Dr. Dave Lawie: Critical Materials Gap, Mining R&D & Copper Tech Breakthroughs

0:00I'm Michael Fox and this is a prospective podcast that I've joined in here. We're courting guests. I have Dr. Dave Lowy, who's the chief geoscientists with index from Australia. Welcome Dave. I might. Yep. Right to be back on this. Yeah, it's it's good to have you back. It's been a while since we've done one of these. So we're we're overdue before we get into our discussion about the gap like we'd normally talk about. Let's give everybody a quick overview of index and what it is you folks do. I'm the chief geoscientist and, literally, actually, Michael, we come to the director of research here of index index is a global mining technology company. We're headquartered in Perth, but operate literally everywhere. Anywhere there's some sort of activity going on around resource development and drilling and exploration and pre-competitive data requisition the whole lot.

1:01We're involved. So we invoice in over a hundred countries each year. Our biggest revenue, our biggest region by revenue is both North and South America. So although we're encoded at the other side of the world down under, we're very much a global company and growing. Yeah, one of these things I'm going to have to visit you in Perth because you always come and visit me here in North America. We see each other generally three or four or sometimes five times a year in person. I furthest away from both of us, I think, is over the London and the UK where UNI will be at the resourcing tomorrow again the first week of December. But as we always talk about, we focus specifically on the critical materials sector of the mining industry and what we UNI have been discussing, which is the gap. And to redefine that for our audience, the gap is where we are today versus where we might be in 10, 20 years versus where the government wants us to be in 10,

2:1120 years. And the difference between where we're probably going to be in with the government and the people in charge what that's the space that we refer to as the gap. Yeah, there's a few different gaps in the gap of course as well. There's the gap, just the geopolitical gap between where we mine the materials and then where we refine them into products. There's supply chain gaps because those two processes are often becoming increasingly isolated in different trading blocks now as well, which is a concern. And I think even since around PDAC when we last spoke, I think a really interesting trend coming out of government now relevant to the mining industry all over the world is the re-emergence of the very old-fashioned industrial policy has applied to mining, which I think is a, you wouldn't have thought this would happen two years ago, but I think in a way the Western

3:13governments and other governments are getting involved in our industry because our industry hasn't been stepping up to the plate to use an North American analogy by itself. So the governments around the world are starting to strong arm us into things which I think is no bad thing. No, no, it's not. And yeah, we're seeing a major shift in industrial policy. We're seeing the United States government actually take some ownership of processing and some lines that are critical metals and critical national security initiatives. If you told me the United States government was going to own companies, I would have said no, they think that socialism that's never going to happen and blowing me hold, that's happening. Yeah, look, it really isn't. I saw quite a shocking financial statistic the other day. It was

4:20from 2000 year 2025 and it was showing the, I'm just bringing it up now to have a look at. So new mining capex in the year 2025, then the change between 24 and 25, so it normally places like Australia, Chile and Canada would dominate that table, but I can tell you that in 2025, new mining capex expenditure in the US increased from 12 to 28 billion dollars a year. In Australia, just by way of contrast, it's seven. So the US leads the table, the global table for investment in new mining project capex. It's not, not expansion studies, things like this is for a new mining capacity, whether it gets spent or not within that side frame given the permitting complications and things like that, I don't know, but it is a really clear signal of intent.

5:25And it's just amazing what the Americans do can do with the size of their economy when they put their mind to it. It does mean that our, even for index, our US operations are just going gag buses at the moment, it's so busy in the industry. This was just not the case a couple of years ago. And so top of the ladder is the US. Second is Canada at 26, then Argentina, right, with a lot of the new mining development going on there. So things are changing. It's just amazing. And I think this is another element of gap. You know, this is a result of a lot of government driven industrial policy. But I think another gap in the business knowledge that may emerge is throwing money at mining is useful. But then it often can't fix the time dimension. It's the length of time it takes to get things done. And there are technical things you just need to do, which take time. So drilling

6:25development, everything that this thing takes a long time. But then there's the red green tape aspects of it as well. And I think that will be another thing that starts to drive the industrial policy. We'll be trying to, you know, without destroying the environment with mining, because we've been there in the past, we're not going to get back to that. But somehow making the process is more efficient and harmonizing the rules and rigs between local governments and overarching governments wherever you are with the country you're in. I think it will be the next part of the industrial policy way as well. You would think so, but you know, in the United States, you know, there's still this federal versus state government dichotomy is going on. Like one of the the metals that's in this gap is nickel. And you have the iron belt in Minnesota, where there is an awful lot of nickel. The federal government got rid of the moratorium on mining in the iron belt. Everyone got excited.

