Hello, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Greetings and salutations. Welcome to Windows on a webcast series by the Conference Board, in particular the Economic Economy Strategy and Finance Center. My name is Alex Heil, Senior Economist at TCB. I cover environment, infrastructure and climate. You've probably seen me on other webcast before. So today's topic is going to be critical minerals that occurred to us as a crucial topic in the energy transition when I got myself a new phone the other day. And as I read, there are literally dozens of critical minerals and rare earth materials in that one particular device. So we will address a host of interesting questions today, and let me just introduce you to a few of those. So we're going to start with the basics. What are critical minerals? What are rare earth elements? What are some of these issues that we're all reading about? The geopolitics, their geopolitics, the supply chains, the resources, the environmental impacts, social impacts? How can businesses deal with any of those? You know what, what's going on with the federal government and any kind of federal action right now? So we're going to try to be comprehensive here and in order to have good answers, lots of expertise, I invited my colleague Aaron McLaughlin to the studio. We're going to do this jointly today. Welcome, Aaron. Hi, Alex, Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. So just one more comment on administration. If you need an attendance certificate you to get continuing education credit, you can download that at the very end. Make sure you don't fall asleep during the webcast. That's I think the requirement. One way to do this is you can certainly, you know, engage with us through Q&A. You can answer the poll questions and this will be obvious by the time you get to the end. But enough of the administrative procedure. So I already introduced the topic criminal critical minerals and we've all read about this. I just finished another book about critical minerals. It's it's crucial, especially when we're talking about the energy transition and how we're going to get to a point where we are at net zero, maybe by 2050. So why do we start with the basics? Aaron, tell us what are critical minerals? What are? Critical minerals. Well, that's a great question. So the federal government asked the same question a number of years ago and it was connected to the Energy Act of 2020 that they decided to develop an answer. Now there's a few different agencies within our U.S. Federal government that have come up with answers. So the USGS is actually tracking a lot of minerals, including over 50 that they consider critical. But for our purposes today and in most of the research that we're doing, we are looking at the electric 18. And so these are the 18 minerals that the Department of Energy has determined are critical to energy infrastructure and particularly sort of our new energy infrastructure that is needed, as you said, to decarbonize our hopefully, hopefully our grid in our system in the future. So what makes a mineral critical is that it is, you know, really vulnerable within our supply chain, our US supply chain and actually the world supply chain, and that it is also essential both for our national and economic security. Right, right. So all of this reminds me of chemistry class in high school that I probably failed miserably, but there we go. There we. Go there are the different elements and you know just to give the audience a sense of the the particular demands. I did a little research myself and I looked up information by the IEA and they are estimating minerals used in clean energy technologies, in particular generating technologies for electricity. So give you an example. Per MW of offshore wind capacity, 1 currently needs about 15,000 kilograms of a various, you know, yeah, portfolio of critical minerals. Onshore wind is a little less. That's 14,000, you know. Well, how does that compare to some of the other renewables? Solar is about 3000 and what about fossil fuel generating plants? It's about 1000. So if we're talking about in particular, the demands for, for wind energy, the, the, the, the needs in terms of critical minerals are pretty, pretty crucial. And if we're, you know, in addition, also considering and everybody's talking about that, what about electric vehicles, right? What about batteries? So that's, you know, for rough measure, I think it's fair to say, especially for counting the copper that goes into this, what is the, what is the additional need for an electric vehicle over an internal combustion engine vehicle? The factor is probably around 5:00 to 6:00 times the quantity. So with that in mind, can you add a little bit what what were these minerals used in everyday life? Absolutely. So we use the word sort of the umbrella word critical minerals, but that also includes rare earth elements, which are a subset of critical minerals. And those are also used for a lot of consumer products besides energy infrastructure that we may or may not be aware of. So we have this, you know, household graphic. It's very clean, neat little house here that we're showing and it really shows, you know, light bulbs, solar panels, electric wiring, automobiles including electric vehicles, stainless steel appliances, but also things like cosmetic sunscreen, aluminum for soft drink cans, fertilizer. And of course many of these minerals and commodities have also been hot topics in the last few weeks regarding tariffs, which we're going to talk about a little bit further on in our presentation. But that just sort of highlights sort of the geopolitical and trade uncertainty that we sort of are feeling with regards to a lot of these elements. Yeah, I know that's a very good point. And I think I mentioned in the in the beginning of the webcast that we're going to, you know, deal with questions at the end, but there's just a question that popped up in Q&A just to differentiate again between critical and critical miningals and rare earth elements. So let me provide the answer and you tell me what I got wrong. So from my perspective, critical minerals, that's the copper, nickel, cobalt of this world, right? And then the, the rare earth elements, those are the 17 or so elements that are used in very, very small quantities. And they all have these unpronounceable names showing my, my chemistry ignorance. And those are the ones that are found in very small quantities diluted with other materials and so forth. But those are not necessarily the ones for which we're going to be half these massive demands, but they're