We Just Don’t Have Enough - Prof. Adam Simon
[00:00:00]
Chris, man, that you know what? I'm tired.
Chris Bolhuis: I, I am too.
That,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I'm, I'm, I'm That,
like, good, satisfied, tired, you know what I mean?
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah, that was a fun interview. we just got done interviewing Professor Adam Simon from the University of Michigan and this was,[00:00:30] One of those interviews that I was really looking forward to, because I just wanted to know what his thoughts were.
I always do a dive into these. I, I look these people up and I, I watch all the videos that I possibly can, and this guy was one that, I don't know, I just. I wanted to know more about his research because it's relevant. This is such relevant stuff that we were talking about today. I hope that comes across.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I agree completely, Chris, this was like just one of those just great [00:01:00] interviews and I think that's gonna come across to those of you listening to it. This is just somebody who is top, top, top notch in a bunch of different categories. so Adam Simon is who we interviewed.
He's a professor at Michigan right now. He is the Arthur Thau professor at University of Michigan. He's been at Michigan for a while, like he, he's just published so many papers. He's won teaching awards. He's won best professor awards at Michigan. just accolades everywhere.
And he is doing really, really important, interesting science. He's, he was trained as an economic geologist, has, as he [00:01:30] talked about this really interesting backstory and sort of a really, I think. For me at least, Chris, that was powerful backstory, like really kind of inspiring backstory, and has just done so much.
It's just, frankly, it's intimidating, you know, looking at that, what he's done and what he's currently doing, and the passion and, clarity with which he does it is intimidating and inspiring to me.
Chris Bolhuis: I think way more inspiring than it is intimidating because I, I, I know what you're saying and I, I get it, but
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I. [00:02:00] I think, you know, it's intimidating for me because it's like, oh, that's the bar, you know, I want to be
in
later in my career or something,
Chris Bolhuis: But we need to see that Jesse, like that's, that's so important to see that next level in our own profession so that we, that's something for us to aspire to. And, and I think it's important.
So it's more, way more inspirational than it should be intimidating
for
Dr. Jesse Reimink: sure, for sure. No, that's a great point.
Chris Bolhuis: I remember Jesse, when you went to London for this conference and you came back and this [00:02:30] was, you talked about Professor Simon, you talked about, you went and saw this lecture and we've been trying to get this on the books for a long time now, and we finally made it
happen, and I'm just, I'm really happy that
we did.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I think I texted you when I was like sitting his talking. I was like, Hey, got a guy we got, we got,
get guy on the podcast. Here's his name. all right, let's do it. So, yeah, I totally agree. I mean, this is a really interesting conversation and Chris, we always disagree about titles, but I'm gonna recommend one that I kind of strongly feel is the title is just kind like [00:03:00] we don't have enough or something in that vein, right?
Like we, we just don't have enough. this topic was about copper and the sort of difficulties in mining copper and what, how much we need for this future society. We wanna have, it's a really, really interesting topic, so,
Chris Bolhuis: In order to make the transition, the energy transition, we need copper. He describes it as the artery that makes all this happen and there's just not enough. We can't get to it fast enough. That's really the problem.[00:03:30]
Dr. Jesse Reimink: well let's get to it. It's a really interesting interview and, and Professor Simon is just really well spoken in, just exceptional clarity of thought. So without further ado, professor Adam Simon coming at you coming at you Okay. Professor Simon, thank you for, uh, joining us on Planet Geo. We really appreciate it and welcome
Prof. Adam Simon: Happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: you know, we've been thinking about organizing this for a long time, so we're excited to finally be doing it. And Chris and I kept, uh, revising our, our sort of [00:04:00] list of questions we wanna ask you as we kept learning more and more about what you're doing.
So, uh, this
is really, really fun and exciting. . you wanna lead out?
Chris Bolhuis: Uh, yeah, absolutely. so Adam, do you have an interesting story about what got you into geoscience or Geology in the first place? Was there some sort of moment or aha kind of experience that you had?
Prof. Adam Simon: So I, I had a very non-traditional path to where I am now. finishing high school. I did not go to college, didn't think college was in the cards for me. And I took [00:04:30] a couple of years off and I worked, and first job I had full time was actually doing construction in Washington, DC on a really large project to remove asbestos from one of the largest post offices in, turns out in the country, but the District of Columbia.
And every day my job was to walk around in a Tyvek suit and put air pumps all over the place and sample that air. And then every night [00:05:00] there would be two or three guys that would come in and work the night shift, and they would look at the air samples that had been collected all day to determine whether or not there were any asbestos fibers in those samples.
And I used to hang out at night and I would just sort of shoot the shit with these guys and, and pick up on what they were doing. And the first time that I had been introduced to, you know, what is asbestos? What is an asbestos form? Mineral? [00:05:30] And one thing led to another and I took a Geology class at a community college in Northern Virginia, Sitting through that Geology class. That was my aha moment when I realized that I went to every single class Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I sat through the entire class and I always hung around after that class talking to the person who taught that class. And that was it. You know, and, and I think having grown up, I grew up and went through, uh, [00:06:00] middle school and high school in North Carolina.
And if you were on the college track, you took chemistry, you took physics, you took biology. it took me two tries to get through chemistry, took me two tries to get through Algebra two. And a lot of that was because at that stage in my life, I really had no interest in academics whatsoever. I grew up on the quote, wrong side of the tracks where everybody that I knew their parents worked at a mill and mills, you know, think of those as factories.
Three eight hour shifts, [00:06:30] 365 days a year with no sick days. And so, you know, coming outta high school, I never even thought of myself as college material. but it was, yeah, it was that experience working on a really large asbestos demolition job. And then mostly at the insistence of my mother to at least take some college classes just to see, just to test the waters.
and I did it, and the rest is history.
Chris Bolhuis: so I have to get this straight A second. Adam, did you take a Geology class [00:07:00] because of your exposure to asbestos then? Is that what prompted you to go and do that?
Prof. Adam Simon: it was a combination of, the work experience learning about as best to form minerals.
And when I, when I registered for classes at Northern Virginia Community College, they said, you gotta take a lab science. And so scanning the list, chemistry was out, physics was out, biology was out. Astronomy seemed like it would require way too much [00:07:30] math for me.
So that was out. And then having grown up as the, child, um, oldest of three kids with a single mom, most of our vacations were camping vacations in North Carolina, either at the beach or the mountains. And so I thought, you know, Geology, that could be okay. And I, I took that Geology class also because I, I took a look at the syllabus in the library at the time.
This was pre-web, and the syllabus included minerals. And I thought, well, maybe this will be a way to actually [00:08:00] expand upon my, you know, at that time, knowledge about asbe of form minerals.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I mean, this
is such a, I have so many questions just based on this story, Adam. one of them, I'll just leave it at, this is asbestos. As scary as sometimes we think it is. And now that you're like, you know, a renowned mineralogist and chemist, that's question number one. And secondly, like I feel very similarly about chemistry.
I didn't really, I wasn't interested in chemistry. It was really boring even in college. And then it was grad school where I sort of realized, oh, geochemistry is a thing [00:08:30] and it's really useful. So I guess from both mineralogy and chemistry, is that what kind of got you excited about it? 'cause now you do all sorts of geochemistry and mineralogy, you know,
experiments and research.
Uh.