7:28They were ready to go. And then the governor of Minnesota said, yeah, I don't think so. And everything just ground right back to a halt again. So, you know, as much as we talk about changes, something's changed and then something's just remain the same. Yeah, so we call that another external forcing function. It's worth talking about that. This is a I like this term force external forcing functions, things that are imposed on our industry to try make it move and change or reveal some of the weaknesses in the industry as well. I mean, the supplies required. There's no doubt about that at some point something needs to snap and something needs to change. Because we still need people forget, I think that, you know, when with resource consumption of all sorts, right, I mean, biomass, nonmetallics, metallics, everything

8:28even fossil fuels. As a globe, everything just goes up and to the right. And if it's not going up and to the right, then the world's in an extremely bad place. Because it means something horrible is going on. But the other thing is, I mean, when people think that China, you know, the expansion of China for the last 20 years, which is sucked up in incredible amount of resources of all types, is sort of done now. But there's plenty, plenty of the global south as the economists like to call it. And oddly, I think the global south, they take out New Zealand and Australia. But the rest of the global south still has a very, very long way to run to get to the same GDP per capita as what China is now. And if you project that out, it means that the requirement for resources, just to get that done, keeps it straightly upwards into the right trend. So it's not going away anytime soon. Then throw on all industrial policy and geopolitical supply

9:29chain, and so on, etc. And these external forcing functions become tricky. The other part of that is our lack of recent discovery success, which has been well documented. But there are some other things going on as well. And one of them is, you know, the industry, global industries had access to some pretty innovative technology for the last 20 years. But if you break out the industrial sectors, mining is at the bottom of the lead table for productivity improvement with utilities. And that is not a good place to be. And in fact, mining and utilities have gone backwards by quite a lot, if you've mentioned that back to 20 years ago, whereas an industry that were often compared with against, because it's an adjacency and it's involves land and space and don't, etc. Which is agriculture, agriculture is near the top of the lead table, and there's bound of the

10:32head, or has gone ahead and leaps and bounds. So, you know, that's that's not a good thing. And I think it's not answered everything, but it points to why we're having these gaps as well. The other thing is that if you remember what mining spends on R&D, it's, I'm going to put this in a bit of Australian air, a puffed air, we would call it. Something like a little bit over 1% of revenue gets spent on R&D, which is just not great when you compare it with other industries. And that's not, you know, if you look at R&D, most of it would be development, a big D, very small R, and the top 10 mining capitals around the world, so only spend three billion dollars on it globally. One company in the oil and gas game, SLB or Shlombu Zays, they're used to be known, they alone, just them, and they're not even a company doing the mining, you know, better commas, are spending a billion dollars a year. So, I think that that points at something. And then I also like thinking

11:34that up with the business rigs and opportunities surveyed, EY runs each year. And, you know, I think this is sort of ironic and sort of fun, even as an ordinary funny joke. But back in 2005, when they ran the survey, I asked them to see what the top 10 priorities were. Given what I've just said, number one was access to capital, where we talked about that in the next podcast, but bottom of the list was innovation. So, you know, given all of these external forcing functions and what the world requires of us, we've seen it spend a pretty good amount of time punching ourselves around in a wet pipe of value, not achieving much. No, I couldn't agree with you more, although I think that we're starting to see the wheel start to turn towards some change. Being a podcast or a listen to lots of other podcasts, it gives me ideas for topics, guests to get better at my trade.