significant enough that they are used in some of these technologies. Yes, they're used in other technologies. And as you said, many of them are sort of subsets of often a refining process or perhaps even sort of the coal process refining process. So again, the sort of kind of confusing table of elements has different shadings and you can see there's also they differentiate between light and heavy rare earth elements. But those are the ones that you see sort of in the blue shading, which are the ones that are probably don't immediately come to mind. What? Are you? And then to make matters even more complicated, different organizations, the DOE various, you know, research outfits, they have defined these, you know, these groupings of minerals and rare earth elements slightly differently. So it's it's a bit of a Gray zone, but hopefully this answers the question is makes this clear. Should we go to the first poll question and just. See. How concerned audience members are about some of these elements? I'm just trying to navigate my my technology here. Here we go. First call question, how concerned are you about the impact that potential shortages of critical minerals and rare earths might have on your business? So this is from the perspective of individual businesses, not necessarily Oh yeah, we that's important for the country overall, but really from a business focus point of view for answers. And we're going to give audience members maybe 30 seconds or so. And obviously a lot of our members and a lot of companies are service providers that are not manufacturing anything. So in that case, we may not get as many folks that are directly concerned with that, but certainly for our member firms and our audience that are actually producing, you know, something physical, that's where it's really. Right. And it's interesting that's a Gray zone because you can also argue that some of the technologies and technical components that are used even by some of these service providers. Your computer. Right, in the aforementioned smartphone, certainly. So we're at 51%. Let's try to give this, you know, I'm counting to five essentially and then we're moving on. Some stragglers coming in. Appreciate that. So almost there maybe we can get to in the interest of time, let me click over and we will see where we stand. Apologies to anybody who didn't get the answer in. All right. So we are somewhat concerned nearly 50%, not really on the radar is about 1/5 of the total and then the rest is split. Any response? Any reaction? I, I think this is what I would expect, you know, that sort of level of being somewhat concerned and that's probably because these are companies that are using them. It's very interesting. A lot of our price issues and supply chain issues were really, really paramount around critical minerals in 2021 and 2022. And they've come down a little bit, but a lot of the concern is actually looking outwards for the next 10 years. So it's something that is not a crisis point right now, but for firms that are really planning and doing strategic planning and looking out five or ten years, I think that that's exactly where you need to be at the somewhat concerned level. So. Right now that's that's a very good point. So let's talk about, you know, what are these concerns? Can you sort of flesh out a little bit what are the different dimensions here that we're really talking about? Absolutely. So I really like how the World Economic Forum and some other global organizations sort of position the concerns around critical minerals as a trilemma. And really that's about availability. So meeting to meeting demand and supply, having matching demand and supply, affordability, affordability, and that comes down to sort of the price. And there's also a lot of cost in discovering, mining and refining the minerals and then sustainability. And sustainability is of course about the Earth itself, but it's also about the human and the labor factor that go into critical mineral sort of extraction and refining. Right, Yes. So there's different dimension to all of this. And when we're talking about critical minerals, I think 1 observation, just judging by review of the literature, looking around, checking out what's going on in this country, it, it turns out we're not doing much mining of, of, of either one of these minerals really in the United States. Why is that? So we've only opened three mines in the US and the last since 22,000 and two. So in over 20 years in the US, we have very stringent environmental regulations. We also do not have sort of the economy and the labor necessarily that is positioned to work, you know, in these industries. And there's some minerals that we don't have. So, you know, by far China is sort of the dominant country. They hold about 60 to 70% of the minerals. It's a very large country by landmass and they are refining 80 to 90% of the minerals that are even sort of unearthed from other countries. So I'm going to go ahead to our next slide, which you know, if you look at the at the lithium graphic underneath and this is for mining, it shows that the majority of lithium being, you know, sort of unearthed is coming from Australia at about 60% and then Chile at 19%. And I'm just going to skip ahead to the refining chart, but 60% of that lithium is actually being refined in China. So, you know, and that's, you know, obviously just one example, but we have sort of found ourselves in a situation where the US itself is not producing and refining most critical minerals. So just from a, from a, you know, just observers point of view, if we wanted to, could we get there If we were in a position now where we would say, oh, as a country, considering the name critical and rare and rare, right, We got to do something more along those lines. Could we become self-sufficient in these materials? Most likely not, no. I mean, I think a lot of this is about the pace and the and the supply chain. So looking forward to 2035, which is a lot of what folks are looking forward to. That's only 10 years away. We're already in 2025 S really what is sort of necessitating us having an appropriate supply chain is us having, you know, essential global trade with critical minerals. Perhaps offsetting that with some more development in the US, but sort of understanding the best ways to trade with our partners and perhaps to responsibly speed up sort of permitting and extraction where it makes economic sense as well. Yeah. It's interesting how a lot of these economic issues these days come that come back to just trade and and these these interconnections between various national economies