AI transcript
0:00:03 – Hi, and welcome to the A16Z podcast.
0:00:05 I’m Hannah, and this episode is all about
0:00:08 the exploration for and mining of minerals,
0:00:10 specifically cobalt.
0:00:12 In this conversation, I’m joined by Kurt Haus,
0:00:14 CEO and co-founder of Cobalt Metals,
0:00:18 Professor John Thompson of Earth and Geosciences at Cornell,
0:00:21 and A16Z general partner on the consumer team, Connie Chan.
0:00:24 We explain why it is that cobalt is suddenly one
0:00:27 of the most important and in-demand metals on the planet,
0:00:29 and how technology is transforming
0:00:32 how we find it and the mining industry as a whole.
0:00:34 Along the way, we touch on a little bit
0:00:36 of battery tech history and science,
0:00:39 and how entire chapters of human civilization
0:00:42 are driven by the search for and mining of metals
0:00:45 from ancient civilizations first finding copper
0:00:47 to the major ground shift in the 1950s
0:00:50 with geophysics and knowledge of plate tectonics.
0:00:52 And finally, what kinds of new data sources,
0:00:54 technologies, and techniques we can use
0:00:56 to find more cobalt today.
0:00:59 Everything from geophysical and geochemical data
0:01:01 to agricultural information to old boxes
0:01:03 collected over centuries in the basements
0:01:05 and attics of mining companies.
0:01:08 All of this to satisfy the incredible new demand
0:01:11 as we enter a new age of battery metals.
0:01:13 Why are we even sitting around this table
0:01:14 talking about cobalt today?
0:01:17 What is it that’s suddenly so interesting about cobalt?
0:01:19 I think of it as a color, as a prep, right?
0:01:20 – Well, that’s actually right.
0:01:23 And that was the very, very first use of cobalt.
0:01:26 The very, very first use was in dyes,
0:01:29 and to get a particular type of blue,
0:01:30 that was the principal way to do it.
0:01:32 – And when was it discovered?
0:01:34 – The actual metal was first isolated as a metal.
0:01:36 And I think I’m pretty sure it’s 1739.
0:01:39 – So if you go back 15 years or so,
0:01:42 its principal uses were in high,
0:01:44 sort of high strength steels and things like that.
0:01:48 So cobalt demand sort of grew gradually,
0:01:50 but everybody listening to this podcast
0:01:53 and presumably listening to this podcast on their device
0:01:57 has 10 grams of cobalt in that device about.
0:01:58 – Some might be listening from their cars.
0:02:01 – That’s true, so good point.
0:02:02 In which case, if they happen to be driving
0:02:05 an electric vehicle, it could be closer
0:02:07 to 10 or 20 kilograms of cobalt.
0:02:09 – It’s the battery that uses the cobalt.
0:02:11 – It makes the best batteries.
0:02:13 Everyone knows they have a lithium,
0:02:15 sort of a lithium-ion battery in their phone,
0:02:17 but that’s a chemical reaction
0:02:19 between lithium and cobalt oxide.
0:02:22 And so the two parts of the chemical reaction are essential,
0:02:23 and the greatest energy density,
0:02:26 greatest rate capability,
0:02:28 how fast you can discharge the battery,
0:02:30 greatest cycle life, that kind of thing.
0:02:32 That has some or all cobalt in it.
0:02:33 – Why is that?
0:02:36 Can we get into the science of why that’s the best battery?
0:02:38 – The reason cobalt makes a great battery
0:02:40 is that the battery in your iPhone
0:02:44 is what we call a lithium intercalation cathode.
0:02:46 That’s a fancy name, but what it means is,
0:02:47 lithium is the mobile ion.
0:02:51 So a battery has an anode and a cathode,
0:02:54 and an ion that moves from the anode to the cathode
0:02:58 to react chemically and form a new molecule
0:02:58 that’s more stable.
0:03:01 The cathode looks like kind of like a layered sandwich.
0:03:04 It has cobalt oxide, then lithium,
0:03:06 then cobalt oxide, then lithium, then cobalt oxide.
0:03:07 – Oh, like a layer cake.
0:03:09 – A layer cake, in a fully discharged sense.
0:03:11 You can imagine very intuitively why that’s good,
0:03:14 because the lithium has to get access to the cobalt.
0:03:15 So when you fully charge it,
0:03:17 when you push the lithium out of the cathode,
0:03:20 the lithium can intercalate into those spaces very easily.
0:03:23 And put simply, cobalt forms
0:03:25 the most stable layered structures.
0:03:27 So as you pull lithium out,
0:03:29 it doesn’t sort of disorder or change,
0:03:32 and other similar metals tend to change.
0:03:36 And when they change, then you lose capacity.
0:03:37 Your battery fades over time.
0:03:38 Basically because it forms
0:03:40 that really robust crystal structure,
0:03:43 it forms the longest lasting batteries.
0:03:45 And then it also has the sort of the greatest energy
0:03:48 per molecule for a lithium oxide battery.
0:03:50 – And this is by orders of magnitude.
0:03:53 So like right next to lithium on the periodic table is nickel.
0:03:55 And if you made a nickel oxide,
0:03:57 lithium nickel oxide battery, it would work okay.
0:03:58 But on your first cycle,
0:04:02 it would have maybe 10% less energy density.
0:04:03 Over a hundred cycles,
0:04:06 then it would have maybe 50% less energy density.
0:04:07 – So it really adds up.
0:04:09 In the same age when you’re shopping for your iPhone,
0:04:12 battery life is one of the key things you think about.
0:04:14 – And especially with your electric vehicle.
0:04:16 – And with your electric vehicle, right?
0:04:18 It determines how long you can drive with a car.
0:04:19 – And batteries,
0:04:21 the whole battery technology world is really interesting
0:04:23 ’cause it’s such an important part of our life now.
0:04:25 So if you go back 50, 100 years,
0:04:28 the lead acid battery, which is the first car battery,
0:04:31 which is still the dominant battery
0:04:34 for starting lights and ignition, the SLI battery.
0:04:35 But once you’ve got an established battery
0:04:37 that works that people trust,
0:04:38 it’s quite hard to displace it.
0:04:40 So you’ve got to be convinced people
0:04:41 with any new battery technology
0:04:44 that it’s gonna deliver the right amount of charge
0:04:46 at many, many times.
0:04:49 If you bought your phone and tomorrow had to go back
0:04:51 to get a new battery, you wouldn’t be very happy.
0:04:52 – Right.
0:04:55 – This is where Cobalt is a key piece of that puzzle
0:04:57 ’cause it offers a level of reliability
0:05:00 that it’s gonna be hard to substitute.
0:05:01 – To sum it up simply,
0:05:03 it’s the things you really care about
0:05:05 are rate at which you can charge and discharge it,
0:05:07 how much energy there is per unit mass
0:05:08 and per unit volume,
0:05:11 and how long it lasts in a single charge
0:05:14 and then how much that charge fades over many cycles.
0:05:17 And for all those elements, Cobalt is superior.
0:05:20 – So we went from using it to make a pretty color
0:05:23 to suddenly needing it all around us.
0:05:24 – You can almost define human history
0:05:26 by the types of metals that we were pulling
0:05:28 out of the ground during that time.
0:05:31 And in fact, if you look at the 8,000 years
0:05:34 from the beginning of the metal ages to about 1970,
0:05:37 we produced a certain amount of metals
0:05:38 we pulled out of the ground, called that X.
0:05:41 In the last 50 years, we pulled out the same amount again.
0:05:43 So throughout all human history, now we’ve pulled out two X.
0:05:45 We reproduced it in the last 50 years.
0:05:47 In the next 30, we’re gonna pull out another two X
0:05:49 just on current trends, okay?
0:05:51 It’s the mass of materials coming out of the ground.
0:05:52 But here’s the thing,
0:05:54 the types of metals that we’re pulling out of the ground
0:05:58 are changing and they’re changing for both society trends
0:05:59 and society’s needs, right?
0:06:01 So in the next less than 100 years,
0:06:04 we have to rebuild the entire energy infrastructure
0:06:05 of the world.
0:06:07 Some of that requires the types of metals
0:06:08 that we’ve been pulling out of the ground for a long time,
0:06:10 but some of it requires totally new metals.
0:06:12 And we need lots of new materials.
0:06:13 We need lots of lithium.
0:06:14 We need lots of manganese.
0:06:15 We need lots of cobalt.
0:06:19 If we’re going to convert the entire automobile fleet
0:06:20 to an electric fleet,
0:06:23 we need vastly more cobalt than we’ve pulled out to date.
0:06:24 And in order to do that,
0:06:26 we need to find new sources of cobalt
0:06:27 and that’s what we do.
0:06:28 So how do you do that?
0:06:29 The metal that we need is changing
0:06:30 and now we need cobalt.
0:06:33 How is the way we mine the way we source it changing too?
0:06:35 And actually, let’s go back and start earlier.
0:06:37 What does the history of mining cobalt look like?
0:06:39 The act of exploration and discovery
0:06:42 is fundamentally an information problem, right?
0:06:45 And so the mineral exploration business
0:06:47 is an incredibly old industry
0:06:49 and it’s essentially driven and been driven
0:06:53 by the evolution of civilization.
0:06:55 Right, it’s as old as humanity.
0:06:56 It started pretty much with copper
0:06:59 and that’s because people have actually found copper,
0:07:00 the metal sticking out of the ground.
0:07:01 So they used it.
0:07:02 They could make it into different things
0:07:04 and make it into ornaments and so on.
0:07:06 So this was the very beginnings of metallurgy
0:07:08 as a science, as a discipline.
0:07:11 It’s very cool because they somehow very creatively
0:07:13 worked out how to extract metals from rocks
0:07:16 that looked green ’cause they have copper in them
0:07:18 but didn’t obviously show the copper
0:07:21 until they were smelted effectively in a very hot fire
0:07:24 and a fire that was a lot hotter than a campfire.
0:07:25 So somehow these people had figured out
0:07:28 how to get the temperature of the fire up to a level
0:07:32 where it could reduce the copper bearing material
0:07:34 and extract the metal from that and that’s amazing.
0:07:37 So that’s six, 7,000 years ago.
0:07:39 And that process of exploration back then
0:07:41 just looked like kind of studying the land,
0:07:44 understanding and reading the earth around us.
0:07:46 I read an article recently about the Vikings
0:07:51 and the age of iron and how the Vikings, they think,
0:07:53 were able to identify where the iron,
0:07:56 the bog iron was through a kind of microbial sheen,
0:07:57 apparently.
0:07:59 It’s all based on observation.
0:08:02 And then sort of correlation of different factors
0:08:05 that were purely observation and experiential.
0:08:07 Effectively, that’s the sort of original prospect
0:08:09 of the person who could go into the ground
0:08:11 and recognize that this had potential.
0:08:15 And that really was the way all exploration was done
0:08:17 until about 1950.