12:41I've been noticing that it's coming up more and more as a question by the podcasters. And it does relate to oil and gas, because oil and gas was oil and gas until fracking occurred. And then all of a sudden there was a big increase in productivity that came out of the oil and gas industry because of this new technology. And they keep saying, so what is going to be the new technology, it's going to be the game changer for mining. And of course, nobody really has much of an answer to it. But the question probably for the first time in decades is starting to become a prevalent question. Yeah, and there were at the SMA in New York, in May this year, was on the panel of some of those really, really quite exciting younger companies there. So, D-Cycle and Alter, I think what some of these newer companies are trying to do and bring to

13:43bear to really reduce the capital intensity of extracting lithium from hard rock, for example, by cutting the capital intensity by 50%. So, we'll come back to this capital intensity discussion. Companies looking at using eutectic solvents, which is a very technical word, but they're able to extract precious metals and other metals from the waste without touching all of the other components using a low temperature benign solution that can be recycled and is very effective. So, there are little things nibbling around at the edges now, if we're going to be positive about this. And then there's companies like Silicon Valley, the Red Metal Company, who are revisiting a long standing desire to be able to be able to use, fracking too much of the previous people, but literally fracking relatively low grade copper deposits and being able to extract copper

14:46from hard rock, post fracking, using various exhibits and things like that. And what's interesting there is that is still quite a technically challenging thing to do, because if there are two things you need to be able to do, you need to be able to fracture the rock. So, efficiently to get enough surface area for the licks of interest to attack, but Chalka-Pyra, the main copperberry mineral, is a stubborn, bloody thing, and then being able to, it's interesting to start leaching it to put the copper into solution, the surface of the mineral re-equilibrates or repassivized surface, and you can't pick back at the copper. Now, if we can solve those two things, then we potentially open up a whole new surface for copper that's mindable, and the capital cost to get out of it would be much lower, there'd be much less surface infrastructure and a lot less permitting required, so it would potentially bring quite a new source of copper to market relatively quickly, compared with the

15:46traditional ways of going about it. And then you've got the people who are looking at recovering these metals from existing tailings, facilities, and things like that, which is also good, but I think that it's all good and all adds to supply, but that's not going to revolutionise anything that has helped, whereas if you're literally able to crack hard rock copper deposits and extract copper that would have done that required again, change your view. Yeah, that would, but within the copper industry, there is one game changer that's happening right now. We have, I believe it's Rio Tinto, which is an Australian company. They have created this extraction method called Newton and UT-L-N, which will take the copper, leach it out of the rock, and turn it into cathode right at the site. Yes, yes, and then those new time, and there's an

16:47OPP's working a couple of these as well, they're quite tricky to run. They're bugs, if you like, bugs in very common, so you could keep the bugs happy, so the materials that you can apply them to, they're going to very, you need to know what about them, they need to be just right for the bugs to survive and work and keep going. But yeah, again, and I know there's some new projects opening up in Arizona, I think. Yeah, there are kind of the guys in mind. Yeah, so the these things are all, they're all hopeful and all positive, but whether they can get to the point of adding something like copper, you know, in five years can they add three million tons of copper into the copper that we would cry, not sure, not sure, but make don't want to don't want to, you know, disavow them at the wanting to try, rather than people. No, and I don't think it's necessarily about adding tons of copper into the into the process.

17:52When we go to look at the copper industry and we'll you know, we'll use the United States as an example. On the United States produces 50% of their needs in the United States, but only 50% of that 50% do they have the smell to capacity to process the copper to turn it into cathode so that it's an informed that they can make product with. By using the new ton process instead of having to take and mining conventionally and then going to a smell to eliminate that step so it allows them to maybe produce more than their current capacity inside the United States because right now if they were to double their capacity, they don't have the smell to capacity to process the copper, so it still goes overseas to China who has been not shy about, you know, weaponizing thermonopolis in

18:57in critical metals. What if you actually solved by mining more copper if that's the case? Yeah, that's a really good point, Mike. And in fact, the fracking thing should have be able to be unlocked would also be delayed to produce copper cathode at site, so it does help close the gap indeed from another point of view as well. If you can have the mining and refining in the same political jurisdiction, then you get you remove a whole lot of risk at supply chain. Yeah, most definitely, but then there's the education and workforce gap because again, if they were to wave their mounted guan in double, and we're talking just the copper industry, but double capacity for the copper and build it up smelters to process it all, they don't have the training workforce to actually do any of that. And in order to train that

