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Geoscience is EVEN MORE Important · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

0:02
SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
0:13
SPEAKER_01: Oh man.
0:14
SPEAKER_01: Oh wait.
0:15
SPEAKER_01: Okay, hold on.
0:16
SPEAKER_01: I'll be right back.
0:17
SPEAKER_01: This might take me one minute.
0:19
SPEAKER_01: I'll be right back.
0:19
SPEAKER_00: What are you doing?
0:21
SPEAKER_00: Oh, he's getting his hat.
0:22
SPEAKER_00: He's getting his hat.
0:24
SPEAKER_00: Yes, he remembered.
0:28
SPEAKER_00: Hey, I have a guess about what you just did.
0:31
SPEAKER_00: What do you think I just did?
0:33
SPEAKER_00: So I thought about this was I was coming down to record.
0:37
SPEAKER_00: The last time we left off, we were having a conversation about a hat and you wearing a hat.
0:43
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
0:45
SPEAKER_00: This is my stormy cromer.
0:49
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
0:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, put the ears down.
0:51
SPEAKER_00: Let me see the put the ears down in my head.
0:53
SPEAKER_01: They're gonna get in the way of my headphones.
0:54
SPEAKER_00: I know you don't have to keep them down.
0:56
SPEAKER_01: My man bun in the back is here.
0:58
SPEAKER_01: We go.
1:00
SPEAKER_00: That is so good.
1:01
SPEAKER_00: Stylish, right?
1:03
SPEAKER_01: Well, stylish.
1:04
SPEAKER_00: So actually, while you went away, I kept talking in the microphone because I'm like, I know what you're doing.
1:09
SPEAKER_00: I know what you're doing.
1:10
SPEAKER_00: And you just went to London and I was hoping that you bought one in London because that'd be like the best.
1:16
SPEAKER_01: That would have been really good.
1:17
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:18
SPEAKER_01: I didn't.
1:18
SPEAKER_01: So this is my old stormy cromer right here.
1:20
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:21
SPEAKER_00: All right.
1:21
SPEAKER_00: I like it.
1:22
SPEAKER_00: I like it a lot.
1:23
SPEAKER_01: Winter fishing.
1:23
SPEAKER_01: It's a good one.
1:25
SPEAKER_01: I gotta wear it.
1:26
SPEAKER_01: I gotta wear it the whole time, though.
1:27
SPEAKER_01: Does it make you feel smart when you put that on?
1:28
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
1:29
SPEAKER_01: It makes me feel like chopping wood more.
1:31
SPEAKER_01: This feels a little bit more backwoods-y than it does like pretentious.
1:35
SPEAKER_01: You know, this feels like a Minnesota out there chopping wood in the snow or something like that.
1:39
SPEAKER_01: But anyway.
1:41
SPEAKER_00: Speaking of which, I split a ton of wood.
1:44
SPEAKER_00: I have two massive piles of split wood sitting in the back part of my driveway that's waiting to get stacked, but it is so hot where I'm at in Michigan right now.
1:54
SPEAKER_00: I just like I'm not gonna do it right now.
1:55
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna just that pile can sit there.
1:57
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna wait till it cools off, then I'll stack it.
1:59
SPEAKER_01: So, those of you who've uh requested Chris's stump grinding and wood splitting services, you're gonna have to wait for a couple weeks till it cools down.
2:07
SPEAKER_00: He only works during cool weather.
2:09
SPEAKER_00: That's a fact for sure.
2:10
SPEAKER_00: Which by the way, we didn't get any requests, but that that's all right, I understand.
2:14
SPEAKER_01: You you will soon.
2:16
SPEAKER_01: Um, so uh Chris, today uh this is a fun episode.
2:19
SPEAKER_01: We've been doing a lot of like random fun ones, but you and I have not recorded together in kind of a while.
2:24
SPEAKER_01: It's it's been a minute since we've recorded, and it's the start of the semester, things have gotten busy.
2:29
SPEAKER_01: I was also traveling a bit for work and conferences, but we thought that this is a good opportunity.
2:36
SPEAKER_01: I think both of us are pretty excited, and we've sort of been building excitement over the course of the last year or a couple years maybe, about the value of geoscience.
2:46
SPEAKER_01: And so, if I could frame this episode, I think what we're trying to do is our very first episode, which I have not gone back and listened to, and frankly, it's a bit painful to do.
2:55
SPEAKER_01: Those of you who are listening to this, if you go back and listen to our very first episode, which is Geoscience is important, period.
3:02
SPEAKER_01: Uh, the audio is not great quality.
3:04
SPEAKER_01: We have gotten a lot better in our audio quality.
3:07
SPEAKER_01: So if you do decide to go back and listen to that, uh, you know, give us a little bit more.
3:10
SPEAKER_01: Well, how bad is it?
3:11
SPEAKER_01: Uh, have you listened to some of our like first 10 episodes?
3:14
SPEAKER_00: Like, what's bad about it?
3:16
SPEAKER_00: Like the just the quality itself or us?
3:18
SPEAKER_01: It's just echoey.
3:19
SPEAKER_01: Let's just say we've gotten a lot better.
3:21
SPEAKER_01: So we talked about how geoscience is super important, and we we sort of went through a whole bunch of different aspects of why geoscience is important.
3:29
SPEAKER_01: But I think, Chris, and correct me here when I'm wrong, but I don't know, this exercise of doing this podcast, interviewing a bunch of people, and I just got back from the Society of Economic Geologists meeting where it was abundantly clear that geoscience and geology is even more important than it was three years ago.
3:46
SPEAKER_01: And it's only looking to become more and more and more important in the next decade.
3:51
SPEAKER_01: And so I don't know.
3:52
SPEAKER_01: Uh is that a good way to sort of frame speaking about this topic?
3:55
SPEAKER_01: And how do you feel about it?
3:56
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
3:58
SPEAKER_00: Doing this podcast for over three years now, my thinking on why geoscience is important has evolved.
