Industrial Ecology and Critical Minerals: Dr. Nedal Nassar

S2E7 Nedal Nassar

Jesse Reimink: [00:00:00] Welcome to PlanetGeo the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works and why it matters to you.

Jesse Reimink: Is that good? That was good. You know, don't chase. Well done, Chris. Well done. I

Chris Bolhuis: know. Thank you. Thank you. You did not know I

Jesse Reimink: was bilingual. Did you know? Hey man, it's good to see your face. I mean, you know, you are, you're pretty fancy over there. It's it's always, it's always good to be looking at you.

Chris Bolhuis: What do you mean? I look fancy. Why? What do I look fancy? You

Jesse Reimink: had like a nice V a deep v-neck going on. Like a very stylish v-neck.

Chris Bolhuis: Uh, no, it's a quarter zip north face.

Jesse Reimink: Well, you're wearing it. You're wearing it in a stylish way, man. Thank you. I appreciate that. You're you're looking very, uh, prestigious. Yeah, I won't say the same, but thanks. I never do no. That's right. Hey, we had a great interview today. Oh dude, this was so fun. I mean, okay. I'm going to, I'm going to run through the CV. I, I walked away from this [00:01:00] interview. So totally impressed by this guy. So we interviewed Dr. , who is a PhD industrial ecologist, which I didn't really know what that was until this interview. Very fun, but he is the chief of the U S Geological Survey's Materials Flow Analysis Section, which might be a little bit confusing, but basically looks at how elements in critical commodities move through our society. Amazing job. He's a leading member of the us national science and technology council who won the 2019 Presidential Early Career Award for scientists and engineers, which I cannot emphasize enough how big of a deal that is. That is a massive award. He's got an MBA from Cornell, a bachelor's in chemical engineering from university of Minnesota and a PhD from Yale. So got the credentials, backed it up. What an amazing. Guy. Just totally nice guy.

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. He is like, you just get the feeling. This is one of the most genuine, probably kindest, [00:02:00] most kind people that you're ever going to come across. I mean, just that kind of person and, uh, what a great interview, you know, in prepping for this interview. And then with getting to talk to them, the takeaway for me is the importance of knowing the process of the things that we use. You know, like it's so complicated for one, like he said, and it was a beautiful way of putting it that, you know, we don't get our cell phones at the store. Everything that makes up a cell phone comes out of the earth. We use it. And then what do we do with it after that, which is almost as important as everything else that came before. The whole recycling process. And because these minerals, the, you know, the vast majority of the critical elements that are coming out of other countries, particularly like China and, uh, it's, uh, It's something that is extremely

Jesse Reimink: exciting. You know, this is not necessarily, he's not a geoscientist, but he works with and manages geoscientists. And I think, you know, Chris, we [00:03:00] always talk about the importance of geoscience in the phrase that kind of gets tossed around is that if it doesn't grow in the ground, we have to mine it to use it. And so, so much of our society is based on stuff we mine and he's really addressing. What happens after it's mind, like really trying to understand that at a macroeconomic scale, which is just super, super interesting. I would love to talk to him for four more hours. I mean, I think

Chris Bolhuis: this is you and your, you have this like latent. Pent up data part of you, then I don't completely understand

Jesse Reimink: it's true

Chris Bolhuis: because I look at all that and I'm like, oh my gosh, you could go down a thousand rabbit holes a day doing this job. And you're excited about that. Um, I don't know what to make of that really, to be honest with ya.

Jesse Reimink: And, uh, Nedal is excited too. He just portrayed it very well. And I'm super excited for the pled geo listeners to get to hear from him. [00:04:00] So that's right with that. Let's get to a crisp, but before we do follow us on all the social medias we are at planet geo cast, send us an email plan geo cast@gmail.com. And most importantly, Chris, what do people do share our podcast with somebody that you think would like it that's the most important thing? Absolutely. Cause it's episodes like this, that show. How important to you as science is to society in our everyday lives? Well said. All right, let's go. Let's do a Chris

Jesse Reimink: Dr. Nassar welcome to PlanetGeo. Thank you so much for joining us. We are really excited to talk to you. This is like one of our more interesting in sort of outside of geoscience interviews. This is very fun. I'm super excited to learn from you.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Thanks for having me. I appreciate that.

Jesse Reimink: Yeah, this is going to be great. So we gave a brief introduction, but you are the chief of the United States [00:05:00] geological surveys, materials flow analysis section right now. Is that correct? Did I get it all right there in line? Okay, cool. And so we kind of always like to start out these interviews by talking about what inspired you to get into your field of science and.

Jesse Reimink: I'll be honest. I'd never heard of an industrial ecologist until we started looking at your resume. So can you start out there? Like, what the heck is an industrial ecologist and how'd you get into it? Like, what was your, was there sort of an aha moment that kind of got you down this career path?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Yeah. So I, I have vivid memories of, of being a child and looking at some old encyclopedias that displayed, you know, those world maps that had those bar charts hovering over them that showed different countries and the production of copper, natural gas and other natural resources of them.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: And I was fascinated by him. So for very early on, I was fascinated by this idea of understanding. Natural resource endowments, the benefits that the yielded to those nations, the potential conflict or cooperation that may ensue but my path towards this field of work really was [00:06:00] by no means a straight line, right.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Really excelled and was fascinated by chemistry, math, and physics. So naturally I majored in chemical engineering. After graduation, I worked as a, as a process development engineer, so developing new manufacturing processes in the semiconductors and data storage industries. And that was key for me because I got to see how decisions were made upfront in the manufacturing sector.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: But not wanting to be pigeonholed. I went ahead and got an MBA in sustainable global enterprise. So they had this immersion program where they got you interested in specific topics. And this program at Cornell university was looking at ways where we can solve the grand challenges of our time using different business models. Right? So business as a solution to these grand challenges. And I was really interested in that, but as an engineer, I went back to, I got to put numbers on things, right. I got up.