19:57kind of workforce, you're looking at, you know, four or five years worth of post-secondary education, so you understand the process and have the training to be able to do this at a line level. So even if we were to start a mine tomorrow, we probably don't have the workforce to work in that line. True, true. But I will say just last 12 months, speaking of many of the universities, that is reversing a bit now actually the enrollments in, while mining engineering, metallurgy, and geoscience are ticking back up again. Certainly in the insurgers here in Oleson, some in the US, I know, they are as well. You know, speaking about this a bit in the past, but one out working of some of the current American administrations carry on is certainly made mining critical, excuse the put it into the news and got people thinking about it and I think that together with a lot of

21:02discussion around the requirements of data centers, climate, everything, electrification has got lots of people talking about mining and mining, all sorts of commodities. So it's good. You know, one out working of those, it's really sort of energized the way people talk about the entire industry, which is great. And it is attracting some younger people back in to get trading in it. Well, now they can, you know, we rather, but with tough ask 10 years ago, if you want to come into the industry, you might as well probably thought you're a bit crazy in a environmental band, or well, that's not the case now. And with the out of benefit for the young people thinking about it, it pays extremely well as an industry, as a secret pays very well, and gives you opportunities to do things which just are not available in many other careers. So in geosoggest for example, or mining genes, you literally get to travel the world and see parts of the planet that now other people would typically get the same. Right. Yeah, it's absolutely,

22:06it's a great career for some young person coming up to go into because yeah, they can work domestically in their own country, but at the end of the day, you know, they have an opportunity to work in South America. They could work in Africa. They could work in in Asia. They could work in Australia. They could work in Europe because a mine is a mine is a mine. Yeah, there's subtle differences between them, but most of the skills from one mind to another are transferable. Yep, it's all about the rocks, Mike. It's still about the rocks. It'll always be about the rocks. The rocks are political, whether they don't care where they are on the planet. If you know about the rocks, you're a geographically transportable skill. Yeah, no, definitely. So we've talked about AI in data centers. We've brought that up as it relates to copper, but it also affects a lot of these other critical metals because yeah, copper is how that

23:10energy is going to be transferred and moving around. But at the same time, it's going to need that energy. And, you know, uranium and nuclear power is part of the equation that is coming about with this. And that's on the critical metals. You need zinc, you need, you know, other metals to operate these, the power that goes into these data centers and the data centers themselves. And it keeps adding it all up to increasing the gaps that we've already been talking about. Yeah, I agree, Mike. You go to all of those things. They're all parts of these external forcing functions. And when we add, when we layer all of these things on top, of course, they create their new gaps

24:12or intensify existing gaps. One thing I've been thinking about a bit lately is obviously the price of commodities is important, but commodity prices are good. No doubt about that, including gold. But the prices of things like, let's just say copper and zinc, although they're high, particularly historically high, although yes, high. But they're not, given everything we've been speaking about, they're not really increasing to a point to really sharply intensify or encourage or incentivize the delivery of new material to the market, like really, really shaking industry up. So even, you know, a while ago, I'm not a modern bloc CEO of Anglo-Solidian England tech. You know, he made a comment two, maybe even three years ago that to really incentivize companies to

25:12really, really go after adding new supply, with copper in particular, that the price needed to be sustainably above 15,000, as well as a ton. It's almost there. It's getting there, but it's still even given what's going on in the current market. So I wasn't broken that price point, though. But I've been thinking about this in a slightly different way now. There's one thing is the price of a commodity to incentivize supply. But to bring the supply on, even with the high price, the thing that really matters, and this is another gap, or in this case, my call, the squeeze, is the capital intensity to add a new, well, ton of gold, ton of zinc, ounce of gold, things like that. We've gone through the last, say, 15 years, the last 10 or the last 15 years, where the inflationary environment has really been quite benign. But since COVID, inflation's obviously increased, but now it's sticky, and it doesn't seem to be going anywhere soon. So the point is that to really,