and the dependencies that have been created over time. So I think it will probably, you know, you know, so in when doing so, we can talk about individual minerals. Let's tackle these these issues one at a time. If we're talking about the sustainability, we're talking about the social and, and maybe just from the resource extraction angle, let's start with the environmental impact. How would you? Is that one of the main reasons why we don't have these mines in the United States? It certainly is, yes. So it takes in a study that was recently published of about 30 economies, we are second to last for the length of at about 29 years for the length at times time between discovery and actual production of a mine. So, and that is largely due to environmental concerns, but it's also due to the fact that there's many other countries that are getting there quicker that are perhaps more developing countries. And so their desire to open the minds is is economically more feasible than it is for us. And economically feasible, does that mean it's it's not as high of an environmental standard and that's why they're willing to, yes, go that route? It's a combination of there not being as high of an environmental standard, of there being more labor availability. And probably, and I think you can speak to this even better than me, the kinds of Labor laws that perhaps aren't as strict as well when it comes to workers actually working in the mine. And you know, it is very, very, very difficult and challenging work. Right. So I looked up a little bit of an environmental dilemma that I thought was fascinating. So there is the Rhyolite Ridge Lithium and Boron mine, I believe it's in Nevada that has been proposed. It's gone through various stages of permitting litigation. Someone can talk about this more knowledgeably than I can, but let's just say it's in development and it's one of the main minds for those particular substances because the expectation is that it will have enough lithium for 370,000 EVs in terms of the battery capacity that you need to produce for the next 20 years. So 370,000 EV battery type, you know, capacity annually for the next 20th. Massive capacity, massive resource. Now it turns out that there is a flower team, sparkweed. I've learned that is for some reason, and the botanist can talk about this better than I can as well. It really likes the lithium rich soil. So it actually only grows in these kind of mine, these sort of mine. So it's this conflict between what do we actually do with a flower that has been now designated as an endangered species essentially and the minerals that are under the ground. And if we're talking about the environmental impact, I think it's important to recognize what kind of mining operation we're really talking about, right? So I grew up in the rural region of Germany. There was a lot of coal mining going on and it was sort of interspersed with a lot of that. There was basically residential development pretty much right next to the mine because these are towers and they go, you know, they go thousands of feet deep and they extract the coal underground. That's not really what we're talking about here. What we're talking about here is open pit, open holes in the ground, kind of mines that. They leave a pretty large footprint. They leave a pretty large footprint in the development, in the extraction phase and then also in the mitigation phase and, and just closing it off afterwards. So from an environmental perspective, those are pretty, pretty big impacts. And it's also a big impact on, especially for a country like the US, on how we use our land, right? What is the value of that land and is that its most valuable use, you know, and the time it takes, you know, time is money here in the US, unlike some of unlike China and some other countries, we are a capitalist society. And so it is businesses that have to make the decision about acquiring that land, going through the permit process, identifying the plants and the flora and any other sort of environmental considerations. And oftentimes it's just not economically feasible. Or that land itself, perhaps it's not. That's not the best use of that land, right? So it all comes down to some sort of a cost benefit calculus as well. And and then from an environmental point of view, it is really hard to assess and judge what the value of let's say an invite an endangered species is that is is arguably destroyed if you have a large extensive mining operation. So that's that's all true. And those are the additional complications and challenges. And just one, one more additional sort of and you already alluded to this in terms of the just the length of time it takes between approval and full operation of a mine. What I read in this one case that I was just mentioning, it's about four years, four to five years. So you have something approved, permitted ready to go. It's not like you're starting to pull lithium out of the ground tomorrow. This is this multi year development. So even this whole notion of all we can, we can become independent of these international supply chain relationships is is a maybe at best. So the White House, the current White House has, you know, issued in energy emergency, for example, within the last, you know, month or so. And that's very interesting. And I sort of in my head compare it to a little bit this critical minerals paradigm. So with an energy emergency, you know, right now oil is not at a very high price per barrel and we are not experiencing a shortage. But the purpose of that emergency is basically to free up some of the regulations that have been on oil companies, fossil fuel companies to drill and explore further wells, perhaps even on federal lands. But what we've heard from the oil industry and and the fossil fuel industry is that, you know, they may welcome that deregulation, but they're still not going to to drill new wells unless it economically makes sense. You know, unless the the the cost and the price and the comparison, you know, oil, like critical minerals, is a global commodity, you know, it has to make sense. Yeah. No, that's a good point. It's all about the economics that is under underpinning all of this. So you know, maybe it's a good idea to sprinkle in these audience questions as they pop up since there's another one that there's one that comes back to basically some of the geography. So who controls minds resources of these critical minerals? Well, it probably depends largely on the country. I'm going to click back to the previous map slide just to give us the the second slide is sort of big on China because that's