Jesse Reimink: Can I ask about that engineering? So I'm picturing, I mean, I don't know what five, six year old Nedal, you're looking through the encyclopedia and thinking, wow, it's interesting. [00:07:00] Like what countries are producing copper? I mean, I thought I was pretty nerdy. I was a little kid. That's interesting that you were passionate about this. Like from very related, like how old were you when this was like, oh, this is what I want to do. When did you decide that?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Well, so I was. Like I said it was probably first or second grade, just, you know, my parents had these encyclopedia sets and I was just really fascinated at looking at maps and resources and you know, it only daunted. You know, maybe five, 10 years ago that, wow. I really liked this from a long time ago.

Jesse Reimink: Um, that's exceptional. That's amazing. That's very cool. Very, very cool.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Yeah. I thought so too, but it's, it's like, I didn't take a straight line from here to there. It really took a lot of different paths to get to where I am today, but I do feel really lucky to be in the position that I am and do the work that, sorry,

Jesse Reimink: I interrupted your you're at your MBA and Cornell, right?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Yeah. So I was, you know, I was learning about sustainability issues and how business can. Sustainability issues. But as an engineer, I always wanted to look at numbers and put numbers and not just talking about [00:08:00] concepts and theories. And so I found this field called industrial ecology that seemed to fit the bill.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: It was a combination of engineering, business and environment, and it really. Really struck a chord with me. And I found this program at Yale university that specialized in this. So I went forward and, and got my PhD from there. That's

Jesse Reimink: very interesting. Chris, are you going to ask the question? Like, can you paint us a picture for what industrial ecology is? Like? Is there a good analogy?

Chris Bolhuis: I always think of ecology and its relation to biology. Never heard of this before.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Yeah. So simply put industrial ecology is the science of sustainability. Right. So instead of just fuzzy concept, it's, it's trying to do science around the idea of sustainability and the, the term might seem like an oxymoron, right?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: How could you do industry and ecology at the same time, but it is inspired by the biological metaphor that industrial systems can potentially mimic ecosystems. So you have different. Participants in this ecosystem. In this case, they might be manufacturing firms. They could be cities, [00:09:00] whatever it is, they exchange materials and energy between them.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: They generate waste and some of them may be, can take the waste from one industry and use it as a resource for another, just as different biological organisms might behave in an ecosystem.

Jesse Reimink: Oh, very nice. Okay. That's very nice analogy. Very cool.

Chris Bolhuis: Okay. That makes sense. Now. I never would have put that together.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Yeah. And, and the theory goes, the idea is that when you start out with a relatively new ecosystem, it's pretty linear, right? So you're going from taking resources. As much as you can, as quickly as you can to grow. And then you're creating a lot of ways. Eventually the resources start to be constrained and you have to use what you have.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: And there there's more competition between the industry players and less is wasted. And so the system goes from being linear. To circular, right? So a lot of the different, uh, organisms that might be in an ecosystem start to find their niche and be players and the same idea or the same, uh, um, in theory, the same idea would be for [00:10:00] industrial systems.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: So at the beginning, you know, we're just take, take, take, and it's very linear creating waste at the end of it. But then when we're a resource constraint, we become a much more circular. And you hear a lot that have that term in the recent conversation, especially in Europe talking about the circular.

Jesse Reimink: Oh, interesting. Okay. Uh, that makes a lot of sense. So it's, it's sort of the, I mean, you have to know economics, you have to know industrial design and manufacturing design. You presumably have to know chemical engineering, given your background, like what, what the whole process, what are the main like inputs to this interdisciplinary thing called industrial ecology? Like what else do you need to know to do your job? What other specialties are you're pulling from.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Yeah, it is inherently interdisciplinary and it needs to be because it's trying to tackle such a complex problems and the problems really can stem from just understanding. Which product is better, right? So the classic paper versus plastic, that might seem like a relatively trivial question, [00:11:00] but it actually is quite complex.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: When you look at the entire system, you know, for the transportation of those goods, manufacturing of those goods, where do the raw materials come from? Where are they? What are they ultimately, where are they ultimately disposed of? And so there's a lot that goes into it. And so, uh, but that's just one. Uh, another piece of it could be looking at just like we do for metabolism of biological organisms.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: We can look at the metabolism of an industrial system or a city or a country or the globe. So how much of a specific commodity are the human systems metabolizing and what's going on to it? So sort of what's the environmental fate of that, of that specific commodity.

Chris Bolhuis: That's a lot of different directions you could go.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Absolutely. And so you can talk to two industrial ecologist and they would have nothing to do with each other in terms of their work very, very far apart.

Chris Bolhuis: All right. Nedal I have to get to this question. And so I was getting. Uh, for this interview last week and I, I watched a YouTube video. I think you were doing a, uh, like a [00:12:00] water flow or a waterfall chart on Tantalum, I think. And I called Jesse after I watched this and pardon my language, but I, I get Jesse on the phone. I said, Jesse, holy shit, this guy has a really, really important job. Can you tell us about this a little bit? Like why I. I was struck by,

Jesse Reimink: well, let me, let me interject. It was holy expletive, but maybe not shit, but it was like, how have I not heard of this before we got it?

Jesse Reimink: Like, why are we not talking about this more? This is crazy. Like we got to know, and I, I feel the exact same way. So yeah. I'm excited to hear your answer to this question.

