Okay, you’re listening to Unite and Heal America, this segment matters. I’ve gotten Michael Barnard on the program today,

Michael is with the company, The Future Is Electric. And Michael is a Chief Strategy Officer. Michael, welcome to the program.

Thanks, Matt. Glad to be here.

Well, tell us a little bit about your background and what brought you to the environmental space. And what your company The Future Is Electric does.

Sure, so 30 years ago, I was a pretty hardcore environmentalist. You know, my, what my degree from the University of Toronto included a minor in environmental studies. And, you know, always paid attention to the space. But I was also cognizant that I didn’t have the personal attributes to be successful, because I care too much. It’s one of those things where I piss more people off than I actually delivered, you know, effective group movement forward.

And so I, you know, pivoted to I stayed in computers and technology and, you know, became a global solutions architect, and systems engineer with the, one of the biggest tech firms in the world, had architectural leadership positions in North America, Latin America, and Asia, and always in the sideline was researching, studying, learning more engaging in environmental things, but not as a direct thing. Since about 2010, I’ve been trying to get I tried to get a major firm to pivot to be much more focused in the space failed miserably.

So you know, and but I engaged with solar projects in Japan, I engaged with wind projects in northern Quebec, through the firm, on the other side, engaged with utilities around the world, and eventually just decided to, it was time to leave the company, and strike out on my own and make my, you know, a direct application 100% of my days.

And so I did that. And, you know, since about 2010, have been publishing constantly assessing solutions across the entire space of climate solutions, assessing climate problems globally, reading the literature, reading the studies, engaging with people, like Mark said, Jacobson out of Stanford, you know, spend time with climate scientists around the world.

I spend time with PhDs in machine learning who spend their days working on climate solutions using machine learning technologies through TFA strategy. However, not being that deep a nerd but being a very deep nerd. And having a long history of communicating with people who aren’t nerds, bridging the gap doing English English translation, in other words, I bring the context for what will actually work based on the fundamentals of science, physics, chemistry, economics, something else, I studied both behavioral and classical and cognitive science as solutions, and help major institutional investors.

VCs invest their money wisely this decade, so that it’s actually useful next decade in the decade after, and I sit on a couple of startup boards of firms, which I consider to be very high value on I assist them to understand where to skate to where the puck will be, rather than what the hype is today.

Okay, well, that’s quite a bit. I guess in terms of, of what your company does, specifically, are you advising major institutional investors as to how they should invest their money is that the primary focus of The Future Is Electric.

Yeah, the there’s a lot of people pushing the government’s and I’ve certainly, but I had absolutely no success in engaging with governmental efforts. And it’s domestic, as you know, much more personally than I do that. All politics are domestic, all politics become very personal, all politics are very retail. And so there’s a very interesting thing.

I have a better luck, because of the nerdiness of way I approach things, dealing with capital, folks with money, folks, and there’s an awful lot of money that’s looking to invest wisely in the global transformational opportunity. We’re in the middle of we have to decarbonize our entire economy over the next 80 years or so, going to do a lot of the heavy lifting in the next 15 years. And so institutional investors are getting lobbied by a lot of people who are promoting stuff which is of less value, and they’re being engaged with by people who have a vested interest.

I as an independent have no vested interest. I just go where the data actually leads. And I speak to a broad range of people from to assist me to understand what is and isn’t, and I publish, and then I get beaten up if I’m wrong. And so that’s led me to the attention of people like jigger Shaw, who’s currently the director of the loans program office of the US Department of Energy, formerly the founder of Sun Edison, one of the more successful solar deployment firms in the United States.

And, you know, speaking to him about how they’re deploying their $40 billion in investments, it led me to speak through Jeffries bank, I think it’s the sixth biggest investment bank in the world, through 200 of their institutional investor clients globally, probably at minimum worth about $500 billion worth of funds, that is debating.

In that case, Small Modular nuclear reactors with a woman who was the US, the UK deputy secretary, secretary of nuclear security, and currently does a lot of fiscal and economic assessments of nuclear in the space. And so I engaged to try to help capital spend itself more wisely, because a lot of money out there.

