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Industrial Ecology and Critical Minerals: Dr. Nedal Nassar · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_05: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_05: Is that good?
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_05: That's good.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_05: Who knows?
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_05: Well done, Chris.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_03: Well done.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_03: I know.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_05: You did not know I was bilingual, did you?
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_05: Hey man, it's good to see your face.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, you know, you are you're pretty fancy over there.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_05: It's always good to be looking at you.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_03: What do you mean I look fancy?
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_03: Why?
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_03: Why do I look fancy?
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_05: You know, I thought you had like a nice V, a deep V-neck going on, like a very stylish V-neck.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_03: Uh no, it's a quarter zip north face pullover.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_05: Well, you're wearing it, you're wearing it in a stylish way, man.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_05: Thank you.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_05: I appreciate that.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_05: You're you're looking very uh prestigious.
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  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_03: I won't say the same, but thanks.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_03: I never do.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_05: No, that's right.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_05: Hey, we had a great interview today.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_05: Oh, dude, this was so fun.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, okay, let I'm gonna I'm gonna run through the CV.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_05: I I walked away from this interview just being so totally impressed by this guy.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_05: So we interviewed Dr.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_05: Nadal Nassar, who is a PhD industrial ecologist, which I didn't really know what that was until this interview.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_05: Very fun.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_05: But he is the chief of the U.S.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_05: Geological Survey's materials flow analysis section, which might be a little bit confusing, but basically looks at how elements in critical commodities move through our society.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_05: Like amazing job.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_05: He's a leading member of the U.S.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_05: National Science and Technology Council.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_05: It won the 2019 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, which I cannot emphasize enough how big of a deal that is.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_05: That is a massive award.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_05: He's got an MBA from Cornell, a bachelor's in chemical engineering from University of Minnesota, and a PhD from Yale.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_05: So got the credentials, backed it up.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_05: What an amazing guy, just totally nice guy.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, he is like you just get the feeling this is one of the most genuine, probably kindest, most kind people that you're ever gonna come across.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, just that kind of person.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_03: And uh what a great interview.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_03: You know, in prepping for this interview and then with getting to talk to him.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_03: The takeaway for me is the importance of knowing the process of the things that we use.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_03: You know, like it's so complicated for one.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_03: Like he said, and it was a beautiful way of putting it that you know, we don't get our cell phones at the store.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_03: Everything that makes up a cell phone comes out of the earth.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_03: We use it, and then what do we do with it after that, which is almost as important as everything else that came before it, the whole recycling process, and because these minerals, you know, the vast majority of the critical elements, they're coming out of other countries, particularly like China, and uh it's uh it's something that is extremely important.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_05: You know, this is not necessarily he's he's not a geoscientist, but he works with and manages geoscientists.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_05: And I think, you know, Chris, we always talk about the importance of geoscience in the phrase that kind of gets tossed around is that if it doesn't grow in the ground, we have to mine it to use it.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_05: And so so much of our society is based on stuff we mine, and he's really addressing what happens after it's mined, like really trying to understand that at a macroeconomic scale, which is just super, super interesting.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_05: I would love to talk to him for four more hours.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, see, I think this is you and your you have this like latent pent-up data part of you that I don't completely understand.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_03: It's true.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_03: Because I look at all that and I'm like, oh my gosh, you could go down a thousand rabbit holes a day doing this job, and you're excited about that.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I I don't know what to make of that, really, to be honest with you.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_05: And uh Nadal's excited too.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_05: He just portrayed it very well, and I'm super excited for the Planet Geo listeners to get to hear from him.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_05: So that's right.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_05: With that, let's get to it, Chris.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_05: But before we do, follow us on all the social medias.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_05: We are at Planet Geocast.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_05: Send us an email, planetgeocast at gmail.com.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_05: And most importantly, Chris, what do people do?
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_03: Share our podcast with somebody that you think would like it.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_03: That's the most important thing.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_05: Absolutely, because it's episodes like this that show how important geoscience is to society in our everyday lives.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_03: Well said.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_05: Let's go.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_05: Let's do it, Chris.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_05: Dr.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_05: Nassar, welcome to Planet Geo.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_05: Thank you so much for joining us.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_05: We are really excited to talk to you.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_05: This is like one of our more uh interesting and sort of outside of geoscience interviews.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_05: This is very fun.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_05: I'm I'm super excited to learn from you.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for having me.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_02: I appreciate the opportunity.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, this is gonna be great.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_05: So we gave a brief introduction, but you are the the chief of the United States Geological Survey's materials flow analysis section right now.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_05: Right.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_05: Is that correct?
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_05: Did I did I get it all right there in line?
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_05: Yes, you did.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_05: Okay, cool.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_05: And so we kind of always like to start out these interviews by talking about what inspired you to get into your field of science.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_05: And I'll be honest, I'd never heard of an industrial ecologist until we started looking at your resume.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_05: So can you start out there?
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_05: Like, what the heck is an industrial ecologist and how'd you get into it?
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_05: Like, what was your was there sort of an aha moment that kind of got you down this career path?
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so I I have vivid memories of of being a child and looking at some old encyclopedias that displayed, you know, those world maps that had those bar charts hovering over them that showed different countries and the production of copper, natural gas, and other natural resources over them.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_02: And I was fascinated by them.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_02: So from very early on, I was fascinated by this idea of understanding natural resource endowments, the benefits that they yielded to those nations, the potential conflict or cooperation that may ensue.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_02: But my path towards this field of work really was by no means a straight line, right?
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_02: So I grew up, really excelled and was fascinated by chemistry, math, and physics.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_02: So naturally, I majored in chemical engineering.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_02: After graduation, I worked as a process development engineer, so developing new manufacturing processes in the semiconductors and in data storage industries.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_02: And that was key for me because I got to see how decisions were made up front in the manufacturing sector.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_02: But not wanting to be pigeonholed, I went ahead and got an MBA in sustainable global enterprise.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_02: So they had this immersion program where they got you interested in specific topics.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_02: And at this program at Cornell University was looking at ways where we can solve the grand challenges of our time using different business models, right?