Chris Bolhuis: Can you tell us like why this is so important because it is,

Dr. Nedal Nassar: yeah. I think what we have to realize is that over the. Maybe a couple of decades, technology's really advanced very quickly so that even, you know, everyday artifacts that we hold in our hand contained dozens of different elements of the periodic table.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: So if you're holding a [00:13:00] smartphone in your hand, you're holding half the periodic table in your hand, give or take a few elements that's unprecedented. Right? So imagine holding, you know, we're holding half the periodic table in our right. That's pretty crazy. And it took a huge amount of effort to get from here to.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: A huge system, you know, of, of mining, processing, manufacturing, logistics, and transportation, to get that product in your hand. And it's such a complicated system. And so my job is really to understand where's it all coming from and where is it all?

Jesse Reimink: Oh, so no big deal. I mean, yeah. Yeah. So super easy. Right?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Exactly.

Chris Bolhuis: Well, I think what, Jesse, we'll get into that a little bit more. I think with some of the other questions in terms of like how complicated that process is.

Jesse Reimink: Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree. I wanna, I wanna kind of push on that a little bit or press on it. I don't know, whatever the phrase is, dive into deeper. Like why is it important? To know where it's coming from, where it's going. Look, [00:14:00] can you, can you, can you frame it? Like, why do we have to care?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Yeah.

Chris Bolhuis: Maybe pick an element that you're thinking of when you answered this question.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Sure.

Jesse Reimink: Oh, that's a good idea. Yeah.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: So they're really two main camps. Why this is important. Two perspectives. And the first one I've already, already sort of touched upon, which is the environmental perspective, right? So there's an environmental perspective. And the other one is sort of more of a national security perspective. So let's, let's pick one commodity. So. Is a relatively scarce geologically scarce element.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: It's found typically an ores in a few parts per million. That's the good stuff, but it's used in a lot of different technologies. I think most folks have heard recently in the news. There've been carjackings where they're taking the catalytic converters, uh, out of the bottom of cars. Well, they're getting it.

Jesse Reimink: I hold that. Chris, Chris, I just called, I got a phone call from Chris, like two weeks ago, Saturday. And he was in such a foul mood cause. Exactly. I think he was securing some piece of [00:15:00] whatever his car and he was so pissed off about it.

Chris Bolhuis: I was putting a catalytic converter shield on the bottom of my Toyota Prius.

Chris Bolhuis: Absolutely.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Yeah, the prices are shooting

Chris Bolhuis: in the butt. Oh, wow.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: But when the prices shoot up, carjackings for, for catalytic converters shoot up because there's platinum in there and there's palladium in there and there's rhodium all platinum group elements. And so that's, that's one of the major uses of platinum. Of course, other people know the other major uses include jewelry, but platinum is also used in a lot of other high techs. It's used in hard disk drives. It's used in medical devices, anti-cancer drugs, glass manufacturing equipment for those led screens, a lot of different uses for, for platinum.

Jesse Reimink: What do you like, how is it used and at what concentration, like, if you say a hard drive or something like how much is in a hard drive and like, is it, is it in an alloy in some semiconductor? Like w like, what does.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Yeah.

Jesse Reimink: And maybe this is not an interesting thing, but like, I'm just curious. Oh, it's in all these things, but in what [00:16:00] concentration and, and in what parts or

Dr. Nedal Nassar: yeah, typically very, very low concentrations. There's maybe a couple of grams of platinum in your car. Often, almost always with rhodium and palladium, there might be. Ruthenium which is another platinum group element, for example, is a, they call it pixie dust because they're basically just putting a little bit on that, on that hard disk platter to get, get the property that they need. So it's very, very small quantities, which actually leads us to another problem. When all these really scarce metals are also used in very small quantities, it makes it really hard to recycle, right.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Precious metals like gold, silver, and the platinum and the platinum group metals really, really expensive stuff. Right? Thousands of dollars per Troy ounce, but some of the other elements that we care about, not as exciting. But still used in very, very small, constant amounts and concentrations, which means that they're not necessarily economically attractive to, to recycle a post-consumer end of life.

Jesse Reimink: Oh, that's interesting. [00:17:00] Okay. So they're used in everything, but they're absolutely necessary in these things. Like you can't have your car without the platinum or you can't substitute platinum for something else in these things really.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Yeah, that's a really good question. So we look at substitution quite closely, so there always will be a substitute one thing for another, right?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: So you can imagine, instead of using copper wires to conduct electricity, you can use aluminum. You're going to lose some performance though. So typically you're going to have a loss in performance or your it's a higher cost, which is why people aren't using it in certain cases. The element that's the best substitute is typically in close proximity to that element on the periodic table, which makes sense.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Right. So platinum can substitute sometimes for palladium palladium can substitute sometimes for nickel or vice versa, but obviously you're going to have some sort of performance difference because they're not the same element. What that also means is that, you know, when a material scientists are putting together a product and they're trying to find out, you know, what else could I use [00:18:00] instead?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: On the other end of the supply chain at the very beginning when we're mining the oars. No surprise. They're also co-produced so nickel palladium, platinum, all co-produced from the same sulfide doors. So it doesn't necessarily always solve the problem to say I'm going to substitute my way out of it.

Jesse Reimink: Okay.

Chris Bolhuis: All right, Jesse, let's let's get into this critical mineral stuff.