Prof. Adam Simon: I think we probably share a lot of similarities there. You know, for me it was initially the concept that, you know, I could set up these air pumps and I could suck air through these cellulose filters, and then you could put those filters on, glass plates, dissolve away the paper and acetone and put 'em on a microscope, and you could see things.[00:09:00]
And it was seeing things that were then connected to public health. So thinking about different, the, many different types of as bests, deformed minerals, the aspect ratio of as bests defor minerals, the size of those minerals, what sizes were regulated by the federal government relative to sizes of minerals that weren't regulated, other minerals that could also get into the lungs.
And so, yeah, I think for me, I just became fascinated with, [00:09:30] you A group of minerals that we mine from different types of rocks around the world, and then we can separate out specific minerals. And they have these amazing properties as insulators. And in fact, we still use some asbestos for minerals for, um, insulating purposes.
But we know that when we breathe in large amounts of these asbestos minerals, they can cause a variety of [00:10:00] cancers. So I, I think for me it was that early recognition of, you know, here's something just really interesting. How does nature make a mineral that you can literally use as a thread, right? I mean, you can weave these things in.
You, you go back to World War ii, they used to weave as best offor minerals into kids' pajamas. Right? I mean, all kinds of ways that we used it. So yeah, it, it was, you know, I, I think for me, chemistry in high school. Was absolutely atrocious [00:10:30] because it was pure memorization with no application.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Oh,
amen.
Yes.
Prof. Adam Simon: as soon as I had the, the chance to start connecting, you know, what's a mineral?
What, defines a mineral? How does a mineral form, and then how do we use these minerals? And then what are the positive and negative impacts on society?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. That okay. I mean, that's a really interesting thread to, to pull apart there. The positive and negative impacts on society one , you're, you an economic [00:11:00] geologist
Chris Bolhuis: on a second. Hold on, Jesse. Hold, hold on. So, Adam, Jesse is widely known for these long-winded questions. You know, they have like multiple parts. He's a little ridiculous on this, but I'm interested about the first question that he asked, which is, is asbestos, all that it's kind of cracked up to be, is, is it as dangerous as sometimes it's, it's made out to be.
Prof. Adam Simon: so, um, I think the science now indicates that that we didn't need to go [00:11:30] as crazy as we did in the eighties and early nineties, removing asbestos from everywhere.
So, you know, one example would be . All of our old buildings where if you walked on the floors and all of the floor tiles were nine inch by nine inch, All of those floor tiles had asbestos as a component within the floor tile. And then in almost every public building that contained those floor tiles, the masick or the glue beneath those floor tiles contained [00:12:00] asbestos. And when it exists in a good working condition, it poses no problems. Right? No problems whatsoever.
but it is disturbed and you, remove that asbestos from the mastic and the glue and the floor tile, and then it is within the airspace that people are breathing, then it poses a risk. but I think, you know, looking back now, 30 plus years, when we just went overboard. Removing it from everywhere.[00:12:30]
I, I don't think that was necessary.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I just had this conversation in our lab space, we have like a computational lab space and we wanted to like rid of an old chalkboard and replace it with a whiteboard or something, right? And they're like, well, let's check if doesn't have as best ass behind it, we're good. If it does, it's gonna cost you like 30 grand to move that thing and it's not gonna be worth it. Uh, and
it has as best as behind it, right? And they're like, okay, just leave it. we're just gonna leave that.
We're not gonna move it. When they destroy the building, they'll think about it then. You know, it's that kind of thing. So,
Prof. Adam Simon: Right. know, I, I have friends here in Ann Arbor, [00:13:00] and when they buy houses and they go to renovate the houses, you know, in some cases there's a need to remove the asbestos because you're physically removing the materials in which asbestos is contained. But in a lot of cases, you can simply encapsulate it.
if you've got asbestos and you can cover that asbestos with a different type of floor, there's no need to remove it.
Chris Bolhuis: So, Adam, one other thing, we're still on question one, and I like, but I'm really interested because your story is, it is very [00:13:30] unusual. This is, is especially considering where you are right now, university of Michigan and, professor of geoscience. when did you decide, can you talk about that decision to, just send it and, and go for this, you know, advanced degree?
I mean, how did that all come about then?
Prof. Adam Simon: so after taking about, a year's worth of classes at Northern Virginia Community College and getting to know a professor, a guy named, um, Dick Grouse, Richard Grouse, who had a PhD in Geology from Syracuse, I transferred to the [00:14:00] University of Maryland into their undergraduate program in Geology. And at the time, Geology required that you take a summer field course, but they didn't offer their own course.
They really wanted students to take field courses offered by schools that were, you know, really well known for teaching field, courses. so after my junior year, I signed up for a field course through New Mexico Tech and went out to New Mexico for six weeks. A buddy and I drove from dc, did a 10,000 mile [00:14:30] road trip that summer, which was phenomenal, including Alberta.
we, we went up through Banff and Jasper and came across through Edmonton.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: amazing.
Prof. Adam Simon: so, so I'm at field camp and one of the guys that taught one of the sections of field camp is a guy named Andy Campbell. And just back and forth, you know, it was, as a kid from North Carolina, I had never really seen rocks.
Everything that, that I grew up around was soil and saprolite. And so I'm at this field camp and Andy was part of the instructor team teaching us [00:15:00] about plutonic rocks, metamorphic rocks, stratigraphy, et cetera. at the end of that summer field camp, I told Andy that one of the requirements at the University of Maryland is you had to do a six credit, two semester senior thesis.
All undergraduates had to do that. And Andy said that a buddy of his from grad school was a faculty member there. And I didn't know the guy, turns out the guy had been on sabbatical and didn't teach a course that I would've taken. So Andy said, when you get back, you should knock on this guy's door, [00:15:30] Phil Candela, and just tell him that you took Field Camp and you met me and that I recommended that you talk with Phil about a senior thesis. And I remember knocking on Phil's door, it was August of 1994 going into my senior year, and that conversation became a few hours. And Phil had done his undergraduate degrees in philosophy and chemistry and then a PhD in Geology. And so he was really almost hearkens back to what I would say is like the [00:16:00] philosopher scientist, he really. Well, he still is, but he was an expert at reducing really complex problems down to very simple, ways of understanding them. So. I asked if I could do a senior thesis with him. and he said yes. And I did a senior thesis with him, basically breaking apart a bunch of rocks that he and a PhD student had collected from the Sierra Nevada mountains in California.
And [00:16:30] I broke apart all of these rocks and separated all of the minerals from each other, and then learned how to do, acid digestion of minerals and used an old atomic absorption spectrophotometer. So I learned how to do a, a s and measure copper abundances in all of these minerals. And, you know, looking back on it, it was a relatively simple senior thesis, but it was a senior thesis that was really well scaffolded and taught me the [00:17:00] value of
Putting together scientific studies by focusing on hypotheses.
And over the course of that year, I spent a lot of time with Professor Candela and just got more interested in, in science and applied to go to graduate school to do a master's degree and went to Stony Brook University, did a master's degree.
my wife and I both moved to New York. She got a Master's. I got a master's. We got married, we had a baby. Well, she [00:17:30] had the baby, but I was part of that whole process.
and decided that we were both gonna, I was gonna take some time off. I wasn't a hundred percent sure that I wanted to keep going for a PhD.
So we moved back to the Washington DC area where she was from. And at that time my sister lived there and my dad lived in that area. And we moved back and I took a job doing analytical chemistry for a small company and to make ends meet. I taught a night class at that same community college that I had been a student at [00:18:00] six years prior.