26:19to hit a price even of around 15,000 USD, it's ton of copper. You need the capital intensity to bring a ton of copper into supply to be around 35,000 USD to get a ready return of around 16%. Now, there's still an internal rate return of 16% at a copper price of 15,000 USD. It's not still not a great return to bring new supply. But if that capital intensity now starts to creep up and up and up, and the price still won't shift, we're getting entirely new squeeze in the market. In this case, in particular, for copper. The other thing that's going on, which is another squeeze, and we're talking about squeeze as now rather than gaps, which be HP-related to this this year, maybe late last year, with their operations in Chile, was people assume that there's a capital intensity benefit for bringing new supply online around existing mines, rather than

27:25building brand new mines. The point that the HP made was adding new copper supply around existing mines, as becoming just as expensive, or the capital intensity, is becoming just as expensive, as adding copper from a Greenfields development, which I think is a really interesting commendium indeed, and something that doesn't get spoken about often enough. One reason for that is existing mines were built obviously some time ago. Adding new capacity needs, new infrastructure, but it means that the new capacity of the mine needs to be added using under different conditions, and these people differently, the mine needs to be better. There are different permalitions required. So you need to build a better mine around the existing mine to bring new supply online in a brown fields environment. Now that's interesting, so no matter whether you're talking green for yellows or brown for the capital intensity, it's increasing, it's increasing the inflation, the price

28:25is not moving much at all. So that's a squeeze, and that is a problematic squeeze in the industry, because if you just have that confidence to go in and start the incentive levels are still out behind after that way. It's a really go-and-blow, a ton of capital on bringing new supply online. And of course the big mining companies got beaten up during the last boom for overspending on capital, so they're quite hesitant to acquire, well, hesitant would be the word to go out the limb now and do it. So these are squeezes and constraints, and then the other squeeze, and that would be just the the shareholders and investors, if you like, in the Western mining companies, who sort of are holding a handbrake on them doing something about this as well, thinking about copper prices, price in years from now, which I think going back to the start is where the governments are stepping

29:27in with industrial policy to just get things done, because it's sort of been lost a little bit in the remittor what the companies did themselves applying standard economics. Honestly, I think these are really interesting shifts that are going on at the moment, and you know, you made the comment that it's not an economic, an economic purist view of a way to run an industry, but this is where we're finding ourselves now, almost a socialist outlook to run the mining industry. Yeah, you know, I absolutely meant like there's a prime example in central British Columbia, the Highland Valley copper mine that's owned by TAC, and they've just announced a $2 billion expansion, which you know, that's a substantial expansion of that mining operation, but it's going to extend the life of it and extend the production for quite some time, but it's still a $2 billion capital outlay. So without assistance from the British Columbia government and the Canadian government,

30:33I don't know that that would have necessarily happened on its own based on the economic equation in the business model. Yeah, isn't that interesting, right? So you'd think that in a perfectly functioning market, the price will get to the point where the increased price would justify that capital without needing to worry about it so much, we just don't secure the capital and production and the price is going to be whatever is now plus X in two, three, five years now, what's the problem? The fact that governments go step in here and lubricate those processes for the industry is I think odd and essential as it turns out, but something is broken in there and I can't put my finger on it. Yeah, I know there is something that's gotten broken there and it's, you know, there's been, under-investment in this sector for decades and in the meantime, you know, you have our main competitor, which, you know, arguably is China and most of this in this process and, you know,

31:43it's a state capitalist system where the state is putting up a lot of the capital that's needed and our investors, you're just simply weren't keeping up with it so something had to change, but again, the speed that inflation is affecting the capital, a lot of these new minds and expansion operations is shocking. I had an interest in conversation with a finance here that, you know, his organization was responsible for debt financing for a lot of mining operations all over the world and we had a conversation about feasibility studies and he was saying that the feasibility study was older than four to six months. It was completely useless and they'd have to go back and do it again because the inflation had changed the, the cap-ass structure of