Jesse Reimink: Okay Nedal I've always been curious about this. Well, we have this term critical minerals, which is very much people are hearing about this. So I want to hear what the definition of a critical mineral is from you. And I also want to know, well, maybe let's start there. What is a critical mineral? What do we mean when you know, the wall street journal, New York times is writing about critical minerals and how important are they are?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Yeah, so I think a lot of people are, have different definitions of what a critical mineral is. Um, You know, there are, uh, academics that have their own definitions. There are government agencies that have their org definitions, their news articles, uh, that use their own deficients [00:19:00] oftentimes they're conflicting. Well, we try to do. Really stick to a more concrete definition. So what we're looking at is an issue regarding supply risk, so that, you know, is there a supply risk for this commodity and for us, for there to be risk, we think that there there's three things need to happen.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: There has to be a likelihood of a supply disruption. You have to be exposed to it and you have to be vulnerable to, so those three conditions must be bad for there to be. What, what do you mean exposed to it? So, so let's suppose you're in the United States. And you don't have you can't, you can't or don't produce any of the commodity.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: So you were exposed to a foreign supply disruption. On the other hand, if you produce the vast majority of that commodity, or you produce everything that you need in the consumed domestically, then you're not exposed to a foreign supply destruction.

Jesse Reimink: And what does vulnerable mean then in that, those sound kind of.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: So exposure is, am I exposed to it? So for thinking like pandemic, [00:20:00] am I, am I getting exposed to it? Vulnerable would be, you know, if I get it, is something bad going to happen to them. Am I vulnerable to, I

Jesse Reimink: see. Okay. That's a great analogy actually, you know, pandemic, you know, for sure.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Yeah. So, you know, the hazard for, for us is a foreign supply disruption. So is it really likely to happen on or not? Are we exposed to it or not? And then for those specific industries that can. Are they really able to withstand that supply destruction? Can they substitute their way out of it? Could they pass the cost onto a customer? Could they absorb the price shock? For example

Chris Bolhuis: then, and this right here gets at the question of why is your job so important? Those three things right there. That that's the takeaway for me. What are the top five critical minerals do you have, do you have a top five? Or is that too hard of a question? Is that too broad?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: We do. Um, so in our latest analysis, we do provide sort of [00:21:00] a rank ordering of, of the commodities that sit at the top. But we try to emphasize that it's, you know, don't worry too much about who's number one and who's number two. Um, because things do change, right. Things change. And we're often dealing with. Because we're looking off in a global systems, we're not, you know, in a lab measuring things to, you know, six significant digits.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: We're really dealing with one, maybe two significant digits. So what we really try to do is tell people, you know, look at the general trends. Look, who's generally towards the top of the list, versus those towards the bottom of the list. We believe it's more of a continuum than, than sort of a. Straight cutoff.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: So things that tend to go on the top of the list typically are commodities that go into permanent magnet. So things like neodinium, protium, Terbium other, uh, things that are really going on top of the list. These days are things that go into lithium ion batteries. So, uh, cobalt, uh, lithium nickel, magnanese, graphite.

Chris Bolhuis: For our listeners. [00:22:00] Why, why the permanent magnets?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: So permanent magnets are really used in a lot of different applications. There's a lot being used in electric vehicles for drive train and for, uh, other, uh, components of the vehicle they're used in defense applications. Um, and, and because of, uh, these permanent magnets, the ones that are made of rare earth are produced mainly in one. That's really the driving concern for a lot of this is that the production of mineral commodities is concentrated so heavily in just a few countries.

Jesse Reimink: Is that China is the rare earth elements in China mostly. Is that the that's right?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: So the mining, uh, and to a greater degree, the refining of rare earth elements is almost all in.

Chris Bolhuis: So that kind of leads into my next question. And I have an answer for this because I did not sleep well when I did a lot of research in this day about you, but Nidal, what keeps you up at night? What is it about your [00:23:00] research in your job that like sometimes you, you, you can't sleep well. I like, I just got to believe that's the case.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Yeah. I feel like I wish I had more hours in the day because. So many things going on.

Jesse Reimink: Yeah.

Chris Bolhuis: I don't know if I, I think I would want less hours in the day. I don't

Jesse Reimink: know.

Chris Bolhuis: I'm sorry, go ahead.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Oh yeah. There are so many aspects of this to look into and so many issues to consider. And we're trying rapidly to, to understand all the risks that we're facing as a country, and to be able to communicate that clearly to the rest of the federal government.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Um, so that they, you know, USGS as a science agency, we do the science and then we present our results to other parts of the federal government that can implement policies and recommendations. And so that's, that's key for us. And so. We really try to do the best we can with the resources that we have to try to understand the problem and really anticipate what the problem might be in the next five to [00:24:00] 10 years.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: And that's, that's really what the challenge is. And what keeps me up at night is are we missing something? Uh, is there a way we can do something better? Um, because we're, there's quite a bit of data on, on commodities, like copper, where we really know what's going on. Uh, but for. Really minor metals.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: There's very little information in, in certain cases, we barely know what world production is. Right? So we have a general idea, but, um, the markets are often opaque because they don't really want to share that information. The players that are in the market, don't really, it's a competitive advantage issue. Other times they might not be in market economies. Right. So they're not necessarily sharing that information or it's, it's not clear that you can trust information. That's really

Dr. Nedal Nassar: interesting. So it is not your answer to the question then. It is not what I thought it would be. Maybe like a problem that you, because you know more about this than the vast majority of the people walk in. It's not a problem on the horizon that you say [00:25:00] we're not listening to this. That's not what keeps you up at night?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: No, I think in the last. 10 years. And maybe especially in the last five years, there's been a lot of attention on this less so in, in, in general, in the general public, but definitely among members of Congress within the federal government, this is on people's radar. It's a, it's a bipartisan issue that, you know, people care about and understand the solutions of which are, you know, are still to be worked out. Okay.

Chris Bolhuis: Then you don't play a part in that at all. Do you?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: So we provide recommend. But we don't do the implementation.