where a lot of the minerals are actually manufactured and refined for end use or use in further production. But this is a good example of sort of the countries that are producing a lot of our, you know, most critical minerals. So you can see, you know, Australia, which we discussed, but you can also see the Congo, Chile, Argentina, Canada, which also takes a very long time to get there. They're my, they're very similar to the US in their time frame. So, you know, I think there are instances such as with China, where a lot of it is under government control. And then there are instances such as Congo in other places where it is under private corporate control that may or may not be based in that country. There are multinational corporations that are sort of coming in and taking control. You know, we've had a lot of sort of geopolitical conversations recently with the new administration as they have referred to Canada, referred to Greenland and referred to the Ukraine. And they are critical minerals and how we may partner with them perhaps in ways that they don't want in order to garner control of their critical minerals. So I mean, it really does differ country by country what level of government control there is. But in the US, you know, the most recent executive orders around critical minerals, besides sort of trying to deregulate the permitting process, also open up federal lands. But other than opening up federal lands and deregulating the permitting process, frankly, there's not much in a, you know, capitalistic or open market society like the US that you could do if it doesn't economically make sense. So if I hear you correctly, what really what the, what this, this, this supply chain in many cases and therefore the ownership structures look like is there's the extraction and mining and then there's the processing and extraction and mining is really that's in various different countries. I think it's, it's important to point out that it's not, you know, it's not that one country has soup has has sources of all of these critical minerals. It's usually concentrated, yes, right. Cobalt, OK, that's in the in Congo, for instance, but in others are sprinkled throughout the world. And then, however, there's much more concentration on the processing side that's following right. And that's a lot of this is centered in, you know, what's actually happened in China, China in, in, you know, some, some various levels of control there. That's very true. So we talked a little bit about some of the environmental perspective and that's, you know, that's at least makes it more understandable when it comes to, you know, how much resistance there is, especially when in the United States when it comes to mining of critical minerals. What about, you know, social aspects? You, you alluded to this at some point already. What are some of those? Can we can we sort of talk a little bit about what some of those concerns are? Sure. I think the social aspects in large part are about, you know, who has the benefit of the materials once they're, you know, refined in mind. You know, obviously we have a situation where you know, you have an iPhone, so that has a lot of critical minerals in it, chips, other items. So when we think about sort of global trade and we think about where the minerals are being used and sort of where the preferences are, that's where sort of the global supply chain and the security of the global supply chain for certain countries is important. For the US, you know, they've sort of looked at supply risk very closely. That's what our different federal agencies have been tasked to do since 2020. And you know, I put up a chart here that shows the ones in red are being seen as critical over the next 10 years and then the ones in yellow and green are are less. So I think the other really interesting sort of socioeconomic point of view is which countries are going to be able to control the trade with our upcoming tariffs, you know, and how that and how that trade flow will be affected by tariffs. So I think, you know, there's more power to economies and nations and societies that can control trade that can have better access to these minerals. And you know, the US has traditionally been in a position to influence that, right? So if we're looking at the different supplying countries, then you know there are different concerns depending on where you look and that's we already covered some of the environmental impacts. That's certainly true if we're looking at some of their sort of social impacts. I was just looking, if I can find the statistics, I actually took notes on this. Now I can find anymore. But for rough measure here, 50% of all critical mineral supplies are within 25 miles of an Indigenous. That's true, yes. Population center, Land and I. Think that's especially true in the US and in Canada. Yes. Well, there are lots of them are in the western half of the state and that's there's lots of exposure there. That's certainly true. So then you're not only balancing the extraction of critical minerals with the species that are threatened by that process, but you also have to assess to what extent this is imposing on indigenous people that have been right. They may be affected, they may have to be displaced if one pursues mining. There's all kinds of things that need to be considered. I think the one example that struck me the most is really of the the Democratic Republic of Congo when it comes to the, the extraction of, of, of cobalt there, right? Most of the 70% of the world's cobalt is, is extracted there. So I think that mirrors where the most of the supplies in the ground still out today. And they certainly have a system in which it's industrialized, it's large mines, right? This is real extraction of, of at a large scale. But they also have an artisanal mining community, which are essentially just citizens and families and get paid pittance for the most part to just extract, you know, basically collect soil that is rich in minerals, cobalt in particular, drop it off, have it assessed in terms of what it's worth, sell it couple dollars a day, do this again. It's back breaking work. It includes child labor. I think a lot of this from a global resource management point of view. And I think that has been represented in certainly some of the the ways that some of the large multinational tech firms, for instance, have addressed this as, oh, we would like to have a clean quote, UN quote supply chain, right? But I think it's important to recognize also that it's very hard to certify, yes, that all the materials that went into this beautiful, right, smart