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_02: So business as a solution to these grand challenges.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_02: And I was really interested in that.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_02: But as an engineer, I went back to I gotta put numbers on things, right?
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_05: I gotta put Can I ask about that engineering?
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_05: So I'm picturing uh, I mean, what I don't know, what five, six-year-old Nadal.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_05: You're looking through the encyclopedia and thinking, wow, that's interesting.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_05: Like what countries are producing copper?
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, I thought I was pretty nerdy.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_05: I was a very nerdy little kid.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_05: That's interesting that you were passionate about this like from very early age.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_05: Like, how old were you when this was like, oh, this is what I want to do?
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_05: When did you decide that?
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you know, so I was interested in this, like I said, it was probably first or second grade.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_02: Just you know, my parents had these encyclopedia sets, and I was just really fascinated and looking at maps and resources.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_02: And it, you know, it only dawned to me like you know, maybe five, 10 years ago, that wow, I really like this from a long time ago.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_05: Um that's exceptional.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_05: That's amazing.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_05: That's very cool.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_05: Very, very cool.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I thought so too.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_02: But it's it's like I didn't take a straight line from here to there.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_02: It really took a lot of different paths to get to where I am today.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_02: But I I do feel really lucky to be in the position that I am and do the work.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_05: Sorry, I interrupted.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_05: You're you're at your MBA in Cornell, right?
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so I was, you know, I was learning about sustainability issues and how business can solve sustainability issues, but as an engineer, I always wanted to look at numbers and put numbers and not just talk about concepts and and theories.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_02: And so I found this field called industrial ecology that seemed to fit the bill.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_02: It was a combination of engineering, business, and environment.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_02: And it really, really struck a chord with me.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_02: And I found this program at Yale University that specialized in this.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_02: So I went for it and got my PhD from there.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_05: That's very interesting.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_05: Chris, are you gonna ask the question like can you paint us a picture for what industrial ecology is?
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_05: Like, is there a good analogy?
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_03: I always think of ecology and its relation to biology.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_03: Never heard of this before.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so simply put, industrial ecology is the science of sustainability, right?
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_02: So instead of just fuzzy concept, it's it's trying to do science around the idea of sustainability.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_02: And the the term might seem like an oxymoron, right?
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_02: How could you do industry and ecology at the same time?
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_02: But it is inspired by the biological metaphor that industrial systems can potentially mimic ecosystems.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_02: So you have different participants in this ecosystem.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_02: In this case, they might be manufacturing firms, they could be cities, whatever it is, they exchange materials and energy between them, they generate waste, and some of them maybe can take the waste from one industry and use it as a resource for another, just as different biological organisms might behave in an ecosystem.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_05: Oh, very nice.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_05: Okay, that's very nice analogy.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_05: Very cool.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, that makes sense now.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_03: I just I never would have put that together.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and and the theory goes the idea is that when you start out with a relatively new ecosystem, it's pretty linear, right?
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_02: So you're going from taking resources uh as much as you can, as quickly as you can, to grow, and then you're creating a lot of waste.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_02: Eventually, the resources start to be constrained, and you have to use what you have, and there's more competition between the industry players and less is wasted.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_02: And so the system goes from being linear to circular, right?
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_02: So a lot of the different uh organisms that might be in an ecosystem start to find their niche and and be players.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_02: And the same idea or the same um in theory, the same idea would be for industrial systems.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_02: So at the beginning, you know, we're just take, take, take, and it's very linear, creating waste at the end of it.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_02: But then when we're resource constrained, we become uh much more circular.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_02: And you hear a lot that of that term in in the the recent conversation, uh especially in Europe, talking about the circular economy.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_05: Oh, interesting.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_05: Okay.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_05: Uh uh that makes a lot of sense.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_05: So it's it's sort of the I mean, you have to know economics, you have to know industrial design and and manufacturing design, you presumably have to know chemical engineering given your background.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_05: Like what the whole process.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_05: What are the main like inputs to this interdisciplinary thing called industrial ecology?
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_05: Like, what else do you need to know to do your job?
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_05: What other specialties that you're pulling from?
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it it is in inherently interdisciplinary, and it needs to be because it's trying to tackle such uh complex problems.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_02: And the problems really can stem from just understanding, you know, which product is better, right?
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_02: So the classic paper versus plastic.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_02: That might seem like a relatively trivial question, but it actually is quite complex when you look at the entire system, you know, for the transportation of those goods, manufacturing of those goods, where do the raw materials come from, where are they, what are they ultimately, where are they ultimately disposed of?
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_02: And so there's a lot that goes into it.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_02: And so, uh, but that's just one piece of it.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, another piece of it could be looking at just like as we do for metabolism of biological organisms, we can look at the metabolism of an industrial system or a city or a country or the globe.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_02: So, how much of a specific commodity are the human systems metabolizing and what's going on to it?
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_02: So, sort of what's the environmental faith of that of that uh specific commodity?
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_03: That's a lot of different directions you could go.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_02: And so you could talk to two industrial ecologists and they would have nothing to do with each other in terms of their work.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_02: Very far apart.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_03: All right, Nadal, I I have to get to this question.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_03: And uh, so I was getting ready uh for this interview last week and I I watched a YouTube video.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_03: I think you were doing a uh like a water flow or a waterfall chart on tantalum, I think.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_03: And I called Jesse after I watched this, and and pardon my life.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_05: Well, let me let me interject.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_05: It was wholly expletive, but it was like, how have I not heard of this before?
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_05: We gotta talk.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_05: Like, why are we not talking about this more?
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_05: This is crazy.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_05: Like, we gotta know.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_05: And I I feel the exact same way.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_05: So, yeah, I'm excited to hear your answer to this question.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, can you tell us like why this is so important?