Jesse Reimink: So I guess that, that kind of leads us nicely into a question that Chris and I are both quite interested in. I mean, you know, we're geoscience educators, which we'll come back to from a geo-science perspective, but if you could like teach the U S population like to one or two things, I mean, Our listener base is not the U S population. We wish it was. We hope it will be, but if you could teach our listeners or the U S population, like two basic [00:26:00] things, what would you tell them? Like, it could be anything, it could be like, care about tantalum. Cause it's important to why here, or like in general, we got to worry about this country or whatever. Like, I don't know any two pieces that you think are really, really important.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Yeah. That's a tough question. I think, I think a lot of people are unaware. Just how. Um, complicated. Our global economy has become, right. So I think Aldo Leopold. The fame naturalist. One said like the fear is that people think that the frying pan came from the store or that they get the milk from, from the grocery store. It's like the fear is that people think that they get their, their phones from, from the shop.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: And it's like, no, it took a lot of effort to get you that device that you're holding in your hand or that vehicle that you're driving. There's a lot that went into it. It's, it's a very complicated global system. Think twice before throwing it away. Right. And just discarding [00:27:00] it because there's a lot of really important commodities and metals that are components of those things.

Jesse Reimink: That's a really interesting answer. So can I, can I ask a follow-up to that is, has the pandemic and the supply chain issues that we've all heard about for the last six months, has that helped. In explaining that cause you, do you find people are more receptive to critical minerals or the supply that the intricacies of the global supply chain do people fundamentally get that more easily?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Yes, absolutely. I think, you know, when I talked to somebody that I just met and they asked me what I do and they're like, oh yeah, I get it. The semiconductors I'm like, yeah, sort of.

Jesse Reimink: Okay. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. Taiwan Semiconductor all these things. Yeah, for sure. That's funny.

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah, I have a follow-up to, to your answer. Nedal is you said it's so important to know where it came from. Right. But what about recycling? And it's [00:28:00] so recycling is so complicated, figuring that out. What are your thoughts on that?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Yeah, so recycling is a big deal and it'll, we're not doing a lot, right? So if you look at the recycling rates, so this is post-consumer. So what happens after the consumer gets a product? And then what, what happens to it? The recycling rates for most elements of the periodic table are very, very low in some cases, zero, right? So we're not recycling any of them. We do pretty well in recycling. The big base and precious metals, right? So we're going to recycle our gold and silver and platinum group metals.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: We're going to recycle our copper and aluminum, but for a lot of other things, a lot of other elements in the product table, the recycling rates are typically less than 1%. Wow. Um, and so that's, that's a concern. Wow. Um, oh my gosh. Now there's a lot of efforts to, to improve that. It all has to make economic sense.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Oftentimes, what is it? What is the holdup is lack of collection, right? So people [00:29:00] often. Discard, you know, they would discard them or hold onto them. I know I have a couple of old cell phones that are still sitting in my drawer. Right. Um, there's some value there that I perceive. There's probably more value in the material than in the product itself at this point, but it's still, you know, it's, it's an economic problem. It's a behavioral problem. Uh, it's potentially a policy problem.

Jesse Reimink: So. On that, on that, that point of economics versus policy versus individual, I mean, would it be economical if you could just for instance, get everybody's old cell phones, all in one spot with nothing else in there. Why would all this stuff be recyclable at that scale? Or do you need a more, uh, precise or a smaller scale recycling thing? Like if it's everybody just Chuck, their old cell phones into one bin in the, in the whole country, would that be efficient to extract the Playdium and the platinum and the rhodium?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Yeah. I mean, there are companies that do do that. You need to have volumes. And if you look at the concentrations of some of these commodities in [00:30:00] old electronics, it's typically higher than the ores that we're getting them from. That's yeah. That's typically not.

Jesse Reimink: So it's definitely an economy of scale type thing. If you just get enough people to do it or whatever government agency to initiate it, it happens or it's efficient to do it.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: It could. So interestingly, so. Um, let's go back to the platinum example, right? So platinum is, you can categorize it into two different categories of uses one that our consumer uses, and one of them that are more industrial uses. So when you look at the industrial uses of platinum, this would be in catalyst, for example, or glass manufacturing equipment.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: The recycling rates are over 95%. Wow. Industries, like we're not losing any of the platinum we bought, right? This is expensive stuff. We're going to recycle every little bit that we can get our hands on. And the losses are negligible. In most cases. On the other hand, if you look at the consumer side, we, again, we get, get quite a bit of a split for things that we can track pretty well [00:31:00] vehicles.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: We typically don't lose track of vehicles. We might write what we typically give a good, good handle of where the vehicles are and where they're going. Even if they're shipped out of the country, you know, for second use or whatever. Keep a pretty good track of him for other smaller, you know, consumer oriented things. We really can't keep track of them. And those are where we see really, really low recycling rates.

Jesse Reimink: Interesting. Okay. So recycle your cell phones and computers. Yes. That's a good path forward. Okay.

Chris Bolhuis: Uh, that's a, that's a good point. Is there another one or two products that we really need to do a better job at.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: I'll have to give that some thought electronics is really what comes to mind is it's just, they have so many things in them. And the recycling rates are typically really, really low, mainly because of collection. There is another issue. That's really not about the, you know, the consumer side, but as an industrial issue.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: [00:32:00] But you know, a lot of the elements that we're talking about going to steels. So, uh, vanadium, molybdenum niobium, oftentimes when they get recycled, they don't get recycled for the same steel grade. So because we don't know what it is. So we're like, okay, let's just throw it in the dump, you know, with the pile, with everything else.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: And it gets downgraded to a lower grade steel and you're losing that property. So a lot of these elements that are alloying elements don't necessarily get recycled. They're doing better and better of tracking to them, but there are thousands and thousands of different alloys. So it's really hard to keep track of that exact chemistry that went into that alloy to make sure that you're going to retain it. And oftentimes it doesn't make sense if the volumes are not there.