32:48the project that much in that short, a period of time that they couldn't finance based on the feasibility study, if unless it was that current. Yeah, well that's just variability on top of variability. I mean, feasibility studies and getting minds and production just with the technical and geological risk is hard enough, but then layering on top of that are very, very sticky inflation on the coast side that is really tricky. You know, it's just one of the things industry has to do with the young where price takers, we don't control the price, and we've got inflation affecting all of our underlying costs and our cost of capital as well, just the cost of capital, then that's a tricky problem for sure, hence the state steps in in various countries, including the US now to just try and take some of that risk on. Yeah, well, most definitely, and one of the areas that the United States is putting the

33:52thumbs on the scale, so to speak, is they're, they have the import export bank of America, which is basically government run, and they're stepping up to make sure that a lot of these mining operations in order to get their catbacks. They're stepping up to the plate and finding the loans for a lot of these organizations. I don't know that we're necessary to that stage in Canada. We do have an export bank and an import export bank, but I don't see where they're the one stepping up. At best, I think you see government guarantees to some degree, but not necessarily government loans or government funding, so it's still up to the capital markets to fund these projects. Yes, well over here in Wales, the federal government at least, just put a toe in the water, dropping some things up, and it interestedly on the, on the smelting, you know,

34:53finish products side of things, so try to keep an all-eminent smelter running and try to keep another smelter running down at Tazzy, and supply some critical minerals as part of smelting zinc as well. So, governments have got the message, and they are, they are trying to help, but, you know, it's only, you've been three years from now, if the inflation is still running along, you know, higher than it wants it to, whether at this level of government support is actually going down to increase. Yeah, well, definitely. Now, I'll tell you what keeps me awake at night, is the data center problem, because, you know, in China, I can't speak capital, if they want to build a data center, they don't care what the Chinese population say about it, that data center is going to get built. We're getting massive amounts of pushback on the data centers in North America.

35:55I don't know about it, not Australia, or not so much in Europe, although I suspect that they're seeing pushback there as well. If that were to occur, all this gap, a lot of this gap starts to disappear. Like, if there's no data centers, we don't need the energy expansion that they're talking about. Therefore, we don't need to copper and a lot of these other minerals in order to fund the energy to get to the data centers, to get to everybody. If the data center equation falls apart, this whole equation about needing more mines, needing more processing and higher, and higher prices and capaxes, has that come crashing down, but these did it last. Yeah, I don't think it comes crashing down, because the, you know, the requirement of the copper increased to the last 100 years of the K-GAP, about 3%, you know, doubles every 25 to 30 years,

36:57a consumption of it, that was before any of this, all this stuff is just on top of that already increasing requirement for copper and everything else in fact. So I don't think so much, it would help a bit, but the fact is that no matter what the world will be wanting more and more of these, just to, just to industrialise and increase the quality of living in various parts of the world, including go to sales. So I think it goes away, might moderate the whole thing a bit, well, it must, the supply isn't needed in the end, but I know I don't think it goes away, I think that this problem just persists. Okay, so start just to data center problem, it's societal problem. Yeah, no, no, if you look back at what the world has produced and consumed before, even getting up to, if you go back four years before, even the whole EV,

37:58took off, everything was up into the right, across everything, the number, the rate of increase, consumption of all resources and all commodities is just, just astounding. The fact, the fact the industry has been able to sustain these incredible increases and supplies of these materials, without actually increasing the price in cost and currency basis, is really a big gold star stamp for the industry that it's been able to do this for the planet. It's just, we might think about it like that. And you know, after this problem, I'll give you a couple of pictures that shows you the price of zinc and copper and cost and currency and the amount of production as it's built up over the last hundred years and you look at it and go, man, that's that's an impressive outcome. So it's done a good job. But now we're, now we're getting the point where to keep it going, it is indeed the challenge and it's something we need to keep going, not for the next five, 10, 20, 50 years. Yeah, as you know, we're probably, you need to be

39:02looking at this as a hundred year pro, but problem, which in Western society is very hard because they think in four year election cycles in a lot of ways. Well, three years here actually, market, the federal system of government. Well, if you're in the United States, it's like a perpetual election season. No, no, it doesn't. We're lucky in Canada. We only have to kind of put up with it every four years, but it's different in different parts of the world. That's for sure. But yeah, I can hear what you're saying because like I know, here in my backyard, you know, Prince Edward Island, small island province, we're reaching the capacity of our electric grid. And we don't have data centers. You know, we have increased amounts of electrification that's happening on the island, but you know, they're talking that we are probably a year or so away from