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_03: Because it is.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think what we have to realize is that over the last maybe a couple decades, technology's really advanced very quickly.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_02: So that even you know, everyday artifacts that we hold in our hand contain dozens of different elements of the periodic table.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_02: So if you're holding a smartphone in your hand, you're holding half the periodic table in your hand, give or take a few elements.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_02: That's unprecedented, right?
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_02: So imagine holding, you know, we're holding half the periodic table in our hand.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_02: That's pretty crazy.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_02: And it took a huge amount of effort to get from here to there a huge system, you know, of of mining, processing, manufacturing, logistics and transportation to get that product in your hand.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_02: And it's such a complicated system.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_02: And so my job is really to understand where is it all coming from and where's it all going.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_05: Oh, so no big deal.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, yeah, that's that sounds oh yeah, so super easy, right?
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I think we'll, Jesse, we'll get into that a little bit more, I think, with some of the other questions in terms of like how complicated that process is.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, uh, yeah, I totally agree.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_05: I want to I want to kind of push on that a little bit or press on it.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_05: I don't know, what whatever the phrase is, dive into deeper.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_05: Like, why is it important to know where it's coming from, where it's going?
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_05: Like, can you can you can you frame it like why do we have to care?
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, maybe pick an element that you're thinking of when you answer this question.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_03: Sure.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_05: That's a good idea, yeah.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_02: So there are really two main caps of why this is important, two perspectives.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_02: And the first one I've already already sort of touched upon, which is the environmental perspective, right?
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_02: So there's an environmental perspective, and the other one is sort of more of a national security perspective.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_02: So let's let's make one commodity.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_02: So platinum is a relatively scarce, geologically scarce element.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_02: It's you know found typically in ores in a few parts per million.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_02: That's the good stuff.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_02: But it's used in a lot of different technologies.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, I think most folks uh have heard recently in the news that there have been carjackings where they're taking the catalytic converters uh out of the bottom of cars.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_02: Well, they're getting it too.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_05: This was just I uh hold on.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_05: Chris, Chris, I just caught I got a phone call from Chris like two weeks ago Saturday, and he was in such a foul mood because he was exactly I think he was securing some piece of whatever his car, and he was so pissed off about it.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_03: I was putting uh a catalytic converter shield on the bottom of my Toyota Prius.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_03: There you go.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_03: The the prices are shooting up pain in the butt.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_03: There you go.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_03: Oh wow.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_02: But when the prices shoot up, carjackings for for catalytic converters shoot up because there's platinum in there, there's palladium in there, and there's rhodium, all platinum group elements.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's that's one of the major uses of platinum.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_02: Of course, other people know the other major uses include jewelry, but platinum is also used in a lot of other high-tech.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_02: So it's used in hard disk drives, it's used in medical devices, anti-cancer drugs, glass manufacturing equipment for those uh LED screens, a lot of different uses for platinum.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_05: Can I ask, what do you like?
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_05: How is it used?
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_05: And and in what concentration?
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_05: Like if you say a hard drive or something, like how much is in a hard drive?
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_05: And like, is it is it in an alloy in some semiconductor?
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_05: Like, what like what is the yes?
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_05: And maybe this is not an interesting thing, but like I'm just curious.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_05: Oh, it's in all these things, but in what concentration and and in what parts or yeah, typically very, very low concentrations.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_02: There's maybe a couple of grams of platinum in your car.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_02: Often with almost always with rhodium and palladium.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_02: There might be ruthenium, which is another platinum group element, for example, is uh they call it pixie dust because they're basically just putting a little bit on that on that hard disk platter to get the property that they need.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_02: So it's very, very small quantities, which actually leads us to another problem.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_02: When all these really um scarce metals are also used in very small quantities, it makes it really hard to recycle.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_02: Precious metals like gold, silver, and the and platinum and the platinum group metals, really, really expensive stuff, right?
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_02: Thousands of dollars per troy ounce.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_02: But some of the other elements that we care about are not as expensive, but still used in very, very small concent amounts and concentrations, which means that they're not necessarily economically attractive to recycle at the post-consumer end of life.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_05: Oh, that's interesting.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_05: Okay.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_05: So they're used in everything, but they're absolutely necessary in these things.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_05: Like you can't have your car without the platinum, or you can't substitute platinum for something else in these things, really.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's a really good question.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_02: So we look at substitution quite closely.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_02: So there always will be a substitute, one thing for another, right?
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_02: So you can imagine instead of using copper wires to conduct electricity, you can use aluminum.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_02: You're you're gonna lose some performance though.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_02: So typically you're gonna have a loss in performance, or you're it's a higher cost, which is why people aren't aren't using it.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_02: In certain cases, the element that's the best substitute is typically in close proximity to that element on the periodic table, which makes sense, right?
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_02: So platinum can substitute sometimes for palladium, uh, palladium can substitute sometimes for nickel, or vice versa.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_02: But obviously, you're gonna have some sort of performance difference because they're not the same element.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_02: What that also means is that you know, when material scientists are putting together a product and they're trying to find out, you know, what else could I use instead, on the other end of the supply chain at the very beginning, when we're mining the ores, no surprise, they're also co-produced.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_02: So nickel, palladium, platinum all co-produced from the same sulfide ores.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_02: So it doesn't necessarily always solve the problem to say I'm gonna substitute my way out of it.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_03: All right, Jesse, let's let's get into this critical mineral stuff.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_05: Okay, Nadal.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_05: So I've always been curious about this.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_05: Well, we have this term critical minerals, which is very much people have here are hearing about this.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_05: So I want to hear what the definition of a critical mineral is from you.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_05: And I also want to know well, maybe let's start there.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_05: What is a critical mineral?
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_05: What do we mean when you know the Wall Street Journal, New York Times is writing about critical minerals and how important they are?
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_02: So I think a lot of people are have different definitions of what a critical mineral is.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, there's uh academics that have their own definitions, there are government agencies that have their own definitions, there are news articles uh that use their own definitions.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_02: Oftentimes they're conflicting.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_02: What we try to do is really stick to a more concrete definition.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_02: So what we're looking at is an issue uh regarding supply risk.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_02: So that you know, is there a supply risk for this commodity?