Well tell us now that you brought up the small nuclear reactors, where where do you fall on that issue? Are you pro or con, just kind of give us the the high level view and then we can drill down as needed?

Sure. small modular reactors have mostly been around since in the 50s, and 60s, and scale. Original nuclear reactors were that size, they were on economic for physics reasons, thermal generation likes to be big, right? It’s like coal plants and nuclear plants tend to be gigawatt scale. Small Modular Reactors are kind of throwing that away with the hope that they can turn into a manufactured object, more like wind turbines, but still pretty big.

The challenge is, when I talk to people like Professor Ben flew beard, who is the Oxford Chair of major program management, and who has studied nuclear failures globally, in terms of project management, he’s an expert in project management. It takes, you have to have dozens of things built before the the curve, the experience curve or Rights Law kicks in. So it’s gonna take a lot of building them before they start doing.

And there’s about 18 different designs of them extant right now. So there’s a lot of competition in this space. So the odds that any one of them are going to be successful is low. What I assert is that it’s going to take a major country like the United States, or China, or the ASEAN organization in the southeast in Asia, to pick a single design as a national strategy and double down on it as a moonshot technology.

In other words, it’s out of the hands of finance people, it’s out of the hands of institutional investors, it’s in the hands of policymakers. And that is going to be uniquely dependent upon different geographies. I don’t suspect they’ll succeed in the United States, because the ability of the United States to engage in moonshots, the deployment of energy is quite low these days for structural reasons, which you probably know, as well as I do so. So I tell institutional investors, leave it upside for 15 years, let the policymakers figure it out.

Well, I guess that’s an interesting question. I generally am a little concerned when government picks the winners because they’re not always the best at picking winners. And though the market isn’t perfect in that regard, either. It might, the government’s advantage is that it could help push it faster, which is very important in this situation, but may get it wrong.

And then we’ve got a bunch of reactors that aren’t optimal. So yep, so are you gonna disagree annually from or you’re generally pro nuclear, and that we should be investing in the US as well as countries all over the world in creating more no nuclear reactors?

I’m very, very happy for every nuclear reactor China turns off. I think that they’re mostly a diversion from building what works and is scalable, reliable, and repeatable today, which is wind, solar transmission and storage. You know, there’s only about 30 nuclear generation countries in the world, the developing nations have to jump through about 20 Major IAEA hoops, including massive subsidies of security for nuclear supply chains, waste streams and sites.

And those constraints don’t apply to wind, solar transmission and storage. And so I tend to say that nuclear is something that I would prefer the United States kept their fleets going, I would prefer that Germany had kept made the decision to keep their nuclear fleets going and ditch their coal. I’m glad that China is building I think it’s a bit of a distraction otherwise.

Right well, That is the big problem with nuclear is that it keeps getting more expensive per kilowatt produced, rather than wind and solar keep getting cheaper to produce per kilowatt. So, which is kind of backwards, you would think that nuclear would get less expensive over time, but it’s actually getting more expensive.

So, a little bit counterintuitive, I guess, because of all the regulatory issues and safety issues, as you just described, it is quite a bit more complex than putting up a solar array or wind farm. So we’ll be back in just a minute with our guest, Mike Barnard. You’ve been listening to Unite and Heal America. And we’ll be back to talk to Michael about the future its electric and how he sees it playing out over the next few decades.

You’re listening to to Unite and Heal America, this map and your host, and I’ve got Michael Barnard on the program, Michael’s with The Future Is Electric. And we were just talking about nuclear power and the future of nuclear power in this country.

And, Michael, I think, if I’m correct, your position is that it would require a national strategy here in the US and kind of a top down approach to saying, hey, we need X amount of reactors, say what’s to say, 50 reactors across the country, we’re going to use one design, and we’re going to kind of cut some of the red tape and say every state gets one or something along those lines. And, and it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen here, and we’re going all systems go. Is that kind of what you’re saying? And what’s the likelihood of something like that happening?

