Tell us a bit about yourself and your current focus in the industry.
My area of focus within our industry is critical minerals projects and investments, working with founders and companies acting as a strategic advisor and consultant to them. I take on non-executive and executive director positions in private and public companies, and often modestly co-invest. I am genuinely passionate about responsible and sustainable exploration, processing, rehabilitation, and recycling projects for all net-zero materials, and about new and innovative enabling technologies. Previously, I was the managing director for investment projects at TRAXYS, a global physical commodity trading house, and before that deputy CEO at CUNICO Resources which in my time was a prominent ferro-nickel integrated producer.
I am based in New York City, which in the past only meant I needed more connecting flights to get to where the action was, but now it’s great because this city has become an important global hub for mining and mining tech investments. The big mining funds are all here, many angel investors and family offices are active, many companies are getting their primary or secondary listing on NASDAQ or NYSE (and many already are traded on the OTC). Also, Washington DC, with relevant touch points like ARPA, LPO, CSIS, SAFE, to name just a few, is a convenient train ride away, Canada and Australia have critical minerals delegations in New York, the NewLab innovation cohort for materials, energy and transport has a flagship branch here, and mining tech start-ups are moving here. We even have an active New York Mining Club.
I am originally a business lawyer that got his MBA and switched to business development and then while on an assignment fell in love with mining and never looked back. Around 2017 I realized, like many others, that the transition to renewable energy, electrification (and other non-fossil fuel propulsion such as hydrogen) of transportation on air, sea, and land, and the need to decarbonize supply chains (industrial, construction, agriculture) to reach a net-zero world will create great opportunities for growth in the mining and metals sector because none of these visions can be realized without a lot more of the materials we mine and process, and that we need to figure out better ways of doing that. So, from then on, critical minerals were my focus.
What do you think are the key challenges for today’s metals and mining space?
If you do a root cause analysis on many of the challenges we are facing in terms of slow approval timelines and onerous permitting processes, the “not in my back yard” (NIMBY) objections to projects, the insufficient investments from the private sector and institutions, and the difficulty of recruiting the next generation of young talent to join our sector, you will realize that they all boil down to the poor image the mining and metals industry has in the eyes of the public and the lack of understanding of its crucial role in enabling all aspects of modern life and that the world will not be able to meet its net-zero goals and avert climate change without (a lot of) mining. We are still wrongly viewed by many as unsafe, pollutive, technologically stagnant, and there is lack of trust in our commitment to environmental standards and to the wellness of the communities we are embedded in.
Nothing is further from the truth these days and it is important that all of us consistently and relentlessly advocate and explain that. We also need to tell people about all the innovation and deep tech we are deploying in mining and processing these days and the great job opportunities the sector offers that enable those who join to have an exciting and purpose-led career where they can make a real difference and play a crucial role in the energy transition, in reaching net-zero carbon goals, and in fighting climate change. Everything we have is either grown on the crust of the earth or mined from it. I would argue that there is nothing greener than a modern, sustainable, and responsible mining project delivering net-zero enabling critical minerals into the supply chain.
The supply and demand gap in critical minerals poses a potentially significant challenge to the energy transition and decarbonization. Where are we seeing the biggest gaps?
To me this challenge remains fundamentally a supply side story, and most of the gap bridging answers need to come from there. We will simply need a lot more of all the relevant materials, and this is a dynamic list evolving with time and innovation, to successfully meet the challenges of the energy transition and get our planet to a net-zero GHG emissions position and avert climate change.
What we can better observe now, is that the list of net-zero enabling materials, as we should probably call them, is long and dynamic, and goes beyond the obvious copper, lithium, nickel, graphite, and others we spoke of as a matter of concern initially. For example, materials like fluorspar (binder in cathodes), food grade phosphoric acid (for LFP), silver (wind turbine brushes), niobium (one of the CAM coating options), platinum (in hydrogen fuel cell electrodes), high purity manganese sulphate (now also the M in LMFP), all have new use cases and applications that are making them into net-zero enabling materials. Some of the many materials are also critical in the sense that there are substantial risks to their future availability or due to concentration of their sources in one or two countries (mainly on their intermediate processing), but even the ones that are theoretically available will be needed in much greater quantities than are currently being produced.
I would even go further and say that the slowdown in the acceleration rate of EV adoption in the US and some other western countries (which was a topic of many discussions this year) is not really a demand side hiccup, but the result of the supply side’s failure, in the case of Western OEMs, to produce and offer affordable EVs that will enable mass adoption after we now reached the marketing 101 chasm that follows the early adoption of new technologies and products. Not everyone can afford to buy one or two US$100,000 cars just to drive to work and to the supermarket. Once we have the EV equivalencies of the Model-T, the floodgates will open.