40:04rolling blackouts in certain times because there won't be enough energy being generated to supply the energy needs of the island. So that into itself is problematic. I'm hearing that in different sectors of the United States, where that's also occurring. And again, data centers, seven, let play a role in certain areas, but in other areas not so much. So it is an ongoing, you know, infrastructure challenge that, you know, that we're going to have to be facing. Yeah, and that's, you know, that's a bit like what I was saying about the commodities over the years so that our utilities and our power transmission networks have been very, you know, one of those boring things to think about for decades because it was built out. And then although, although, you know, a lot more people and facilities being added to the grid, etc.

41:06Over time, the electrical appliances themselves were getting more and more efficient. So although there were more things connected to it that could handle the amount of power that the grid could just handle the demand due to the efficiency and the use of electricity. You know, lead lights and houses and streets, that's always seems really added up. But we, you know, we're in front of the point where all of those benefits were offsetting the requirement for increased transmission. All those benefits that sort of got run through and dried up at about the same time as we started to electrify even more things and put even more demands on the grid. So that's sort of a double whanning and, I mean, I know, I know, human Australia, the utilities were getting in trouble for goal plating the power distribution networks as they call it over investing in them. Not anymore. That's a political argument that's gone by the side now. And in fact, there's a scramble just to create more transmission capability and increase it capacity. But, you know, technology's helping

42:10there. You know, there are companies in Europe and the US that build these new types of conductors and that is called re-conductoring. And they can just take existing infrastructure. So if you've, you know, if you've built the built-by-high transmission power lines with all the pylons and everything, that they're really expensive, but it causes the pylons. But you can just restring them with these new conductors. You can send another 30, 50 percent power down the same pylon infrastructure that needing to rebuild it. So that's what, and those technologies are really interesting. They fascinate me actually. And these new conductors, I know we're going off police never here, but they put fiber objects down that are they can optimise you, man, a power, you can send down them. So, you know, on hot days, you have to throttle back as well. How much paper said down it because they warm up and they sag. You know, I'm sagging too much, but you just have a very rubbery picture of what's going on in the network. But with these new conductors, they can see exactly what's going on. And they may know exactly how much power they can push down

43:14the individual cables before they sag too much. So there's a rule. There is an optimisation we had with all of that. And you're going to imagine a whole layer of AI sitting over a very intelligent grid. It will be, you know, that may, I know, maybe it's very false, I don't know, but it may actually be able to optimise you so that existing infrastructure to allow us to send more power on the grid. And that will be a good thing. Yeah, but these new pylons, they're going to need materials anyways, right? So, the gap gets with one hand and takes with the other as we, as we keep pointing out, as we go through these discussions. And there's no free lunch. We want everything's going to go up and to the right and we want more, we want our nice standards of living. So yeah. Okay, well, let's, for the last bit of this conversation, let's discuss the big orange elephant in the room. You know, he's been good for the mining industry

44:17and that he has put a pretty good spotlight on, on the importance of critical metals. And pretty much all the countries in the world are kind of going, yeah, these are critical metals. And this is very important. We need to mine more of it. And we need to keep it in domestically. But a lot of this policies kind of go against that and thwarted in a lot of ways. So is, is he an impediment to, to closing the gap or is he going to, you know, shorten the gap or, or widening, I guess, is the question. Yeah. So is that a net positive or a net negative us suppose? So I would think given the airtime, this issue has been given globally in the last couple of years. I think this, and if you look at it long, and I don't have the exact time, for actually, feeling from now about five, 10 years, I think this has absolutely been a net positive