So yeah, I mean, we have to look back at history, the successful nuclear deployment programs, they’ve been national strategic initiatives, they’ve picked a single design, they’ve gone for a limited period of time, 20 to 30 years. So the staff who were able to do the work, were able to keep deploying, and we’re in that transformational and build phase, not an operational phase where the United States is, for example, right now, United States is very much in an operational phase, and more power to those guys and women who keep your nuclear reactors operating as well as they do, because it’s, they’re doing great work.

But that does mean, a nap country has to pick a winner. It’s not a market decision. It’s a national decision. It’s like if hearken back to the the history that it states would go back to the foundation of the Bureau of Reclamation, and the establishment of the major dams, that was part of the first new deal in the second new deal. And massive amounts of electrical generation and irrigation infrastructure was built and remains federally owned. You know, the United States government is still one of the biggest owners, operators of electrical generation.

I think it is actually the biggest on a individual gigawatt hours per year basis of electrical generation, the United States. The New Deal seems to be being demonized in the United States, which, you know, has those of us from outside the United States scratching our heads. Because it was a very successful program that built a tremendous amount of the infrastructure, which helped make America a very successful place for decades.

And so can America are the conditions right for the United States to create a new deal, perhaps a? What is what’s a favorite color these days a green New Deal? And the answer is no, politically, it was we look at the recent history of the build back better bill and the infrastructure bill. We see that, you know, we know the elections are looming in November. There are structural reasons why there’s a bit of a log jam in the United States for national scale progress.

I want to talk to Jigar Shah the other day, he was pointing to some of the successes they’ve got in terms of HVDC grid up in the northwest. Hopefully, we’re actually going to see we you know, offshore wind is over supplied in the northwest. But he’s hoping for small modular reactors on old existing coal plant sites, you know, as the great hope for nuclear in United States, simply because it’s impossible to you know, the way I describe the United States is the authority to say no has devolved down too far for substantive societal strategic change.

You know, it’s right now we look at the HVDC interconnector was coming in from Canada that was blocked yet again by people in New York State who were not aligned with climate goals and We’re arguing against something which had massive value, because it obstructed their view slightly. And so that devolution of authority to say no is a significant problem that is a political problem for the United States to overcome.

And I’m not sure how it’s going to do it. But as we look around the world, you know, South Korea did a great job with its program in the 1990s and 20 2000s, except for the corruption scandals, and substandard parts in the nuclear plants, which, you know, don’t keep me awake at night, but would if I was going to be concerned about something.

And China’s program is quite good as well. And they’re trying to pick a winner, and deployed everywhere. As part of their program of decarbonizing their grid, we’re building a lot more wind and solar.

Tell us a little bit about the HVDC. And what that is and why it’s important.

Sure, so HVDC says stands for High Voltage, direct current, as opposed to the other stuff, high voltage, alternating current, and alternating current, this is, uh, back to Tesla and Edison. And the great, you know, electricity wars were, I think it was Edison who killed an elephant on Capitol Hill with a, you know, just like a nutty, nutty experiment.

The direct current means it, you know, alternating current goes back and forth, magnetically, and it goes, just and it’s useful. And every one of our outlets, like if you look around your house and your condos and stuff, all the outlets have alternating current coming out of them, it’s got a heartbeat of 60 hertz cycles a second, our appliances need to expect that a whole bunch of stuff needs to expect that. And that’s great stuff and all of our transmission.

A lot of our transmission inside a big grid is alternating current. But about 50 in the 1950s, some bright Swedish people got together and said, Well can direct current has advantages, direct current for especially long distance transmission. And so they said, if we can make this work, and it wasn’t guaranteed, they could, we can push a lot more electricity through a wire with a lot less loss of electricity as it passes.

And so that’s a big advantage, a bigger pipe that loses electric less electricity that goes. So high voltage direct current has matured about 2012 We rocked the salt the last problem with it. So now we’ve got robust breakers. And it’s being built globally in massive amounts, the longest line is about 3500 kilometers, which is 2600 miles or so in China, from Mongolia to Beijing.