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_02: And for us, for there to be risk, we think that there are three things need to happen.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_02: There has to be a likelihood of a supply disruption, you have to be exposed to it, and you have to be vulnerable to it.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_02: So those three conditions must be bad for there to be risked.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_03: What what do you mean exposed to it?
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_02: So so suppose you're the United States and you don't have you can't you can't or don't produce any of the commodity.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_02: So you are exposed to a foreign supply disruption.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_02: On the other hand, if you produce the vast majority of that commodity or you produce everything that you need and consume domestically, then you're not exposed to a foreign supply disruption.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_05: And what does vulnerable mean then?
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_05: In the those sound kind of similar.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_02: So exposure is am I exposed to it?
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_02: So for a thing like you know, pandemic, am I am I getting exposed to it?
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_02: Vulnerable would be, you know, if I get it, is something bad gonna happen to you?
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_02: Am I vulnerable to it?
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_05: I see.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_05: Okay, that's a great analogy, actually.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_05: You know, pandemic, you know, yeah, for sure.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, the hazard for for us is a foreign supply disruption.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_02: So is it really likely to happen or not?
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_02: Are we exposed to it or not?
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_02: And then for those specific industries that consume it, are they really able to withstand that supply disruption?
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_02: Can they substitute their way out of it?
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_02: Could they pass the cost on to a customer?
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_02: Could they uh absorb the price uh shock, for example?
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_03: And and this right here gets at the the question of why is your job so important?
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_03: Those three things right there, that that's the takeaway for me.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_03: What are the top five critical minerals?
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_03: Do you have do you have a top five list?
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_03: Or is that too hard of a question?
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_03: Is that too broad?
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_02: We do.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so in our latest analysis, we do provide sort of a rank ordering of the commodities that sit at the top, but we try to emphasize that it's you know, don't worry too much about who's number one and who's number two.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um, because things do change, right?
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_02: Things change.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_02: And we're often dealing with because we're looking often at global systems, we're not, you know, in a lab measuring things to you know six significant digits.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_02: We're really dealing with one, maybe two significant digits.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_02: So what we really try to do is tell people, you know, look at the general trends, look who's generally towards the top of the list versus those towards the bottom of the list.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_02: We believe it's more of a continuum than than sort of a uh a straight cutoff.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_02: So things that tend to go on the top of the list typically are commodities that go into permanent magnets.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_02: So things like neodynium, dysprosium, terbium, other uh things that are really going on top of the list these days are things that go into lithium-ion batteries.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so uh cobalt, uh lithium, nickel, manganese, graphite.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_03: For our listeners, why why the permanent magnets?
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_02: So permanent magnets are really used in a lot of different applications.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_02: There's a lot being used in electric vehicles for drivetrain and for uh other uh components of the vehicle.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_02: They're used in defense applications.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um and and because the uh these permanent magnets, the ones that are made of rare earth, are produced mainly in one country.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_02: That's really the driving concern for a lot of this is that the production of mineral commodities is concentrated so heavily in just a few countries.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_05: Is that China?
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_05: Is the rare earth elements in China mostly?
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_05: Is that the that's right.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_02: So the the mining uh and to a greater degree the the refining of rare earth elements is is almost all in China.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_03: So that kind of leads into my next question, and I have an answer for this because I did not sleep well when I did a lot of research in this day about you.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_03: But Nadal, what keeps you up at night?
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_03: What is it about your research and your job that like sometimes you you you can't sleep well?
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_03: I like I just gotta believe that's the case.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I I feel like I wish I had more hours in the day because there's just so many things going on.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know if I I think I would want less hours in the day.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_03: I'm sorry, go ahead.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_02: No, yeah.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it's there's so many aspects of this to look into and so many issues to consider.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_02: And we're trying rapidly to understand all the risks that we're facing as a country and to be able to communicate that clearly to the rest of the federal government.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so that they, you know, USGS is a science agency.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_02: We do the science and then we present our results to other parts of the federal government that can implement policies and recommendations.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's that's key for us.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_02: And so we really try to do the best that we can with the resources that we have to try to understand the problem and really anticipate what the problem might be in the next five to 10 years.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_02: And that's that's really what um the challenge is and and what keeps me up at night is are we missing something?
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_02: Uh is there a way we can do something better?
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um, because we're there's quite a bit of data on on commodities like copper where we really know what's going on.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but for some of these really minor metals, there's very little information.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_02: In in certain cases, we barely know what world production is, right?
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_02: So we have a general idea, but um, the markets are often opaque because they don't really want to share that information.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_02: The players that are in the market don't really, it's a competitive advantage issue.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_02: Other times they might not be in market economies, right?
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_02: So they're not necessarily sharing that information, or it's it's not clear that you can trust the information that's coming out.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_03: That's really interesting.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_03: So it is not your answer to the question, then is not what I thought it would be, maybe like a problem that you because you know more about this than the vast majority of the people walking, it's not a problem on the horizon that you say we're not listening to this.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_03: That's not what keeps you up at night.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_02: No, I think in the last 10 years, and maybe especially in the last five years, there's been a lot of attention on this.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_02: Less so in in in general in the general public, but definitely among members of Congress within the federal government, this is on people's radar.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_02: It's a it's a bipartisan issue that you know people care about and understand, the solutions of which are you know are still to be worked out.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_03: And you don't play a part in that at all, do you?
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_02: So we provide recommendations, but we don't do the implementation of any solutions.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_05: So I guess that that kind of leads us nicely into a question that that Chris and I are both quite interested in.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, you know, we're geoscience educators, which we'll come back to uh from a geoscience perspective.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_05: But if you could like teach the US population like two, one or two things.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, our listener base is not the US population.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_05: We wish it was, we hope it will be.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_05: But if you could teach our listeners or the US population like two basic things, what would you tell them?