45:20influence. So how people think about these supply chains, I think, you know, into the industrial policy, a lot of the industrial policies being around, out around the world, these are going to long survive, you know, multiple administrations or certain US, but elsewhere as well. So I think, I think that train is leaving the station in a good way, and I don't think it'll be stockable, we'll just keep going. So I think, you know, honestly, a couple years ago, I've been just despairing around getting governments involved to help lubricate these processes, so the industry can step up and do what it needs to do. That's happening now. And I think that survives the current into a political climate, if you like, political climate. I think it survives all of that, and keeps going. So that's absolutely a net positive. Okay. My concern on this is that because you're such an isolationist, in a lot of what he does, does that bring about a situation

46:25where globally every country becomes an isolationist? And these critical metals don't get to where they need to get to in order for everybody to thrive together. You'll have and kind of ones in cap countries. Yeah. Look, if we're talking about the thin market, critical metals like the rare earths and chimney, tampering things like that, not the big one, not the big thick market ones. And now they've got airtime and people thinking about them, with time, with time, I don't know how much, I'd say, at least two years, I'm saying. It'd be very easy for the West to solve this. And when you have the technology, you have the industries, you have the consumers, and you have the miners, if you put, and I said this before, the US, Canada, Australia, South Korea, and Japan, for example, together, that would just be an unbelievably powerful alliance

47:33that could solve every last one of these problems to do with the, not to make copper here, that's a different thing, but some of these more militarily and specialty metal and magnet type materials that could be solved in five years could make the problem go away. Yeah, right now, apart from you and I, Australia and Canada, are these other countries getting along well enough for us to be in the alliance? Oh, I get. Things change, Mike, with time, we're just going to, I think we're probably not alone and just waiting this out. I think a lot of countries are waiting it out and hoping things might change for the better on that front when we get through, well, the next six months and then maybe two years after that. It's interesting though, so here's the thing, there's nothing stopping Canada, ours, South Korea, Japan, and let's throw India on the mix as well here,

48:35from just doing it themselves. It just, why wouldn't that happen? And throw the EU into that as well. So it's not inconceivable that that just couldn't be solved with that sort of mechanism. It makes one of those countries put in, pick a number of five billion agent added it up. It could do a lot of damage to fixing a lot of these issues with those metals in particular. You can't really put the same gold copper into the equation you'd consider to where their mind is outside of that cohort, if you like, it makes much more the supplies, much more geographic and more specific. Yeah, and you believe an awful lot more copper than you do say, CETE and merger, Manium, or some of the other specialty metals, like even Lithium, it's a major battery contributor, but it's not as significant as the other metals that you need to also need to go into those batteries as well.

49:37Yeah, you need a lot of them and multiple applications, of course. But luckily, South America is a relatively benign and cooperative part of the world to deal with. Yes, it is. And maybe that is the solution. Maybe we need to look to ourselves to solve these problems for new alliances to close that gap. And then I guess we could let America have a little bit of it after we've done that, I guess. We could let them back into the club when they're ready. Yeah, well, exactly. So that's the state of the gap, but it keeps, it looks like sometimes it's getting better, but then other times it looks like it's getting worse, but it keeps turning on and turning on and some problems get solved and new ones get cropped up.

50:40So you and I are going to be talking about the gap for quite some time. Well, I think the gap and the squeeze, the gaps and squeezes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So if people want to keep following your musings on this, Steve, how would they do so? Well, they can listen to your podcast, of course, or they, I get into Navig LinkedIn. Sometimes I put some things in there, but you can look me up on LinkedIn to see I'm getting involved in. I also give talks around the place I pop up here and there, but normally they're publicizing LinkedIn as well. Yes, we'll be giving a talk in London in December when we're there for resource. Not tomorrow. Not giving a talk there, more just working and talking to people out and around and outside being event itself. But the one thing we do is we can give the Dave and I we pub tour and if people want to hear your musings, they can come and meet you in the pub. The old quid's head hotel on the Tuesday night of the London event. Perfect. Dave, thank you very much for your time and this

51:46discussion and I look forward to having you back on again soon and we've, as always, we're going to have lots of talk about. So good to have you and we'll be talking again in a few more weeks or about a month's time, I think. Yeah, no, that's cool, Mike. And thanks for the opportunity. The prospector news podcast is for educational purposes only. The opinions expressed are those of the participants are not to be taken as investment advice. Listers need to do their own due diligence and seek advice of a licensed investment advisor.