device actually free of conflict, right? Decades ago, we had this conversation about conflict diamonds. I think we're now having the same conversation about conflict. But yes. Yes, it's very complex supply chain, right. So the more complex the supply chain is, the further both the geographic distance and the more intermediaries there are in it, the more likely that you cannot have a clean certification process. And so it is challenging. Yeah. So I think you know when we're looking at these different and I think that's why this is such a multi faceted issue because it's not just all can we produce those domestically because you will have these impacts in the US, you have them even more so in other parts of the world. It gets very challenging very quickly. All of that is certainly very true. This might be a good point to pivot to our next audience poll question, which I need to talk our audience through this a little bit. Make sure you scroll all the way down to the bottom because there are more answers. There's a, there's 6 answers potentially. What we tried to capture with the poll question is essentially what are the issues that are most important to audience members? So what specifically are you paying attention to when it comes to critical minerals and rare earth elements, changes in federal policy, cost of critical minerals, price of critical minerals, environmental impacts, impacts on indigenous communities and supply chains mainly located in geopolitical hotspots. So if we could ask everyone in the audience to submit their responses, that would be much appreciated. We're going to give this a little bit of of time, so let's engage in a little bit of forecasting. What do you think? Is that the answer that it's going to come out on top? Well, I think it will be interesting to see how many people select changes in federal policy because that is a rapidly changing environment. I think that if we have folks attending the webinar that are actually using critical minerals in their own manufacturing process than things like costs and prices might be more impactful economically. But then of course, we may have folks hopefully who are also thinking about the environmental and this and the social impacts, so. Yeah. I mean, I think critical minerals are one of those. If you work in, in, in some proximity to that industry, you're very sensitive to these issues. And however, the average person, the average consumer on the street buys critical minerals when they buy device they're just not aware of. They're not aware of. It and so they're, they may be thinking about this more when they're talking about, oh, I'm going to buy an electric vehicle next year because they are. It's so obvious in your face that all the battery clearly where does the battery come from, where the materials come from, whatever the anode, What about the different components? I think that becomes more right. It's a more more much more direct impact, but I think it's interesting is one would really have to get a cross tab on responses in terms of how much they. I think so. All right. Now that we have sufficiently stalled, yes, let's look at what the answers are. So we're at 51%. So I take that as 51%, that's majority vote. Let's go to the answers. And you were correct. Look at that. Changes in federal. Changes in federal policy. And I would, I would venture, I guess this is clearly, you know, this is clearly informed by a lot of the federal policy changes that are currently on foot. And so therefore that's much more sensitivity around this. So that's about a little bit more than a third 36% the supply chains in geopolitical hotspots, that's about 31%. And then the rest of the answer sort of, you know, carry across there any other observations about our poll results? I think it's interesting that cost and price are not super high up on the list and I think that might be reflective of that. Prices have largely stabilized from some of the surges that we saw, as I was mentioning back in 2021 and 2022. In most analysts who look at those specific markets think that price is stabilized because other countries, not the US, started filling the the vacuum by opening. They saw the EV where, you know, revolution beginning to happen. They know that we're moving towards a renewable energy as a as a global, you know, as a globe. Who knows if we really are as a country, Hopefully we are still, but the prices have sort of stabilized, but there is a lot of price uncertainty going forward. You know, and uncertainty is sort of the economist word of the month, at least the month if not first quarter because of tariffs, because of federal policy, because of trade flows and how we are treating our trading partners. And so I think also a number of people, you know, sort of selecting the supply chain category is also very telling. Yeah. So let's, let's pay a little attention to, you know, it's the Conference Board, yes, it's focused on member firms, member business, right. It's the business angle that essentially we're covering in our work here. So as as a business executive, how should I be thinking about this? What are the impact? What, what, what, how does that concern me? What's tell me what to do? OK, well, let's affirm that businesses and CE OS are definitely concerned about geopolitical instability. So at the Conference Board, we take an annual survey, it's called our C-Suite outlook and we actually, and it involves a couple thousand CE OS and C-Suite executives both from the US and globally. We took the cert, the most recent survey we took in November after the US presidential election. So, so our response, our responses do reflect sort of knowledge of what the policy priorities were going to be. Maybe folks didn't realize quite how quickly a lot of the policy priorities would be executed. But when we asked our C-Suite executives select the external factors or issues you think will have the greatest impact on your business in 2025, the number one answer was a geopolitical risk. So we can see here and the global CEO's are in the darker blue, in the brighter blue is US domestic CEO's that the response of both ESU and China tensions and global political instability were sort of our leading responses. And I think that speaks directly to sort of this knowledge that we're going to need and in part critical minerals we're going to need to have, you know, continue with a global trade of materials and products. And that tensions between big trading partners like the EU and China could potentially offend that, which I think is very interesting. Yeah, I know. That's very interesting, Aaron. So just as a