So I went back in and I talked with Dick Grouse, who was still the professor there. And it was I taught intro to Geology and historical Geology and I would teach two nights a week, an hour and a half, a lecture, a coffee break, and then an hour and a half lab. And I just realized that teaching the, lectures and the labs, because at community colleges, there are no tass.
So when I would teach the labs. I was teaching, [00:18:30] first of all, most of the students were older than I was. A lot of the students were first gen, college students. A lot of students were immigrants from other countries. And I realized that there was a connection and that I. Slowly, almost, I would say class by class.
I realized that I had an ability to break complex material down and build it back up in a way that it connected with people in the class. and I [00:19:00] did that for a couple of years. And then December of 1999, I went back to the University of Maryland, had a Christmas party every year. And I'm standing there and I still have this full-time job.
And I'm teaching a night class at Northern Virginia Community College. And I'm talking to the chair of the department at the time, telling him how much I really like teaching. And if I could do it over again, I probably would pursue a PhD and try and become a faculty member to teach. And, he just looked at me and he said, well, why don't you do it?
can pay you as [00:19:30] a TA next semester if you come back. And so I did that. And, you know, it's always the statistics of small numbers things when you earn a PhD, but I thought, well, you know, if, I can earn a PhD and I can gain a lot of teaching experience and I can make a go at this, then I'll, I'll do it.
And that's been, um, 23 years.
Chris Bolhuis: that's amazing, Adam, because you had a baby, you had a wife. It's, it's really difficult to make that decision to go back to living that lifestyle at that stage of your life. That's, [00:20:00] uh, not a common story.
Prof. Adam Simon: it was not, it was not financially easy.
but I have to say, like for me, few years of being a PhD student were just absolutely amazing,
in every possible way. and I took every advantage I could of, networking and doing outreach and meeting with every seminar speaker who came through the University of Maryland.
Um, really fun.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I, you know, Adam, I, you, I'm guessing you're kind of the same when you're interacting with undergrads who are debating whether they [00:20:30] go to grad school or not. And you know, they, a lot of times they get, they like folks on the PhD and, oh, I want to go do a PhD. Why? Because they sort of like school, they think, and I, I think, you probably look for students who are, have that, that drive that you had, that were like, oh, here, I know I want a PhD and here's why.
you know why you want the PhD, going to get a PhD. Just 'cause it's the next step is. Usually a bad decision, but if you know why, it's valuable no matter what stage of life you're in or what career stage you're in, you look for students like [00:21:00] you at that time, , you know what I mean?
That sort of have that passion or, or just know what they want a little bit and have that life experience to enter it at a mature stage.
Prof. Adam Simon: Yeah, I agree with you a hundred
percent. what I try and encourage students to do is, you know, think about a PhD. You're not getting a PhD, you're earning a PhD, and it is a lot of sweat equity that you put into earning a PhD, and you really have to go into it knowing 100% this is what I wanna spend the next four to five years of my life doing.[00:21:30]
no matter what unions tell us, it is not a 40 hour a week job and every PhD student is gonna advance at a different rate. So there's always competition among PhD students and somebody's publishing faster than somebody else. And so I do spend a lot of time when I'm recruiting students, really trying to make sure that earning a PhD is something they're intrinsically motivated for.
You know, it's not to please other [00:22:00] people, it's not to get a particular job or earn a particular salary, but that they really are interested in doing science. And you know, what I tell students is if you're fundamentally interested in doing science and you earn a PhD and you do good science, then you can pretty much do anything you want.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I agree completely with that. And it's also, it's not a job. You're not, I tell students they're not working for me. You know, they're sort of working for themselves. know, this is your project. If you don't do it, I'm not gonna do [00:22:30] it. it's a project that you have to sort of own, and you have to, again, be intrinsically motivated to do because it's interesting and exciting and worthwhile.
And the, the degree, the three letters,
as much as, as much as I'm overeducated Chris, uh, , they do, they do matter. You know, the PhD matters. It has, uh, carries a little weight, uh, at, at certain times in life, . But anyway,
uh, mean, you're also just a great shining example of the community college system.
I mean, I, It's a great model. It's a great, like, if you [00:23:00] don't know what you wanna do, get into it with some night classes or something like that and maybe strike your passion or strike,
you know, the, the, the realization. It's a, powerful story you have.
So,
Prof. Adam Simon: I, I, I, I, I was just gonna say, I, you know, I, I think it's a blessing in the US that we have an education system that lets people take non-linear paths. You know, a lot of countries around the world, coming out of fifth, sixth, seventh grade, and you're either on a path or you're not on that path.
And so for me, one [00:23:30] of the things that I, I know worked well for me is, you know, a lot of the mistakes I made when I was younger, I was able to learn from those mistakes. And I was able to go to community college. And you know what I do now? Doesn't matter that I started at a community college, right? I mean, I tell it, it's all about where you finish.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: yeah. That, you know what? I've never thought of it that way. I'm gonna have to stew on this a little bit, that . That's a really interesting point that, you know, the US' education system is allows for those paths in a way that most other, uh, [00:24:00] particularly western societies don't really have. That's a really interesting point.
Um, I'll have to consider that. Uh, speaking of what you do now, Adam, the reason, okay. One of the reasons we're really excited, I was at SEG, the SEG conference in London recently. I'm not an economic geologist. I just went, 'cause I had some general forensic account and I wanted to learn what this critical minerals thing was all about.
But I saw you give an amazing talk and I thought that is really an interesting take on this. And I given similar talks, I think, or, or sort of in this theme where you are blending. [00:24:30] So you, you know, you did, if I understand it correctly, you got your PhD and your, your, a lot of your early work was on experimental, economic, Geology experimental or deposits.
I want to touch on that, but you have a lot of economics. You're like threading in a bunch of economics and societal. Demand projections. So can you give us like the, the summary of what you're talking about here or what your, your thesis is? Because like Chris, before we hit record here, Chris was like, oh yeah, I watched a new video with Adam and man, [00:25:00] it's kind of scary.
or I can't remember if you phrased it that way, Chris, or not, but
Chris Bolhuis: it, it didn't make me feel good.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: yeah.
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah, Adam, so I guess what you're doing right now is you're talking about transitioning away from the fossil fuels to go transition over to electric. Right? And in order to do that, I, I think you put it this way, that, we need, among other things, copper.
Copper is the artery for making, it's the arteries for making this [00:25:30] happen.
Is that, is that a
Prof. Adam Simon: Yes. Yep.
Chris Bolhuis: summary? So can you just, can you talk a little bit about this, what you're working on in this context? And then, I don't know, I have so many different directions that I want to go with this and ask you about.
Um, yeah, I do. I really do.
Prof. Adam Simon: Yeah, so, so about a year ago, uh, a collaborator, Larry Cathos, who's a professor emeritus at Cornell University. I went to Cornell and I gave a couple of talks and he and I [00:26:00] started discussing critical minerals, not in terms of the way they're typically portrayed. You know, we need 20 times more lithium, we need 20 times more nickel,
but how much do we actually need?
And then how much are we likely to expect mining companies to produce within a given period of time? So what we did over the last, six to nine months is we said, okay. if we imagine [00:26:30] a world where we no longer use fossil fuels, there's no more combustion of coal, oil, natural gas, right? and certainly there's a lot of discussion about that Now, you know, the COP talks in the Middle East, and in, since Biden took over the inflation reduction Act and all of its climate provisions.