4:06
SPEAKER_00: I still think that how I felt in the early days and how I have felt for my entire career, really, that hasn't changed.
4:13
SPEAKER_00: You know, I think geoscience is important because we study our planet, and and that is always going to be the case.
4:19
SPEAKER_00: Like we live on an amazing planet and understanding how it works that just got me into the field, that's what excited me about it.
4:27
SPEAKER_00: It still does, you know, when I step in front of a a class full of students, I mean that that excitement is real.
4:32
SPEAKER_00: I still feel that way.
4:33
SPEAKER_00: But learning about these other things and doing this podcast has forced us both to learn things that we otherwise wouldn't have done has really evolved my thinking on why geoscience is important.
4:46
SPEAKER_00: Now it's important also from a societal standpoint, too, apart from natural disasters and things like that.
4:53
SPEAKER_00: Those have always been in the forefront.
4:55
SPEAKER_00: But now we're talking about finding resources.
4:59
SPEAKER_00: This is what geoscientists can do, and they actually do this as their job.
5:03
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's absolutely shaped the way that I think about why geoscience is important.
5:08
SPEAKER_01: And everything from, so I have a question, but everything from carbon sequestration, that's a geology, you know, problem fundamentally.
5:16
SPEAKER_01: You got to know rocks and minerals and reactions to you know, minerals coming out of the ground.
5:20
SPEAKER_01: We'll talk about that a little bit.
5:21
SPEAKER_01: But I have a question.
5:22
SPEAKER_01: Have you?
5:23
SPEAKER_01: I'm guessing you have, because you're a very good teacher, but how have you, maybe is a better way to phrase it, how have you brought this thinking into the classroom?
5:30
SPEAKER_01: Because I just did this, I just decided when I got back from this, this uh trip, this conference in London, where there's a bunch of people talking about copper demand.
5:38
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, we don't have enough copper, we're not gonna have enough copper.
5:41
SPEAKER_01: That seems to be a common thread.
5:43
SPEAKER_01: So I thought, okay, in my intro to geoscience class, I'm just gonna take copper and like thread it through a lot of the conversations.
5:50
SPEAKER_01: So I was talking about nucleosynthesis, like how do elements form was the how did the solar system form?
5:54
SPEAKER_01: How do our elements form?
5:56
SPEAKER_01: That was the lecture last week.
5:57
SPEAKER_01: And I decided, okay, I'm gonna focus on copper and I'm gonna try and like thread copper into all of or many of my discussions of various aspects in this intro-level class.
6:07
SPEAKER_01: So I'm curious how you've done it, because I'm sure you've done it more thoughtfully in interesting ways than that.
6:12
SPEAKER_01: But how have you brought this to the classroom?
6:14
SPEAKER_00: Many of the same ways, but I just use smaller words than what you just used, I think.
6:18
SPEAKER_00: Look, when I've always come about Earth science and geoscience from the standpoint of this is a science that we have to learn really just for the sake of learning, curiosity about how our planet works.
6:32
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's cool, and let me interrupt you real quick, Chris, because that most of the people, my generation and younger, that's how they got into geology.
6:39
SPEAKER_01: I think like they're interested, it's cool, it's just fundamentally effing cool.
6:44
SPEAKER_01: And that's why people are motivated to do it, right?
6:47
SPEAKER_01: But I think there's a ground shift and a ground, like a sort of a shift from, or maybe not a change from that, but a layer on top of that.
6:53
SPEAKER_01: In addition to it being cool, it is really relevant and really directly applicable.
6:58
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
6:59
SPEAKER_00: My thought has always been more idealistic, or um, I don't know how to say this, like from a just from uh let's learn this for the sake of learning because it is awesome, it is really cool.
7:08
SPEAKER_01: Like a passion, like a passion based.
7:10
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you're you're like pure, like a hundred percent passion.
7:13
SPEAKER_01: If people know Chris Bull, as it is passion, like all the way through, right?
7:16
SPEAKER_01: So that makes sense.
7:17
SPEAKER_00: But now I have but right, but now I have specific examples that I can point to about all right, well, you can actually get a job in the field, and I get less people looking at me like I have a horn growing out of my head when I say, hey, maybe you need to think about going into geoscience, because I can point to specific examples.
7:36
SPEAKER_00: You can go and work, you know, we just interviewed Andrew DeWitt, and you can go work in some environmental aspect of geoscience and do really well at that and make a good living, and that's right here local, you know.
7:49
SPEAKER_00: Um and so I'm able to to pull in these different specific examples of what you can actually do in geoscience and not only get a job and make decent money, but also do something that's important.
8:03
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, important work.
8:04
SPEAKER_00: And so that's the that's how kind of how my thinking has shifted over the last three years about why geoscience is important.
8:14
SPEAKER_00: It's just become broader, bigger, and more clear in my head, actually, to be honest with you.
8:20
SPEAKER_01: I agree completely with that.
8:21
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's not like I sort of always used to use vague statements that oh, it's important because it's cool.
8:26
SPEAKER_01: It's a new lens you put on your life that you can kind of see the world in a different way, which remains true and is absolutely true and valuable, but also we can put some statistics, we could put some numbers on the importance as well in a way that maybe we didn't used to be able to do as clearly, I would say, when I was going through school, certainly.
8:45
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely, and that's a great segue, Jesse.
8:48
SPEAKER_00: Into let's get into the actual topic of conversation in today's episode.
8:53
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna talk about why geoscience is important, and we're framing this based upon this conference that you just went to.
9:00
SPEAKER_00: It was in the UK, it was in London, right?
9:02
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's right.
9:03
SPEAKER_00: It was which, by the way, I gotta ask you about this too, because I know Tess and I agree on this.
9:07
SPEAKER_00: You were kind of a curmudgeon.
9:09
SPEAKER_00: You even when you would talk to me about this about going to London, I was I have to go to London, I have to go to this conference, and you know, we didn't get it.