as a, you know, from a research structure perspective, the CEO survey certainly allowed for multiple answers. Our very talented producer just whispered in my ear that for our poll, we only allowed for one answer. So yes. Clearly, right, these are not necessarily comparable because obviously it is in all likelihood more than one concern that people have. That's without question. But I do think, and I think that's that is reflected in our poll here of our, you know, our CEO poll that we conducted earlier this year. These geopolitical pressure points, they are becoming more and more, they becoming more and more visible frankly by the day. Yeah. And they also are becoming much more important from from from a business perspective. Right. So that leads us to your, your big question of, you know, what should business leaders do as they consider this for their own businesses, their own supply chains, where they fit in the supply chain? Exactly. We made people wait 40 minutes. We made people wait, you know? The strategy to. Propose any solution So so we're developing a paper around this and it's really around 5 strategies for businesses with regards to critical minerals and resources. The first one strategy might seem a little obvious, but it's about building supplier diversification and expansion. You know, and this really speaks to understanding that if you are getting supply of minerals or products from one source, one country, this might be a great time to diversify because you know, in part because we have entered a trade war. Basically we are embarking on a situation where we are imposing tariffs on goods from a number of countries including our three largest trading partners which are China, Mexico and Canada. And so understanding where your minerals or other critical materials are coming from, perhaps diversifying your supply, which can be challenging given the limited number of countries that some of these things are sourced from, diversifying your refining of these materials. So even say you're sourcing something from South America or Australia, but it's being refined in China, you may want to take another look at that and then sort of do undergoing your diversification in your expansion. Right. So it is really all about trying to find alternative suppliers, if you will, right, because there is a lot of sensitivity around these issues. But it's not like we try to make that point clear to everyone in the beginning. Depending on what kind of technology you're talking about, it's not like you can cut with current technology in mind. You can find an alternative. That's why they are called critical minerals. They are critical because that's the way to go, right? So, I mean, if we're talking about electric vehicles, there is, you know, new technology being developed when it comes to batteries. That's certainly true. And that may lessen the resource demands for some of these materials. All true. But as of the two of us talking here about it, that's just not the case yet. So we're really having these, if you are a business in that space, what you really need to think about is what's your supply right going to be? We've all learned this lesson during COVID when people were all of a sudden thinking that, oh, maybe having one origin country for their for their main supply of their process is probably not the wisest choice. And then they've diversified into other parts of the world. The same in a sense will have to happen, but it's going to be so much more difficult. It will be probably also more difficult impact for various layers just because we're talking about substances that are difficult to extract in the first place. Yes, it will be more difficult than your than your widget or some or something that is sourced with material that is more plentiful. But I think it's absolutely necessary. And I think businesses will just have to look at the cost strategies around that now #2 developing alternatives you sort of already touched upon, Alex. Thank you. So some alternatives don't yet exist, but, you know, at different points in time, businesses may choose or choose not to invest in research and development to see if they can use different kinds of materials. You know, some materials seem irreplaceable. But as technology evolves, as different materials and compounds and rare earth extractions happen, you know, may perhaps for some things there are different alternatives that can be used. And you know that component maybe if you're a business leader of focusing also on research and development, you know, as well as doing your supplier diverse diversification expansion I think is pretty important. Right. And as economists, right whenever we don't have an answer to a problem, it's all come back to the same issue, and that's efficiency. Efficiency, right? So then it's like maybe we can just do more with less. Yes. And, and maybe so that's maybe one way around. I mean, we, you know, for some of, you know, some of our audience that remember this whole debate about, oh, peak oil, we're going to run out of oil, right? And now the US is the largest oil producing country in the world, right? So where things can certainly change. Things can change. And So what is might now currently be portrayed as a real resource crisis may not materialize in the same way. In the same way, There's also, I think a point here that we might want to think about just the usage itself, but maybe, maybe not everybody needs to get a phone every, every year, right? So I mean, that's simplifying it, but I think there's sort of there's an aspect of this that also probably should be considered. Yes. And you cannot seek new solutions without investing in research and development and I think that's part of it. So strategies 3 and four kind of go hand in hand. And as you sort of touched upon 3 is enhancing efficiencies for the materials and the manufacturing. You know, we all know that in any given manufacturing process, often there is waste and sort sort of being able to look back at that and trying to tighten up the waste or the reuse during the manufacturing process is really, really important and #4 is about advancing the circular economy. So especially when it comes to some of the rare earths, it may be beneficial to look at a a refining and processing process and see if you can extract other minerals or make good use out of things derivatives, even if it seems to cost more. Or maybe that's not your core business or your core need being able to look at things really in a more 3 dimensional way so that you could extract things. And so the case study drawing to the right, which is from the