0:08:19 They went to places where they could still observe
0:08:20 the metals or the minerals then
0:08:22 that they knew had the metals in,
0:08:24 even if they didn’t understand exactly why
0:08:26 or how or what the concentration was.
0:08:27 – But oftentimes the minerals
0:08:29 aren’t sitting above the earth.
0:08:30 – No, not now.
0:08:33 They’d find it on the surface and they’d keep mining down.
0:08:34 And originally they would mine down
0:08:35 till they hit the water table
0:08:37 and then they couldn’t deal with it.
0:08:40 The Romans then started using wheels to actually de-water.
0:08:42 So they could then go deeper.
0:08:44 And the breakthrough in the Industrial Revolution
0:08:45 was the steam engine,
0:08:47 which then allowed them to make pumps
0:08:50 that then could take the water from much, much deeper levels.
0:08:52 So at that point then they could chase it further and further.
0:08:54 But they didn’t know where it was going.
0:08:55 They just followed it.
0:08:56 – Blindly.
0:09:00 – So the 1950s was when we started to develop technologies,
0:09:02 remote technologies, geophysical technologies
0:09:04 that could predict where things were going
0:09:07 and predict where things might be.
0:09:08 – Really recent actually.
0:09:10 – And what were those sort of different sources
0:09:12 of information in the 1950s that changed
0:09:13 that we started becoming aware
0:09:15 of these new Earth’s processes?
0:09:16 – So two really.
0:09:19 One was what was called the plate tectonic revolution
0:09:21 of the 1960s to 70s.
0:09:24 When people realized that the planet is dynamic
0:09:26 and that the planet is descending
0:09:29 off the west coast here of North America,
0:09:31 the ocean plate is going beneath us
0:09:34 and that’s giving us all earthquakes and volcanoes and so on.
0:09:37 And simultaneously was the development of geophysics.
0:09:40 So the ability to detect the signature of the Earth
0:09:43 beneath the surface in terms of its physical properties.
0:09:46 So how magnetic it is, how dense it is,
0:09:47 how conductive it is,
0:09:49 we started to be able to measure those things.
0:09:51 Those measurements, the data that comes from that,
0:09:54 correlates in some cases with the presence of metals.
0:09:56 – How much does it correlate?
0:09:57 How predictive was it really?
0:09:58 – Poorly is the answer.
0:10:00 (laughing)
0:10:03 There were many false positives.
0:10:06 So we generated maps of magnetic signatures
0:10:08 and people would say there’s all these
0:10:10 fancy looking anomalous bumps in the data
0:10:13 and they drill them, they put holes in the ground
0:10:15 and it turned out that one in a hundred
0:10:16 would actually be interesting.
0:10:18 – Incredible amount of investment and effort
0:10:20 and tools, interesting.
0:10:21 – And that hasn’t changed.
0:10:22 We’ve got more and more tools now,
0:10:26 but if statistically when we look at the chance of discovery,
0:10:27 our odds are still very low.
0:10:28 You know, we’re in thousands,
0:10:30 one in thousand, one in 5,000.
0:10:31 – Well, let’s go back to Cobalt
0:10:33 and talk about what that process has looked like
0:10:35 for Cobalt because it hasn’t,
0:10:37 we haven’t, there hasn’t been a reason
0:10:41 to invest a lot of discovery in Cobalt, right?
0:10:42 Up until this point.
0:10:43 – Yeah, that’s exactly right.
0:10:44 – Besides pretty pictures.
0:10:45 – Right, that’s right.
0:10:46 So one of the interesting things
0:10:49 about Cobalt in particular as a metal
0:10:51 is that you have big copper mines
0:10:52 that are principally there because of copper
0:10:55 and they also have a lot of copper and a little bit of Cobalt.
0:10:57 – And that just happens to be because Cobalt and copper
0:10:58 tend to be–
0:10:59 – Hang out together.
0:11:00 – They hang out together.
0:11:01 – Not always, but in certain circumstances they do
0:11:04 and so it was, effectively the marginal cost
0:11:06 to produce Cobalt out of these mines is very low.
0:11:07 – A nice little extra perk.
0:11:08 – It’s an extra perk, right?
0:11:09 You would develop the mine anyway
0:11:11 if there was no Cobalt there.
0:11:14 So you have this sort of kind of gift to the world.
0:11:16 We’re gonna invest in copper production
0:11:18 and we get a little more, a little Cobalt.
0:11:19 And same thing with nickel.
0:11:22 You get a lot of Cobalt associated with nickel.
0:11:25 So that byproduct production of Cobalt
0:11:28 alongside copper and nickel was more than sufficient
0:11:32 to supply the world up until now.
0:11:33 – When you say more than sufficient,
0:11:35 does that mean sometimes people didn’t?
0:11:36 – Absolutely.
0:11:38 – So there’s just piles of Cobalt sitting around?
0:11:40 – Even just in the last 15 years
0:11:42 where copper mines were developed,
0:11:45 the Cobalt was well-known, its presence was well-known
0:11:47 and investment decisions were made
0:11:49 not to extract the Cobalt from the ore,
0:11:51 to extract the copper and to throw the Cobalt
0:11:53 into the tailings pile.
0:11:54 – Why?
0:11:58 – Because at the time if you did make that investment
0:12:01 and supplied that Cobalt, it would have tanked the market.
0:12:02 – Too much.
0:12:05 – Because the demand was not there from the smartphones
0:12:07 and the laptops and the electric cars yet.
0:12:08 – Nobody needs it.
0:12:09 – Quite literally.
0:12:10 – Exactly.
0:12:12 And so now the whole situation has flipped.
0:12:15 So now all of those mine tailings
0:12:19 that are full of Cobalt and that are known
0:12:21 are being reprocessed or investments are being made
0:12:22 to go reprocessed.
0:12:24 – So everyone that was sitting on a garbage pile of Cobalt
0:12:26 is suddenly feeling good about it.
0:12:27 – Oh, absolutely.
0:12:30 In fact, the two largest projects to come online
0:12:34 in the next 18 to 24 months are exactly that,
0:12:36 our waste pile reprocessing projects.
0:12:40 But in order to convert the entire global vehicle fleet
0:12:45 to electric vehicles, we need vastly more than is available.
0:12:47 – Even just current predictions,
0:12:48 if you include global demand,
0:12:52 especially from Asia of electric vehicles,
0:12:56 we’re likely gonna run out of Cobalt from known supply
0:12:57 in less than 10 years.
0:13:00 – Wow, we have the sudden increased demand.
0:13:02 What are the sourcing efforts starting to look like?
0:13:05 How is it changing how we actually find and source Cobalt?
0:13:06 – If you look into the scientific literature
0:13:09 and you look at gold or deposit formation,
0:13:12 you’ll find a very rich scientific literature
0:13:13 on how gold deposits form.
0:13:15 You’ll find a very rich scientific literature
0:13:17 on how copper deposits form.
0:13:19 You will not find a rich scientific literature
0:13:21 on how Cobalt deposits form
0:13:22 because people haven’t looked for it
0:13:23 and people haven’t done that.
0:13:24 – Right, there was not the same incentive.
0:13:25 It just wasn’t important.
0:13:27 – So, John, what does that science look like
0:13:29 for how to find Cobalt?
0:13:30 How much do we know?
0:13:32 – Not very much is the simple answer.
0:13:35 I mean, it’s kind of starting pretty at a basic level.
0:13:37 If we wanted cobalt, we’d have gone looking for copper
0:13:38 and we know how to do that quite well.
0:13:40 And we’d have to go looking for nickel.
0:13:42 – So it’s kind of like piggyback on other knowledge.
0:13:44 – And when we’d hope that we found some copper
0:13:45 and oh, this is terrific.
0:13:47 We’ve got a bit of extra cobalt.
0:13:49 But there’s no science basis for that
0:13:51 to what actually makes cobalt tick.
0:13:56 So understanding what kind of liquid will transport cobalt?
0:13:59 So if we have a fluid that moves through the earth,
0:14:02 you know, just water dominated, maybe salty water,
0:14:05 it moves through the earth and it interacts with a rock,
0:14:07 will it actually extract cobalt?
0:14:09 We know kind of how much copper it might extract,
0:14:10 but we don’t know with cobalt.
0:14:13 So if it did and then it keeps moving
0:14:15 and then that liquid kind of comes up on the surface
0:14:17 or comes into a different environment,
0:14:18 would it precipitate cobalt?
0:14:20 We don’t know the answer to that either.
0:14:21 And yet we know it did that
0:14:23 because we can find occurrences around the world
0:14:25 which are rich in cobalt.
0:14:27 And we can see the evidence that came
0:14:30 from the passage of a liquid through the rock
0:14:33 and it left the cobalt behind in cobalt minerals.
0:14:34 – So that’s one clue.
0:14:35 – So that’s one clue.
0:14:36 And if we understand how that work,
0:14:38 then can we extrapolate to other areas
0:14:40 and predict where it might work again
0:14:42 or where it might even work even better
0:14:44 and give us a greater concentration of cobalt?
0:14:47 So that’s the science kind of basis.
0:14:49 – And what are some of the other clues
0:14:50 that we’re starting to gather
0:14:51 and where you wanna dive deeper
0:14:54 into why is this happening with cobalt?
0:14:56 – Well, it’s key to understand it’s not that rare.
0:14:58 – When you look at the distribution of cobalt,
0:15:01 it occurs in environments that formed from liquid rocks,
0:15:03 so very high temperature, plus 1,000 degrees,
0:15:06 but also it’s precipitating on the ocean floor,
0:15:08 deep, deep on the ocean floor below 4,000 meters
0:15:10 beneath the surface.
0:15:13 We have the nodules, these little concentrations of metal
0:15:15 that are precipitating out of seawater.
0:15:17 And so at seawater temperature,
0:15:19 that’s two degrees in the deep ocean.
0:15:20 – And how do we know those are there?
0:15:23 – They were found in the late 1800s on an expedition
0:15:25 that was just dredging stuff off of the bottom
0:15:27 for the heck of dredging stuff off of the bottom.
0:15:28 – Oh my gosh.
0:15:29 – We pulled up these little round balls
0:15:30 called manganese nodules
0:15:33 because the major constituent actually is manganese,
0:15:35 but they contain significant cobalt.
0:15:38 – And how interesting that that’s what exploration was back
0:15:39 then like let’s just drag.
0:15:42 – Yeah, let’s just pick stuff up on the ocean
0:15:44 and see what’s there.
0:15:45 – The result is we know cobalt can form
0:15:46 at really high temperatures
0:15:49 and we know it can form at really cold temperatures.
0:15:50 That’s a huge range of conditions,
0:15:52 range of pressures, temperatures.
0:15:53 Now we want to get a little bit smarter
0:15:56 and cleverer understand which of those range of conditions
0:15:58 will give us more cobalt
0:16:01 relative to copper or nickel or manganese
0:16:01 or other things that make them more.
