Electrification's Next Chapter | Mining Mindset Clips

Generally, the electrification ship has sailed - it's out there and it's not coming back. Scooters are electrified, motorcycles are being electrified, cars are electrified, trucks are being electrified, buses are being electrified, and even helicopters are being electrified.

There's a company that produces an eVTOL - an electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. It's a two-passenger helicopter run on a battery. There are also aircraft companies looking to develop battery-powered airplanes.

I think step one is going to be a hybrid, because you use an enormous amount of power taking off and landing, but once you're up in the air you could run off battery. The other thing that needs to happen is energy density - the power per kilogram of a battery needs to increase. For airplanes, it may need to push close to a thousand kilowatt-hours per kilogram. You'd need either huge batteries at current densities - Tesla vehicles are very heavy for a reason - or some type of higher-density chemistry.

I was at a Benchmark Minerals conference last week, and one of the tours was to an aircraft company developing a hybrid airplane. So it's happening now. That's why I say the realities of life are that EV mandates don't matter anymore. You don't need EV mandates because people want to disrupt the disruptors. Tesla was the leader, and now everybody wants to put Tesla out of business by building the next car that's supposed to be better.

The other thing is that people have to spend money to build a battery plant, and they're not cheap. When you decide you're going to produce a vehicle and spend three billion dollars on a battery plant that happens to be an NMC technology, you're not going to come in next year, or next five years, or maybe even next ten years and change it. It'll be a slow transition from one battery chemistry to another, even though there are all these people out there trying to disrupt the battery system - sodium-ion batteries trying to get rid of lithium-ion batteries.

What industries or markets will see the most significant impact from high-purity manganese products besides electric vehicles? It's electric vehicles and energy storage.

You've got wind and solar and other intermittent power generation - you need to be able to store that energy somewhere. That's where batteries come in. I call them container-size batteries, and you can have one to a hundred or more of these batteries collecting the energy created by a windmill or a solar plant, charging all these batteries, and then when the wind stops blowing or the sun stops shining, you drain those big batteries. That's a big market for NMC as well as other battery chemistries.

I think there'll be more LFPs and there'll be more manganese in the LFPs. One of the issues I'm hearing from the manganese in LFP batteries is that the manganese tends to deteriorate over time. At a certain point, that manganese may not be there. So how do you keep the manganese in that battery chemistry for the longer term? That's an active area of research.

The other thing we'll have a lot more of is recycling of vehicle batteries. We'll be out 15 to 20 years, and those batteries will have long reached their useful life and start coming back into the recycle economy - there'll be a whole lot more of that.

Over the past five to ten years, the research focus has been on getting a battery we can put in a car - nobody was worried about recycling. Now people are worried about the circular economy: how do we design a battery for being recycled? You've got all these different chemicals and metals in these batteries. How do you design that battery to begin with so that it's much easier to recycle those materials? The recycling portion of the business will be much more advanced than it is at the moment.

There'll be a range of different technologies for producing power - hydrocarbons, nuclear, solar, wind, and there may be other things we don't know about yet.

I think nuclear is going to make a bigger comeback, especially because of smaller nuclear pieces of equipment - small modular reactors that could power a specific project, not just a big nuclear plant that's going to power a whole area, but targeted, project-specific use cases.