GAO, shows how, you know, extraction from a conventional acid mine may just, you know, typically have put things in sort of an in mind disposal, but you can actually recover rare earth element critical minerals by just going through a different kind of process after refining. Right, which which brings up a good point. And there's a question in the chat about this as well. It's it's recycling. It is. It's the concept of the circular, yes. And so from what I've read, you know, we are recycling in particular. One can imagine that the recycling of batteries on a large scale is going to be a critical part of this process, especially, you know, years in the future. Studies that I've seen, basically they suggest that we are probably a decade away from having recycling of battery materials, critical minerals make much sense because we're not at that point yet where there is enough, right, that could be reused. That's not to say that that shouldn't be part of the research and that shouldn't be part of an effort to, to make that happen. Because then I think ultimately that that recycling loop is also going to take away a lot of their, the pressure, the demand, right these these urgencies to develop more and more of these materials in all kinds of parts of the world where it might be undesirable to do so. Exactly. And then our fifth strategy sounds a little mysterious. It's called enabling activities. And this is really sort of because these minerals and materials are critical to national security, to economic security. These are really sort of all of the different both sort of federal and society kind of activities that would enable better refining and production, but also within the industries themselves, but you know, within manufacturing. So it's a little bit of a of a bucket, but it's really about stepping back and keeping an eye on all of sort of the supportive things that need to happen to make sure that companies and countries sort of understand these minerals and materials and how important they are. Right, right. I think that's a very good point and it is complex. So, so maybe we can before we sort of entertain a few questions that have come in, go to our final slide and talk a little bit about, well, clearly there is a big influence that governments have that the US government has. So what about where are we right now? Is there anything that's happened recently? What, what, what are we sort of what are we, what are we dealing with here? Well, we have an executive order that came out on March 20th. We wrote about it. This is a screenshot of our really dynamic website where we are trying to catch all of the federal economic and policy activities and it's on major critical minerals policy and regulatory changes. So the executive order really did a couple of things. One, it essentially like a lot of these executive orders invoked the Defense Production Act, the Emergency Energy Act and sort of all of those acts that allows the federal government to say, let's not have to consider a lot of these regulations that slow us down for good or bad. And so it is expected to accelerate permitting and accelerate sort of the production opening of different critical minerals, you know, areas in the US. However, as we've discussed, you know, it has to make economic sense for companies to engage in that. It also instructs different leaders within the cabinet, within the federal government, including, you know, agencies like the Department of Energy, Department of Interior, which is in charge of USGS, to take a look at the different federal lands which have already been identified as having critical minerals and come up with a plan of how to start mining these minerals quickly. So it will be very interesting to see how that works and the pace, the realistic pace of things. You know, our transition to renewable energy is already well on its way. Our tradition, our transition to electric vehicles as well on its way and are just use of a lot of these materials is, is happening you know and will grow within 10 years. So whether or not these activities are actually feasible for the economy and sort of the pricing structure for it to all happen quickly, who knows. But there is definitely a push by the White House to get rid of as much regulation and open up the federal lands. Right. It's really interesting, you know what you bring up because it just triggers in me these thoughts about and we we haven't. So, so if the intent of the federal policy action is to have more mining for critical minerals within the borders of the United States, then that's also predicated that there will be sufficient demand. We didn't talk about necessarily some of the that what I think is some of the smaller uses that militarily strategically right for specialized weapon systems. There's guest demand for that. That's certainly true. It seems to me however that the largest if we're just talking about numbers, volumes, tonnage that's going to go to renewable energies, batteries for right electric vehicles and so forth. And we cited the numbers on on an offshore wind earlier. In a world where some of the same federal policy actions also slow down some of those those transitions. It is interesting what that actually means because ultimately, and I think that's the big point, if you're a mining executive and you're interested in spending probably billions of dollars building out a mine somewhere in Nevada or someplace, you need price certainty, you need regulatory certainty, you need demand certainty, you need all these. You need all this and you also need labor, which we talked about. You know, we are at a four point 1% unemployment rate in the US, We have a declining birth rate, our population is getting smaller. And the other federal policy that sort of conflicts with some of this, really the whole concept of domestic reshoring and boosting our manufacturing is having much stricter immigration policies and even undergoing deportation. So you know, besides sort of the price and the environmental social considerations, there's also do we have the labor force that is going to participate in these activities both by volume and by choice. Right. And especially specialized and we've done a lot of work on this, our our colleagues in the labor market team in particular on labor shortages and what this all means. I can all check this out at our website. The I think that's, that's a critical point, especially when 1 considers citing these numbers. Yes, we have a you know a low unemployment rate there as birth rate for the country overall. We're talking regional markets, right. We're talking small states