9:17
SPEAKER_00: I didn't get it.
9:18
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, wait a second, I would love, I've never been there.
9:21
SPEAKER_00: I would love to go to London and go to a conference, and you just like uh I don't understand you sometimes.
9:28
SPEAKER_01: I've been a bit, yeah, I was a bit curmudging about this, and and it was it was uh unwarranted, that's for sure, because it's probably the most valuable conference I've been to in a long time.
9:37
SPEAKER_01: It's the start of the semester.
9:39
SPEAKER_01: There's a lot going on in our lives right now.
9:41
SPEAKER_01: It was more about like having you know traveling than about going to the conference.
9:46
SPEAKER_01: Um, but it but I was I was pretty I was pretty cranky about it.
9:50
SPEAKER_01: That's very true.
9:51
SPEAKER_01: But I came back super, super motivated.
9:54
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was super useful, made a bunch of new connections.
9:57
SPEAKER_01: It was like one of the best conferences I've been to in a long time, for sure.
10:00
SPEAKER_00: And actually, I called you, you were in London.
10:03
SPEAKER_00: I forgot about it, actually.
10:04
SPEAKER_00: I forgot uh you were even gone, and I just called you out of the blue and you picked up and you and I'm like, What are you doing?
10:09
SPEAKER_00: And you said, uh, I'm in London and I'm having a beer at an English pub, you know.
10:13
SPEAKER_01: Or Yeah, and actually I was there.
10:16
SPEAKER_01: The only reason I went there is because Tess was giving me a hard time about not enjoying the experience.
10:21
SPEAKER_01: And she's like, You need to send me a photo of you with a beer in an English pub.
10:25
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, Okay, I'll go do that.
10:27
SPEAKER_01: And that's when you called me and I was like, Yeah, I'm following my wife's directive here.
10:31
SPEAKER_01: And it was actually pretty good.
10:32
SPEAKER_01: Then later that night, like the I don't really follow rugby, but my in-laws follow rugby, and so I was a rugby game came out.
10:38
SPEAKER_01: I had fish and chips and a beer and was watching some rugby.
10:41
SPEAKER_01: So I was like, okay, this is a good experience.
10:43
SPEAKER_00: That's pretty awesome.
10:44
SPEAKER_00: I had been excited.
10:47
SPEAKER_00: Good.
10:47
SPEAKER_00: So, Jesse, you came back from this conference, and I haven't seen you as excited about coming back from a conference like I've seen you with this.
10:57
SPEAKER_00: You feel like this was very valuable.
11:00
SPEAKER_00: So, this is going to be our conversation today.
11:03
SPEAKER_00: Can you frame what this conference was all about and why you came back?
11:08
SPEAKER_00: Because you said that to me.
11:09
SPEAKER_00: I think that was your exact verbiage, actually, that you were fired up and enthusiastic about the field of geology.
11:17
SPEAKER_00: So give us a little sense of what this was all about, and then we'll go from there.
11:21
SPEAKER_01: Sure.
11:22
SPEAKER_01: So this is the Society of Economic Geologists conference, and it it meets every year.
11:26
SPEAKER_01: And these are a combination of industry geologists, mostly so it's mostly like minerals exploration.
11:33
SPEAKER_01: So these are people who are going after copper deposits, gold deposits, uh now lithium deposits, rare thelmet deposits, these types of sort of minerals things.
11:43
SPEAKER_01: So there's the exploration side, people looking for deposits.
11:46
SPEAKER_01: There's a few of the sort of mining companies there too, the big mining companies, and then there's a whole bunch of academics like myself who are doing research on ore deposits and you know, trying to understand more ore deposits from a uh a sort of process-based perspective.
11:59
SPEAKER_00: So that can you hold on a second.
12:00
SPEAKER_00: Can you really quick just explain what an ore deposit is a minute?
12:04
SPEAKER_01: Uh it's a good yeah, thanks, Chris.
12:05
SPEAKER_01: That ore deposit is just something that is a geological feature that has a concentration of something that we care about at a a level that is economic to get it out.
12:16
SPEAKER_01: So a copper deposit would be copper that's above 0.5% of the rock.
12:20
SPEAKER_01: That's a really good ore deposit of copper.
12:23
SPEAKER_01: So there's a lot enough copper that's concentrated there that we could mine it and it would be economical to get it out.
12:28
SPEAKER_01: And there's all sorts of different categories of different geologic settings that form uh you know different types of deposits.
12:36
SPEAKER_01: So it gets really complicated really quick.
12:37
SPEAKER_00: But okay.
12:38
SPEAKER_00: All right.
12:39
SPEAKER_00: So why were you so excited?
12:40
SPEAKER_00: Let's jump to that.
12:41
SPEAKER_00: Like what what got you fired up about this?
12:44
SPEAKER_01: It was really So the theme, like the thematic title of this conference for this year was resourcing the green transition.
12:52
SPEAKER_01: So I kind of went into it thinking, okay, this is going to be a lot about critical minerals.
12:56
SPEAKER_01: There's going to be, you know, a bunch of discussions about various aspects, things we've we've like interviewed people on this podcast about, things we've kind of talked about.
13:04
SPEAKER_01: But I think there was a really interesting attitude that was very prevalent at this conference that was a weird combination of positivity and gloom.
13:15
SPEAKER_01: I think, and let me kind of explain what I mean, I suppose.
13:18
SPEAKER_01: The positivity came from geoscience is super important going forward.
13:23
SPEAKER_01: Like we basically we don't have enough of a lot of different elements that we need for this green transition: lithium, copper, cobalt, vanadium, a list of things that we need more of for society to go into this green energy economy or this this energy transition.
13:38
SPEAKER_01: So that's positive.
13:40
SPEAKER_01: Like that that's a really good thing.
13:41
SPEAKER_01: Geologists are needed for this.
13:43
SPEAKER_01: We're valued in this in society again.
13:46
SPEAKER_01: The gloom part came from the same thing.
