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Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with a global expert on minerals processing and battery minerals, Lyle Trytten. We were closing out an engagement to do a technoeconomic assessment of seabed mining and it was a great opportunity to discuss the space and some of the things we knew going in and discovered along the say. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation on my podcast channel, Redefining Energy — Tech.

Michael Barnard [MB]: Hi, welcome back to Redefining Energy Tech. I’m your host, Michael Barnard. My guest today for this very special episode is Lyle Trytten, professional engineer with decades of experience in developing mines and mineral processing and refining around the world. He speaks and consults as the nickel nerd through Trytten Consulting. Welcome, Lyle. 

Lyle Trytten [LT]: Thanks, Mike. It’s a pleasure to be here. 

[MB]: The reason we’re talking today is that Lyle and I are nearly finished with a commission to do a techno-economic assessment of seabed mining of polymetallic nodules. For context, President Trump signed an executive order to advance seabed mining, and American Samoa is currently holding consultations around leasing for seabed mining. A couple of firms, including at least one Canadian, are working on the technological challenges of how to actually extract nodules from the seabed.

We’re going to explore this now that we’ve done a deep dive. But first, since you’ve got this extraordinary global background, tell us why you’ve ended up in a position to speak with NRCan and other organizations about minerals and critical minerals around the world. 

[LT]: Thanks, Mike. My career has evolved in ways I never anticipated when I was younger, growing up as a chemical engineer in Alberta—a province very much centered on petroleum. I landed in the metals world almost by accident during a period of weak employment for engineers in Alberta in the early ’90s. I discovered I really enjoyed the variety of the work, the areas I got to work in, and the problems I got to solve.

I started with what was originally Sherritt Gordon Mines Limited, which later became Sherritt Incorporated, then Sherritt International Corporation. Over the years, I had the opportunity to work on everything from utilities, fertilizers, and metal refining in Canada to advanced technology deployment overseas. I designed, started up, and commissioned nickel and copper operations in Australia, the U.S., and Indonesia. Those were great learning opportunities—startups are where you find out what wasn’t built right. Over time, those experiences gave me much broader exposure than most.

As the Canadian metals industry evolved in the ’90s—with the sales of Inco and Falconbridge to overseas companies (Inco now part of Vale, Falconbridge part of Glencore)—Natural Resources Canada became concerned about getting Canada-relevant answers from employees of multinationals. They began reaching out more to Sherritt, still a Canadian company focused primarily on development within Canada. That gave me the chance to build a strong relationship with them.

Six years ago, I left Sherritt to start my own consulting business, which has since blossomed. Now, I advise the International Energy Agency, sit on their expert advisory group for critical minerals, and peer-review many of their reports. I also advise NRCan on metals development in Canada and on the implications of international developments. It’s not just one-way advice either—it lets me engage in knowledge-gathering globally. Through pro bono discussion groups and collaborations, I’ve learned far more about what’s happening in the world than I ever could on my own.

[MB]: This is part of the reason I ended up dragging Lyle into this. I already knew about it, and we’d had a chance to talk when he reached out before a minerals conference in town. We had a great two-hour conversation, which I later wrote about in CleanTechnica—people can look that up if they’re interested.

A few weeks ago, representatives of a group of NGOs focused on ocean concerns reached out to me. Their main goal is making sure we don’t damage the oceans more than we already have. They said, “Mike, we’ve been trying to find someone who can do a techno-economic assessment of seabed mining. We’ve approached economics professors and others, but there’s really nothing out there. You seem able to cover a lot of ground—could you do it?”

I said, “Well, I can cover some of it, but there’s a whole set of minerals expertise I don’t have.” I had a couple of candidates in mind, with Lyle as number one. Paul Martin was number two because he and Lyle overlap in some areas of experience. But since this was mining, Lyle was the first choice. If it had been chemicals or process engineering, Paul would have been first and Lyle second. They have complementary skill sets.

Lyle was intrigued, said yes, and we proceeded. It’s been interesting. But now we have to step back and ask: what exactly are we talking about? At the beginning, I tossed out a polysyllabic phrase—“seabed mining of polymetallic nodules.” So let’s start there: what are polymetallic nodules, where do they occur, why do they form, and what are they made of? Lyle, take it away. 

[LT]: Let me back it up one step further. There are really three classes of undersea mineralization of interest to the global mining and metals industry. Of course, most mining today is terrestrial—operations on every continent except Antarctica deliver the metals we rely on daily. If you use devices, bicycles, cars, or live in a house, you depend on mining.

In the seabed, the first class is manganese-rich crusts, which are higher-manganese mineralizations that occur in shallower waters offshore in some parts of the world. The second is sulfide deposits around black smokers—vents where mineral-rich waters flow out of the earth into the sea, precipitating metals like nickel, cobalt, copper, and others, depending on the water’s chemistry. The third is polymetallic nodules, which have been investigated for over 50 years as a potential source because they’re widespread across most deep-ocean basins, with varying characteristics and densities.

The appeal of nodules is that, in theory, they can be recovered without the intensive technologies used in terrestrial mining. You don’t need to blast rock or excavate crust—they’re simply sitting on the seafloor. These nodules formed over millions of years as metals precipitated out of seawater, mainly manganese and iron, with smaller amounts of nickel, cobalt, and copper. Over time, they accrete into potato-sized lumps—not rock in the terrestrial sense, but close enough for analogy. These can be harvested, brought to the surface, and processed to recover valuable metals.