0:16:04 – I think that’s where the data play makes so much sense.
0:16:07 – Exactly, that takes us into now the data world.
0:16:09 – Because rather than like comparing
0:16:10 various exploration efforts,
0:16:11 they’re looking at places
0:16:13 that are fundamentally so different.
0:16:17 Now you can track every known source of cobalt
0:16:20 and what aspects or what qualities
0:16:22 around that land made it particular
0:16:23 and then pattern match.
0:16:25 – There’s pattern matching that process
0:16:28 and then there’s just looking at the patterns of data
0:16:30 until and get them to tell us a story.
0:16:33 – That almost reminds me of like the initial way
0:16:35 of looking at the landscape with very little information
0:16:38 and trying to pattern match the green rocks
0:16:40 or the iron sheen or what have you,
0:16:42 but this is like at a much higher resolution
0:16:45 and much greater than any one human could ever do, right?
0:16:49 – What the data world can do for us now AI machine learning,
0:16:51 it is the 21st century prospector
0:16:54 because it’s not biased and prospectors weren’t biased.
0:16:55 They were just observers.
0:16:57 So the digital world can observe and integrate
0:17:01 and interrogate the data in ways that we humans,
0:17:04 geologists with all our biases will never do.
0:17:07 – And we can go back and look at all the other historical
0:17:10 known traces of cobalt and all the reports that are written
0:17:13 that are like in PDF form right now actually
0:17:15 over the last several decades.
0:17:18 – Or not even in PDF, yes, or in paper form.
0:17:21 – So where are you pulling these different
0:17:22 information sources from?
0:17:23 What are they?
0:17:25 What are the main streams of different kinds of information?
0:17:27 – There’s a huge amount of information out there.
0:17:30 The challenge is that it’s not well-structured
0:17:32 or even digitized in some sense.
0:17:34 You have geophysical data, which is that we’re talking
0:17:36 about things like gravitational anomalies,
0:17:40 magnetic anomalies, electromagnetic responses,
0:17:42 things like that, it’s a whole class of data.
0:17:45 Geochemical data is compositional data
0:17:48 in basically a point in space
0:17:52 and a list of concentrations at that location.
0:17:53 Then you have mineralogical data,
0:17:55 which is like geochemical data, but it’s more complex
0:17:58 because it gets into not just a list of elements,
0:18:01 but actually what molecules the elements were in.
0:18:04 And then you have things like agricultural information,
0:18:05 right, which are sort of indirect
0:18:07 or topological information.
0:18:09 – Meaning like what is the soil like here?
0:18:11 – I mean, this is used for inference, right?
0:18:13 It’s not necessarily direct observation,
0:18:14 but that’s really important.
0:18:18 Then hyperspectral data, which is just the wide band
0:18:21 of electromagnetic emissions and reflection
0:18:22 from the surface of the earth.
0:18:23 – Is weather a part of that as well?
0:18:25 – Groundwater is a great source of information.
0:18:30 So you have very, very wide sets of data.
0:18:33 That data has been collected over centuries really.
0:18:35 – Right, it sounds like basically every piece of knowledge
0:18:37 we have about the earth and the way the earth works.
0:18:39 – That’s exactly right.
0:18:40 To first order, every piece of knowledge
0:18:42 about how the earth works and what about the earth
0:18:43 is relevant.
0:18:45 It’s just a matter of how relevant,
0:18:47 those sort of relative weightings of importance.
0:18:49 And so in certain jurisdictions,
0:18:52 that data has been sort of aggregated in certain ways.
0:18:54 And there’s a lot of it as public in certain places.
0:18:56 It has not even been digitized.
0:18:58 – Over what kind of time scale are you looking at?
0:19:00 Is this all like fresh new data?
0:19:02 Is this data from 200 years ago?
0:19:04 When people were panning for gold?
0:19:06 – Both, new and old.
0:19:07 So something like–
0:19:09 – The good thing is the rock doesn’t move that quickly.
0:19:11 – That’s the one possible.
0:19:13 – So 200 years ago is not really that.
0:19:15 – That’s so fun.
0:19:16 – Unlike a lot of, it’s actually interesting.
0:19:19 Unlike a lot of data analytics and data science plays,
0:19:22 we are looking at effectively a static system.
0:19:23 I mean, of course the earth is dynamic,
0:19:25 but on a time scale we’re looking at it,
0:19:26 it’s effectively static.
0:19:30 That’s a very different data science problem,
0:19:31 but we’re dealing with sparse data
0:19:34 and then we’re dealing with highly, highly disparate data.
0:19:37 So we have a program of trying to aggregate
0:19:38 all these different data sources
0:19:40 and then do two different things on it.
0:19:43 From one side, we have our basic science approach,
0:19:46 which is sort of how these ore bodies formed,
0:19:49 cobalt or any other material we might be looking for,
0:19:51 and then looking for those sorts of indicators.
0:19:53 And then you have the really exciting thing,
0:19:56 which is the data, rather than us asking the data questions,
0:19:58 the data tells us stuff, right?
0:20:00 So this is where your machine learning
0:20:02 or statistical association modeling becomes important, right?
0:20:05 Because the data itself can make predictions
0:20:07 based on the patterns that it sees.
0:20:10 And that’s where you eliminate the human bias
0:20:13 and the non-systematic approach of historic exploration.
0:20:15 – Yeah, and just like to tie that back to again,
0:20:18 like the demand for cobalt is so new.
0:20:20 So there’s lots of reports out there
0:20:23 where they’ll say there’s known cobalt in these places,
0:20:24 they just didn’t go mine them.
0:20:27 If you even get all those reports and digitize them
0:20:28 and look on a map, oh, you know,
0:20:31 all those reports are clustered in these areas.
0:20:33 That already surfaces some interesting sites.
0:20:37 – And probably enough, if you go back 30, 40 years,
0:20:39 a lot of the people out exploring
0:20:41 were very good at identifying minerals,
0:20:43 and better than we probably are now,
0:20:46 because we rely on a lot of extra tools to do it for us now.
0:20:47 And they recorded that presence of that mineral.
0:20:50 So now you’re not looking through all these old texts
0:20:52 for the word cobalt, because they didn’t write cobalt down.
0:20:55 They wrote down the name of a scooterotorite,
0:20:58 which is a very, you know, as a particular code arsenic.
0:21:00 So yes, they would have found that interesting,
0:21:02 but not from a commercial perspective.
0:21:04 They just thought it was cool.
0:21:05 They found another mineral,
0:21:06 because they were just like being a birdwatcher.
0:21:08 They were mineral watchers, so they recorded that.
0:21:10 So now you’ve got to go through the data
0:21:12 and find those references to that kind of thing.
0:21:15 – I just want to drill one level down just for like fun color.
0:21:17 Where do those reports live now?
0:21:19 Where are these types of data coming from?
0:21:21 I mean, the modern data must be easier to access,
0:21:23 but the old data– – Boxes.
0:21:25 Boxes and boxes and boxes and boxes and paper.
0:21:26 – In warehouses. – Warehouses.
0:21:28 – Dusty basements. – Basements.
0:21:31 – How do you even get access to all these?
0:21:31 – It’s hard.
0:21:33 I mean, some of the mining companies
0:21:34 are 100-year-old companies,
0:21:36 and they have 100-year-old data.
0:21:38 And so they have boxes and boxes sitting there.
0:21:41 Some would be well-archived and cataloged,
0:21:43 and some is completely unknown.
0:21:45 And inside those boxes could be anything.
0:21:47 It could be actual good information,
0:21:48 a mention of a mineral,
0:21:50 or it could be some mention of a conversation
0:21:51 between two people.
0:21:54 And in the conversation, they made mention that,
0:21:57 “Oh, when I was in the hills, I found this rock,
0:21:58 and it has this mineral in it,
0:22:00 and that happens to be a cobalt mineral.”
0:22:03 – 20 years ago, if you went to a new city,
0:22:05 and you wanted to find a business in a new city,
0:22:07 you had to get the yellow pages for that city,
0:22:09 and you had to get a paper map for that city,
0:22:12 and you had to look up the address in the book,
0:22:15 and then you had to look on the map for that location.
0:22:17 And a lot of what mineral exploration does now
0:22:18 is exactly that.
0:22:21 It’s very site-specific.
0:22:23 You kind of collect all the data for a new project
0:22:24 in a new area at a new time.
0:22:28 But it’s relatively easy to image the surface of the earth
0:22:29 and the infrastructure of the earth
0:22:30 and the way Google Maps did,
0:22:33 and to catalog all the businesses.
0:22:36 The problem we deal with is data sparsity, right?
0:22:37 So in some locations,
0:22:40 we have tremendous amounts of surface data density
0:22:43 and meaningful amounts of subsurface data density.
0:22:46 And in other locations, it’s very data poor.
0:22:49 And so then we have to use really sophisticated statistics,
0:22:52 really, to try to figure out and predict
0:22:53 what is in those materials,
0:22:55 what is in those areas where there is no data.
0:22:58 How do you actually deal with that incredible variety
0:23:00 and huge amounts of data in some areas
0:23:02 and very little, very old data in other areas?
0:23:04 It’s about making predictions, right?
0:23:07 So it’s about using places where there is a high density
0:23:10 of data and you can train and make predictions
0:23:11 and then make those predictions in areas
0:23:13 where there isn’t high densities of data
0:23:16 and then go out and validate it by collecting new data.
0:23:18 It’s interesting because in some ways
0:23:20 it feels incredibly modern and new,
0:23:22 but in other ways it also feels like a kind of old fashioned way
0:23:24 of exploring again.
0:23:25 Actually, a lot of this reminds me
0:23:28 of like their original idea of venture capital,
0:23:31 which is when kings and queens would fund
0:23:34 these exploration efforts to look for natural resources
0:23:36 or look for new land or whatever they were looking for.
0:23:39 – The whole idea of exploring the earth
0:23:42 to encourage people to look for the materials that we need
0:23:45 such that society can improve and do new things.
0:23:47 That’s an old concept.
0:23:49 That’s what developed California ultimately,
0:23:52 was that influx of people looking for gold.
0:23:55 And governments also fairly early, 150 years ago,
0:23:57 started mapping the rocks on the surface
0:23:59 because they knew if they map rocks
0:24:02 that somebody would recognize associations
0:24:04 and realize that that might have potential
0:24:05 and therefore they’d go exploring,
0:24:07 therefore they’d find things and that would then open up
0:24:09 and create economic activity and so on.
0:24:12 It’s a very old cycle we’re repeating,
0:24:13 but more efficient and more effective.
0:24:15 – Because now one of those explorers is a computer.
0:24:18 – Yeah, it’s also gonna help us actually mine
0:24:21 more efficiently and more effectively and more cleanly.