Jesse Reimink: Wow. That's very cool.

Chris Bolhuis: It's something that I think everybody can tie into is aluminum. Let's say, are we, how are we doing with aluminum

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Aluminum we do a really good job, right? So we do a really good job of recycling cans and recycling different alloys, interesting thing with aluminum recycling is that it's, it works in, in a sort of cascade [00:33:00] fashion where you're going from the rod alloys to the cast allies.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: So it's sort of things. Downcycled a little bit. And the thing that they all ultimately often get absorbed in is the cast aloe is used for engine blocks, right? So the aluminum engine block. And so an interesting trend is, well, if we're moving away from industrial combustion engines, right. And towards the electric.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: We're going to lose the need for that engine block. So the question is, okay, where is that cascading getting go to, if it doesn't have any place to go. Um, and so that might throw a little bit of a wrinkle into the aluminum recycling chain.

Jesse Reimink: That's really interesting. It is.

Chris Bolhuis: Are you saying that all. As we recycled aluminum, it gets downgraded. And the end of the line, there is the engine block, right?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: So the, the wraught alloys, you know, there are different, different grades of aluminum alloys in the more impurities quote unquote impurities are in there. It goes down to the cast alloys, and ultimately the engine block has sort of that, that sort of stop gap at the end.

Jesse Reimink: That's uh, that's so [00:34:00] interesting. Very interesting. Wow. What a, what a cool little factor that is a great dinner party factoid right there. That is I'm going to, I'm going to whip that out next time. I have some people to impress, so Nedal, I want to kind of move into some geoscience stuff here cause that's where Chris and I are familiar.

Jesse Reimink: And we're very curious on your perspective here, but let's, let's lead into it from why the us geological survey, I guess. It's interesting to me that that's the agency that has things and also on a personal note, and you don't have to answer this if you want to, but my guess is that your expertise, you could make a hell of a lot more money working for a commodities trader than you could the U S geological survey. So both a personal and a, uh, you know, was sort of a structural question to that. Both sides to that question.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Yeah. Uh, you know, gathering information on mineral resources has always been part of the US Geological Survey's mission since the organic act in the 1800s. Right? So this was part of it in terms of understanding the natural resources, the mineral resources of the country.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Our center, the [00:35:00] National Minerals Information Center has been around in one form or another for over a hundred years. We were originally in the US Geological Survey. We then moved to the U S Bureau of Mines and then came back to the US Geological Survey. When the bureau of mines was defunded in Congress in the mid 90's.

Jesse Reimink: Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah. That's really interesting. Uh, is there a personal drive? I mean, maybe I'm wrong with this, but commodities traders must like eat up your data. Like, I mean, they must just love this stuff. If you're worried, if you like know more about where tantalum is moving than everybody else, like you can make money off that knowledge, presumably. Um, so like, I guess who uses your data? Who, who is listening to you? Where do you interact the most?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Yeah for us, our main customer really are other federal agents. So we work closely with the department of defense, the department of commerce, the department of state to provide them with information that they need to, to carry out their missions and, and set policies that they, that they can recommend.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: We often [00:36:00] do this, especially in the last decade or so. All of these efforts are often coordinated at the White House with a US National Science Technology Council. Um, there's a critical mineral subcommittee where, uh, we are co-chairs and there are representatives from all the other federal agencies. But in addition to, you know, other federal agencies, you know, our data is used by, uh, the private sector, as you mentioned, uh, the Mo both in the mining sector, but also in the manufacturing sector that ended up using these commodities to make, uh, their businesses.

Jesse Reimink: Interesting. Yeah. I mean, it looks like I just looked from looking at some of the charts. They look like very nice, uh, predictive tools for anybody who's really in the weeds with any individual sector. Um, okay.

Chris Bolhuis: So Nedal earlier on, you said that from a very young age, you were really into chemistry and math. And the engineering and maybe even physics and I just couldn't help, but notice that geoscience was not a part of that list.

Jesse Reimink: [00:37:00] Um, Chris is a little bit offended by that. So I'm,

Chris Bolhuis: um, I'm S I'm really offended by that. Um, what do you do anything with geoscience? Um, do you have, you know, what is the most interesting geoscience. Aspect

Dr. Nedal Nassar: to you. Yeah. I mean, half my team is geoscientists, right? So we have people that are geochemists geologists that have done previously geochronology and things like that. So we have a lot of, you know, hardcore geoscientists on the team and I depend on them. Right. I depend on them to help me answer requests.

Chris Bolhuis: Darn right. You do.

Jesse Reimink: Chris. Chris, Chris is stewing over there. He's steaming come out of his ears. Kidding?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: No, I mean, I, I depend on them to help me answer questions. I, you know, why does this deposit type contain commodity X and not commodity? Why and why is it more likely to be found here and not there? So these are questions that, that you need the geosciences.

Jesse Reimink: [00:38:00] What is the most useful contribution of geoscience or free from your view? I mean, you're leading a team that includes geoscientists. Like, I don't know quite how to phrase it, like who who's the most valuable, what are the great skill sets like for, let's say students, I have students who are very interested in critical minerals, you know, what are useful skills that we need from a geo-science perspective in this conversation?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Yeah. I think, you know, you need to have. These are skills. I think that every, every discipline needs to have, you need to have a really good data analytics, right? So you need to be able to crunch a lot of numbers, right. And to be able to parse out data, you need to also be able to. I understand the mineral systems, right?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: So what are we really dealing with here? Right. And, and really have, I think what's really most important is just to have that intellectual curiosity to say, well, why is that right? Why, so, why are we getting most of our relatives from China, right. Where are other deposits that, that could be economical, um, answering those questions is, is going to be [00:39:00] really key going forward.