13:48
SPEAKER_01: We don't have enough of a lot of these things.
13:51
SPEAKER_01: And there's a lot of attitudes that like it's gonna be really hard to find enough, or really hard to get enough out of the ground, actually, to actually to go through this energy transition, as like we've talked about it in the news about.
14:05
SPEAKER_00: Okay, and so for me, not attending this conference, just listening to what you're saying, the sense I'm able to make out of this is that back in the day, back in when the times were really good, you know, we we were mining these things, the grade of the ore had to be a much higher percentage than it is now.
14:20
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that just makes sense.
14:22
SPEAKER_00: Like these ore deposits were two percent and higher.
14:25
SPEAKER_00: What are we getting now?
14:27
SPEAKER_00: We can't be anywhere close to two percent.
14:29
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's well, for copper, it's dropped to like a half a percent.
14:32
SPEAKER_01: You know, we're gonna talk about this in later episodes, certainly, I hope.
14:35
SPEAKER_01: But copper, mineable copper, copper ores that were currently mined went from two percent to a half a percent, and that's a big drop.
14:44
SPEAKER_01: Like that changes the economics of your mine dramatically.
14:48
SPEAKER_01: It means copper gets more expensive, basically.
14:50
SPEAKER_01: So that's one aspect.
14:51
SPEAKER_01: Like, all the easy another way to phrase it is all the easy stuff has been found.
14:55
SPEAKER_01: Like all the stuff that's just laying on the surface, we found that.
14:58
SPEAKER_01: So now we got to go and find stuff that's hundreds of meters down, it's not exposed at the surface, and we need to have like a more nuanced view of how copper deposits form, for instance.
15:09
SPEAKER_01: We have to have a more like academic view in order to find them at depth.
15:13
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so I have a question that just popped into my head thinking about this then.
15:16
SPEAKER_00: Were there any sessions that dealt with what are the governments gonna do?
15:21
SPEAKER_00: What is the government of you were in the UK, what are they doing to kind of incentivize this whole shift that we want to make?
15:30
SPEAKER_01: It's a really this is where the the sort of rubber meets the road.
15:33
SPEAKER_01: So there wasn't any sessions on it, but all of the keynote talks, the big keynote talks focused on this aspect.
15:39
SPEAKER_01: So we need more of this stuff.
15:41
SPEAKER_01: The economy is going to need more, the global economy is going to need more.
15:45
SPEAKER_01: And governments are enacting laws that are incentivizing us to both get more, build more wind farms, build more solar panels.
15:54
SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of talk about some European Union laws and the and the US uh Inflation Reduction Act about how those will trickle down into the industry.
16:03
SPEAKER_01: But the problem is that new mines are not getting easier to open.
16:08
SPEAKER_01: They're getting way harder to open.
16:10
SPEAKER_01: There's this sort of disconnect or there's this tension between you know wanting to build more electric vehicles and having tons of incentives to do that, but the raw materials are not getting easier to get out of the ground for various reasons that would get political for sure.
16:25
SPEAKER_01: And I don't think we're not making any political statements on this.
16:29
SPEAKER_01: Like it is a fact, it's just getting harder to get stuff out of the ground.
16:32
SPEAKER_00: So there have been recent articles, Jesse, about mines in Minnesota, Arizona, and Alaska, for instance, that have not been allowed to open.
16:40
SPEAKER_00: So that's the disconnect you're talking about.
16:42
SPEAKER_00: Those are just some specific examples.
16:45
SPEAKER_00: What's going on?
16:46
SPEAKER_00: Is it a state level thing?
16:49
SPEAKER_00: Is it a federal level issue?
16:53
SPEAKER_00: Why?
16:54
SPEAKER_00: I don't understand.
16:55
SPEAKER_01: I think each one would be have a specific, you know, ultimate reason.
16:59
SPEAKER_01: But I mean, nobody wants a mine in their backyard, right?
17:03
SPEAKER_01: Like I think that's safe to say.
17:05
SPEAKER_01: So it could be very local politics that prevent this stuff from happening.
17:10
SPEAKER_01: In the US, it we have a a quite uh a strong and powerful environmental protection agency uh that sometimes shuts these down for for good or or maybe marginal reasons.
17:20
SPEAKER_01: Um and so it gets really political really quickly, let's just put it that way.
17:25
SPEAKER_01: But there is this sort of disconnect where we know we need the stuff, we're incentivized to build the things that are like more environmentally friendly on paper, EVs, but it's not getting easier to open mines.
17:37
SPEAKER_01: So there it I don't know why.
17:38
SPEAKER_01: Like I think each one has a specific use case.
17:40
SPEAKER_01: We've talked in our lithium one about Thacker Pass in Nevada, which is probably maybe likely going to become a lithium mine.
17:48
SPEAKER_01: It's a huge lithium deposit, but there are environmental protests all the time about that.
17:52
SPEAKER_01: So so it is a yes, every mine is its own unique like hot button thing, um, most of the time, I would say.
17:59
SPEAKER_01: So in some governments and some societies are more friendly to mine uh to building mines than others.
18:08
SPEAKER_01: That's that's very clear.
18:09
SPEAKER_01: And so it just depends on where you are, I think.
18:12
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
18:13
SPEAKER_00: I came across this stat too in getting ready for this episode about the time required to open one of these mines.
18:20
SPEAKER_00: And back in the 50s, it only took three to four years to open up a mine and start producing.
18:24
SPEAKER_00: Now it takes over 16 years, and it can take longer than that.
18:28
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think this Thacker Pass is a perfect example of that.
18:32
SPEAKER_00: So the way I see this is this kind of inner conflict, right?
18:36
SPEAKER_00: Like we need these resources to make the transition, but it comes back to NIMBY, you know, good old NIMBY, not in my backyard.
18:43
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
18:43
SPEAKER_01: Oh, I this is so funny.
18:45
SPEAKER_01: So we had some friends who are visiting with us, and that's NIMBY people who haven't heard that.