And there’s no lines of similar length being composed from Morocco to the United Kingdom from was one that’s 5400 kilometers from Australia, to Singapore, this stuff is great, because it goes underwater without losing electricity. It goes underground without losing electricity, you lose about 3.5% of the electricity over 600 miles of transport, which is better than any other mechanism for transporting energy in the world.

And so it’s not tied to a grid. It’s already used in United States, they call it asynchronous grid connectors. So the five grids in United States actually have high voltage, direct current linking them, because it’s not doesn’t have a heartbeat.

So you can actually do that. So HVDC is a transmission of technology suitable for bringing wind in from offshore wind farms, for connecting major grids for connecting continents, something called Med grid in Europe, which is a designed to bridge the Mediterranean with these high voltage direct current lines to the 600 miles across the Mediterranean to Europe, and so that Europe and Northern Africa can share in the same electricity and share renewables back and forth. It’s a key part of broadening the grid and making renewables highly viable. But once again, it comes with constraints.

We’re talking about, you know, the HVDC connector from Quebec to New York State to bring down more electricity from the James Bay hydro facility, that incredible low carbon electricity that they built and maintain as a you know, a provincial assets.

And that was blocked. Michael skellies great book superpower I’m not sure if you’ve read it, but you know, read it and get Michael Skelly on your show was a fascinating discussions story about him trying to build HVDC from the Texas panhandle, across the intervening states, to the eastern seaboard to bring wind energy, from where the plains to the population centers of the eastern seaboard.

And he failed miserably because United States only allows transmission rebuilt inside states. So it’s a really interesting problem once against that devolution of authority inside the United States. It makes it challenging, but Biden and people like Jigar Shah are trying to overcome by using federal rights of ways and stuff like that.

And what do you see? How do you think the progress is coming on the front of having a national grid that is more robust that can handle the renewables more effectively, and maybe has more storage capacity so that we don’t have these brownouts and things of that nature because of the variability of wind and solar energy.

But it’s a really interesting problem, because Biden’s original plan in his when he was a candidate, was to build a to challenge the Belt and Road Initiative from China by building an HVDC super connector down through Central America to Latin America. But that didn’t sell domestically, once again, politics being domestic and retail.

And he picked up Sanders’ plan, which was an HVDC super grid, using federal rights of way along rail and highways. And then as we move forward, it’s turning into a northeast mash. And there’s some other stuff and it’s kind of starting to dissolve.

When Jigar is seeing his loan applications. What he’s seeing is what the local people can sell, not what is effective across larger geographical regions. And so there’s some significant constraints inside the United States about bridging large geographical regions with HVDC, which are, you know, I hope are overcome?

Oh, we certainly do. It’s it’s crazy. The patchwork politics that we have that as you said, are impeding our ability to to solve this problem. So that, as you said, the authority that allows instant citizen, major infrastructure changes which benefit the entire society has kind of gotten to the point the absurd, and we I realized that there, there is the point where it imperils our entire existence that because I think this has gone too far.

So anyway, you’re listening to unite heal America. And is Matt Matern, your host, Michael Barnard, on the show, who’s with The Future Is Electric. And we’ll be right back in just a minute to talk to Michael a bit more about these very important questions.

You’re listening to Unite and Heal America, this is Matt Matern, your host, and I’ve got Michael Barnard on the program, Michael is with The Future Is Electric. And we were talking with Michael about the grid and and how some of the problems that the Biden administration is facing in in reconfiguring the grid across the US to better serve the growing use of renewables.

So, in that regard, Michael, I had a question regarding the use of hydrogen. And I read a little bit about some of your views on hydrogen and, and whether or not it could be a power source of the future. It seems as though there’s a bit of a disconnect between different groups within the environmental community on this.

And some people think that hydrogen can be used effectively. In the future, I had Dr. Jack Brower from UCI, who was a pretty big proponent of hydrogen and got head Mayor Rex Paris of Lancaster, and he’s done a lot with the use of hydrogen and clean hydrogen. And yet, I’ve seen you write a bit about it saying that you didn’t think that it’s really as viable. Tell us why.