Chris Bolhuis: Okay. So does

Jesse Reimink: sounds like, sorry, Chris, let me, it sounds like, uh, like you do have to have some foundation. Geology knowledge, you know, rocks and minerals like that, that is useful. It's not being disregarded in this conversation. Is that true?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: It's absolutely helpful to have that. Right. And oftentimes, because I don't, I have to rely on my geoscience friends to help me understand those pieces. Sure. Okay. Sorry,

Chris Bolhuis: Chris, is it important at all to know? Why certain elements form in certain kind of geo-science settings to know where to look.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Is that what you're saying? Exactly. So if, if we want to develop, let's say a supply scenario for five, 10 years out into the future for a mineral commodity, that's only produced as a byproduct. So let's say, you know, tellurium or rhenium, right? So we want to understand copper.

Jesse Reimink: So these are only produced as byproducts. Uh,

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Right. So tellurium is produced [00:40:00] from the copper anode signs and copper refining. So it'd be important to understand, you know, okay. Are all, you know, copper porphyries created equal in terms of tellurium content? Or what about sediment hosted copper deposits? You know, how is it different? Right. If I'm going to, if all I have is data on copper. How can I predict where my delirium is going to be coming from? I need to understand it from a mineral systems perspective, not just from a commodity perspective. Oh,

Jesse Reimink: that's really interesting. Okay. That's a really interesting point.

Chris Bolhuis: Jesse, you didn't even get that. He dropped a geoscience term and you just slid right by it. You didn't even.

Jesse Reimink: Porphyry deposits. It's amazing. This is really interesting. I've been talking with, uh, one of I colleagues in our department about, you know, new classes that students would find interesting. And one of them we were talking about is the metrology of your iPhone. And you know, this is exactly as you're kind of describing. So if we ever actually ended up doing this class, I'll have to sort of ring you up and see if you can come get, you you'll give a virtual guest lecture or something [00:41:00] like that. Cause this is like totally right down that alley. That's very cool. This is so.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: That sounds great. I'd love to.

Jesse Reimink: So let's focus on like the critical part of this critical minerals. Like what happens if one of these things shuts down? I don't know. Maybe you don't want to give hypotheticals, but if like China stopped shipping rare earth elements, or if like tantalum, can't be mined and can't get out of the DRC. What happens? And are there examples of that happening where we've been successful or failed? Like previously, can we use history with any of these types of things? Can you just. And maybe not walk us through scenarios, but discuss this.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: So if we have a hypothetical situation where a country cuts us off, either intentionally or unintentionally, right. What'll happen depending on the size of that country's production relative to the world production. Right? So if they're a major private player, this is going to cause a major impact to that commodities market. A couple of things would happen in sequential order. One, the other producers that are still producing are going to probably try to [00:42:00] expand their production as much as they can.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Oftentimes they are very limited in the short term to how much they can expand that production to. You know, physical capacities or restraint, you know, they can't run their equipment faster or they don't have enough labor or whatever the case might be. There might be some inventories lying around. So, you know, somewhere in the market that people will say, okay, well we'll use up the inventories for now. As you may have heard, you know, most companies are running pretty lean as we call it. Right? So they're not keeping very much inventory as the started, you know, with, with the Japanese where they're doing, you know, just in time manufacturing. Right. And a lot of it is the reason why our men, our supply chains are so disruptive now these days, because we've been running lean, which is good in one sense. But on the other hand, if you have a disruption, you don't have any buffer. So the buffers are really minimal at this point. Uh, we do have a national defense style. So this is run by the department of defense, uh, the defense logistics agency that maintains a stockpile of certain [00:43:00] commodities that are important for defense applications and essential civilian needs.

Chris Bolhuis: That's amazing.

Jesse Reimink: That's never touched unless something catastrophic happens. That's the idea behind these strategic stockpiles.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: There's always movement in the stockpile. So. The defense logistics agency might put in a request to you to purchase or to sell some things to back to the market. And that happens regularly. Uh, but it's there in case of a national emergency. Now, assuming there's not enough, uh, or the problem continues for a prolonged period of time, then you can imagine that the manufacturing sector, that consumes and stuff is going to start to feel some pain. They're going to try to find alternative uses, you know, alternative materials or they're going to have to decrease their production. As we saw with the semiconductors. Right. So they couldn't get enough semiconductors. They stopped producing your favorite truck.

Jesse Reimink: Okay. And are there historical analogs to something like this happening? I mean, maybe even as simple as like trying to, or, uh, my wife and I we've been trying to order like a dining room [00:44:00] table, you know, we can't get, we haven't been able to get it for months and months and months because the supply chain stuff, is there something specific to the sort of mining industrial minerals sector? That this has happened before and we've successfully weathered it or, or unsuccessfully with.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: So I think the example that most people are aware of is the rare earth crisis that happened in around 2010, 2011, which is why I keep saying, you know, about 10 years ago, this really started to become on people's radar is because, uh, there was a dispute between China and Japan. Uh, there were threats to that. China might be cutting off rare supplies. They never actually did, but just the threat of it, the markets into a Tuesday, and, you know, everybody was, was running scared that China has its dominant position in re Hertz and they were potentially going to be cutting us off. And w what could we do? Another example that has been relatively successful was one where, uh, involves beryllium. So beryllium is a, is a light. Uh, it's has a lot of [00:45:00] applications in defense applications. Uh, it's also used in the most recent James Webb telescope that folks heard about. So it's using the mirrors there.