0:24:23 And that’s really important because to me,
0:24:25 there’s no point in us going electric
0:24:27 and having electric cars using cobalt for batteries
0:24:30 and so on to do that if we create a big mess
0:24:31 in terms of providing those materials.
0:24:34 So we’ve not only got to find it better,
0:24:36 we’ve also got to then exploit it and develop it
0:24:38 in a way that’s more efficient and cleaner
0:24:39 and doesn’t have the kind of problems
0:24:41 that we’ve seen all over the world.
0:24:44 – Well, I think it’s fantastic to think about the way
0:24:46 that the searches and exploration for these metals
0:24:50 have driven sort of entire chapters of human civilization.
0:24:53 And if we think about that, the age of copper,
0:24:55 the age of iron, if we think now we’re entering
0:24:57 the age of cobalt, what are some of the ripple effects
0:25:01 that we’re gonna see as we begin to more smartly mine
0:25:05 and access this new incredibly important mineral?
0:25:08 – Trying to solve climate change and other major issues
0:25:10 that requires very specific use of commodities
0:25:12 that we’re not so familiar with, like cobalt.
0:25:15 And so that changes the way we need to think about them
0:25:17 and the way we therefore also need to exploit them.
0:25:20 And the exploitation part is to be more selective.
0:25:22 We’ve been, we’ve bulk mined everything.
0:25:23 So we make big, big holes in the ground
0:25:26 in order to get iron ore or copper out of the ground.
0:25:28 And if we want to be really clever,
0:25:31 we’ve got to only find higher concentrations
0:25:33 because higher concentrations are more efficient.
0:25:36 But we also now need to try and be very selective
0:25:37 about how we mine them.
0:25:38 – Have much higher certainty.
0:25:40 – Yeah, so, and it’s great if we go back
0:25:43 and reprocess the tailings, which as we’re doing for cobalt.
0:25:45 And actually the Romans were the first people
0:25:48 who started reprocessing waste rocks to do that.
0:25:50 They did a couple of cycles of this kind of stuff.
0:25:52 So that’s not a new idea either.
0:25:53 But it’d be much better to be a really efficient
0:25:56 at the outset and extract as much metal as we can
0:25:58 from the less and less volumes of rock
0:26:01 instead of moving more and more rock to get, you know,
0:26:03 to get metal. – And from a consumer perspective,
0:26:05 this can result in much better batteries.
0:26:08 Because right now even the amount of cobalt
0:26:11 in the battery is kind of a financial decision.
0:26:11 – Oh really?
0:26:12 – And sourcing this decision.
0:26:14 – A financial and sourcing decision, right.
0:26:17 Like if these companies could put more cobalt
0:26:19 than they put in today in their batteries,
0:26:20 it would still be a better battery.
0:26:22 So if we want batteries or iPhones
0:26:25 that last one, two weeks without a charge.
0:26:27 – Yeah, we need more cobalt.
0:26:28 – Yeah.
0:26:29 – You know, there must be a cobalt craze, right?
0:26:31 Like everyone, everyone and their mom
0:26:33 suddenly wants to go mining cobalt.
0:26:35 – That’s the other cobalt issue
0:26:37 is that a lot of it comes from the DRC.
0:26:40 – Over two thirds of the world’s supply.
0:26:42 And again, remember, cobalt’s not a rare metal.
0:26:45 So the fact that two thirds of our supply
0:26:48 comes from the DRC, the Congo right now
0:26:48 is largely a function
0:26:51 of where those copper and nickel mines historically were.
0:26:54 – And it’s mined at a scale of local people
0:26:56 who don’t aren’t regulated,
0:26:59 don’t necessarily do it in an appropriate manner
0:27:01 and use child labor and may have links
0:27:03 to all sorts of other potential problems.
0:27:05 It’s basically done by local people
0:27:07 and DRC in other parts of the world.
0:27:11 They’re doing it because they are impoverished
0:27:14 and they feel they can probably make a better living
0:27:16 by scraping up the material
0:27:19 than plowing a little piece of land.
0:27:20 – Well, this highly valuable material.
0:27:21 – Highly valuable material.
0:27:24 – So it’s these small teams that are taking the gamble
0:27:29 and using shovels and very basic tools to go look for this.
0:27:30 – Correct.
0:27:32 – So that’s actually how it’s happening right now still
0:27:34 is just small groups of people
0:27:37 with eyeballs and shovels in the dirt.
0:27:40 Consumers care about where their products came from now.
0:27:42 They care about the ingredients.
0:27:44 They care about how they were made.
0:27:47 They care about if this came from a local farmer.
0:27:49 So they will eventually start also caring
0:27:52 about where their batteries came from.
0:27:54 – In the DRC where this is done,
0:27:56 they are mining material where,
0:28:00 which was originally a copper cobalt deposit
0:28:04 that then suffered thousands of years of weathering.
0:28:07 So rain came down and dripped through the rocks
0:28:10 and it actually separated the copper from the cobalt.
0:28:12 So the cobalt stayed near the surface
0:28:14 and deeper down it gets more copper rich.
0:28:15 And the mineral that they mine now
0:28:18 is it’s got this great name called heterogenite,
0:28:20 which as you might guess,
0:28:21 is something to do with being heterogeneous.
0:28:22 It looks all over the place.
0:28:23 It’s really messy stuff.
0:28:26 And they can just literally dig that up and put it in bags.
0:28:27 But unfortunately,
0:28:29 that also concentrate quite a bit of thorium,
0:28:30 which is radioactive.
0:28:34 So now we have artisanal miners, local people and kids
0:28:36 who are mining bags for this stuff,
0:28:37 which is slightly radioactive.
0:28:38 It’s not super radioactive,
0:28:40 but it’s radioactive enough to cause concern.
0:28:41 They don’t know that.
0:28:43 They’re just interested in getting bags full
0:28:46 and getting paid for the bag of dirt that they scrape out.
0:28:49 Some people estimate as many as 100 million people
0:28:53 on the planet involved in some kind of activity
0:28:54 like this at this scale.
0:28:55 Not just cobalt.
0:28:56 Not just cobalt.
0:28:59 Gold diamonds, other coltan, other minerals.
0:29:03 Okay, so let’s talk about what this new kind of endeavor
0:29:07 of exploration and mining and knowledge aggregation,
0:29:10 what does that mean on the company building side?
0:29:11 Who do you need?
0:29:13 What kind of people do you need
0:29:16 to sort of represent all those different elements?
0:29:17 It’s a fantastic question.
0:29:21 And basically it’s two very different classes of people
0:29:23 and they’re both essential.
0:29:26 Our company is effectively half made up
0:29:29 of economic geologists, geochemists,
0:29:30 mineral explorationists,
0:29:33 people who have spent their careers
0:29:34 looking in sort of the conventional manner
0:29:36 for mineral deposits of all kinds.
0:29:39 And then the other half is data scientists, right?
0:29:41 And so one of my co-founders,
0:29:44 has got his PhD in quantum computing.
0:29:46 And the other one was the chief reservoir engineer
0:29:49 for ConocoPhillips for many years.
0:29:52 Oil and gas has been incredibly sophisticated
0:29:54 in how they use technology
0:29:56 because there’s a very clear financial reason
0:29:58 to go find oil and gas.
0:29:59 Right, right.
0:30:02 But that same sophistication has not brought
0:30:04 over to mineral and metal exploration.
0:30:07 We relatively well understand the environment
0:30:08 in which we find oil and gas
0:30:10 and we have very good sophisticated tools
0:30:12 to then help us do that.
0:30:15 So the mining business is playing cash up on discovery
0:30:17 and it’s playing cash up on exploitation as well.
0:30:19 And so just in the last 10 years,
0:30:23 everything now in mining is being sensors all over it.
0:30:25 Data is being gathered in the mining process.
0:30:27 Autonomous vehicles are coming into mining so on.
0:30:30 And that’s why the team makeup I think is so interesting
0:30:32 because you have data scientists,
0:30:35 you have people who are truly experts in cobalt
0:30:36 and they already know
0:30:39 and have this gut feeling of where to look.
0:30:41 And then you have people from oil and gas
0:30:43 who can take that sophistication
0:30:45 and kind of bring them up to date.
0:30:46 Okay, so we’re entering a new era
0:30:50 not just about sort of the importance of cobalt
0:30:53 but also about new ways of mining as a whole,
0:30:56 transforming a whole industry and a whole model
0:30:59 of how we find and explore in the earth.
0:31:03 So what changes as a result of that entire model
0:31:04 shifting so dramatically?
0:31:06 That’s a fantastic question.
0:31:08 I think when you think about,
0:31:10 when you think about like the metallurgic epochs, right?
0:31:14 The sort of copper age, the bronze age, the iron age,
0:31:18 the steel age, giving rise to the industrial revolution
0:31:20 and then petroleum that’s we’re basically at,
0:31:24 we’re still in a petroleum age from a material standpoint.
0:31:26 I would say we’re entering the battery materials age.
0:31:29 And so battery materials will be the sort of,
0:31:32 the backbone of energy infrastructure
0:31:33 in the next 100 years.
0:31:36 And that requires a staggering amount of new material
0:31:38 and different materials than we needed in the past.
0:31:41 Cobalt being a salient one, but not the only one.
0:31:44 I think that the tools that we’re developing specifically
0:31:46 to develop, to look for cobalt
0:31:47 actually have a lot of generality to them.
0:31:50 And ultimately I think we’ll probably be looking
0:31:53 for a lot of things other than cobalt
0:31:58 to feed the need of the battery materials age broadly.
0:32:00 So a new kind of exploration
0:32:01 for a new age of new materials.
0:32:03 When you create the Google Maps,
0:32:04 you don’t just know where that stores,
0:32:07 you know where everything else is too.
0:32:09 And funnily enough, it’s different, but it’s the same.
0:32:13 It’s still source to material, to technology,
0:32:15 to people’s desire to change the world.
0:32:16 And that’s the way it’s been
0:32:18 when it was the sword 5,000 years ago
0:32:21 to electric vehicle now, it’s that same process.
0:32:24 But what we’re doing is gonna speed it up,
0:32:27 make it more efficient, use the data more effectively.
0:32:29 So we’re bringing all our tools that we have now
0:32:32 to do the same thing as it was done 5,000 years ago.
0:32:33 – That’s wonderful.
0:32:35 Thank you so much for joining us on the A16Z podcast.
0:32:36 – You’re welcome, thank you.
0:00:05 I’m Hannah, and this episode is all about
0:00:08 the exploration for and mining of minerals,
0:00:10 specifically cobalt.
0:00:12 In this conversation, I’m joined by Kurt Haus,
0:00:14 CEO and co-founder of Cobalt Metals,
0:00:18 Professor John Thompson of Earth and Geosciences at Cornell,
0:00:21 and A16Z general partner on the consumer team, Connie Chan.
0:00:24 We explain why it is that cobalt is suddenly one
0:00:27 of the most important and in-demand metals on the planet,
0:00:29 and how technology is transforming
0:00:32 how we find it and the mining industry as a whole.