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_05: Like it could be anything.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_05: It could be like care about tantalum, because it's important what here, or like in general, we got to worry about this country or whatever.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_05: Like, I don't know, any two pieces that you think are really, really important.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's a tough question.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_02: I think I think a lot of people are uh unaware of just how um complicated our global economy has become, right?
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_02: So I think Aldo Leopold, the the famed naturalist, once said, like, the fear is that you know people think that the frying pan came from the store or that they get the milk from from the grocery store.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_02: It's like the fear is that people think that they get their their phones from from the shop.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_02: And it's like, no, it took a lot of effort to get you that device that you're holding in your hand or that vehicle that you're driving.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_02: There's a lot that went into it, it's it's a very complicated global system.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_02: Think twice before throwing it away, right?
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and just discarding it because there's a lot of really important commodities and metals that that are components of those things.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_05: That's a really interesting answer.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_05: So can I can I ask a follow-up to that?
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_05: Is has the pandemic and the supply chain issues that we've all heard about for the last six months, has that helped you in explaining that cause?
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_05: You do you think do you find people are more receptive to critical minerals or these supply the the intricacies of the global supply chain?
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_05: Do people fundamentally get that more easily now?
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, absolutely.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_02: I think, you know, when I talk to somebody that I just met and they asked me what I do, and they're like, oh yeah, I get it.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_02: The semiconductors.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, yeah, sort of.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_05: Okay, that's good.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_03: Taiwan semiconductor, all these, yeah, for sure.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_03: That's funny.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_03: I have a follow-up too to your answer, Nadal.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_03: Is you said it's so important to know where it came from, right?
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_03: But what about recycling?
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_03: And it's so recycling is so complicated.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_03: Figuring that out.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_03: What are your thoughts on that?
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so the recycling is a big deal, and it'll we're not doing a lot, right?
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_02: So if you look at the recycling rates, so this is post-consumer.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_02: So what happens after the consumer gets a product and then what happens to it?
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_02: The recycling rates for most elements of the periodic table are very, very low.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_02: In some cases, zero, right?
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_02: So we're not recycling any of them.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_02: We do pretty well in recycling the big base and precious metals, right?
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_02: So we're going to recycle our gold and silver and and and platinum group metals, we're going to recycle our copper and aluminum.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_02: But for a lot of other things, a lot of other elements in the periodic table, the recycling rates are typically less than 1%.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_04: Wow.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so that's that's a concern.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um my gosh.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_02: Now there's a lot of efforts to to improve that.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_02: It all has to make economic sense.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_02: Oftentimes, what is a what is the holdup is lack of collection, right?
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_02: So people often don't discard, you know, they would discard them or hold on to them.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_02: I know I have a couple of old cell phones that are still sitting in my drawer, right?
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um, there's some value there that I perceive.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_02: There's probably more value in the material than in the product itself at this point.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_02: But it's still, you know, it's it's an economics problem, it's a behavioral problem, uh, it's potentially a policy problem.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_05: So is it on that on that that point of economics versus policy versus individual?
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, would it be economical if you could just, for instance, get everybody's old cell phones all in one spot with nothing else in there?
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_05: Would would all this stuff be recyclable at that scale?
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_05: Or do you need a more uh precise or a smaller scale recycling thing?
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_05: Like if you just if everybody just chucked their old cell phones into one bin in the in the whole country, would that be efficient to extract the palladium and the platinum and the rhodium out of?
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, there are companies that do do that.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_02: You need to have volumes.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_02: And and if you look at the concentrations of some of these commodities in old electronics, it's typically higher than the ores that we're getting them from.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_05: Oh, okay.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_05: Interesting.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_02: So that's yeah, that's typically not an issue.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_05: So it's definitely an economy of scale type thing.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_05: If you just get enough people to do it or whatever government agency to initiate it, it it happens, or it's efficient to do it.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_02: It could.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_02: So interestingly, so if if you think about um let's go back to the platinum example, right?
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_02: So platinum is you can categorize it into two different categories of uses.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_02: One that are consumer uses, and one are that are more industrial uses.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_02: So when you look at the industrial uses of platinum, this would be in catalyst, for example, or glass manufacturing equipment.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_02: The recycling rates are over 95%.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_02: Industry is like, we're not losing any of the platinum we bought, right?
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_02: This is expensive stuff.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_02: We're gonna recycle every little bit that we can get our hands on, and the losses are are negligible in most cases.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_02: On the other hand, if you look at the consumer side, we again we get get quite a bit of a split for things that we can track pretty well, like vehicles, we typically don't lose track of vehicles.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_02: We might, right?
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_02: But we typically keep a good handle of where the vehicles are and where they're going, even if they're shipped out of the country, you know, for second use or whatever.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_02: We keep a pretty good track of them.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_02: For other smaller, you know, consumer-oriented things, we really can't keep track of them.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_02: And and those are where we see really, really low recycling rates.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_04: Interesting.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_05: Okay, so recycle your cell phones and computers.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_05: Yes.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_05: That's a good a good path forward.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_05: Okay.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_03: That's a that's a good point.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_03: Is there another one or two products that we really need to do a better job at?
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_02: I'll have to give that some thought.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_02: Uh electronics is really what comes to mind is it's just they have so many things in them, and the recycling rates are typically really, really low, mainly because of collection.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_02: There is another issue that's really not about the um you know the consumer side, but is an industrial issue.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, a lot of the elements that we're talking about go into steels, right?
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_02: So uh vanadium, molybdenum, uh, niobium.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_02: Oftentimes when they get recycled, they don't get recycled for the same steel grade.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_02: So because we don't know what it is, so we're like, okay, let's just throw it in the dump, you know, with the pot with everything else, and it gets downgraded to a lower grade steel, and you're losing that property.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_02: So a lot of these elements that are alloying elements don't necessarily get recycled.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_02: Now they're doing better and better of tracking them, but there are thousands and thousands of different alloys.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_02: So it's really hard to keep track of that exact chemistry that went into that alloy to make sure that you're gonna retain it.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_02: And oftentimes it doesn't make sense if the volumes are not there.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_03: Um, yeah, that's very cool.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_03: Something that I think everybody can tie into is aluminum, let's say.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_03: Are we how are we doing with aluminum?