somewhere out West and you know with relatively low population density, low and you know workforce density and that's where this needs to be. It's not like these mines necessarily need this is not people with pick access, right. So this is from what I've read if a large lithium mine that may reap that may generate maybe a few 100 something like that workers. I guess it depends on the specification certainly, but even even though you need to get those people to that, to that location. So should we, there's, there's another question in the chat, so why don't I read it and maybe you can respond, We can both sort of chime in. What is the outlook for growing mineral refining in the US? Can existing chemical production or oil refining assets or sites that could do those exist that could be converted to lithium refining? I think that would be very difficult. It's very dissimilar to crude oil refining. It's a separate process. So, so no, I mean it's not that we that there aren't any natural substitutions for a lot of this. Of course, as we were talking about research and development might you know mean that maybe there's some byproducts and I think we've heard about that with regarding sort of coal byproducts and coal ash might be able to sort of looking at the circularity of some of these things might be able to help inform, but but there is not a lot of room for substitution in these processes and so. That that's my sense. I think especially if one looks at some of that, there's actually a lot of research and intellectual property development around some of these extraction methods. So if you take the the Salton Sea in California, the hot brine that can be extracted, it's rich in minerals dissolved somehow. I forget all the specifics, but I remember certainly that there are companies that are basically trying to deal with this problem of trying to get either rare earth minerals or rare earth elements or critical minerals out of that very hot brine solution. And and those are those are those are challenging problems and they're probably very, very different from what we're finding in more traditional fossil fuel based refining processes. So let's see if there's any other question. Now is the time to sort of before we wrap it up in a couple of minutes. One more question that came in on just the demand overall and what this would mean for the breakdown with different countries. Let me just sort of address this initially since I talked about, you know, some of these demand projections from different types of of of uses when it comes to renewables and cars. So I think the answer is it depends, right? It depends. It depends in terms of what we're talking about. So if we're talking about the, in particular battery materials in a world where we're going towards electrification and a decarbonization economy, then we're probably talking 10 * 20 * 30 times the demand and the needs for critical minerals that are going to have to be increased over the next decade, 2 decades or so. It will vary and efficiencies and alternative uses that you already mentioned there and they'll play a role in terms of what can be substituted. But overall, we're talking about a major step up. I think it's not clear right now if the countries that are producing let's say predominantly lithium, predominantly cobalt, predominantly rare earth minerals are going to be the ones that will be able to meet that demand going. Forward. Danny has an interesting question in terms of well, does, is Congo 70% of the cobalt production or cobalt mining that takes place there? Is that going to be the case in 25 years from now? We don't know. It's possible that there will be other resources. So before, before I wrap us up here with our final, with our final references to our other works, any last comments you'd like to make? Well, I would say you know some of these really long term considerations are definitely on our radar, but probably the most immediate things that we are looking at are the tariffs that are connected to these. So steel and aluminum, those tariffs are are in place similar to the tariffs that we had before on those, but no exemptions for countries 25%. We have been also hearing in the last day or two that a copper tariff is likely to come out much sooner than expected, could come out within the next couple weeks. So I wanted to plug the resource on our website, that's the QR code here. It's called navigating Washington. When these tariff announcements happen, we do a very quick analysis of these and what what is the effect for businesses. And so I encourage our viewers to sort of keep apprised of these things by. Visiting a lot is happening. So the takeaways for sort of drawing a line in the sand, what should you remember from this webcast? I think it's important to realize that these materials, critical materials, rare earth elements, they used in a lot of different devices, there's growing demand for them. It is generally the case that the mining, processing and use happen is happening in very different parts of the world. Not happening here. Exactly. And none of the mining really for the most part happens in the United States. We're very as a country, as an economy very dependent on some of these trade flows. There is efforts going on efforts going on in terms of to to increase mining, but we are really in the early stages. So with that, there's lots of challenges. So you already mentioned, you know, how do we as the Conference Board address some of these challenges? What we're talking about this and we're talking about members, we're issuing your daily emails as part of our Navigating Washington series. We as an errand and myself, we're engaging in work on energy, infrastructure and environment and welcome you to check out our research. On our designated website that covers everything from supply chains to reassuring to climate to environmental impacts. So lots there. And lastly, the next upcoming webcast is Economy Watch. That's April 9th on the US, US pop, US public policy and the economy. Make sure you tune in. There's always very good insights and very important takeaways as a result of this. Check out our ESF presence in general. And if you're not a member yet, you should definitely consider becoming a member of the ESF Center. You are for, you know, a very reasonable investment getting access to a whole host of experts that can talk to you and your staff about all kinds of critical issues for the economy. So with that, thank you so much for thank you. Alex, thank you all. And we can wrap it up here. Thank you so much for joining us today, and we'll see you next time.