0:00:34 Along the way, we touch on a little bit
0:00:36 of battery tech history and science,
0:00:39 and how entire chapters of human civilization
0:00:42 are driven by the search for and mining of metals
0:00:45 from ancient civilizations first finding copper
0:00:47 to the major ground shift in the 1950s
0:00:50 with geophysics and knowledge of plate tectonics.
0:00:52 And finally, what kinds of new data sources,
0:00:54 technologies, and techniques we can use
0:00:56 to find more cobalt today.
0:00:59 Everything from geophysical and geochemical data
0:01:01 to agricultural information to old boxes
0:01:03 collected over centuries in the basements
0:01:05 and attics of mining companies.
0:01:08 All of this to satisfy the incredible new demand
0:01:11 as we enter a new age of battery metals.
0:01:13 Why are we even sitting around this table
0:01:14 talking about cobalt today?
0:01:17 What is it that’s suddenly so interesting about cobalt?
0:01:19 I think of it as a color, as a prep, right?
0:01:20 – Well, that’s actually right.
0:01:23 And that was the very, very first use of cobalt.
0:01:26 The very, very first use was in dyes,
0:01:29 and to get a particular type of blue,
0:01:30 that was the principal way to do it.
0:01:32 – And when was it discovered?
0:01:34 – The actual metal was first isolated as a metal.
0:01:36 And I think I’m pretty sure it’s 1739.
0:01:39 – So if you go back 15 years or so,
0:01:42 its principal uses were in high,
0:01:44 sort of high strength steels and things like that.
0:01:48 So cobalt demand sort of grew gradually,
0:01:50 but everybody listening to this podcast
0:01:53 and presumably listening to this podcast on their device
0:01:57 has 10 grams of cobalt in that device about.
0:01:58 – Some might be listening from their cars.
0:02:01 – That’s true, so good point.
0:02:02 In which case, if they happen to be driving
0:02:05 an electric vehicle, it could be closer
0:02:07 to 10 or 20 kilograms of cobalt.
0:02:09 – It’s the battery that uses the cobalt.
0:02:11 – It makes the best batteries.
0:02:13 Everyone knows they have a lithium,
0:02:15 sort of a lithium-ion battery in their phone,
0:02:17 but that’s a chemical reaction
0:02:19 between lithium and cobalt oxide.
0:02:22 And so the two parts of the chemical reaction are essential,
0:02:23 and the greatest energy density,
0:02:26 greatest rate capability,
0:02:28 how fast you can discharge the battery,
0:02:30 greatest cycle life, that kind of thing.
0:02:32 That has some or all cobalt in it.
0:02:33 – Why is that?
0:02:36 Can we get into the science of why that’s the best battery?
0:02:38 – The reason cobalt makes a great battery
0:02:40 is that the battery in your iPhone
0:02:44 is what we call a lithium intercalation cathode.
0:02:46 That’s a fancy name, but what it means is,
0:02:47 lithium is the mobile ion.
0:02:51 So a battery has an anode and a cathode,
0:02:54 and an ion that moves from the anode to the cathode
0:02:58 to react chemically and form a new molecule
0:02:58 that’s more stable.
0:03:01 The cathode looks like kind of like a layered sandwich.
0:03:04 It has cobalt oxide, then lithium,
0:03:06 then cobalt oxide, then lithium, then cobalt oxide.
0:03:07 – Oh, like a layer cake.
0:03:09 – A layer cake, in a fully discharged sense.
0:03:11 You can imagine very intuitively why that’s good,
0:03:14 because the lithium has to get access to the cobalt.
0:03:15 So when you fully charge it,
0:03:17 when you push the lithium out of the cathode,
0:03:20 the lithium can intercalate into those spaces very easily.
0:03:23 And put simply, cobalt forms
0:03:25 the most stable layered structures.
0:03:27 So as you pull lithium out,
0:03:29 it doesn’t sort of disorder or change,
0:03:32 and other similar metals tend to change.
0:03:36 And when they change, then you lose capacity.
0:03:37 Your battery fades over time.
0:03:38 Basically because it forms
0:03:40 that really robust crystal structure,
0:03:43 it forms the longest lasting batteries.
0:03:45 And then it also has the sort of the greatest energy
0:03:48 per molecule for a lithium oxide battery.
0:03:50 – And this is by orders of magnitude.
0:03:53 So like right next to lithium on the periodic table is nickel.
0:03:55 And if you made a nickel oxide,
0:03:57 lithium nickel oxide battery, it would work okay.
0:03:58 But on your first cycle,
0:04:02 it would have maybe 10% less energy density.
0:04:03 Over a hundred cycles,
0:04:06 then it would have maybe 50% less energy density.
0:04:07 – So it really adds up.
0:04:09 In the same age when you’re shopping for your iPhone,
0:04:12 battery life is one of the key things you think about.
0:04:14 – And especially with your electric vehicle.
0:04:16 – And with your electric vehicle, right?
0:04:18 It determines how long you can drive with a car.
0:04:19 – And batteries,
0:04:21 the whole battery technology world is really interesting
0:04:23 ’cause it’s such an important part of our life now.
0:04:25 So if you go back 50, 100 years,
0:04:28 the lead acid battery, which is the first car battery,
0:04:31 which is still the dominant battery
0:04:34 for starting lights and ignition, the SLI battery.
0:04:35 But once you’ve got an established battery
0:04:37 that works that people trust,
0:04:38 it’s quite hard to displace it.
0:04:40 So you’ve got to be convinced people
0:04:41 with any new battery technology
0:04:44 that it’s gonna deliver the right amount of charge
0:04:46 at many, many times.
0:04:49 If you bought your phone and tomorrow had to go back
0:04:51 to get a new battery, you wouldn’t be very happy.
0:04:52 – Right.
0:04:55 – This is where Cobalt is a key piece of that puzzle
0:04:57 ’cause it offers a level of reliability
0:05:00 that it’s gonna be hard to substitute.
0:05:01 – To sum it up simply,
0:05:03 it’s the things you really care about
0:05:05 are rate at which you can charge and discharge it,
0:05:07 how much energy there is per unit mass
0:05:08 and per unit volume,
0:05:11 and how long it lasts in a single charge
0:05:14 and then how much that charge fades over many cycles.
0:05:17 And for all those elements, Cobalt is superior.
0:05:20 – So we went from using it to make a pretty color
0:05:23 to suddenly needing it all around us.
0:05:24 – You can almost define human history
0:05:26 by the types of metals that we were pulling
0:05:28 out of the ground during that time.
0:05:31 And in fact, if you look at the 8,000 years
0:05:34 from the beginning of the metal ages to about 1970,
0:05:37 we produced a certain amount of metals
0:05:38 we pulled out of the ground, called that X.
0:05:41 In the last 50 years, we pulled out the same amount again.
0:05:43 So throughout all human history, now we’ve pulled out two X.
0:05:45 We reproduced it in the last 50 years.
0:05:47 In the next 30, we’re gonna pull out another two X
0:05:49 just on current trends, okay?
0:05:51 It’s the mass of materials coming out of the ground.
0:05:52 But here’s the thing,
0:05:54 the types of metals that we’re pulling out of the ground
0:05:58 are changing and they’re changing for both society trends
0:05:59 and society’s needs, right?
0:06:01 So in the next less than 100 years,
0:06:04 we have to rebuild the entire energy infrastructure
0:06:05 of the world.
0:06:07 Some of that requires the types of metals
0:06:08 that we’ve been pulling out of the ground for a long time,
0:06:10 but some of it requires totally new metals.
0:06:12 And we need lots of new materials.
0:06:13 We need lots of lithium.
0:06:14 We need lots of manganese.
0:06:15 We need lots of cobalt.
0:06:19 If we’re going to convert the entire automobile fleet
0:06:20 to an electric fleet,
0:06:23 we need vastly more cobalt than we’ve pulled out to date.
0:06:24 And in order to do that,
0:06:26 we need to find new sources of cobalt
0:06:27 and that’s what we do.
0:06:28 So how do you do that?
0:06:29 The metal that we need is changing
0:06:30 and now we need cobalt.
0:06:33 How is the way we mine the way we source it changing too?
0:06:35 And actually, let’s go back and start earlier.
0:06:37 What does the history of mining cobalt look like?
0:06:39 The act of exploration and discovery
0:06:42 is fundamentally an information problem, right?
0:06:45 And so the mineral exploration business
0:06:47 is an incredibly old industry
0:06:49 and it’s essentially driven and been driven
0:06:53 by the evolution of civilization.
0:06:55 Right, it’s as old as humanity.
0:06:56 It started pretty much with copper
0:06:59 and that’s because people have actually found copper,
0:07:00 the metal sticking out of the ground.
0:07:01 So they used it.
0:07:02 They could make it into different things
0:07:04 and make it into ornaments and so on.
0:07:06 So this was the very beginnings of metallurgy
0:07:08 as a science, as a discipline.
0:07:11 It’s very cool because they somehow very creatively
0:07:13 worked out how to extract metals from rocks
0:07:16 that looked green ’cause they have copper in them
0:07:18 but didn’t obviously show the copper
0:07:21 until they were smelted effectively in a very hot fire
0:07:24 and a fire that was a lot hotter than a campfire.
0:07:25 So somehow these people had figured out
0:07:28 how to get the temperature of the fire up to a level
0:07:32 where it could reduce the copper bearing material
0:07:34 and extract the metal from that and that’s amazing.
0:07:37 So that’s six, 7,000 years ago.
0:07:39 And that process of exploration back then
0:07:41 just looked like kind of studying the land,
0:07:44 understanding and reading the earth around us.
0:07:46 I read an article recently about the Vikings
0:07:51 and the age of iron and how the Vikings, they think,
0:07:53 were able to identify where the iron,
0:07:56 the bog iron was through a kind of microbial sheen,
0:07:57 apparently.
0:07:59 It’s all based on observation.
0:08:02 And then sort of correlation of different factors
0:08:05 that were purely observation and experiential.
0:08:07 Effectively, that’s the sort of original prospect
0:08:09 of the person who could go into the ground
0:08:11 and recognize that this had potential.
0:08:15 And that really was the way all exploration was done
0:08:17 until about 1950.
0:08:19 They went to places where they could still observe
0:08:20 the metals or the minerals then
0:08:22 that they knew had the metals in,
0:08:24 even if they didn’t understand exactly why
0:08:26 or how or what the concentration was.
0:08:27 – But oftentimes the minerals
0:08:29 aren’t sitting above the earth.
0:08:30 – No, not now.
0:08:33 They’d find it on the surface and they’d keep mining down.
0:08:34 And originally they would mine down
0:08:35 till they hit the water table
0:08:37 and then they couldn’t deal with it.
0:08:40 The Romans then started using wheels to actually de-water.
0:08:42 So they could then go deeper.