Sure. So first off, I’m big fan of hydrogen, it may not come across that way. But that’s green hydrogen to displace the massive amount of hydrogen we already use today, which is a major climate problem on the same scale as all of global aviation. Yeah, it’s like hydrogen manufacturing. Hydrogen today, and then a couple of its uses are as much as all of our jet travel, and that’s 2019 jet travel, not, you know, the past couple of years.

So there’s a couple of reasons for that when we right now, or 99% of hydrogen is made from natural gas or coal using steam reformation, or, or coal gasification and that has, with the steam reformation of natural gas, that’s about 12 times the mass of CO2, or CO2 equivalents as the hydrogen is produced. So that’s a lot for Coal, it’s worse, it’s 20 to 35 times as much.

So job one needs to be fixing our use of hydrogen today. Luckily, that’s going to be pretty easy. Let’s start with why I think I have a lot of hope for that space. 55% of our pure hydrogen, about 50 million tons a year, is used in oil refineries, mostly to get sulfur out of oil. And because sulfur causes acid rain, and you know, makes us sick and stuff like that.

And so it’s just like, you know, the acid rain treaties that I think Reagan signed with Mulrooney, back in the 80s. You know, we need to, we need to be self rising. That’s what it’s been used for. But we’re gonna stop using nearly as much oil in the future. So we’re going to be stopping refining as much oil, they’re gonna stop desulfurizing it so that hydrogen demand is going to go down. Great news, on the next big chunk, about 33 million tons of years used to make ammonia fertilizers. And obviously, we need fertilizers.

But ammonia fertilizer has been relatively flat despite massive population growth, because we’re getting much better at using it. And there’s two or three things going on with that. With the shift to low tillage, agriculture, precision agriculture, and new agri genetics for nitrogen fixing, we’re gonna actually be diminishing our demand for ammonia based fertilizers, which is a really good thing. So this big climate problem of manufacturing hydrogen today from fossil fuels is not as big a problem as we replace those fossil fuels with green hydrogen.

But the requirement required energy to manufacture just the hydrogen that will persist is still more terawatt hours of electricity than we manufacture from renewables today. In other words, inventing new uses for hydrogen, when we have a major climate problem with hydrogen is a bit of a head scratcher. So we have to square that circle, first square circle to square. The second thing is hydrogen, green hydrogen, as a source is only a store of energy, have to manufacture it.

And it’s pretty inefficient as an energy store. It’s a chemical, which we have to do stuff with it, you know, we lose about 30% of the energy from renewables, we lose it when we manufacture green hydrogen electrolyzers, the normal figure is 80%. But there’s a whole bunch of that water vapor that’s mixed in, there is actually a nother process to remove the water vapor, which takes another 10%. So it’s about 70%.

And then, when we use the hydrogen, if we use it, you know, as the Utah facility that the DoD just gave $404 million to, to put manufacture hydrogen on site, put it in salt caverns, and inject into a natural gas generators, well, the natural gas generators, when we burn hydrogen, in a Thermal Generator like that, or a generator like that, we lose another 50% and then storing it takes another 10%. So we’re down as an energy store, we’re throwing away 75% of the energy.

If we use fuel cells, instead, we only sell throw away 60% of the energy. Whereas there are other mechanisms of storing energy, that are 80 to 85%, efficient batteries, redox, flow batteries, and pumped storage hydro. So as a store of energy, it’s problematic. And as we consider it for transportation, I happen to know you have a Mariah little birdie told me it’s deeply inefficient compared to battery electric vehicles.

And so my perspective is that all ground transportation will be electrified, with directly grid tied or battery. And I point to, you know, 40,000 kilometers, about 30,000 miles round the equators distance of high speed, electrified freight and passenger rail that in China, I point to Europe, where freight rail is most electrified and increasingly electrified. And that’s a sole problem getting electricity to trains. Similarly, for small for light vehicles.

As much as you might love your MRI in California, the globally smaller, small via light vehicles are going battery electric. And there is no comparison the market has spoken on that one. And for heavy vehicles like trucks, jury might still be out. But I think when the jury comes in, it’s going to be battery electric for those as well, for a variety of reasons.