18:50
SPEAKER_01: It's it's not in my backyard, right?
18:52
SPEAKER_01: That's the acronym.
18:53
SPEAKER_01: Uh, but there's a a so in Maryland outside of DC, so in the DC suburbs, that they they have a mascot.
19:01
SPEAKER_01: Their mascot is a bee.
19:03
SPEAKER_01: It's the NIMBY.
19:04
SPEAKER_01: So they have somebody who dresses up like a bee and like goes to the town council meetings and like will go to like the Saturday farmer's market kind of thing.
19:13
SPEAKER_01: The NIMBY will be around.
19:15
SPEAKER_01: It's so funny.
19:17
SPEAKER_01: It's so funny.
19:18
SPEAKER_01: But I understand it, you know.
19:20
SPEAKER_01: Like, I wouldn't want a mine right next door to me, right?
19:22
SPEAKER_01: Like, it is just a tension that you can understand.
19:26
SPEAKER_01: And we have a history of mining being environmentally very damaging.
19:31
SPEAKER_01: I think that's changed.
19:32
SPEAKER_01: I think mines can be produced a lot more um in a much more environmentally friendly manner.
19:37
SPEAKER_01: But the fact of the matter is this stuff has to come out of the ground if we want to do the energy transition stuff we're talking about, as we're envisioning it right now and as governments are incentivizing for it.
19:48
SPEAKER_01: So this gets really political really quickly, and I don't I like I don't have thoughts on it apart from it's gonna be hard to figure out, and it's a good time to be a geologist.
19:59
SPEAKER_01: So, like, that's where I land on it, I suppose.
20:01
SPEAKER_00: I I get you.
20:02
SPEAKER_00: So the excitement was that's one of the first things you said to me is these keynote speakers were excited.
20:09
SPEAKER_00: It is a good time to be a geologist.
20:11
SPEAKER_00: We're in demand, and a lot of good things happen if that's the case, right?
20:16
SPEAKER_00: But the doom, the the because you said it was a or maybe gloom, I should say, not doom.
20:20
SPEAKER_00: The gloom is that there are so many restrictions and we have this inner conflict of sh, you know, how do we do this then?
20:29
unknown: Right?
20:30
SPEAKER_01: That's gonna be a huge challenge.
20:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it it's it's both it's gonna be a huge challenge, therefore we're needed, but it's gonna be a huge challenge.
20:37
SPEAKER_01: Okay, like this is gonna be hard.
20:39
SPEAKER_00: So all right, Jesse.
20:40
SPEAKER_00: That brings a question to mind then.
20:43
SPEAKER_00: Were there any sessions that dealt with possible solutions?
20:46
SPEAKER_00: Like that's right away where I go.
20:48
SPEAKER_00: Okay, we de we we have this this inner conflict, somebody's gotta be thinking of how we're gonna do this.
20:54
SPEAKER_01: So there were I wouldn't say there's clear roadmaps for how to do this, but there was something interesting.
21:02
SPEAKER_01: There was several presentations or discussions on ESG, which stands for environmental, social, and governance.
21:10
SPEAKER_01: And this is like a sort of a catch-all term for if you're gonna do it, do it in an environmentally friendly, socially responsible, and just um and good sort of corporate governance method.
21:22
SPEAKER_01: So there were a lot of discussions on how to communicate this need, like first of all, how to like structure a mine.
21:28
SPEAKER_01: If you want to make a mine, how do you do it in a way that is acceptable to the local community?
21:35
SPEAKER_01: And how do you communicate that?
21:38
SPEAKER_01: How do you bridge this communication divide?
21:39
SPEAKER_01: Like, how would a mining company or exploration company go in and talk to a local community?
21:43
SPEAKER_01: So a lot of it comes down to like thinking about these issues and communicating those issues and having like a two way communication street.
21:51
SPEAKER_01: So as far as the solutions go, I didn't see like a clear roadmap, but a lot of it was in sort of the science communication side.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: Space, I think.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: How do we bridge this communication divide, I guess, between often local communities and sort of companies wanting to extract the resource and the broader society needing to extract the resource?
22:10
SPEAKER_01: Like, how do you and I, Chris, you and Michigan, me in Pennsylvania, how do I think about putting a mine in Nevada or putting a mine in my backyard in Pennsylvania?
22:18
SPEAKER_01: Like, how do we internally communicate to ourselves?
22:21
SPEAKER_01: Like that's a that's a tricky one.
22:23
SPEAKER_00: So to be honest a hundred percent, you got really doctory in that response.
22:27
SPEAKER_00: And so my mind drifted while you were talking.
22:29
SPEAKER_00: I started a daydream.
22:31
SPEAKER_00: And uh so I'm not really honestly clear on what you just said, but my here's where my mind went.
22:36
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
22:37
unknown: Okay.
22:38
SPEAKER_00: Well, it's it's appropriate.
22:40
SPEAKER_00: You have the hat on, you you know, you look like a doctor today.
22:43
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
22:43
SPEAKER_00: Um, I was just thinking about this is an age-old problem, NIMBY, not in my backyard.
22:50
SPEAKER_00: But how do these coal mines then that we have in the East, the West Virginia coal mines, the coal mines out in Wyoming, how did they get established?
22:59
SPEAKER_00: How did they get accepted into the local fabric, right?
23:02
SPEAKER_00: And it's because, at least in large part, they provided jobs, they they became this integral part of the economy.
23:09
SPEAKER_00: And I just wonder if today that's still a major factor uh in it.
23:16
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
23:17
SPEAKER_01: We've started this discussion of with people on on sort of in industry geologists or geologists who go into work in industry.
23:24
SPEAKER_01: And I think we should interview somebody who's in this ESG space.
23:26
SPEAKER_01: There's a bunch of companies that have started that are sort of ESG consultants, and they're fundamentally geologists who are like, okay, go between between the mine and the the local community or something, trying to communicate these issues and trying to bridge this communication gap.