0:08:44 And the breakthrough in the Industrial Revolution
0:08:45 was the steam engine,
0:08:47 which then allowed them to make pumps
0:08:50 that then could take the water from much, much deeper levels.
0:08:52 So at that point then they could chase it further and further.
0:08:54 But they didn’t know where it was going.
0:08:55 They just followed it.
0:08:56 – Blindly.
0:09:00 – So the 1950s was when we started to develop technologies,
0:09:02 remote technologies, geophysical technologies
0:09:04 that could predict where things were going
0:09:07 and predict where things might be.
0:09:08 – Really recent actually.
0:09:10 – And what were those sort of different sources
0:09:12 of information in the 1950s that changed
0:09:13 that we started becoming aware
0:09:15 of these new Earth’s processes?
0:09:16 – So two really.
0:09:19 One was what was called the plate tectonic revolution
0:09:21 of the 1960s to 70s.
0:09:24 When people realized that the planet is dynamic
0:09:26 and that the planet is descending
0:09:29 off the west coast here of North America,
0:09:31 the ocean plate is going beneath us
0:09:34 and that’s giving us all earthquakes and volcanoes and so on.
0:09:37 And simultaneously was the development of geophysics.
0:09:40 So the ability to detect the signature of the Earth
0:09:43 beneath the surface in terms of its physical properties.
0:09:46 So how magnetic it is, how dense it is,
0:09:47 how conductive it is,
0:09:49 we started to be able to measure those things.
0:09:51 Those measurements, the data that comes from that,
0:09:54 correlates in some cases with the presence of metals.
0:09:56 – How much does it correlate?
0:09:57 How predictive was it really?
0:09:58 – Poorly is the answer.
0:10:00 (laughing)
0:10:03 There were many false positives.
0:10:06 So we generated maps of magnetic signatures
0:10:08 and people would say there’s all these
0:10:10 fancy looking anomalous bumps in the data
0:10:13 and they drill them, they put holes in the ground
0:10:15 and it turned out that one in a hundred
0:10:16 would actually be interesting.
0:10:18 – Incredible amount of investment and effort
0:10:20 and tools, interesting.
0:10:21 – And that hasn’t changed.
0:10:22 We’ve got more and more tools now,
0:10:26 but if statistically when we look at the chance of discovery,
0:10:27 our odds are still very low.
0:10:28 You know, we’re in thousands,
0:10:30 one in thousand, one in 5,000.
0:10:31 – Well, let’s go back to Cobalt
0:10:33 and talk about what that process has looked like
0:10:35 for Cobalt because it hasn’t,
0:10:37 we haven’t, there hasn’t been a reason
0:10:41 to invest a lot of discovery in Cobalt, right?
0:10:42 Up until this point.
0:10:43 – Yeah, that’s exactly right.
0:10:44 – Besides pretty pictures.
0:10:45 – Right, that’s right.
0:10:46 So one of the interesting things
0:10:49 about Cobalt in particular as a metal
0:10:51 is that you have big copper mines
0:10:52 that are principally there because of copper
0:10:55 and they also have a lot of copper and a little bit of Cobalt.
0:10:57 – And that just happens to be because Cobalt and copper
0:10:58 tend to be–
0:10:59 – Hang out together.
0:11:00 – They hang out together.
0:11:01 – Not always, but in certain circumstances they do
0:11:04 and so it was, effectively the marginal cost
0:11:06 to produce Cobalt out of these mines is very low.
0:11:07 – A nice little extra perk.
0:11:08 – It’s an extra perk, right?
0:11:09 You would develop the mine anyway
0:11:11 if there was no Cobalt there.
0:11:14 So you have this sort of kind of gift to the world.
0:11:16 We’re gonna invest in copper production
0:11:18 and we get a little more, a little Cobalt.
0:11:19 And same thing with nickel.
0:11:22 You get a lot of Cobalt associated with nickel.
0:11:25 So that byproduct production of Cobalt
0:11:28 alongside copper and nickel was more than sufficient
0:11:32 to supply the world up until now.
0:11:33 – When you say more than sufficient,
0:11:35 does that mean sometimes people didn’t?
0:11:36 – Absolutely.
0:11:38 – So there’s just piles of Cobalt sitting around?
0:11:40 – Even just in the last 15 years
0:11:42 where copper mines were developed,
0:11:45 the Cobalt was well-known, its presence was well-known
0:11:47 and investment decisions were made
0:11:49 not to extract the Cobalt from the ore,
0:11:51 to extract the copper and to throw the Cobalt
0:11:53 into the tailings pile.
0:11:54 – Why?
0:11:58 – Because at the time if you did make that investment
0:12:01 and supplied that Cobalt, it would have tanked the market.
0:12:02 – Too much.
0:12:05 – Because the demand was not there from the smartphones
0:12:07 and the laptops and the electric cars yet.
0:12:08 – Nobody needs it.
0:12:09 – Quite literally.
0:12:10 – Exactly.
0:12:12 And so now the whole situation has flipped.
0:12:15 So now all of those mine tailings
0:12:19 that are full of Cobalt and that are known
0:12:21 are being reprocessed or investments are being made
0:12:22 to go reprocessed.
0:12:24 – So everyone that was sitting on a garbage pile of Cobalt
0:12:26 is suddenly feeling good about it.
0:12:27 – Oh, absolutely.
0:12:30 In fact, the two largest projects to come online
0:12:34 in the next 18 to 24 months are exactly that,
0:12:36 our waste pile reprocessing projects.
0:12:40 But in order to convert the entire global vehicle fleet
0:12:45 to electric vehicles, we need vastly more than is available.
0:12:47 – Even just current predictions,
0:12:48 if you include global demand,
0:12:52 especially from Asia of electric vehicles,
0:12:56 we’re likely gonna run out of Cobalt from known supply
0:12:57 in less than 10 years.
0:13:00 – Wow, we have the sudden increased demand.
0:13:02 What are the sourcing efforts starting to look like?
0:13:05 How is it changing how we actually find and source Cobalt?
0:13:06 – If you look into the scientific literature
0:13:09 and you look at gold or deposit formation,
0:13:12 you’ll find a very rich scientific literature
0:13:13 on how gold deposits form.
0:13:15 You’ll find a very rich scientific literature
0:13:17 on how copper deposits form.
0:13:19 You will not find a rich scientific literature
0:13:21 on how Cobalt deposits form
0:13:22 because people haven’t looked for it
0:13:23 and people haven’t done that.
0:13:24 – Right, there was not the same incentive.
0:13:25 It just wasn’t important.
0:13:27 – So, John, what does that science look like
0:13:29 for how to find Cobalt?
0:13:30 How much do we know?
0:13:32 – Not very much is the simple answer.
0:13:35 I mean, it’s kind of starting pretty at a basic level.
0:13:37 If we wanted cobalt, we’d have gone looking for copper
0:13:38 and we know how to do that quite well.
0:13:40 And we’d have to go looking for nickel.
0:13:42 – So it’s kind of like piggyback on other knowledge.
0:13:44 – And when we’d hope that we found some copper
0:13:45 and oh, this is terrific.
0:13:47 We’ve got a bit of extra cobalt.
0:13:49 But there’s no science basis for that
0:13:51 to what actually makes cobalt tick.
0:13:56 So understanding what kind of liquid will transport cobalt?
0:13:59 So if we have a fluid that moves through the earth,
0:14:02 you know, just water dominated, maybe salty water,
0:14:05 it moves through the earth and it interacts with a rock,
0:14:07 will it actually extract cobalt?
0:14:09 We know kind of how much copper it might extract,
0:14:10 but we don’t know with cobalt.
0:14:13 So if it did and then it keeps moving
0:14:15 and then that liquid kind of comes up on the surface
0:14:17 or comes into a different environment,
0:14:18 would it precipitate cobalt?
0:14:20 We don’t know the answer to that either.
0:14:21 And yet we know it did that
0:14:23 because we can find occurrences around the world
0:14:25 which are rich in cobalt.
0:14:27 And we can see the evidence that came
0:14:30 from the passage of a liquid through the rock
0:14:33 and it left the cobalt behind in cobalt minerals.
0:14:34 – So that’s one clue.
0:14:35 – So that’s one clue.
0:14:36 And if we understand how that work,
0:14:38 then can we extrapolate to other areas
0:14:40 and predict where it might work again
0:14:42 or where it might even work even better
0:14:44 and give us a greater concentration of cobalt?
0:14:47 So that’s the science kind of basis.
0:14:49 – And what are some of the other clues
0:14:50 that we’re starting to gather
0:14:51 and where you wanna dive deeper
0:14:54 into why is this happening with cobalt?
0:14:56 – Well, it’s key to understand it’s not that rare.
0:14:58 – When you look at the distribution of cobalt,
0:15:01 it occurs in environments that formed from liquid rocks,
0:15:03 so very high temperature, plus 1,000 degrees,
0:15:06 but also it’s precipitating on the ocean floor,
0:15:08 deep, deep on the ocean floor below 4,000 meters
0:15:10 beneath the surface.
0:15:13 We have the nodules, these little concentrations of metal
0:15:15 that are precipitating out of seawater.
0:15:17 And so at seawater temperature,
0:15:19 that’s two degrees in the deep ocean.
0:15:20 – And how do we know those are there?
0:15:23 – They were found in the late 1800s on an expedition
0:15:25 that was just dredging stuff off of the bottom
0:15:27 for the heck of dredging stuff off of the bottom.
0:15:28 – Oh my gosh.
0:15:29 – We pulled up these little round balls
0:15:30 called manganese nodules
0:15:33 because the major constituent actually is manganese,
0:15:35 but they contain significant cobalt.
0:15:38 – And how interesting that that’s what exploration was back
0:15:39 then like let’s just drag.
0:15:42 – Yeah, let’s just pick stuff up on the ocean
0:15:44 and see what’s there.
0:15:45 – The result is we know cobalt can form
0:15:46 at really high temperatures
0:15:49 and we know it can form at really cold temperatures.
0:15:50 That’s a huge range of conditions,
0:15:52 range of pressures, temperatures.
0:15:53 Now we want to get a little bit smarter
0:15:56 and cleverer understand which of those range of conditions
0:15:58 will give us more cobalt
0:16:01 relative to copper or nickel or manganese
0:16:01 or other things that make them more.
0:16:04 – I think that’s where the data play makes so much sense.
0:16:07 – Exactly, that takes us into now the data world.
0:16:09 – Because rather than like comparing
0:16:10 various exploration efforts,
0:16:11 they’re looking at places
0:16:13 that are fundamentally so different.
0:16:17 Now you can track every known source of cobalt
0:16:20 and what aspects or what qualities
0:16:22 around that land made it particular
0:16:23 and then pattern match.
0:16:25 – There’s pattern matching that process
0:16:28 and then there’s just looking at the patterns of data
0:16:30 until and get them to tell us a story.