Chris Bolhuis: Oh, it's in the mirrors.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Yeah. So, uh, there's one mine in the U S for mountain in Utah that mines Virgin diet, which is actually, uh, the mineral that, uh, brilliant comes from. We're actually pretty unique in that the rest of the world's mine's barrel, but it's, it's the largest producer and there's one plant that turns the org concentrates, uh, into high purity, burly metal. And in the early two thousands, that plant shut. And that was a big problem because it was the only producer in the U S the largest producer in the world and the department of defense relied upon them. Um, and so. Taking action. The department of defense use their title, three defense production act mechanisms, and they were able to through a private public partnership, re-establish the plant and get it back up and running, which is why [00:46:00] the United States today is the leading producer still remains as a leading producer of Berlin.

Jesse Reimink: So I'm curious. I guess maybe this is not an interesting question again, but like, why didn't the mind just charge more to the defense? Like, I guess why doesn't, how does the market not solve these problems? Why did they shut down?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Yeah. Yeah. So it wasn't about the mine it was really about the metal plant. Okay. Yeah. There were a lot of different reasons. I think, uh, if I remember correctly from, from the historical case, it's they had old obsolete equipment that they never, you know, continuously updated and maintained. There were some environmental issues as well. And actually that's quite similar to the case where, uh, with rare earths, right? So the U S used to be the largest producer VR. Uh, we have the mountain pass mine. It, it stopped producing. Um, there were some concerns, environmental concerns. The mine ended up shutting down. It's now been brought back. There has been a decade long trend of this. Right. [00:47:00] So, uh, and oftentimes it's, it's not just at the mining, it's often at the downstream. So the smelting and the refining of the mineral commodities, and we've been losing, losing more and more of that over, over the last several years. Interesting.

Jesse Reimink: Okay. That's, that's a very interesting answer.

Chris Bolhuis: Nedal is there anything that we can do? Better as individuals or as a country, like, does this need to be legislated the whole recycling thing? So we don't run into these supply chain issues. Like what can we do?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Yeah. Uh, I think that's a question I often get, and I think the answer is not simple. I think as an industrial ecologist, I want to say this is a systems problem, right? This is not just individual behavior. Now don't get me wrong. We as individuals can do a lot and can make a big difference as a. Sustainable global enterprise MBA person. I want to say, well, this should really be solved through new business models, right? So this shouldn't just be a policy driven approach. It really has to be all hands on deck. I think we have to look at the question and [00:48:00] say, what really is the problem here? And try to solve it. I think there's places for policy there's places for business, you know, with new business models, there's places for individuals with individual behaviors, but it really is probably. All of the above kind of solutions

Jesse Reimink: on a related note, you know, Chris and I, we both collectively see hundreds of students and teach, you know, hundreds geoscience every year. What can we do better as geoscience educators in this space? Should we be adding sections into our introductory courses about critical minerals and all these issues? Like what would it be helpful to you? And. Solution.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Yeah. I wouldn't presume to know what the right answer is, but I think, I think like any specialized field, right? So whatever specialized field you're in, I think it's always important to step back a little bit and say, um, you know, why and the questions that you guys asked me, why is this important, right? How is what I'm doing, feeding the bigger picture? What part, what role am I playing [00:49:00] and where, where do I fit in? Um, now again, there there's a room for. Pure science. Right. But there's also, I think an important place for, to say, how is this contributing to solving some of these really grand challenges of our time? I think Carl Sagan used to say, you know, we're at the technological adolescence phase, right? And a lot of these sustainability issues are really things that are problems that are very difficult to solve. And it's going to really. Uh, all hands on deck to try to solve them. So where can, where's our part, how are we contributing to solving some of these grand challenges?

Jesse Reimink: Oh, that is a great answer. Okay. I love that answer.

Chris Bolhuis: I do too. That it is Nedal. Do you feel I'm sneaking one in here? Do you feel like you and your team are making a difference?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Yes, I think we are. Um, I think we've moved the conversation quite a bit forward. This was not something that most people would have heard of, you [00:50:00] know, more than a decade ago. The fact that I'm talking to you, I think is, is, uh, evidence enough to say that it's getting people's attention to say that this is an important topic and we're making a difference

Jesse Reimink: for sure. Good. Okay. It all, we always wrap up our, uh, our interviews with, with this last question. We really, we, we get a wide range of answers here, but what has been your best day as a scientist?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Uh, you know, I could probably point to a couple of specific examples. Like when I, uh, I won a presidential award or when I was called upon to testify before the Senate.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: But I really feel that it's really just the fact that I can come in day to day and do what I love and call it a job is really what I really, it might be a corny answer, but that's, I really feel privileged. That's

Jesse Reimink: a good answer. I like it. That's a damn good answer. Yes, absolutely. I really

Dr. Nedal Nassar: do. I have to pinch myself every day and say, wait, I'm doing this for a job.

Jesse Reimink: I mean, that's amazing. You'd go [00:51:00] back to, you know, your first grade self looking at maps of the world and you get to make those things. That's fricking cool. That's a great answer. Well, the adult, this has been an exceptional discussion. Um, super, I learned a ton. This has been very fun. I was excited for weeks to talk to you.

Jesse Reimink: This has been really great. We're really appreciative of your time. Thank

Dr. Nedal Nassar: you. I really had fun too. I echo that.

Chris Bolhuis: Um, not all. This is one of the coolest parts about doing this podcast is getting to talk to people like you. It's been just an absolute pleasure. So thank you so much.

Jesse Reimink: Thank you. Yeah. And, uh, and we, we, we might reach out for round two at some point, if, if you're up to it, I'd love to dive deeper into some of these topics.

Jesse Reimink: This is. Yeah, that sounds great. Anytime. All right. Thanks a lot, bill. Really appreciate it. Thanks

Chris Bolhuis: a lot

Dr. Nedal Nassar: at all. Thank you.[00:52:00] .