23:39
SPEAKER_01: We should definitely try and interview some people about this because I think it would be useful, Chris, like you said, to get some specific examples.
23:45
SPEAKER_01: How has it worked in certain areas?
23:46
SPEAKER_01: How does it not work in others?
23:47
SPEAKER_01: You know, like that that'd be really interesting conversation that speaks to some issues.
23:52
SPEAKER_00: I just wonder, I guess, to finish the thought that I had about you know how these things got established in the past, and I wonder if part of it was that maybe we weren't as environmentally grounded, I guess, maybe you know, back then, and and that played a part in it.
24:08
SPEAKER_00: And you also have the advantage of providing jobs, and uh, and it becomes like this integral part of the economy itself.
24:14
SPEAKER_00: And so I don't know.
24:15
SPEAKER_00: These are just thoughts off the top of my head.
24:17
SPEAKER_00: I really don't.
24:18
SPEAKER_01: And I think that's a good that's an interesting point, Chris, because I think like especially in the US, at least the Midwest and Eastern part of the US, our most recent experience with mining is probably these coal mines and old school mines that were probably pretty environment or were certainly environmentally damaging in a way they were not built with the environmental sensibilities and knowledge we have today.
24:44
SPEAKER_01: So I think that that might be part of the problem is that we we perceive mining as this bad thing because we're thinking back to the 1920s version of it, as opposed to maybe what could be in a more modern environmental sort of framework for building these things in a more responsible manner.
25:01
SPEAKER_01: So this is a really interesting topic, I think, to get into.
25:04
SPEAKER_01: I don't certainly don't have the knowledge of knowing where these issues are.
25:08
SPEAKER_01: So I think we should try and interview some people in this space.
25:11
SPEAKER_01: That'd be really cool.
25:12
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
25:13
SPEAKER_00: I just um I think of what would this discussion that we're having right now look like if you and I were just sitting on my front porch drinking a beer or two?
25:22
SPEAKER_00: You know, what would you say?
25:23
SPEAKER_00: What seriously, like what would you say to that?
25:26
SPEAKER_00: I I feel like you're kind of you know trying to be very moderate about but what are your real thoughts on this?
25:32
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean I go back to sort of I we need to get the stuff out of the ground and we need to do it in a way that's that is sustainable that's sustainable and responsible, but we need to get the stuff out of the ground.
25:43
SPEAKER_01: So this tension between incentives to build things that we think are are necessary to to decarbonize our economy and energy sector, but in order to do that, we have to get some commodities out of the ground, like lithium and copper and things like that.
26:00
SPEAKER_01: And that that's gonna require some stuff being built, some mines being milled.
26:03
SPEAKER_01: And I think you're right, job creation is a great one, making sure that mines are are developed in a uh sustainable way.
26:09
SPEAKER_01: A common thing now is like there's money put aside at the outset to remediate the facility.
26:14
SPEAKER_01: So you don't just have a mine go bankrupt and then the government has to remediate the site, but actually the investors have to stockpile money up front to fund the remediation down the road after the mine closes in 20, 30 years or something.
26:26
SPEAKER_01: So yeah, I think like many geologists, we we love the environment, we're very responsible in this regard, but but we're not sort of ardent environmentalists necessarily.
26:36
SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, there there is some stuff that needs to come out of the ground.
26:39
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
26:40
SPEAKER_00: It it is definitely a conflict of interest.
26:42
SPEAKER_00: It's something that I think every geologist has to grapple with at some point in the career.
26:46
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
26:47
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, for sure.
26:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
26:48
SPEAKER_00: All right.
26:48
SPEAKER_00: Well, Jesse, that is a good transition into the last part of our discussion today.
26:54
SPEAKER_00: About you also came away excited about rare earth elements and and these different elements that we gotta get out of the rocks for purposes that we are just learning about now.
27:05
SPEAKER_00: You know, you talked about vanadium, right?
27:08
SPEAKER_01: Well, this is the other, and you and I were just talking about this as well, about like another series.
27:12
SPEAKER_01: We could have another sort of podcast series.
27:14
SPEAKER_01: We generate series that are very like we're doing five at once, basically, and they come out sporadically, so it must be very confusing for the listeners.
27:23
SPEAKER_01: So apologies for that.
27:24
SPEAKER_01: They're not like cohesive things, but this is just the podcast.
27:27
SPEAKER_01: This is just random ideas, random thoughts with Chris and Jesse.
27:30
SPEAKER_01: That should be a new title.
27:31
SPEAKER_00: Well, that was something that we argued about early, early on, Jesse.
27:34
SPEAKER_00: Was I wanted to go through this like very systematic, you know, teacher-like approach to it.
27:39
SPEAKER_00: You're like, no, screw that, man.
27:40
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna bounce all over the place.
27:43
SPEAKER_00: And we fought about this, and you were 100% right.
27:46
SPEAKER_00: So you're right, though.
27:47
SPEAKER_00: Like, we have this series going on right now about people in the industry, but we're not gonna release them one, two, three, four, five.
27:54
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna release them every two weeks or every three weeks.
27:56
SPEAKER_00: And so, because then we're bouncing around to another series like on geochronology or something like this.
28:01
SPEAKER_00: And so you're right, we're gonna put one point on that.
28:03
SPEAKER_01: You did win because we did do both.
28:05
SPEAKER_01: We did do Camp Geo, and we're still working on Camp Geo, but that's you know, that's very structured and very thought-out uh plan of attack there.
28:12
SPEAKER_01: So we did do both, but um, we were just talking about this from uh another series we're gonna kind of start, which is the sort of importance of geoscience, mostly pulled from the new versions of textbooks, of geology textbooks, has these little you know, boxes that are like societally relevant aspects of you know asbestos or whatever these little things are.
28:30
SPEAKER_01: And we were just talking about this aspect because showing up at this conference, it was it like a wild, wild west of research into these weird elements that we've never really paid attention to as geologists studying these deposits, like vanadium would be one.