So the question then is, if it’s not good for energy storage, and it’s not good for transportation, where might we have new markets for it? And you know, and by the way, I’ve also done the assessment of global aviation, where it’s battery electric and biofuels. Training.

Let me let me interrupt you there for a second, Michael. In terms of the battery electric, I guess I have a concern that factoring in all the mining that’s going to be required to, to create all these batteries. And from what I understand or have read, there is a question as to whether or not there’s enough of the minerals, the lithium and other metals that are required to to create these batteries.

If we created a billion cars, there’s a question whether or not there’s enough of those metals to create that kind of fleet of vehicles.

My take is that it’s a spurious claim made by the biggest mining consortium in the world, the oil and gas industry, the oil and gas industry takes out vastly more fossil fuels of all types, then all the batteries required for full electrification vastly more, and the earth is an absurdly big space. Did you know that Quebec up in Canada used to be the world’s leading minor of lithium, back in the 50s.

There’s still enormous amounts of lithium underground and hard rock in all sorts of places around the world. We just haven’t been extracting it. It hasn’t been economic now with higher demand. Market is speaking, lots of lithium coming out. One of my people, one of the people I speak to is Alex grant of jade Cove, he’s a great guy should probably talk to him about lithium and stuff.

But he’s a global lithium extraction expert and deals with unconventional lithium extraction, you know, where we’ve got lots of lithium. It’s actually in salt brines in the oil and gas fields like the Permian Basin and up in Alberta and stuff like that. There’s these massive bubbles of brine underground, with lots of lithium in them that we can pull out, push through reverse osmosis filters, put the brine back underground and keep the lithium.

And then lithium is a massively recyclable metal. When we use a lithium in a battery, we get most of the lithium back when we recycle the battery. Lithium ion batteries are still relatively new to recycling were to what 30 or 50%. But we’re putting them in landfills so they’re easy to get. And you know, lead acid batteries are massively recycled.

For the same reason, the lead him as the lead acid battery gets recycled and reused for new lead acid batteries. Lithium and existing batteries will get reused. We have a supply disconnect. We don’t have a supply shortage.

Well, my understanding is that we are not currently recycling or it’s not recycling effectively in a, the these lithium ion batteries that are coming that are being used by these vehicles. So correct me if I’m wrong on that front.

So yeah, you’ve been listening to the wrong, you’ve been listening to people who have a vested interest the other way I would start a Tesla, as you know, a big one gets 80% recycling, their major recycling initiatives going forward. It’s actually a huge growth area right now. And I’m you know, it’s one of the things I say to people, Hey, lithium ion recycling is a massive opportunity, and it’s just getting bigger.

Well, it’s, it’s certainly something that I believe we need to do. I guess the question is, is Tesla doing that profitably? Or is are they taking a loss on that?

Tesla’s very profitable? Well, on that particular piece of their operation is are they are they personally recycling? Are they as a company? Are they recycling those batteries? Are they outsourcing it to somebody else?

They have a fairly integrated supply chain for batteries. And they have been specifically moving getting into direct lithium acquisition and mining to further integrate their supply chain. Yeah, it’s an integral part of their strategy to recycle their batteries.

Okay, well, you’ve been listening to Unite and Heal America. My guest again, Michael Barnard will be back to talk to Michael in just one minute.

You’re listening to Unite and Heal America. This is Matt Matern, your host and I’ve got Michael Barnard on the program. Michael’s with The Future Is Electric. And, Michael, we were just talking about the metals that are necessary to be put into the batteries that go into electric cars and and you were saying that you think there is enough of it to to meet the needs of the economy, which could grow into what a billion plus vehicles or more that we have across the planet?

Tell me what are the sources of the information that you have that lead you to, you know, the assertion that there is sufficient? Are there are sufficient heavy metals to, to meet the battery needs of growing economy?

Sure. So, right now, Lithium has gone through kind of two phases and went through its bad phase of being used as a mood altering substance for people with mental challenges that, you know, sad, thankfully, went by the wayside, and that’s when Quebec industry died. And for lithium extraction, you know, we look at the metals, we look at lithium, we look at cobalt, we look at a few others, we look at stuff for the catalysts and stuff for the anodes and diodes.