And so what we did is we basically said, all right, let's calculate how much copper is required if every single internal combustion engine vehicle [00:27:00] is replaced with a battery electric vehicle. And we included motorcycles. We included 18 wheelers. We included trucks, delivery trucks, passenger vehicles, et cetera.
Every single vehicle becomes a battery electric vehicle. And we pull data for how many miles every vehicle on earth drives every single year. And then what we did is we said, okay, let's calculate how much copper would be required, if all [00:27:30] of these vehicles were battery electric. And then we asked the question, well, where does all that electricity come from?
If we're not generating electricity using natural gas and coal, then all of that electricity has to come from, a new source. So we said, all right, what if all of that new electricity comes from nuclear power plants? And we calculated how many new nuclear power plants would we need to generate all this new electricity?
And then we calculated how much copper would we need [00:28:00] if all of that new electricity is produced by some combination of wind turbines and solar panels, and, you know, the method is it's not based in any way on opinions, right? I mean, it's funda, it's mathematically based, right? Every battery electric vehicle contains X pounds of copper.
So if you have a billion battery electric vehicles, you can calculate how much copper you need. So we put numbers to that, and then what we did is we said, okay. [00:28:30] Our mining company's gonna be able to supply all of this copper over the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years. So to do that, we took historical production data that have been tabulated by the US Geological Survey and the British Geological Survey and other organizations for every year starting in 1900.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: these are like mine, copper being
extracted outta mines in a given year. Okay.
Prof. Adam Simon: exactly. So, you know, if, if [00:29:00] you go back to the year 1900, what was the total amount of copper that was mined from, from mines on the planet. And we, took those data for 1900, 19 0 1, 19 0 2, all the way through 2022. And then what we did is we fit a model that Allows us to essentially predict or extrapolate future production rates.
And you know, the way that I like to, to tell people to visualize that is if you can [00:29:30] remember at some point in a math class, in middle school or high school doing rise over run, right? And so you're, you're looking sort of at a plot where you've got an x axis and a y axis and you have a rise over run.
Those production data, they essentially define a line from 1900 to 2022. And then we just developed a mathematical relationship that allows us to extrapolate out into the future.[00:30:00]
And then what we did is we said, okay. Now we know how much copper we need in a given scenario to electrify everything.
All of our battery electric vehicles, they're all powered by wind and solar. And now we have a sense for how much copper mining companies are realistically gonna be able to provide. and when you look at those data, what they tell us is we will not be able to decarbonize, meaning eliminate [00:30:30] all fossil fuels by everyone driving a battery electric vehicle.
And that's not because we don't have enough copper. It's because over the next couple of decades, based on the last 120 years of mine copper production, it is unrealistic to expect mining companies to be able to produce the amount of copper we need within the next few decades.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: So, what do you mean? Can you, tease [00:31:00] apart that difference? You ended by saying, it's not that we don't have enough, it's that we can't
produce enough. What, why did you qualify that at the end? is the root of that
Prof. Adam Simon: Yeah. So, you know, humans have been mining copper for thousands of years, right? I mean, in, the old testament of the Bible, copper is one of the seven metals of antiquity. And in fact, if you read the book of Job, in the book of job, it literally talks about mining, silver mining, gold mining, copper. And we can go to, for example, king [00:31:30] Solomon's mines, and we can see where humans were mining
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Oh, really?
Prof. Adam Simon: If you fast fo oh, it's, it's amazing. It's, it's a place called the Tim Na Valley in the Negev Desert. And you can literally see what, what match I have been. Yeah, I took a a, I took a group of undergrad and graduate students there in, um, early March, 2020, right before the pandemic. And I always tell students that reading the Bible, is a history lesson, right? You don't have to [00:32:00] believe in a, in a higher power. But if you think about it, the Bible, when it was written, it was written during the Bronze Age. And so if you're reading the Old Testament and you're reading about copper and gold and silver and tin and iron and mercury, those were the metals that literally put Xs on the map all over the Middle East and created trade routes that we read about in the Bible.
So if you fast forward to today, [00:32:30] right? people picture in their, in their minds a mine, right? A big hole in the ground. That hole in the ground, on average, there's always variability, but on average, globally, for a mining company to build a mine and start physically extracting copper from some rock, it is at least 15 to 20 years the time a group of geologists say. We have [00:33:00] found a big body of rock in Minnesota, and this body of rock contains a lot of copper, and they do all of the economic analysis and they get all of the funding and they get all of the permits. And then somebody pushes the go button.
And the first excavator and backhoe
are moved
in from that time at least 15 to 20 years. And it varies depending on metals. but is the [00:33:30] global average. And I think a lot of mining companies today would say it's even now getting a little bit longer because permits are so hard to get.
So. when we think about copper, we know that there are a lot of areas around the world, on all six continents where mining is allowed. We don't mine on Antarctica. We have an international treaty that eliminates the ability to do that. We know, or we can estimate how much copper [00:34:00] At a given dollars per pound price for copper could be mined from the Earth's crust. Once we find it, and we know where it is, and we can fully constrain how much copper there is in a given volume of rock, it's 15 to 20 years. So if it's 2000, let's, let's call it, it's January 1st, 2024. And the United States, we sell 16 million [00:34:30] new light duty passenger vehicles every year. so, and last year there were about 600,000 of those that were battery electric vehicles.
So let's imagine a world within five years, 10 years, where all 16 million vehicles are battery electric vehicles. Globally, we buy about 80 million light duty passenger vehicles a year. So all of a sudden, all 80 million of those vehicles are battery electric vehicles. Where does that copper come from?[00:35:00]
mathematical analysis that we did indicates that, there will not be enough copper in the supply chain to meet that demand
unless. The copper that is in the supply chain is very specifically allocated only for battery electric vehicles, right? So when, when we, when we think about copper mining now, you know, all of the copper that mining companies are pulling out of the ground today, [00:35:30] next week, next month, that's already spoken for,
when a mining company pulls copper out of the ground, it is physically embedded in some technology within weeks to months. You know, it doesn't sit around and wait five years to get used. So in real time mining companies around the world, they're extracting about 23 million tons of copper a year.
And all of that copper is already spoken for. [00:36:00] There are a lot of uses of copper. So, you know, one of the things I. That is in the news a lot is, people talk about how many people around the world don't have access to electricity. And estimates vary, but I think a reasonable number is about a billion, 1 billion people that don't have access to reliable electricity.
And if all of those people, if we want them to have electricity that's gonna take copper, because we know [00:36:30] that copper is fundamental to producing electricity, distributing electricity, and then copper is embedded in all of the technologies that electricity is used to power.
Chris Bolhuis: Wow. That's amazing. Adam, I have a question though. Can you explain why you say that copper is the artery? Because I think some of our listeners are probably thinking, well, what about the platinum metals? What about lithium? You know, what about these other things? Why is copper the center of your attention
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, and I think I just read a press release that Tesla [00:37:00] was replacing some copper conductors with aluminum, maybe in their vehicles it's not as good, but it's like a kind of a replacement in some cases. Yeah, like that's a really interesting question.
Prof. Adam Simon: Yeah. So, so Copper has for a hundred years, um, copper has been the choice to generate power at electric power plants. So thinking here about massive copper coils and magnets. And if you spin the copper coils fast enough around a magnet, [00:37:30] then you can create an electromotive force and you can push electricity out onto the grid.
