i am presuming that from your comments that we are not doing a lot of the basic uh processing here in the united states and and to you that represents a risk because we become dependent on foreign sources for things that we rely on like our cars and our cell phones um so there's uh now so very interestingly you said that the database for canada is very good and our database is not as good so where will the will come what needs to happen in the united states and then of course are you making it happen well dear darris movement uh there's movement in the senate particularly uh murkowski the alaska senator um she's really pushing uh for us to really invest into this i think the new administration with president-elect biden is gonna look at this i think very seriously um you know also looking at a of course a science-based uh climate change based policies they're going to quickly discover that that's going to also be one of the issues uh you know building of infrastructure is is a big issue as well we have to build new infrastructure so so it's this whole network of things that that needs to happen uh and that that's going to be key in uh for the future so i'm sure that some of the people are thinking about this topic are worried about the process especially the processing uh as a potentially uh dirty activity and dirt and what i mean by dirty is that it's a polluting activity so can you tell me about what are the challenges how good is our processing capability and how green is it for the lack of a better term right or is this something we really need to worry about it's something we need to worry about in mythology of course is you know some of these cobalt minerals they can contain arsenic uh you know the arsenites and stuff like that so the metal industry of course is it's an issue but um it's it's a whole lot less of an issue than say uh burning natural gas to create energy uh this the second thing is i think is that it creates a uh a recycling economy so it's a closed economy yes i wanted to ask you about this so for those three medals how much can we reclaim at the end of a battery life i i don't know the real answer to that but it's it's pretty it's probably very high i think you're looking at if i remember vaguely but it's about 90 so there's a you can really create this closed loop economy where after after time you have mined all the cobalt you need or all the metals you need and you just keep recycling them uh now the recycling processes are polluting um but they are also concentrated in you know in in these plants that we can start thinking about uh or capturing the gases and whatnot that are associated with that and that just becomes like many other things that becomes a an imperative research program to make sure that we invent a a future where this essentially becomes sustainable so there's an initial harvesting from the ground but i guess i hope i'm not being pollyanna-ish but once that initial harvest has occurred if if the technologies allow for the reprocessing of it then it becomes much more sustainable yeah exactly and this is what i mentioned in the beginning of going from from liquids to solids right right solid is solid waste it's just a whole lot more easy to recycle than gases yes and this is the thing and so that's that's why uh this is such a big revolution that has to happen so now we have focused a lot on cobalt because as i understand it's a limiting a limiting agent for a lot of these batteries but can you give us a summary of what's the status of our nickel and lithium reserves is that fine no problem or are there some challenges there's also challenges there last though uh the problem with nickel is about the three times as a sort of production shortage in the future we'll have to produce about three times more and there's a deficit right there the problem with nickel is um that it is often in low grade deposits and so you have to mine much more of it the processing is much more expensive so in order to keep the prices low you need to still discover a lot of of nickel deposits do you know if nickel is still used to make nickels in the united states i don't have no idea that's a good question this is a stump the geologist i'm sorry okay so nickel the reserves are there but it's uh it takes a lot more work to extract from those reserves what about lithium um lithium i'm not so familiar with i've been focusing a lot on the cobalt and nickel numbers and there are huge deposits particularly in bolivia and so bolivia was you know as also these countries are becoming the saudi arabia of lithium yes uh so again uh discovering those deposits is going to be important as well it's not just about the reserves it's also about the geographic diversification of where are you finding things you don't want to find everything in one country right that's a problem that's the resources course that's going on and so that for these countries that do have these reserves they have a challenge of kind of nurturing it for the welfare of their people but then there of course are great global pressures on them to distribute and uh exactly this and this is the saudi arabia challenge that you that you referred to so is there good global cooperation in this area or is it every country out for themselves currently it's much like that you know resources separate country out for themselves uh it's market driven uh so it's capitalist driven so it's it's not you know it's not a socialist system so yeah it's definitely every country for themselves and i don't think we have uh necessarily i mean people have analyzed this problem but now we are facing this problem urgently in the next two decades uh people of course are thinking about other types of batteries and stanford is doing a lot of work and research great research in this area but those technologies are at least 10 years away to become like really at the manufacturing scale and distribution and this is the technology that we have in hand so we need to make sure that there's at least a plan to continue that well thank you for listening to the future of everything i'm russ altman if you missed any of this 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2021-01-09 13:53