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_02: Aluminum, we do a really good job, right?
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_02: So we we do a really good job of recycling cans, of recycling different uh alloys.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_02: Interesting thing with aluminum recycling is that it's it works in in a sort of cascade fashion where you're going from the wrought alloys to the cast alloys.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_02: So it's sort of things sort of get downcycled a little bit.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_02: And the thing that they all ultimately often get absorbed in is the cast alloys used for engine blocks, right?
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_02: So the aluminum engine block.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_02: And so an interesting trend is well, if we're moving away from industrial combustion engines, right, and and towards the electric vehicles, we're gonna lose the the need for that engine block.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_02: So the question is, okay, where is that cascading gonna go to if it doesn't have any place to go?
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so that might throw a little bit of a wrinkle into the aluminum uh recycling chain.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_05: That's really interesting.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_03: It is.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_03: Are you saying, Nadal, that as we recycle aluminum, it gets downgraded, and the end of the line there is the engine block?
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_02: So the the rod alloys, you know, there are different different grades of aluminum alloys, and and the more impurities, quote unquote impurities there are in there, it goes down to the cast alloys, and ultimately the engine block is sort of the that sort of stopgap at the end.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_03: I that's a uh that's so interesting.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_05: That's just a very interesting.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_05: Wow, what a what a cool little factoid.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_05: That is a great dinner party factoid right there.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_05: That is, I'm gonna I'm gonna whip that out next time I uh have some people to impress.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_05: So, Nadal, I want to kind of move into some geoscience stuff here because that's where Chris and I are familiar, and we're very curious on your perspective here.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_05: But let's let's lead into it from why the US Geological Survey?
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_05: I guess it's interesting to me that that's the agency that has things.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_05: And also on a personal note, and you don't have to answer this if you want to, but my guess is that your expertise, you could make a hell of a lot more money working for a commodities trader than you could the U.S.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_05: Geological Survey.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_05: So both there's like a personal and a uh, you know, a sort of uh structural question to that, uh both sides to that question.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think you know, gathering information on mineral resources has always been part of the US Geological Survey's mission since the organic act in the 1800s, right?
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_02: So this was part of it in terms of understanding the natural resources, the mineral resources of the country.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_02: And so our center, the National Minerals Information Center, has been around in one form or another for over a hundred years.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_02: We were originally in the U.S.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_02: Geological Survey, we then moved to the U.S.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_02: Bureau of Mines and then came back to the U.S.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_02: Geological Survey when the Bureau of Mines was defunded in Congress in the mid-90s.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, interesting.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_05: Okay.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, that's really interesting.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, is there a personal drive?
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, maybe I'm wrong with this, but commodities traders must like eat up your data.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_05: Like, I mean, they must just love this stuff.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_05: If you're worried, if you like know more about where tantalum's moving than everybody else, like you can make money off that knowledge, presumably.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_05: Um, uh so like I guess who uses your data?
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_05: Who who is listening to you?
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_05: Where do you interact the most with?
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, for us, our main customer really are other federal agencies.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_02: So we work closely with the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce, the Department of State to provide them with information that they need to carry out their missions and set policies that they that they can recommend.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_02: We often do this, especially in the last um decade or so.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_02: All these efforts are often coordinated at the White House with the US National Science Technology Council.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um, there's a critical mineral subcommittee where uh we are co-chairs and there are representatives from all the other federal agencies.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_02: But in addition to you know, other federal agencies, you know, our data is used by uh the private sector, as you mentioned, uh, the m both in the mining sector, but also in the manufacturing sector that end up using these commodities to make uh their business decisions.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_02: Interesting.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I mean it looks like I just look from looking at some of the charts, they look like very nice uh predictive tools for anybody who's really in the weeds with any individual sector.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_05: Um Okay.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_03: So, Nadal, earlier on you said that from a very young age you were really into chemistry and math and the engineering and maybe even physics.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_03: And I I just couldn't help but notice that geoscience was not a part of that list.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_03: Um Chris is a little bit offended by that.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm I'm I'm I'm really offended by that.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_03: Um, what do you do anything with geoscience?
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_03: Um, do you have uh, you know, what is the most interesting geoscience aspect to you?
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, half my team is geoscientists, right?
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_02: So we have people that are geochemists, geologists, that have done previously geochronology and things like that.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_02: So we have a lot of you know hardcore geoscientists on the team.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_02: And I depend on them, right?
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_02: I I depend on them to help me answer questions like darn right you do.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_03: That's right.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_05: Chris, Chris is gonna Chris is stewing over there.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_05: He's steaming coming out of his ears.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_05: I'm kidding.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_03: I'm sorry, go ahead.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_02: No, I mean I I depend on them to help me answer questions like, you know, why does this deposit type contain the commodity X and not commodity Y?
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_02: And why is it more likely to be found here and not there?
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_02: So these are questions that that you need the geoscientists to help answer.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_05: What is the most useful contribution of geoscience, or for from your view?
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, you're leading a team that includes geoscientists, like I don't know quite how to phrase it.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_05: Like, who's the most valuable?
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_05: What are what are great skill sets?
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_05: Like for let's say students.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_05: I have students who are very interested in critical minerals.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_05: You know, what are useful skills that we need from a geoscience perspective in this conversation?
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think you know, you need to have these are skills I think that every every discipline needs to have.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_02: You need to have uh really good data analytics, right?
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_02: So you need to be able to crunch a lot of numbers, right?
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_02: And to be able to parse out data.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_02: You need to also be able to understand the mineral systems, right?
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_02: So what are we really dealing with here, right?
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_02: And and really have, I think what's really most important is just to have that intellectual curiosity to say, well, why is that, right?
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_02: Why, so why are we getting most of our rares from China, right?
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_02: Where are other deposits that that could be economical?
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um, answering those questions is is going to be really key going forward.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_05: Okay, so does it mean sorry, Chris?