0:16:33 – That almost reminds me of like the initial way
0:16:35 of looking at the landscape with very little information
0:16:38 and trying to pattern match the green rocks
0:16:40 or the iron sheen or what have you,
0:16:42 but this is like at a much higher resolution
0:16:45 and much greater than any one human could ever do, right?
0:16:49 – What the data world can do for us now AI machine learning,
0:16:51 it is the 21st century prospector
0:16:54 because it’s not biased and prospectors weren’t biased.
0:16:55 They were just observers.
0:16:57 So the digital world can observe and integrate
0:17:01 and interrogate the data in ways that we humans,
0:17:04 geologists with all our biases will never do.
0:17:07 – And we can go back and look at all the other historical
0:17:10 known traces of cobalt and all the reports that are written
0:17:13 that are like in PDF form right now actually
0:17:15 over the last several decades.
0:17:18 – Or not even in PDF, yes, or in paper form.
0:17:21 – So where are you pulling these different
0:17:22 information sources from?
0:17:23 What are they?
0:17:25 What are the main streams of different kinds of information?
0:17:27 – There’s a huge amount of information out there.
0:17:30 The challenge is that it’s not well-structured
0:17:32 or even digitized in some sense.
0:17:34 You have geophysical data, which is that we’re talking
0:17:36 about things like gravitational anomalies,
0:17:40 magnetic anomalies, electromagnetic responses,
0:17:42 things like that, it’s a whole class of data.
0:17:45 Geochemical data is compositional data
0:17:48 in basically a point in space
0:17:52 and a list of concentrations at that location.
0:17:53 Then you have mineralogical data,
0:17:55 which is like geochemical data, but it’s more complex
0:17:58 because it gets into not just a list of elements,
0:18:01 but actually what molecules the elements were in.
0:18:04 And then you have things like agricultural information,
0:18:05 right, which are sort of indirect
0:18:07 or topological information.
0:18:09 – Meaning like what is the soil like here?
0:18:11 – I mean, this is used for inference, right?
0:18:13 It’s not necessarily direct observation,
0:18:14 but that’s really important.
0:18:18 Then hyperspectral data, which is just the wide band
0:18:21 of electromagnetic emissions and reflection
0:18:22 from the surface of the earth.
0:18:23 – Is weather a part of that as well?
0:18:25 – Groundwater is a great source of information.
0:18:30 So you have very, very wide sets of data.
0:18:33 That data has been collected over centuries really.
0:18:35 – Right, it sounds like basically every piece of knowledge
0:18:37 we have about the earth and the way the earth works.
0:18:39 – That’s exactly right.
0:18:40 To first order, every piece of knowledge
0:18:42 about how the earth works and what about the earth
0:18:43 is relevant.
0:18:45 It’s just a matter of how relevant,
0:18:47 those sort of relative weightings of importance.
0:18:49 And so in certain jurisdictions,
0:18:52 that data has been sort of aggregated in certain ways.
0:18:54 And there’s a lot of it as public in certain places.
0:18:56 It has not even been digitized.
0:18:58 – Over what kind of time scale are you looking at?
0:19:00 Is this all like fresh new data?
0:19:02 Is this data from 200 years ago?
0:19:04 When people were panning for gold?
0:19:06 – Both, new and old.
0:19:07 So something like–
0:19:09 – The good thing is the rock doesn’t move that quickly.
0:19:11 – That’s the one possible.
0:19:13 – So 200 years ago is not really that.
0:19:15 – That’s so fun.
0:19:16 – Unlike a lot of, it’s actually interesting.
0:19:19 Unlike a lot of data analytics and data science plays,
0:19:22 we are looking at effectively a static system.
0:19:23 I mean, of course the earth is dynamic,
0:19:25 but on a time scale we’re looking at it,
0:19:26 it’s effectively static.
0:19:30 That’s a very different data science problem,
0:19:31 but we’re dealing with sparse data
0:19:34 and then we’re dealing with highly, highly disparate data.
0:19:37 So we have a program of trying to aggregate
0:19:38 all these different data sources
0:19:40 and then do two different things on it.
0:19:43 From one side, we have our basic science approach,
0:19:46 which is sort of how these ore bodies formed,
0:19:49 cobalt or any other material we might be looking for,
0:19:51 and then looking for those sorts of indicators.
0:19:53 And then you have the really exciting thing,
0:19:56 which is the data, rather than us asking the data questions,
0:19:58 the data tells us stuff, right?
0:20:00 So this is where your machine learning
0:20:02 or statistical association modeling becomes important, right?
0:20:05 Because the data itself can make predictions
0:20:07 based on the patterns that it sees.
0:20:10 And that’s where you eliminate the human bias
0:20:13 and the non-systematic approach of historic exploration.
0:20:15 – Yeah, and just like to tie that back to again,
0:20:18 like the demand for cobalt is so new.
0:20:20 So there’s lots of reports out there
0:20:23 where they’ll say there’s known cobalt in these places,
0:20:24 they just didn’t go mine them.
0:20:27 If you even get all those reports and digitize them
0:20:28 and look on a map, oh, you know,
0:20:31 all those reports are clustered in these areas.
0:20:33 That already surfaces some interesting sites.
0:20:37 – And probably enough, if you go back 30, 40 years,
0:20:39 a lot of the people out exploring
0:20:41 were very good at identifying minerals,
0:20:43 and better than we probably are now,
0:20:46 because we rely on a lot of extra tools to do it for us now.
0:20:47 And they recorded that presence of that mineral.
0:20:50 So now you’re not looking through all these old texts
0:20:52 for the word cobalt, because they didn’t write cobalt down.
0:20:55 They wrote down the name of a scooterotorite,
0:20:58 which is a very, you know, as a particular code arsenic.
0:21:00 So yes, they would have found that interesting,
0:21:02 but not from a commercial perspective.
0:21:04 They just thought it was cool.
0:21:05 They found another mineral,
0:21:06 because they were just like being a birdwatcher.
0:21:08 They were mineral watchers, so they recorded that.
0:21:10 So now you’ve got to go through the data
0:21:12 and find those references to that kind of thing.
0:21:15 – I just want to drill one level down just for like fun color.
0:21:17 Where do those reports live now?
0:21:19 Where are these types of data coming from?
0:21:21 I mean, the modern data must be easier to access,
0:21:23 but the old data– – Boxes.
0:21:25 Boxes and boxes and boxes and boxes and paper.
0:21:26 – In warehouses. – Warehouses.
0:21:28 – Dusty basements. – Basements.
0:21:31 – How do you even get access to all these?
0:21:31 – It’s hard.
0:21:33 I mean, some of the mining companies
0:21:34 are 100-year-old companies,
0:21:36 and they have 100-year-old data.
0:21:38 And so they have boxes and boxes sitting there.
0:21:41 Some would be well-archived and cataloged,
0:21:43 and some is completely unknown.
0:21:45 And inside those boxes could be anything.
0:21:47 It could be actual good information,
0:21:48 a mention of a mineral,
0:21:50 or it could be some mention of a conversation
0:21:51 between two people.
0:21:54 And in the conversation, they made mention that,
0:21:57 “Oh, when I was in the hills, I found this rock,
0:21:58 and it has this mineral in it,
0:22:00 and that happens to be a cobalt mineral.”
0:22:03 – 20 years ago, if you went to a new city,
0:22:05 and you wanted to find a business in a new city,
0:22:07 you had to get the yellow pages for that city,
0:22:09 and you had to get a paper map for that city,
0:22:12 and you had to look up the address in the book,
0:22:15 and then you had to look on the map for that location.
0:22:17 And a lot of what mineral exploration does now
0:22:18 is exactly that.
0:22:21 It’s very site-specific.
0:22:23 You kind of collect all the data for a new project
0:22:24 in a new area at a new time.
0:22:28 But it’s relatively easy to image the surface of the earth
0:22:29 and the infrastructure of the earth
0:22:30 and the way Google Maps did,
0:22:33 and to catalog all the businesses.
0:22:36 The problem we deal with is data sparsity, right?
0:22:37 So in some locations,
0:22:40 we have tremendous amounts of surface data density
0:22:43 and meaningful amounts of subsurface data density.
0:22:46 And in other locations, it’s very data poor.
0:22:49 And so then we have to use really sophisticated statistics,
0:22:52 really, to try to figure out and predict
0:22:53 what is in those materials,
0:22:55 what is in those areas where there is no data.
0:22:58 How do you actually deal with that incredible variety
0:23:00 and huge amounts of data in some areas
0:23:02 and very little, very old data in other areas?
0:23:04 It’s about making predictions, right?
0:23:07 So it’s about using places where there is a high density
0:23:10 of data and you can train and make predictions
0:23:11 and then make those predictions in areas
0:23:13 where there isn’t high densities of data
0:23:16 and then go out and validate it by collecting new data.
0:23:18 It’s interesting because in some ways
0:23:20 it feels incredibly modern and new,
0:23:22 but in other ways it also feels like a kind of old fashioned way
0:23:24 of exploring again.
0:23:25 Actually, a lot of this reminds me
0:23:28 of like their original idea of venture capital,
0:23:31 which is when kings and queens would fund
0:23:34 these exploration efforts to look for natural resources
0:23:36 or look for new land or whatever they were looking for.
0:23:39 – The whole idea of exploring the earth
0:23:42 to encourage people to look for the materials that we need
0:23:45 such that society can improve and do new things.
0:23:47 That’s an old concept.
0:23:49 That’s what developed California ultimately,
0:23:52 was that influx of people looking for gold.
0:23:55 And governments also fairly early, 150 years ago,
0:23:57 started mapping the rocks on the surface
0:23:59 because they knew if they map rocks
0:24:02 that somebody would recognize associations
0:24:04 and realize that that might have potential
0:24:05 and therefore they’d go exploring,
0:24:07 therefore they’d find things and that would then open up
0:24:09 and create economic activity and so on.
0:24:12 It’s a very old cycle we’re repeating,
0:24:13 but more efficient and more effective.
0:24:15 – Because now one of those explorers is a computer.
0:24:18 – Yeah, it’s also gonna help us actually mine
0:24:21 more efficiently and more effectively and more cleanly.
0:24:23 And that’s really important because to me,
0:24:25 there’s no point in us going electric
0:24:27 and having electric cars using cobalt for batteries
0:24:30 and so on to do that if we create a big mess
0:24:31 in terms of providing those materials.
0:24:34 So we’ve not only got to find it better,
0:24:36 we’ve also got to then exploit it and develop it
0:24:38 in a way that’s more efficient and cleaner
0:24:39 and doesn’t have the kind of problems
0:24:41 that we’ve seen all over the world.
0:24:44 – Well, I think it’s fantastic to think about the way
0:24:46 that the searches and exploration for these metals
0:24:50 have driven sort of entire chapters of human civilization.