In all of our technology products, we use copper to move, charge, or to move electricity within our technology products. You know, if you plug your smartphone in at night, right, that electricity is leaving the wall, moving along copper wires and going into the battery inside your technology, In some cases you can swap copper out. So for example, you mentioned [00:38:00] aluminum, Jesse, you know, aluminum can be used for example, for high voltage transmission lines
and there trade-offs. And then there are also are benefits, you know, aluminum is a lot more abundant on the surface of the earth.
Aluminum is a lot less expensive than copper, but it is a lot less conductive. So if you transition from copper to aluminum, then you have those trade-offs where maybe your cost is decreased and you're not as [00:38:30] concerned about the supply chain. But you have sacrificed some of the benefits that the highly conductive copper provides.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Okay, it's not, you know, it's not just a one-to-one replacement here that that's required.
how, so to Chris's question, do have you done this? Kind of analysis for other commodities or other mi, other elements really that are useful, that nickel, lithium cobalt, maybe, I don't know, these, these ones that the green energy technologies or battery electric vehicles require?[00:39:00]
is that ne,
is that step
Prof. Adam Simon: So that's gonna be step two. and I think, you know what is almost certain to happen is new technologies are constantly being developed.
Um. And the total amount of copper that we need for a battery electric vehicle 20 years from now will probably be less than it is today.
But a lot of these technologies that are being developed, you know, they're not gonna be rolled out for 10, [00:39:30] 15, 20, 25
years. And I think one of the things that leads to a lot of confusion among the general public is, we talk about lithium ion batteries, and of course lithium is, is of paramount importance for a lithium ion battery.
But a lithium ion battery, you just said it, you also need nickel and cobalt and copper and graphite. In all of our battery electric vehicles, you need heavy rare earth elements in order to make [00:40:00] permanent magnets that are used for the electric motors. so right now there's a of mining activity around the world, searching for new sources of lithium and a lot of really cool technology that's being developed in real time.
You know, there's a lot of lithium in different groundwaters around the world and . The way that we have been mining lithium from those groundwaters, if you go to places like Bolivia and Chile and Argentina, is we pump out [00:40:30] millions of gallons of water that has just a little bit of lithium, and then we just let the sun evaporate all that water.
And so that is a really water intensive process. There are new technologies now that, that are referred to as direct lithium extraction, where you literally, I like to think about it as like a water softener in your home. If you're on well water, you know, you're pumping the water out of the ground, you're extracting the lithium, and then you just pump the water back down underground.
So [00:41:00] you have no negative impact on the groundwater systems in these areas.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I like that analogy. That's a really good one. The soft water system. And also I think isn't, uh, I think our, an alumni of our department is working in this space as a company, but it also has the, the best geological formation name that I've ever heard.
The one in Arkansas, I think it's called the smack over formation, is the one that has all
the lithium brines. I love that.
The smack over. It's so good.
Chris Bolhuis: Um, Adam, I, I'm really interested in [00:41:30] Made you think to go in this direction with your research and with your mathematical calculations?
Prof. Adam Simon: I, I think, you know, for a long time, I. Mining companies have been able to satisfy demand no matter what the metal was, So if you go back to 1870, nobody had electricity. And then Edison and other people started figuring out, well, how do we make filaments that we can use for light bulbs?
And if we have filaments for light bulbs, we need electricity. So we have [00:42:00] the first coal-fired power generation, in London and New York City in the early 1870s. And from then until now, it seems like, we've made sort of leaps and bounds, improvements in all aspects of technology.
And over the last 150 years, mining companies have kept up, if industry comes up with a new way, know, some new technology that requires some new sets of metals, then those metals have just always been available. And [00:42:30] it's been sort of an incremental and I would say sort of a slow addition of demand that has been met by the same amount of supply right year over year.
So if we go back a hundred years and society needed a million tons of copper mining companies produced a million tons of copper. And then over time as demand increased, supply increased and it, it sort of kept pace. And you know, [00:43:00] in some cases when demand exceeds supply prices go up. But it's almost always the case that prices will go up and then prices will come back down pretty
quickly.
Now what we're talking about doing is we're talking about taking a planet with 8 billion people with hundreds of millions of combustion engine vehicles with phenomenal amounts of electricity demand, right? If Google NASA world at night, and [00:43:30] you look at our world at night, I mean, it's amazing how much we've changed in 150 years. And all of a sudden, all of these various climate bills around the world, they want within a period of probably 10 to 20 years to instantaneously eliminate all of these internal combustion engine vehicles and have them become battery electric vehicles. So it requires an almost [00:44:00] instantaneous. Huge increase in the supply of copper and all of these other metals, and it's just not geologically realistic mining companies are gonna be able to meet that demand.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: So that last comment you made made me rethink of this. Like, can I ask a couple of like, what do we do about it? Type questions. And the first
one would be, do we as geologists and exploration geologists, do we know of copper deposits out there? It's just either whole holdup is either regulations or the price [00:44:30] point of copper.
Like if copper goes up, can we just start to make more mines? Or if we just got rid of all regulations and said, Hey, mines you can permit them in a year. Does that fix the problem? Or is it geological that we don't actually know of locations that have enough copper in reserve
or in some
Prof. Adam Simon: it's, it's a combination of both.
So, are examples of really large copper deposits. That mining companies have been trying to get permits for to mine [00:45:00] that are, 10, 20, 30 years in the making. And they're still not mining. You know, one of them is, um, it's a project in southern Arizona called Resolution, and it would
be if it were able to start producing copper.
It's an underground mine. It would be one of the top 10 copper producing mines on the planet, and it would go a long way to meeting the copper demand for electrification in the United States. It's domestic copper.
company that owns the [00:45:30] rights to, to mine that particular copper deposit. They have been trying to secure final permits since 2013.
And in 2013, during Obama's second four year term, federal government initially green-lighted all of the permits, but it's been held up in litigation.
So what we are seeing happening in the United States and increasingly in other resource rich countries around the world is [00:46:00] lawsuits that can add years to decades of delay to mining projects.
So even, in the case, you know, here we have this phenomenal copper resource in Arizona, and it could have started producing copper 10 years ago, but it, it still is not producing copper. so one is, is these significant delays, you know, the permitting time that it takes. And the second is that we still need to [00:46:30] find new copper deposits that we can mine.
So there are a lot of ways that geologists have estimated how many copper deposits likely exist in Arizona, in Chile, in, Australia. but those are just estimates and still need to do a lot of work to explore for and discover copper deposits that a mining company can exploit and make a profit. Right. And I think that's one of the critical [00:47:00] keys here as well. You know, all mining companies, they at least have to break even.
And one of the challenges with mining companies is they require a lot of really patient capital. So, about the company that wants to open this mine in Arizona, they've probably put in a billion, $2 billion, and yet they're not mining anything.
So all of that money is just sort of sunk costs. So mining [00:47:30] companies are increasingly really cautious about moving forward with different mining projects because they don't wanna put a lot of money into something and then not be able to recover that investment.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: well, it's an interesting point you bring up 'cause this is something that's always confused me about the exploration in mining industry, is that exploration's this kind of pure speculative sort of space. You know, like people invest in programs up in Arctic Canada or something.