28:44
SPEAKER_01: I mean, lithium is kind of one too, although that's been kind of coming on the scene for the last decade or or two.
28:50
SPEAKER_01: Rare earth elements are another one.
28:52
SPEAKER_01: So all these weird things we didn't really pay attention to that all of a sudden we need and we need to study more.
28:57
SPEAKER_00: Here's a question then, and I want you to talk a little bit about vanadium.
29:01
SPEAKER_00: And okay, this is something that probably a lot of people have not heard of, right?
29:06
SPEAKER_00: And why is this element becoming so important?
29:08
SPEAKER_00: What's it used for?
29:09
SPEAKER_00: Where's it come from?
29:10
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, big batteries, batteries that are heavy and big, like the size of a semi-truck trailer.
29:16
SPEAKER_01: Uh or I just came back from the UK, so a lorry trailer.
29:19
SPEAKER_01: How about that one?
29:20
SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
29:22
SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah, you you think you're pretty clever right there.
29:24
SPEAKER_01: Oh my gosh.
29:25
SPEAKER_01: But like a big battery, they're called vanadium redox flow batteries.
29:29
SPEAKER_01: And vanadium is a key element in there that is the battery.
29:32
SPEAKER_01: They're too it's too heavy to be in your phone or even in like a vehicle battery, but you can put them at a grid substation.
29:39
SPEAKER_00: Oh, like a stationary site.
29:41
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
29:41
SPEAKER_00: Like a Tesla recharging station, that kind of thing, right?
29:44
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, or even better at a like an electrical grid substation where if you have extra wind energy one day, you dump it into this big.
29:51
SPEAKER_00: You store it.
29:51
SPEAKER_01: Okay, awesome.
29:52
SPEAKER_01: Okay, what is it about vanadium?
29:54
SPEAKER_01: What does it do?
29:55
SPEAKER_01: Well, we should do a geology of vanadium episode, but it basically has a bunch of redox states.
29:59
SPEAKER_01: We talked about uranium having like four plus, six plus vanadium has a bunch, and so it makes it really good for charging and discharging batteries.
30:05
SPEAKER_00: Is it just a good, really, really, really good conductor then?
30:08
SPEAKER_00: Is that what you're saying?
30:09
SPEAKER_01: It takes on and loses electrons a lot in a bunch of different ways.
30:13
SPEAKER_01: So it's good for for battery, you know, gaining and losing electrons, moving electrons one way or the other on either side of this battery.
30:20
SPEAKER_01: So like I've never even thought of vanadium ever in like research or paying attention to ore deposits.
30:26
SPEAKER_01: And there's not many people who are specialists in understanding how vanadium gets concentrated in the earth.
30:32
SPEAKER_01: So it's kind of this brave new world from the research side as well.
30:35
SPEAKER_01: There are a bunch of elements that geologists, research geologists, and also exploration companies didn't really pay attention to that we're starting to pay attention to because of these new technologies.
30:45
SPEAKER_01: So that's like an exciting layer on top of this, like the research layer on top of this, this sort of new transition.
30:52
SPEAKER_00: Got you.
30:53
SPEAKER_00: So let's talk about one, maybe two more elements to round out this episode.
30:57
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
30:57
SPEAKER_00: But copper is going to become exceedingly important because we're starting to figure out that you know what?
31:06
SPEAKER_00: To make this transition, there might not be enough copper to be had.
31:11
SPEAKER_00: Were there sessions that dealt with this issue specifically?
31:15
SPEAKER_00: Can you talk about that a minute?
31:16
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there has been.
31:17
SPEAKER_01: Copper's been on the forefront for a long time, like copper's been super important.
31:21
SPEAKER_01: So copper porphyry deposits, there's been a significant amount of research put into those already in the last decade or many decades.
31:29
SPEAKER_01: And that's only getting bigger, I would say.
31:31
SPEAKER_01: It's only getting more important, as you said, not enough copper.
31:34
SPEAKER_01: So maybe new ways to get copper.
31:35
SPEAKER_01: Chris, we spent a bunch of time up in the copper country in northern Michigan there.
31:39
SPEAKER_01: And there's people looking at the old mine tailings to see if they can extract copper from there because those might be like an economic ore deposit.
31:46
SPEAKER_01: The tailings, what's left behind from the mining in the 1800s and 1900s, is economic today.
31:52
SPEAKER_00: Some of them are getting opened back up, by the way.
31:54
SPEAKER_01: Case in point.
31:55
SPEAKER_01: When stuff gets tied, when we start to need more copper, you look at places that you previously kind of discarded or ignored.
32:02
SPEAKER_01: And that opens up a whole new sort of understanding of the geoscience.
32:06
SPEAKER_01: So people are studying a tailings pile made in 1910.
32:10
SPEAKER_01: How has that behaved for the last hundred years?
32:12
SPEAKER_01: And has the copper moved?
32:13
SPEAKER_01: And how do we extract it?
32:15
SPEAKER_01: It's like a lot of interesting sort of chemistry, weathering chemistry that goes on in those things.
32:19
SPEAKER_01: So sort of a brave new world.
32:21
SPEAKER_01: And then things like lithium, it's sort of the weird element.
32:24
SPEAKER_01: We talked about lithium before.
32:25
SPEAKER_01: It occurs in a bunch of different places, but it gets concentrated in certain ones like groundwater or spodgamine.
32:31
SPEAKER_01: I love spodgamine.
32:32
SPEAKER_01: Everybody who was talking about lithium as a commodity, they always had that photo.
32:38
SPEAKER_01: There's that photo.
32:38
SPEAKER_01: We saw the spogamine crystal, Chris.
32:40
SPEAKER_01: There's a photo from the Black Hills.
32:42
SPEAKER_01: Is it the Edamine?
32:43
SPEAKER_00: The Edamine.
32:44
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, has that everybody shows this like foot-long crystal, right?