And the reality is, I’ll do a compare and contrast. Do you remember when the big the big thing was peak oil supply? You know, the idea was that we’re going to run out of oil. And then we just kept finding more and more extractive economically extractable resources. A lot of that was funded by the United States government, by the way, I think it was Ford in the 70s, and put in place initial funding for unconventional extraction, research and development.

And that led to the fracking boom that led to the shale oil revolution, and it states. And it led to the point where the United States is actually a net exporter of oil, as opposed to a net importer. People like the guy who invented this concept of peak demand, or peak supply for oil, got innovation fundamentally wrong.

You know, there’s, the world is absurdly big underneath the surface with a thin tiny surface we tread we think of the atmosphere is big, but it’s this tiny film of saran wrap on this massive hunk of stone and metal with lots of stuff in it. And so the question is, why are we betting against innovation in extraction of the massive amounts of lithium, that are in unconventional oil deposits, such as in the oil sign brines, and other places? Why are we betting against the innovation?

You know, that’s already seen cobalt, which is a problematic metal economically, being displaced in batteries, which already down to a tiny, tiniest fraction of what it used to be in Tesla’s batteries is one example, where we’re betting against new metals being brought forward for batteries. And why are we betting against non metallic batteries, like a CO2 based battery that that I’m engaged with being brought forward as electrochemistry innovations to solve these problems?

It’s the same kind of thing, asserting that we don’t have enough when geologically, we have vastly more underground than we need of any given metal, just a question of whether it’s worth getting at it or not. Why are we asserting that we can’t innovate in those spaces, but we could innovate around oil and gas?

Well, certainly I’m not saying that. We should innovate around oil and gas, that that is not my point. My point is that, based upon the studies that I’ve heard about, there is a question as to whether or not there is as much extractable metal as would be necessary to fund a fully battery based economy. So that’s why I’m asking the question.

And, you know, quite frankly, I mean, the answer that you’ve given me is a little bit too broad brush and not saying it’s kind of more like, Have faith? We’ll we’ll do it. We did it before. And to me, that’s not that’s not hard enough of an answer. I mean, yeah, I believe that we will innovate in the future. But I kind of want to know, a little bit more concretely, hey, we have x amount of proven reserves, here are the places that we can get it from, it will meet the needs, which would be x amount of millions of tons. And this is how we would extract it.

And this is what the cost of extracting it would be, and this is what the environmental cost would be. So that we have a little bit better way to analyze what you’re saying and determine whether or not it it makes. It meets the scientific test of whether or not we should go in that direction. Because essentially, you’re asking us to bet you and others and I’m not completely disagreeing with it, but on battery technology and saying, Hey, it is the future. And I’m saying here’s a major potential problem. And I’m not hearing specifics as to how we’re going to actually meet it.

So I guess I’ll ask the question again and see if you can give me he’d more specifics as to how you think these needs to heavy metals can be met through what is the known proven reserves versus we hope we think we pray it’ll happen in the future?

Well, I, I’m going to answer this, you know, as carefully as I can I alluded to. So we’ve got a problem with CO2 firm, I’m associated with strategic advisor and a board observer, as we move through now, series a technology level four, verging on five, so still in the lab, but with a, you know, a stack prototype, but it actually uses CO2. Instead of lithium instead of vanadium, instead of zinc as the primary mech input, to create a high energy storage medium, it turns it into something called a bromate won’t get into the electrochemistry won’t get into the chemistry.

But they’re actually taking CO2 a problem. And they’re storing electricity with it. Now, it’s not suitable for transportation. So that’s a very key point. But for all the massive amounts of grid storage, we need, you know, pumped storage hydro uses water, and, you know, the CO2 based redox flow battery that a gore develops using CO2. These are not constrained resources. Now, for vehicles, we’re already seeing substantial transformations in chemistries, we’re seeing lithium phosphate, and we’re seeing iron base batteries emerging.