0:24:53 And if we think about that, the age of copper,
0:24:55 the age of iron, if we think now we’re entering
0:24:57 the age of cobalt, what are some of the ripple effects
0:25:01 that we’re gonna see as we begin to more smartly mine
0:25:05 and access this new incredibly important mineral?
0:25:08 – Trying to solve climate change and other major issues
0:25:10 that requires very specific use of commodities
0:25:12 that we’re not so familiar with, like cobalt.
0:25:15 And so that changes the way we need to think about them
0:25:17 and the way we therefore also need to exploit them.
0:25:20 And the exploitation part is to be more selective.
0:25:22 We’ve been, we’ve bulk mined everything.
0:25:23 So we make big, big holes in the ground
0:25:26 in order to get iron ore or copper out of the ground.
0:25:28 And if we want to be really clever,
0:25:31 we’ve got to only find higher concentrations
0:25:33 because higher concentrations are more efficient.
0:25:36 But we also now need to try and be very selective
0:25:37 about how we mine them.
0:25:38 – Have much higher certainty.
0:25:40 – Yeah, so, and it’s great if we go back
0:25:43 and reprocess the tailings, which as we’re doing for cobalt.
0:25:45 And actually the Romans were the first people
0:25:48 who started reprocessing waste rocks to do that.
0:25:50 They did a couple of cycles of this kind of stuff.
0:25:52 So that’s not a new idea either.
0:25:53 But it’d be much better to be a really efficient
0:25:56 at the outset and extract as much metal as we can
0:25:58 from the less and less volumes of rock
0:26:01 instead of moving more and more rock to get, you know,
0:26:03 to get metal. – And from a consumer perspective,
0:26:05 this can result in much better batteries.
0:26:08 Because right now even the amount of cobalt
0:26:11 in the battery is kind of a financial decision.
0:26:11 – Oh really?
0:26:12 – And sourcing this decision.
0:26:14 – A financial and sourcing decision, right.
0:26:17 Like if these companies could put more cobalt
0:26:19 than they put in today in their batteries,
0:26:20 it would still be a better battery.
0:26:22 So if we want batteries or iPhones
0:26:25 that last one, two weeks without a charge.
0:26:27 – Yeah, we need more cobalt.
0:26:28 – Yeah.
0:26:29 – You know, there must be a cobalt craze, right?
0:26:31 Like everyone, everyone and their mom
0:26:33 suddenly wants to go mining cobalt.
0:26:35 – That’s the other cobalt issue
0:26:37 is that a lot of it comes from the DRC.
0:26:40 – Over two thirds of the world’s supply.
0:26:42 And again, remember, cobalt’s not a rare metal.
0:26:45 So the fact that two thirds of our supply
0:26:48 comes from the DRC, the Congo right now
0:26:48 is largely a function
0:26:51 of where those copper and nickel mines historically were.
0:26:54 – And it’s mined at a scale of local people
0:26:56 who don’t aren’t regulated,
0:26:59 don’t necessarily do it in an appropriate manner
0:27:01 and use child labor and may have links
0:27:03 to all sorts of other potential problems.
0:27:05 It’s basically done by local people
0:27:07 and DRC in other parts of the world.
0:27:11 They’re doing it because they are impoverished
0:27:14 and they feel they can probably make a better living
0:27:16 by scraping up the material
0:27:19 than plowing a little piece of land.
0:27:20 – Well, this highly valuable material.
0:27:21 – Highly valuable material.
0:27:24 – So it’s these small teams that are taking the gamble
0:27:29 and using shovels and very basic tools to go look for this.
0:27:30 – Correct.
0:27:32 – So that’s actually how it’s happening right now still
0:27:34 is just small groups of people
0:27:37 with eyeballs and shovels in the dirt.
0:27:40 Consumers care about where their products came from now.
0:27:42 They care about the ingredients.
0:27:44 They care about how they were made.
0:27:47 They care about if this came from a local farmer.
0:27:49 So they will eventually start also caring
0:27:52 about where their batteries came from.
0:27:54 – In the DRC where this is done,
0:27:56 they are mining material where,
0:28:00 which was originally a copper cobalt deposit
0:28:04 that then suffered thousands of years of weathering.
0:28:07 So rain came down and dripped through the rocks
0:28:10 and it actually separated the copper from the cobalt.
0:28:12 So the cobalt stayed near the surface
0:28:14 and deeper down it gets more copper rich.
0:28:15 And the mineral that they mine now
0:28:18 is it’s got this great name called heterogenite,
0:28:20 which as you might guess,
0:28:21 is something to do with being heterogeneous.
0:28:22 It looks all over the place.
0:28:23 It’s really messy stuff.
0:28:26 And they can just literally dig that up and put it in bags.
0:28:27 But unfortunately,
0:28:29 that also concentrate quite a bit of thorium,
0:28:30 which is radioactive.
0:28:34 So now we have artisanal miners, local people and kids
0:28:36 who are mining bags for this stuff,
0:28:37 which is slightly radioactive.
0:28:38 It’s not super radioactive,
0:28:40 but it’s radioactive enough to cause concern.
0:28:41 They don’t know that.
0:28:43 They’re just interested in getting bags full
0:28:46 and getting paid for the bag of dirt that they scrape out.
0:28:49 Some people estimate as many as 100 million people
0:28:53 on the planet involved in some kind of activity
0:28:54 like this at this scale.
0:28:55 Not just cobalt.
0:28:56 Not just cobalt.
0:28:59 Gold diamonds, other coltan, other minerals.
0:29:03 Okay, so let’s talk about what this new kind of endeavor
0:29:07 of exploration and mining and knowledge aggregation,
0:29:10 what does that mean on the company building side?
0:29:11 Who do you need?
0:29:13 What kind of people do you need
0:29:16 to sort of represent all those different elements?
0:29:17 It’s a fantastic question.
0:29:21 And basically it’s two very different classes of people
0:29:23 and they’re both essential.
0:29:26 Our company is effectively half made up
0:29:29 of economic geologists, geochemists,
0:29:30 mineral explorationists,
0:29:33 people who have spent their careers
0:29:34 looking in sort of the conventional manner
0:29:36 for mineral deposits of all kinds.
0:29:39 And then the other half is data scientists, right?
0:29:41 And so one of my co-founders,
0:29:44 has got his PhD in quantum computing.
0:29:46 And the other one was the chief reservoir engineer
0:29:49 for ConocoPhillips for many years.
0:29:52 Oil and gas has been incredibly sophisticated
0:29:54 in how they use technology
0:29:56 because there’s a very clear financial reason
0:29:58 to go find oil and gas.
0:29:59 Right, right.
0:30:02 But that same sophistication has not brought
0:30:04 over to mineral and metal exploration.
0:30:07 We relatively well understand the environment
0:30:08 in which we find oil and gas
0:30:10 and we have very good sophisticated tools
0:30:12 to then help us do that.
0:30:15 So the mining business is playing cash up on discovery
0:30:17 and it’s playing cash up on exploitation as well.
0:30:19 And so just in the last 10 years,
0:30:23 everything now in mining is being sensors all over it.
0:30:25 Data is being gathered in the mining process.
0:30:27 Autonomous vehicles are coming into mining so on.
0:30:30 And that’s why the team makeup I think is so interesting
0:30:32 because you have data scientists,
0:30:35 you have people who are truly experts in cobalt
0:30:36 and they already know
0:30:39 and have this gut feeling of where to look.
0:30:41 And then you have people from oil and gas
0:30:43 who can take that sophistication
0:30:45 and kind of bring them up to date.
0:30:46 Okay, so we’re entering a new era
0:30:50 not just about sort of the importance of cobalt
0:30:53 but also about new ways of mining as a whole,
0:30:56 transforming a whole industry and a whole model
0:30:59 of how we find and explore in the earth.
0:31:03 So what changes as a result of that entire model
0:31:04 shifting so dramatically?
0:31:06 That’s a fantastic question.
0:31:08 I think when you think about,
0:31:10 when you think about like the metallurgic epochs, right?
0:31:14 The sort of copper age, the bronze age, the iron age,
0:31:18 the steel age, giving rise to the industrial revolution
0:31:20 and then petroleum that’s we’re basically at,
0:31:24 we’re still in a petroleum age from a material standpoint.
0:31:26 I would say we’re entering the battery materials age.
0:31:29 And so battery materials will be the sort of,
0:31:32 the backbone of energy infrastructure
0:31:33 in the next 100 years.
0:31:36 And that requires a staggering amount of new material
0:31:38 and different materials than we needed in the past.
0:31:41 Cobalt being a salient one, but not the only one.
0:31:44 I think that the tools that we’re developing specifically
0:31:46 to develop, to look for cobalt
0:31:47 actually have a lot of generality to them.
0:31:50 And ultimately I think we’ll probably be looking
0:31:53 for a lot of things other than cobalt
0:31:58 to feed the need of the battery materials age broadly.
0:32:00 So a new kind of exploration
0:32:01 for a new age of new materials.
0:32:03 When you create the Google Maps,
0:32:04 you don’t just know where that stores,
0:32:07 you know where everything else is too.
0:32:09 And funnily enough, it’s different, but it’s the same.
0:32:13 It’s still source to material, to technology,
0:32:15 to people’s desire to change the world.
0:32:16 And that’s the way it’s been
0:32:18 when it was the sword 5,000 years ago
0:32:21 to electric vehicle now, it’s that same process.
0:32:24 But what we’re doing is gonna speed it up,
0:32:27 make it more efficient, use the data more effectively.
0:32:29 So we’re bringing all our tools that we have now
0:32:32 to do the same thing as it was done 5,000 years ago.
0:32:33 – That’s wonderful.
0:32:35 Thank you so much for joining us on the A16Z podcast.
0:32:36 – You’re welcome, thank you.
with Kurt House (@kurtzhouse), John Thompson, Connie Chan (@conniechan) and Hanne Tidnam (@omnivorousread)
The exploration for and mining of certain metals has driven huge epochs of human civilization, from copper and iron to gold and diamonds. In this conversation, Kurt House, CEO and co-founder of KoBold Metals; John Thompson, professor of earth and geosciences at Cornell and longtime advisor to the mining industry; and Connie Chan, general partner for consume, talk with Hanne Tidnam about why it is that cobalt is suddenly one of the most important metals on the planet.
Because this metal makes today’s best batteries for phones, electric cars, and more, we have gone from little to enormous demand — with that demand expected to only increase. This conversation covers the way technology is transforming how we find cobalt, and the mining industry as a whole. Along the way we touch on the science behind why exactly it is that cobalt is so damn good in batteries; what we know about what makes cobalt as a metal ‘tick’, where it’s currently mined, and where it’s most likely to be found; what data and knowledge used to drive mining; and what the new data sources, technologies, and techniques are today, from geophysical/ geochemical data, to agricultural information, to old boxes collected over centuries in the basements and attics of mining cos…. all of this to satisfy the incredible spike of demand for this material, as we enter a new age of battery metals.