It's almost pure speculation. I mean, there's knowledge in there, but it's a very speculative industry. And then the mining is really [00:48:00] conservative, you know, huge capital expenditures and really conservative. And you're saying it's getting even more conservative now because of this time risk, right? Like, is there a solution here?
I mean, should we all just buy stock in copper mining companies and that'll help ? I don't know. Like
what, what, you know, this is like a disconnect. It's like two, two-faced sort of, uh,
I I don't know. like
Chris Bolhuis: yeah. Can I add onto that? Maybe, Adam, do you, you're a research scientist, do you allow yourself to think about [00:48:30] the solution to the problem?
Prof. Adam Simon: among the possible solutions, If we look at the US and we pass the Inflation Reduction Act, and there was all the controversy around it, and mansion might pass, it might not. But nonetheless, we've now got this inflation reduction act. We are going gangbusters, building downstream plants to manufacture battery electric vehicles.
but there's too little effort on the part of [00:49:00] the administration in Washington DC thinking about the upstream supply of all of these critical minerals that we need to build all of the downstream batteries. I mean, I think on some level, like batteries are sexy. Right. as ugly as the new cyber truck may be the concept of the cyber truck, right?
The, the, but the concept is sexy, right? I mean, who could have imagined we'd be driving around [00:49:30] a stainless steel truck, but people are gonna buy it, right? It's the cool factor. And I think in the United States, one of the solutions would be for the Biden administration to call up the CEOs of the world's top 20, 25, 30 mining companies and invite them all to Washington and sit them all down and say, how can you help us make all of these climate provisions in the IRA reality?[00:50:00]
And that's gonna take some real grownup conversations because you have a large part of the population who elected President Biden that They start with an opposition to mining. All mining is bad. All mining is gonna cause acid, mine drainage, and you know, that's just not the case. if you go to any of the mines that are being operated in the United States, [00:50:30] you know, any of the big copper, gold, silver mines, platinum mines, nickel mines.
When I take students to those mines, it really helps them understand how inaccurate their perceptions of mining are. ahead.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: No, I, I have a question on that. Do you think that the cause of that is, is we have. I think of this in like the northeast where, where I sort of am now. Like we have here in Pennsylvania and like up in New England, we have this, this vision of mining as like the [00:51:00] 1920s version of mining or the oil rush, you know, in
Pennsylvania where they just clear cut everything, pump oil out.
There's abandoned wells everywhere. Very unhealthy, but it's a hundred years old as well. Like, that's not modern mining. So do you think we need publicize successful minds? Like here's what a modern mind looks like. It's not the 1940s version that you have in your head. Like, what do you do with students to like, from taking them? 'cause we can't take our listeners to the mind, you know, it'd be great if we could, but I don't know, what do you say to people,
Prof. Adam Simon: the way that I approach this [00:51:30] in the classes that I teach is, is sort of a multifaceted approach.
If we all agree that we want the human race to be the winner, right? If we all agree that we want the entire world to have access to the technologies, that on some level we take for granted in the us And, I say that knowing there's a lot of economic disparity in the US and access to technology is, far from equal.
But on average, [00:52:00] the access to all things technology in the United States is drastically different than it is, for example, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And what, I try and get students to do is think about mining as fundamental to human progress,
right? We are always gonna make mistakes.
And historically mining companies made mistakes. But if you come up with any analogy, I mean, early efforts to do [00:52:30] surgery, lots of people died. But how many people, if you go to the emergency room and they say, we've gotta do surgery to save you, somebody's gonna say, oh, no, no, no, no. 'cause I remember how many people died a hundred years ago.
Right. And so I think, yeah,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: one.
Prof. Adam Simon: and, and I think that's where the administration in Washington could really help their own cause by making a more public statement. the critical need for mining and [00:53:00] how mining today is so different than it was, you know, mining is also one of the ways, and again, you you're always gonna have people who are anti-capitalist, but if you think about global development.
Mining is among the most important aspects of global development, right? there's a lot in the news now about, for example, the Congo and artisanal and small scale miners. And I had the, the chance this past August. I spent a couple of weeks in the Congo, [00:53:30] and while I was there we met with and interviewed a lot of people who are artisanal miners.
Well, the reality is that those artisanal miners are exactly the same type of artisanal miners that immigrated from Europe and participated in the gold rush in the Klondike, the gold rush in California. even if we think about Pennsylvania, I mean, how much mining was done in Pennsylvania?
we used to mine in all of these areas and it was all [00:54:00] artisanal miners and I. Over the last couple of hundred years, all of that early artisanal mining has now completely changed society so that we no longer see the mining. That really was the, the foundation for our economic growth.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: that's an interesting point. I like the phrase that mining is, uh, you know, fundamental to human progress in many ways. you must be getting a lot of calls for you to like, you know, sit on panels or give this talk. Like, is the reception that you're getting [00:54:30] to this sort of thesis in this type of thinking.
Prof. Adam Simon: I have been really surprised, happy and impressed, giving talks to, individuals and groups that at the beginning of the talk. I think they would self-describe as being opposed to mining. And at the end of the talk, they have a new appreciation for the fact [00:55:00] that the energy transition happen without more mining. And that doesn't mean mining with reckless abandon, but it does mean mining.
I have had some really enjoyable conversations with people who have said to me, you know, an hour ago I thought all mining was bad. Now I have an appreciation for how much copper, how much nickel, how much lithium we need, and. we both [00:55:30] agree that we want the climate to win and in order for the climate to win, all the climate scientists tell us we have to stop the combustion of fossil fuels. So I, I have to say like the reception to my talks have been really positive. don't win everybody over, you know, but I think what I've been able to do is communicate the actual demand for all of these metals in a way that people have an appreciation for the mining that's necessary.
And then [00:56:00] also I. You know, talking with people about the safety records for mining, yes, there have been some disasters and there will be disasters in the future, right? I mean, humans, we're human. We make mistakes, but we learn from our mistakes. I think unfortunately in our, our today with 24 7 access to news, there's this adage, you know, if it bleeds, it leads, right?
Nobody has ever turned on CNN, and you see CNN going out and [00:56:30] Sanjay Gupta spends an hour just talking about happy people. So, you know, I, I, I, I think what what we have is, you know, when, when there is a disaster, whether it's the deep water horizon, whether it's the Exxon Valdez, whether it's a tailings dam that collapses in Brazil, people see that and think that that is representative of every single mine on the planet, and it's just not
true.
Chris Bolhuis: It is interesting. so I mean, we, Jesse and I hear this quite often about, you know, there's, there's [00:57:00] gonna be some savior technological that we haven't thought of yet that's gonna solve the problem.
what are your thoughts on that argument?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Or
recycling. Well, uh. Maybe we add recycling to this. Like, oh, we're, we're just gonna magically get really great at recycling
copper or something.
Prof. Adam Simon: You know, we, we, in, in the study that we, we've just recently done, we modeled recycling, and certainly we'll get better at recycling. I'm old enough to remember when we didn't recycle anything, and then I can remember, you know, in the eighties, you'd [00:57:30] start to recycle paper and cardboard, and now we recycle a lot of the things that 30 years ago nobody recycled.
and so eventually, you know, I can imagine a world a hundred years from now where we truly recycle everything, but we first have to build everything out and, gonna take building, you know, a hundred plus million battery electric vehicles and tens of thousands of wind turbines and, hundreds of thousands of solar panels.