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_05: Let me it sounds like uh like you do have to have some foundational geology knowledge, you know, rocks and minerals, like that that is useful.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_05: It's not being disregarded in this conversation.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_05: Is that true?
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_02: It's absolutely uh helpful to have that, right?
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_02: And and oftentimes because I don't, uh I have to rely on my geoscience friends to help me uh understand those pieces.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_05: Sure.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_05: Okay.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_05: Sorry, Chris.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_03: Is it important at all to know why certain elements form in certain kind of geoscience settings to know where to look?
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_03: Is that what you're saying?
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_02: So if if we want to develop, let's say, a supply scenario for five, 10 years out into the future for a mineral commodity that's only produced as a byproduct.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_02: So let's say, you know, tellurium or rhenium, right?
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_02: So we want to understand copper.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_05: These are only produced as byproducts, uh, tellurium.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_02: So tellurium is produced from the copper anode slimes and copper refining.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_02: So it'd be important to understand, you know, okay, are all you know copper porphyry created equal in terms of tellurium content, or what about sediment-hosted copper deposits?
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_02: You know, how is it different, right?
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_02: If I'm gonna, if if all I have is data on copper, how can I predict where my tellurium is gonna be coming from?
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_02: I need to understand it from a mineral systems perspective, not just from a uh a commodity perspective.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_05: No, that's really interesting.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_05: Okay, that's a really interesting point.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_03: Jesse, you didn't even get that.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_03: He dropped a geoscience term and you just it slid right by you.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_03: You didn't even notice.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_03: Porphyry deposits.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_03: It's amazing.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_05: This is really interesting.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_05: I've been talking with uh one of my colleagues in our department about you know new classes that students would find interesting.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_05: And one of them we're talking about is the petrology of your iPhone.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_05: And you know, this is exactly as you're kind of describing.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_05: So if we ever actually end up doing this class, I'll we'll have to sort of ring you up and see if you can come get you know give a virtual guest lecture or something like that.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_05: Because this is like totally right down that alley.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_05: That's very cool.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_05: This is so interesting.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_02: That sounds great.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_05: I'd love to.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_05: So let's focus on like the critical part of this critical minerals.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_05: Like, what happens if one of these things shuts down?
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_05: I don't know.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_05: Maybe you don't want to give hypotheticals, but if like China stops shipping rare thelements or if like tantalum can't be mined and can't get out of the DRC, what happens and are there examples of that happening where we've been successful or failed?
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_05: Like previously, can we use history with any of these types of things?
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, can you just kind of maybe not walk us through scenarios but discuss this?
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_02: So if we have a hypothetical situation where a country cuts us off, either intentionally or unintentionally, right?
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_02: What'll happen, depending on the size of that country's production relative to the world production, right?
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_02: So if they're a major player, this is gonna cause a major impact to that commodities market.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_02: A couple of things would happen in sequential order.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_02: One, the other producers that are still producing are gonna probably try to expand their production as much as they can.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_02: Oftentimes they are very limited in the short term to how much they can expand that production because they have you know physical capacities or restraint, you know, they can't run their equipment faster or they don't have enough labor or whatever the case might be.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_02: There might be some inventories lying around.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, somewhere in the market that people will say, okay, well, we'll use up the inventories for now.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_02: But typically, as you may have heard, you know, most companies are running pretty lean, as we call it, right?
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_02: So they're not keeping very much inventories just started, you know, with with the Japanese where they're doing, you know, just in time manufacturing, right?
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_02: And a lot of it is the reason why our many our supply chains are so you know disrupted now these days, because we've been running lean, which is good in one sense, but on the other hand, if you have a disruption, you don't have any buffer.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_02: So the buffers are are really minimal at this point.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, we do have a national defense stockpile.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_02: So this is run by the Department of Defense, uh, the Defense Logistics Agency that maintains a stockpile of certain commodities that are important for defense applications and essential civilian needs.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_05: That's amazing.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_05: I didn't know that's never touched unless something catastrophic happens.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_05: That's the idea behind these strategic stockpiles.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_02: There's always movement in the stockpile.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_02: So um the defense logistics agency might put in a request to purchase or to sell some things to back to the market, and that happens regularly, uh, but it's there in case of a national emergency.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_02: Now, assuming there's not enough uh or the problem continues for a prolonged period of time, then you can imagine that the manufacturing sector that consumes this stuff is gonna start to feel some pain.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_02: They're gonna try to find alternative uses, you know, alternative materials, or they're gonna have to decrease their production, as we saw with the semiconductors, right?
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_02: So they couldn't get enough semiconductors, they stopped producing your favorite truck.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_05: Okay.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_05: So the and are there historical analogs to something like this happening?
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, maybe even as simple as like trying to order uh my wife and I, we've been trying to order like a dining room table, you know, and we can't get we haven't been able to get it for months and months and months because of supply chain stuff.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_05: Uh is there something specific to the sort of mining industrial minerals sector that that this has happened before and s we've successfully weathered it?
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_05: Or unsuccessfully weathered it?
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_02: So I think the example that most people are aware of is the rare earth crisis that happened in around 2010, 2011, which is why I keep saying, you know, about 10 years ago, this really started to become on people's radar is because uh there was a dispute between China and Japan.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_02: Uh there were threats that you know China might be cutting off rare earth supplies, they never actually did, but just the threat of it sent the markets into a tusie and you know everybody was was running scared that China has its dominant position in rare earths and and they were potentially going to be cutting us off.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_02: And what what could we do?
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_02: Another example that has been relatively successful was one where uh involves beryllium.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_02: So beryllium is a is a light uh metal, uh it's has a lot of applications uh in defense applications.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it's also used in the the most recent James Webb telescope that that folks have heard about.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_02: So it's used in the mirrors there.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, it's in the mirrors?