How can innovation and technology help to solve this? Can you provide some examples of any current drivers of innovation?
Tech and innovation will save the day by allowing us to accelerate our efforts to bring enough materials into the supply chains and make the operations more effective and cleaner. In what was a conservative mining and metals sector, we already have electric yellow equipment, giant autonomous trucks, drones surveying and monitoring, smarter ore sorting systems, and many new improvements in hydrometallurgical and pyrometallurgic conversion and processing. We are seeing innovation and implementation of new technologies all the way from exploration to reprocessing of tailings and waste and recycling of cells and electro-magnets, and everything in between.
There is a lot of effective government support on the innovation front, like ARPA in the US and the many oversees equivalents, there are tech cohorts in universities such as Mineral-X in Stanford, there are private startup incubators like NewLab in New York and Detroit, and many of the mining majors and OEMs have in house innovation teams and corporate venture capital (CVCs) arms that invest in mining tech companies, and all the big mining funds also started creating mining tech investment vehicles.
Exploration is where tech is already making a big difference. New resource discoveries are what feeds our industry, and exploration stages are lengthy, expensive, hard to fund, sometimes intrusive from the point of view of landowners and communities, and full of false positives that waste even more time and money, and false negatives that miss out on potential great assets. Exploration tech companies like Verai and Kobold use AI, machine learning and regional and even global mass data analysis to come up quickly with actionable and substantially more accurate drilling targets. Another important quest is to find ways to reduce the energy intensity of mining operations, from blasting and excavation through the crushing and milling comminution stages of millions and millions of tonnes. Sorting technologies provide some partial solutions, but recently I was very impressed with Eden Geopower (from the NewLab stable) that uses electric stimulation to fracture and break the rock in situ, making everything from then on substantially easier and drastically less energy intense. Eden’s technology is currently being piloted by one of the global mining majors in Chile and Australia.
Can you explain a bit about multi-dimensional mining projects?
These are mining projects that include renewable power generation and carbon capture and storage, all as one integrum. This goes beyond vertical integration of upstream mining and midstream conversion steps, which we also see more and more of, and it takes our industry to the next stage of its evolution. If mines used to each be a single node in the web, and then evolved to become more integrated into the processing of their materials, they are now also becoming more tied and integrated with the generation of the energy they consume and with solving for their carbon emissions, and while doing so will also be able to be part of the solution for others.
What does this mean in the context of the energy transition and what are some of the benefits?
The downstream producers, OEMs, and all other manufacturers, and the ultimate consumers and customers from the public, want and need to know not only what we’re making, but how we’re making it. The customers already want disclosures from their suppliers on carbon intensity per tonne of product to be included in the specs and material sheets and invoices and this will become standard practice. This all means that even before an official or de-facto system of pricing premiums and discounts related to the carbon footprint of mined and processed materials emerges, there will be a competitive advantage to those companies in the mining and metals sector that are themselves already net-zero or even negative and do not pass on to the finished products a carbon burden.
From the broad commercial perspective, perhaps the most important contribution of multi-dimensional mining projects will be the merging of the traditional physical commodities markets and the new emerging voluntary carbon credit markets. The suppliers of materials become also potential sellers of carbon credits from actual capture and storage and can provide their customers with credits on top of the physical products and with various offset solutions.
Looking forward, how do you see the industry progressing with this increased focus on energy transition, integrated value chains, etc.?
Despite the many challenges, I am optimistic about the future of our industry and its ability to further transition from a very conservative sector to one that moves to the forefront of innovation and deep technological and scientific advances. I expect to see development of regional critical materials hubs linking mining, midstream conversion, and downstream, especially in locations with available clean energy and convenient logistics, such as Becancour in Quebec and the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil, and surely others will follow. When you add Scope 3 emissions into your calculations, you want to move less weight and volume around and shorten the supply chain lines.
Perhaps the most interesting development and one that will have a huge positive effect on our sector is the growing investment activity and increasing engagement and involvement by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations as they transition away from an oil and gas based economy. We already can see they intend to go far beyond passive minority investments which was the first cautious move and will pursue much more actual mining (exploration is already speeding up), massive construction of processing facilities (with all the advantages this central location offers and renewable energy sources that are being built), as well as initiating and creating a vibrant ecosystem of innovation centres, academic and industrial research and development facilities, and startup cohorts and incubators.