32:47
SPEAKER_01: There's a there's this like photo, it must be on Wikipedia or something, of that crystal with a guy standing next to it from like you know, 1950 or something.
32:54
SPEAKER_01: And everybody showed that photo if they're talking about lithium in like the intro slides.
32:59
SPEAKER_01: It was really great.
33:00
SPEAKER_00: That is so funny.
33:01
SPEAKER_00: Hey, side note Jenny and I went for a long bike ride, and we passed these these this older couple that were on these electric bikes, right?
33:11
SPEAKER_00: We passed it.
33:12
SPEAKER_00: So you felt so you felt good about that.
33:14
SPEAKER_00: I did feel good about it, but you know, I did.
33:16
SPEAKER_00: But then we went to Rockford Brewing Company, you know, because it was our turnaround point.
33:21
SPEAKER_00: Why not, right?
33:22
SPEAKER_00: Why would you not do that?
33:23
SPEAKER_00: And so guess who shows up?
33:25
SPEAKER_00: They show up.
33:26
SPEAKER_00: And anyway, they sit down right next to us and they start talking about their bikes to us because they were newer to them, you know, and they just I think this is maybe their second or third ride.
33:37
SPEAKER_00: And then the discussion turns to Tesla cars and something like this, right?
33:42
SPEAKER_00: I I did not steer the conversation that way at all.
33:45
SPEAKER_00: I yeah, I didn't want to go there at all.
33:47
SPEAKER_01: I didn't want to steer the conversation, yeah.
33:48
SPEAKER_00: I didn't, I honestly did not because the guy starts ripping on Tesla cars and how you know the lithium can't be recycled, and I didn't want to like I didn't want to argue with him about it, you know.
33:58
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, well, he obviously didn't know what he was talking about.
34:01
SPEAKER_00: But the irony of riding an electric bike, yeah, you know, this this assisted bike, and then not wanting the electric cars and uh you know, just like oh my gosh.
34:13
SPEAKER_00: And so anyway, it just made me think of that because the question that popped into my head is how much of this focused on recycling what we have.
34:21
SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah, a lot, I think.
34:23
SPEAKER_01: And this is probably the Society of Economic Geologists meeting is probably not the place that has the most recycling studying or the you know presentation.
34:31
SPEAKER_01: There were a couple though, like one guy actually very germane to your your story.
34:36
SPEAKER_01: There was one guy who was talking about they had done this project where they looked at this stuff called black mass, which I'd never heard of before, but is basically crushed up lithium-ion batteries.
34:44
SPEAKER_01: So, like if you recycle your phone or your computer, you drop it off the electronics recycling depot, they take the battery out, and then that just gets ground up somewhere.
34:52
SPEAKER_01: So there's like studying this with like microanalytical techniques to study like what the heck is in this stuff.
34:58
SPEAKER_01: And it's lithium, it's copper, like all sorts of random.
35:01
SPEAKER_01: There's pieces of glass from like the phone glass in there, you know, it doesn't get purified.
35:05
SPEAKER_01: So it's super interesting and weird niche stuff that will actually matter a ton probably down the road.
35:11
SPEAKER_00: So they don't separate those metals out when you recycle a phone.
35:14
SPEAKER_01: They do I think his point was that they they try, but there is contaminant stuff, like you'll end up having copper wires or pieces of glass still in there because you don't it doesn't get a hundred percent cleaned out before the battery goes in.
35:26
SPEAKER_01: Like sometimes the glass breaks or something.
35:28
SPEAKER_01: It just sort of goes to sort your recycling to make the recycling center more efficient, right?
35:34
SPEAKER_01: So yeah, there's tons of stuff.
35:35
SPEAKER_01: And I think one thing we we've talked briefly about, Chris, was sand.
35:38
SPEAKER_01: There was actually some interesting conversations about heavy mineral sand, which we've kind of briefly touched on, but I think there's a couple people we could probably interview, especially in the US, that they're researching or studying where heavy sand deposits might be for rare.
35:54
SPEAKER_00: So when you say heavy sand, what elements are they looking for in it?
35:57
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's it's beyond just magnetite, right?
36:00
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
36:00
SPEAKER_01: It's it's I mean, iron the iron would be useful, but they'd also get rare earth elements out of it.
36:05
SPEAKER_01: Uh, you'd have minerals in there that are heavy that have a lot of rare earth elements in them, too.
36:09
SPEAKER_01: So it could be one of these things where you mine the thing and you get a whole bunch of elements.
36:14
SPEAKER_01: You get a bunch of stuff that is interesting.
36:16
SPEAKER_01: So anyway, uh we're getting to the point where I'm rambling, I'm sure, but uh I sort of I think the summary is it's exciting on many fronts and also a little bit depressing or scary.
36:25
SPEAKER_01: Like there are problems to be solved.
36:27
SPEAKER_01: This is not gonna be simple.
36:28
SPEAKER_01: For sure.
36:28
SPEAKER_01: It's not gonna be easy.
36:30
SPEAKER_01: Geologists and geoscientists will be integral to it, though, I think.
36:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
36:34
SPEAKER_00: Well, that's a good way to wrap it up because I you know what, I Jesse, I like excited, happy Jesse.
36:41
SPEAKER_00: I do not like grumpy, oh, I gotta go to London, uh, Jesse.
36:47
SPEAKER_00: That one is not my favorite version of you.
36:49
SPEAKER_01: I know uh when I get pissy and money, I get pissy and money, though.
36:53
SPEAKER_01: I I I needed an attitude adjustment, and uh it was good for me to have an attitude adjustment.
36:58
SPEAKER_01: So right on.
37:00
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37:06
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37:07
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37:12
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37:13
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37:19
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37:29
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37:31
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37:33
SPEAKER_01: You can subscribe, support us, find all of our old past episodes, and send us an email, planetgeocast at gmail.com.
37:40
SPEAKER_01: We always love that.
37:41
SPEAKER_01: Cheers.
37:42
SPEAKER_01: Peace.