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_02: So uh there's one mine in the US, Spore Mountain in Utah, that mines berchandite, which is actually uh the mineral that uh beryllium comes from.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_02: We're actually pretty unique in that the rest of the world mines barrel.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_02: But it's it's the largest producer, and there's one plant that turns the org concentrates uh into high purity beryllium metal.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_02: And in in the early 2000s, that plant shut down.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_02: And that was a big problem because it was the only producer uh in the US, the largest producer in the world, and the Department of Defense relied upon them.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so taking action, the Department of Defense used their Title III Defense Production Act mechanisms, and they were able to, through a private public partnership, re-establish the plant and and get it back up and running, which is why the United States today is the leading producer, still remains as a leading producer of beryllium.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_05: So I'm curious about I I guess uh maybe this is not an interesting question again, but like why didn't the mine just charge more to the defense?
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_05: Like, I guess why doesn't how does the market not solve these problems?
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, why why did they shut down?
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so it wasn't about the mine, it was really about the the metal plant.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_05: Oh, the metal plant, okay.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, there were a lot of different reasons.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_02: I think uh if I remember correctly from from the historical case, it's they had old obsolete equipment that they never you know continuously updated and maintained.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_02: There were some environmental issues as well.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_02: And actually that's quite similar to the case where uh with rare earths, right?
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_02: So the US used to be the largest producer of rare earth.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_02: Uh we have the mountain pass mine, it it stopped producing.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um, there were some concerns, environmental concerns.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_02: The mine ended up shutting down.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_02: It's now been brought back.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_02: But there has been a decades-long trend of this, right?
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_02: So uh, and oftentimes it's it's not just at the mining, it's often at the downstream, so the smelting and the refining of the mineral commodities, and we've been losing, losing more and more of that over the last you know several years.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_05: Interesting.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_05: Okay, that's that's a very interesting answer.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_03: Like, Nadal, is there anything that we can do better as individuals or as a country?
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_03: Like, does this need to be legislated, the whole recycling thing, so we don't run into these supply chain issues?
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_03: Like, what can we do?
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, uh, I think that's a question that I often get.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_02: And I think the answer is not simple.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_02: I think as an industrial ecologist, I want to say this is a systems problem, right?
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_02: This is not just individual behavior.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_02: Now, don't get me wrong, we as individuals can do a lot and can make a big difference.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_02: As a sustainable global enterprise MBA person, I want to say, well, this should really be solved through new business models, right?
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_02: So this shouldn't just be a policy-driven approach.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_02: It really has to be all hands on deck.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_02: I think we have to look at the question and say, what really is the problem here and try to solve it?
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_02: I think there's places for policy, there's places for business, you know, with new business models, there's places for individuals with individual behaviors, but it really is probably gonna have to be a all of the above kind of solution.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_05: On a related note, you know, Chris and I, we both collectively see hundreds of students and teach, you know, hundreds geoscience every year.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_05: What can we do better as geoscience educators in this space?
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_05: Should we be adding sections into our introductory courses about you know critical minerals and all these issues?
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_05: Like what would be helpful to you and to the solution?
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I I wouldn't presume to know what the right answer is, but I think I think like any specialized field, right?
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_02: So what whatever specialized field you're in, I think it's always important to step back a little bit and say, um, you know, why and the questions that you guys ask me, why is this important, right?
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_02: How is what I'm doing feeding the bigger picture?
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_02: What part, what role am I playing and where where do I fit in?
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um now, again, there there's a room for pure science, right?
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_02: But there's also, I think, an important place for to say how is this contributing to solving some of these really grand challenges of our time?
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_02: I think Carl Sagan used to say we know we're at the technological adolescence phase, right?
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_02: And a lot of these sustainability issues are are really things that are problems that are very difficult to solve.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_02: And it's gonna really take uh all hands on deck to try to solve them.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_02: So where can where is our part?
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_02: How are we contributing to some solving some of these grand challenges?
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_05: Oh, that is a great answer.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_05: Okay, I love that answer.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_03: I do too.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_03: That it is Nadal.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_03: Do you feel I'm sneaking one in here?
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_03: Do you feel like you and your team are making a difference?
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, I think we are.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I think we've moved the conversation quite a bit forward.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_02: This was not something that most people would have heard of, you know, more than a decade ago.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_02: The fact that I'm talking to you, I think is is uh evidence enough to say that it's getting people's attention, to say that this is an important topic and and we're making a difference.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_03: For sure.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_03: Good thing.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_05: Okay, Nadal, we always wrap up our uh our interviews with with this last question.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_05: And we really it's a we always we get a wide range of answers here.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_05: But what has been your best day as a scientist?
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_02: Uh you know, I could probably point to a couple of specific examples, like when I uh I won a presidential award or when I was called upon to testify before the Senate.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_02: But I really feel that it's really just the fact that I can come in day to day and do what I love uh and call it a job is is really what I I really it might be a corny answer, but that's I I really feel privileged.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_02: Nah, that's a good answer.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_05: That's a I like it.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_05: That's a damn good answer.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_05: Yes, absolutely.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_02: I really do.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_02: I have to pinch myself every day and say, wait, I'm I'm doing this for a job.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_05: This is I mean, that's amazing.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_05: You go back to you know your first grade self looking at maps of the world and you get to make those things.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_05: That's freaking cool.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_05: That that's a great answer.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_05: Well, Nadal, this has been an exceptional discussion.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_05: I'm super I learned a ton.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_05: This has been very fun.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_05: I was excited for weeks to talk to you.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_05: This has been really great.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_05: We're really appreciative of your time.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_02: I really had fun too.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_03: I echo that.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_03: Um, Nadal.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_03: This is one of the coolest parts about doing this podcast is getting to talk to people like you.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_03: It's been just an absolute pleasure.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_03: So thank you so much.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_05: I really appreciate it.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_05: And uh, and we we we might reach out for round two at some point if uh if if you're up to it.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_05: I'd love to dive deeper into some of these topics.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_05: This is so cool.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_02: That sounds great.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_02: Anytime.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_05: All right, thanks a lot, Nadal.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_05: Really appreciate it.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks a lot, Nadal.
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.