There’s we’re seeing aluminum base batteries emerging. The point is that asking a specific question about lithium and saying, Is it fit for the entire space? When there are innumerable other chemistries evolving? is asking the wrong question. I think, if you want to debate about a specific technology today, and whether it can scale to replace everything in the world, that’s like saying, Are there enough wheels that are fit for Pontiac’s for let’s say, Ford F150s?

Everybody in the world is going to drive a Ford F150? Are there enough wheels, for Pontiac for Ford F150s. When the reality is, everybody in the world is going to drive different vehicles, some are gonna drive electric bikes. So we’re going to be taking the trains, the high speed electrified rail, there’s a lot of people like me who don’t actually own vehicles at all, because of increasing urbanization.

And so if you pick a denominator, which is artificial, a billion cars, and you say, you pick a technology, a specific technology artificially and saying the only answer is that technology, you’ll come up with better answers. And that’s a form of disinformation.

Well, I say if I don’t, appreciate what you’re saying, in terms of there may be innovation for other types of batteries, but until another innovation?

Well, that’s the question for the statement. Sure, there is innovation, I am not saying there isn’t innovation, I’m saying that with the current battery technology, the current batteries that are being used in vehicles, can we scale that out? And you know, that I think that’s a reasonable question. But let’s turn it on. Can we can we make up?

We’ve only got, we’ve only got two minutes, Michael. So I appreciate this is a very complex conversation, it’s hard to squeeze it into two minutes. And I appreciate what you’re saying, because it’s, it’s important, and we don’t have all the answers yet. But I also would say the same thing for hydrogen, you. I’ll take the opposite point, which is that you’re saying hey, hydrogen doesn’t look like it’s gonna work as effectively, but you’re kind of taking current efficiency levels and not kind of baking into the cake, the potential for obviously, breakthroughs there.

One of the Biden administration’s goals is to get hydrogen down to $1 per kilo. And if they did, that would, that would be a maybe a more efficient technology, more efficient energy use then batteries, storing electricity in vehicles? Correct?

Not really, no, because I when I do actually do analyses of hydrogen as I did for Northern Africa, feeding Europe recently in a report, I actually give them all give hydrogen all the benefit of the doubt. I actually do use Lazard’s numbers. I give them the opportunity to have 24/7 365 Electricity firmed so that they can actually leveraged the capital costs of the significant chemical plant that’s necessary to electrify electrolyzer. Hydrogen at scale, and it still comes out.

And then you have to pressurize it, which is challenging, you have to distribute it, which is much more problematic than for other gases and liquids we use today. And then you have to consume it. And so every time I do the math, and every time people who start with physics and chemistry, do the math, hydrogen becomes more and more problematic. This isn’t to say that there won’t be places for hydrogen. I pause it, there’s supplementing biofuels in Long Haul aviation and long haul marine planting.

But they’re not it’s not a primary thing, simply because with we are running into the laws of physics, with hydrogen, we’ve been extracting it and electrolyzing it for decades. We know what what that process is. And we’re already at very high efficiencies, quote, we’re approaching maximum efficiencies today. And we know what it is. And so projections of substantial reduces of infrastructural costs there, don’t hold water when you start tearing it apart.

And I’ve had conversations with substantial people who have been working with hydrogen for 30 years, building chemical processing plants, there’s a lot of hopium his way of describe it around hydrogen, and cheap hydrogen. And it starts to fall apart if you think about the ecosystem that’s necessary to create that cheap hydrogen, what you can have instead?

Well, certainly we’re not going to answer that question in total today, but it’s something that we all should be looking at. And these are important questions facing the world and our economy and our policymakers and us as consumers as to which choices we’re going to make and which technologies will best serve the planet going forward.

So Michael, I welcome your point of view on the program. It’s been a pleasure having you and I look forward to continuing engaging with you going forward so that we can come up with the best solutions, because I think that having robust discussions about these issues helps help us come up with the best solutions.

Matt, it’s been a pleasure. And I look forward to speaking with you further and I wish you good luck with your hope to healing unite United States.

Well, thank you very much and you’ve been listening to Unite and Heal America, this is Matt Matern, and tune back in next week, and we’ll be looking forward to having you on the program.

Thank you, Michael.