We gotta build it out first, [00:58:00] and then, we can recycle those at the end of their lifetimes in 20, 30, 40, 50 years.
know, I favor in all of the above approach. . I think that we should be doing research on everything and it might be that 10 years from now somebody has figured out a way that we don't need lithium ion batteries anymore.
You there's a company in China, CATL, that has prototyped a sodium ion battery for battery electric vehicles. I think that's awesome.[00:58:30] if they could figure out a way to mass produce that at scale and that eliminated the need for lithium and nickel and cobalt and copper in these batteries, I'm all for that.
Um, I don't think that we should wait and not mine the resources because we're hoping five years from now
somebody will have developed something.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: We're sort of that an all hands on deck sort of approach to the, climate. Right now we should be talking about carbon sequestration at the same time [00:59:00] we're talking about nuclear energy sources. At the same time
we're doing wind and battery electric vehicle, like all of it. Hybrids, you
know, I mean, anything that helps re you know, drive that CO2 number down or flatline it
Prof. Adam Simon: Absolutely. And I think that's what makes it so exciting for young people today. You know, I meet so many kids coming outta high school and going into engineering and science programs. I. And the way that young people think and what seems like a crazy idea, but then you realize, [00:59:30] oh, it's not a crazy idea.
It just takes some fine tuning. So, you know, I really think that we have a responsibility as educators to make students aware that, right now what we're concerned about is reducing the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. And ultimately, I don't think we really should care about how we do that.
If somebody can figure out how to economically suck CO2 out of the atmosphere and pump it underground, hey, let's go [01:00:00] for it. Right?
I'm all for that.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Totally. so is it a good time to be a geologist? I mean, like, or geoscientist Maybe let's make it more broad and, and, uh. Is it a good future? Like do you I think this way. I think that it's a great time to be in graduate school in geochemistry. It doesn't really matter what kind of
geochemistry, but there's use for your skillset out there.
Or get an undergrad degree in Geology from Michigan, or even better Penn State. But you know,
Prof. Adam Simon: Yeah, I, I, I would agree with that a hundred percent. You [01:00:30] know, I think Geology is an incredible undergraduate major, and there are so many opportunities today for students who have undergraduate degrees in Geology. there are some really good graduate programs in Geology, including Penn State. and I really think that a lot of students who go into Geology as an undergraduate major, you know, could work in mining, you could work in [01:01:00] environmental remediation.
You know, a lot of students here at the University of Michigan, you they're surprised to learn that . All of the mining companies, they hire environmental people. All of the mining companies, they have government oversight by people who have backgrounds in Geology and geochemistry and environmental science.
So, you an undergraduate or if you're in high school and you're thinking about, you what kind of career field can I go into where I can actually have an impact on [01:01:30] society? I think Geology is just awesome.
Chris Bolhuis: I have a follow up about that, Adam. so I just, this, this afternoon, this is kind of why I ha I wanted to push our interview back from four o'clock to six o'clock because, uh, my alma mater, grand Valley State, brought in a panelist. They brought in seven, geoscientists to talk about their careers.
And, and then they had a bunch of seminar students in there and they had an opportunity to ask questions and so on. And I was talking about this with, my students and I was seeing if, you know, [01:02:00] any of 'em wanted to go. And I ended up bringing in about seven students with me to this panel. And there was a girl that overheard our conversation in the hallway and she said, wait. Geology, you can get a job doing Geology, you know, and, and we come across this all the time in Michigan, right? I mean, you have to come across this, right, Adam, where people just, you said Geology is a good place to be. This is a good direction to go. It's viable. Go do this. But people in Michigan really don't understand what are you gonna do?
Look at rocks all day.
Prof. Adam Simon: [01:02:30] Yeah, I, I think I, I encountered this a lot and, um, I think that's where universities could and should do a much better job of communicating to students in our classes. How the knowledge and skills that they're learning in the classroom translate into various career fields. And I've had this discussion a lot with faculty colleagues here at Michigan.
You know, you get into the [01:03:00] argument of, you know, Geology at a university and applied science or a basic science? And I say both,
right? I mean, I think, you know, as an undergraduate student, no matter what your major is, you should be learning fundamental basic science. And simultaneously, I think that it, be part of our charge as teachers and faculty members to make sure students can connect the basic science that they're learning with real world problems.
engineers do that, [01:03:30] right? I mean, if you go into an engineering major at the University of Michigan, your entire four years is about learning skills that you can apply to solve problems. And I think at the university level in Geology, we should do a better job of that. faculty do that.
You know, most faculty, you're teaching classes and you're doing research and your research, it's basic, but it also has applications. So I try and really bring that into my classes. trying to find ways [01:04:00] that will allow students to make a connection, well here, you know, he's teaching me all of this material and here's how I can use it.
And I've had students from a wide variety of majors take my classes, you know, economics, business, environmental studies, and they realize that when you talk about mining. Pretty much every major on campus is involved, right? Mining companies hire chemical engineers, mining companies hire people who have business and finance and economics degrees.
[01:04:30] Mining companies hire people to do public policy because they're all in Washington, DC and Brussels, where they're lobbying. And so, you know, mining companies on some level, if we think about it through the lens of, what majors did, all of the people who work at a big mining company have, it's probably every single major at Grand Valley State,
every single major at the University of Michigan.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I, I just, I think it's such an interesting time to, to be in geoscience. I mean, with all of these, just this energy transition thing we're, [01:05:00] we're trying to do and trying to tackle with all the potential outcomes or all the potential solutions. You you said, it takes all of them.
so why not throw our hat in the ring? I mean, so
Chris, we've got, we got to like, two of our ,
big long list of
questions, Adam, I, I, I
Prof. Adam Simon: And, and
and
Dr. Jesse Reimink: could, yeah, go ahead.
Prof. Adam Simon: I, I was just gonna throw one thing on that too, is, you know, I also tell students we also need students to push back.
Society needs students who push back to make sure that mining is done responsibly.
You [01:05:30] that's also something that's really important.
And so, you know, I mentioned earlier the mine in, Arizona, that's not yet a mine because it's been tied up in litigation. we also are blessed in the United States to have the National Environmental Policy Act. And, that gives individuals in groups the right to sue, to make sure that mining is done in a way that really does reduce any possible negative impacts.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: No, that's a great, that's a great point. It's the dis the discussion has to be had, [01:06:00] it's not a, a sort of a blanket strategy. So, we're, we're way over time. Um, but I, I think we could, we want to talk about a lot of different stuff with you, , but maybe you could promise us that we could, you would come back and we could do this again sometime and talk more about,
you know, your research and, and maybe come back after, uh, round two of your research or your studies of, of looking at lithium and cobalt and nickel, and you could tell us about the outcomes of, of that, analysis.
That'd be really exciting too. I,
Prof. Adam Simon: Absolutely. I'd be happy to.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: this has been super
Chris Bolhuis: Jesse, before [01:06:30] you
ask the last question, I want to ask a a real, this is a somewhat related question, so, but not really, this is just mainly for me. you have a Tesla,
Prof. Adam Simon: I do.
Chris Bolhuis: And like, are you happy with that?
Prof. Adam Simon: Extremely.
Chris Bolhuis: because I want, I'm, I'm looking at this for like, our next vehicle and, and, uh,
you know, this,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: personal recommendations.
Chris Bolhuis: this is
straight up for personal reasons, but.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: a cyber
Prof. Adam Simon: So I, I, yeah, I, I'm extremely happy with the Tesla. and I would say [01:07:00] that among the things that people don't realize about owning an electric vehicle, is it buys you back a lot of time. You so I, I bought the Tesla two years ago. It was my 50th birthday present to myself, well, my wife and I, and if I think about, you know, for the, the previous 30 years, all of the times driving an internal combustion engine vehicle, you know, you go to the gas station and you think, oh, it's not that big a deal.
You go to the gas station, [01:07:30] you get out, you put the pump in, you wait for the credit card, to clear. But if you integrate . All of the hundreds to thousands of hours that we spend over a lifetime just pumping gas. And you buy an electric vehicle and granted, you have to have the ability to charge the electric vehicle at your home or apartment complex.
And I know that, that we have a lot, you know, a lot of work to do there. But, you know, the thing that my wife and I have realized over the last couple of years is we never [01:08:00] go to a gas station.
Chris Bolhuis: Mm-Hmm.
Prof. Adam Simon: I mean, all, all of that, you know, you buy that time back I haven't yet seen it.
Maybe I should write it, but every now and then in the Wall Street Journal, there's an article about buying back your own time.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Prof. Adam Simon: we used to mow, right?
Right. We used to mow our own grass. Right. You know, you think about, a lot of times you'll hear people criticize, well, you know, now we have all these landscaping companies and they mow everybody's grass.
But, you know, not [01:08:30] that people are lazy, it's they're buying their time back.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: It's the division of labor. This is
like the point
Chris Bolhuis: Oh. This is a whole new argument I can use
on Jenny.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah.
This is the
point of like, uh,
Chris Bolhuis: my time back.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: advanced
Prof. Adam Simon: Well, the other thing is it go Google. Google, the bacteria and viruses that are on gas pumps,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Oh, .Oh, no, that
Chris Bolhuis: No, no, you didn't need to say that. You did not need to. I don't need to be thinking about that. No. Come on. Um, alright. One other question. Okay. Though about the [01:09:00] Tesla though is what happens when the battery goes bad or something like that. Is it, is it as bad as what it's
chris_1_12-04-2023_180655: made
Chris Bolhuis: out to be?
Prof. Adam Simon: No, you know what, what's happening now with, well first of all, there are still year one Teslas that are on the road. they have a phenomenal um, lifespan and what's happening with batteries and electric vehicles in the US is that when you get to that point in time, just like your cell phone, where you can't [01:09:30] charge the batteries back up to 80% or more and you retire those batteries, they can be repurposed for local grid scale battery storage.
the batteries in a Tesla that you might drive for 10 years when they're no longer viable to store enough charge still use them in a Tesla, they can be repurposed for home energy storage. And
we are now seeing companies that are developing the ability to recycle these batteries. They call it [01:10:00] recycling black mass.
And there's a new company now that is currently building the first of its kind black mass recycling center in Missouri, in the Midwest. And that's gonna be first of its kind and 10, 15, 20 years from now, that's gonna be the norm.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I like that. That's interesting. That's very good.
So, Chris, you can go by Tesla now. Uh, as soon as we get off the call,
you can do that. I wanna, I was looking at, I wanna one of those F-150 lightnings. Those look pretty cool. I, I,
like that. Those
Prof. Adam Simon: that [01:10:30] have them and they are awesome.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Oh really? Oh, don't
say that.
Prof. Adam Simon: awesome. Yep.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I need Okay. I need to save up
Prof. Adam Simon: Well, and, and I, I think with those you can still get the full tax credit.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Oh, really? Okay. Well, there we go. Even added benefit, I just like the idea of being able to back up your house. We, you know, here in, in northeast, we, we have so many power outages, like all the time. It's hilly terrain. Trees are falling down all the time. Like we have so many power outages.
I'm like, if I could get rid of this generator that
saves me a bunch of money, if I could just
run it off [01:11:00] my, run my house off my truck. That sounds great. .
Prof. Adam Simon: Well, you know, the, the, the other application, like I, I have a younger brother in North Carolina who's a contractor, and he has every cordless tool known to mankind. And, you know, I've, I've tried to convince him, like, if you bought an F-150 Lightning at the end of the day on the work site, you put all of your cordless tools into the back of the F-150, you literally plug them in.
And then when you, when you get home and you get back to the warehouse, you just plug the truck in.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: The one in. Yeah. You don't. Yeah, totally. [01:11:30] I think it's an amazing, uh, value proposition for sure. I I love that. Okay. Well, you're well, here we go, Chris. We're gonna go on a spending
spree. We gotta start earning
Chris Bolhuis: I know.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: buy These things
Chris Bolhuis: So Adam, last year we did a, we did a, um, an episode on Granite countertops. And, uh, the next day, uh, I went out and bought Granite
countertops.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah,
Chris Bolhuis: this might not turn
Dr. Jesse Reimink: yeah, yeah, No kidding. This is turning out to be an expensive, uh, hobby. This podcast, Chris
Chris Bolhuis: That's
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Um, alright, Adam, we'll [01:12:00] wrap up part one here, our traditional closing question, which is, what has been your best day as a geoscientist
Prof. Adam Simon: Boy, I, I think I, I would say, and they're all on some level the same day, but my best days as a geoscientist are the days. My PhD defend and graduate
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Oh, really? Oh, that's a cool answer.
Prof. Adam Simon: and,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: you had?
Prof. Adam Simon: um, I think I've [01:12:30] had about 23 PhD students finish their
PhDs and, you advising and mentoring and working with, and collaborating with a PhD student, you really see them evolve over four to five years.
you take a young adult who comes in at 21, 22, 23, they're smart. They know a lot they learn so much more over four to five years.
They really, you see them mature [01:13:00] in ways that go far beyond the research they're doing. And, you know, those are the days for me when you see, you know, it's almost always the case that their family comes into town and they give a public lecture that's about one hour that summarizes here's what I've done for the last four and five years.
And I, think those are the days when I just really take a lot of pride in being, in a position to get, to [01:13:30] experience that.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: That's really cool. I like that answer a lot. I look forward to those days, , but, um, I can see, I can see what you mean by that. I can see it on the horizon and I could understand, uh, certainly understand that. That's, that's a good answer. I like that one.
That's a very good answer. Alright, well, Adam, thank you very much for all your time. Uh, this has been really informative, really insightful. I love the, I love the take, I love, um, I love what you're doing and I look forward to an update. I, I can't wait to talk again. This has
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. Yeah,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: joining us and giving [01:14:00] us an hour of your
time.
Chris Bolhuis: Absolutely a pleasure to meet you.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah.
Prof. Adam Simon: Yep. Yeah. Well, great. Yeah, no, I enjoy talking to both of you guys, Chris and Jesse. Thanks
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you. Hey, that's a wrap. Thanks for listening. As always, you can head to our website, planet geo cash.com. There you can find all of our past episodes, learn about us, find transcripts of all of our past episodes.
You can also donate and support us. We really appreciate when people do that. If you wanna learn the basics of geoscience, head over to Camp Geo. That is our [01:14:30] mobile app and our mobile platform. We have a bunch of different courses up there now for purchase and a bunch of free content as well. The basic intro level course in geoscience is there for you. Just download that from your app store. It's the first link in your show notes. If you have questions, send us an email, planet at Geo cast@gmail.com.
Chris Bolhuis: Cheers.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Peace. [01:15:00]