But geology teaches us that Mother Nature isn’t always your friend. Every mineral deposit is different, which means treatment processes are nonstandard. In many chemical industries—like making fertilizer from methane—there’s a single global process. In mining and metals, by contrast, processing methods vary widely depending on the resource.

So, while these nodules may be recoverable and processable, they’re not straightforward. They’ve attracted attention before—in the 1950s, the 1970s, and again in the early 2000s—but so far, none have been extracted commercially. 

[MB]: Let’s talk about the minerals in these nodules. Their composition varies, but they share a core set of metals. How valuable are those metals, and which parts of the mix are actually more useful to us versus less useful? 

[LT]: The principal element in most of these nodules is manganese. Manganese is globally important—it’s used to make steel, both in producing pig iron and in certain grades of steel itself. It’s a substantial mining industry, with most ore coming from Africa and Australia, and global production of around 20 million tons a year. That’s a healthy market, though still small compared to fossil fuels like coal.

Alongside manganese, there’s usually a lot of iron. Metallurgically, iron and manganese tend to occur together, so you’ll often see deposits with 20–30% manganese and 5–15% iron. These deposits also contain smaller amounts of nickel, cobalt, and copper, since those elements sit close together on the periodic table and behave similarly. A good deposit might have just over 1% nickel and copper, and 0.1–0.2% cobalt.

Each of those has a different market. Copper, like manganese, is about a 20-million-ton-per-year market. It’s widely used for wiring—whether transmission lines, house wiring, or the tiny wires in electronics, most are copper. Transmission grids sometimes use alternatives, but in homes it’s almost always copper. Copper production is widely distributed, with a lot from Chile, as well as the U.S., Canada, and elsewhere.

Nickel is used more sparingly than copper, but is about twice as valuable. Its main use is stainless steel—cutlery, cookware, or appliances often contain 8–10% nickel. More recently, nickel has gained attention for high-energy batteries, where cathodes typically use high nickel content.

Cobalt, similar to nickel in many ways, is used in batteries and in specialized applications like superalloys and jet engine turbines. The market is much smaller—around 250,000–300,000 tons per year—and most production comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Cobalt is more valuable than nickel, worth about 2.5 times as much.

So, there’s a hierarchy: iron is lowest value at 5–10% of composition; manganese is the principal metal at 20–30%, though also relatively low value; and then smaller amounts of nickel, copper, and cobalt carry the real dollar value. Those are the primary targets in seabed mining.

[MB]: One of the things we discussed was ore grade. Not being a professional miner or in the minerals industry myself, half a percent or 1% didn’t seem like much. But what does that really mean? If we say the grade of ore is 1%, how significant is it for 1% of the mass of the ore to be copper, cobalt, or nickel?

[LT]: It’s actually quite a high grade when you think about it. Historically, grades have declined over time, which is well documented by many academics. That’s expected—you mine the best material first. Today, it’s typical for copper mines to run below 1% copper. For example, large open-pit mines in British Columbia—Gibraltar, Mount Milligan, Highland Valley—process around 100,000 tons a day at about 0.75% copper, and those are still economic. In Chile, many deposits run 1–1.5%, which is why it’s such a major global producer. There are rare deposits today above that, but not many. We’d love to find more, but those aren’t known right now.

In nickel, we really have two main types of deposits. First, nickel oxide deposits, known as nickel laterites, which globally make up a large share. They typically run between 1–2% nickel but can only be economically processed as whole ore, meaning the entire ore body must be treated intensively. Second, nickel sulfide deposits, which require less energy to process. Underground sulfide deposits typically run around 1.5% nickel, while open-pit sulfides are often well under 1% and still considered economic today.

Cobalt is almost never mined on its own. It’s a byproduct that comes along when mining nickel or copper in certain regions. As a result, cobalt’s market balance is heavily influenced by copper production levels.

So, if you were looking at a terrestrial deposit with grades of roughly 1% nickel, 1% copper, and 0.1–0.2% cobalt, that would be considered very good—especially if it were near surface and accessible.

[MB]: Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Let me wind back a bit. One form of subsea extraction of valuable materials from the seabed is dredging for diamonds, which has been done at depths of around 200 meters. That’s been going on profitably for decades. Obviously, these aren’t conflict diamonds, and the technology has been steadily iterated and improved. It’s essentially like a dredger that works in a port—except it comes back with diamonds, which I didn’t know at first and thought was pretty fascinating. It’s also relevant because some of that technology is now being extended.

The second point I’ll circle back to is your mention of shallow and deep. Let’s quantify that. When you say shallow and deep, what numbers are we actually talking about? 

[LT]: When I talk about shallow resources, I mean up to about 300–400 meters deep. That’s certainly deep for a diver, but only moderately deep by terrestrial mining standards. There are open-pit mines up to a kilometer deep, and underground mines that go as far as 3 kilometers, like some in South Africa and the U.S. But being 3 kilometers down in a purposefully driven shaft with ventilation is very different from being under the ocean.

In the ocean, the depths we’re talking about are around 4 kilometers. That’s the abyssal plain—the flat bottom of the ocean, not the trenches. Once you leave the continental shelf, you’re several kilometers down—three or four kilometers.

For reference, think about offshore oil drilling. The Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico was drilling at about 1.5 kilometers depth. When the mechanical equipment at that depth failed, managing the spill was extremely difficult. With polymetallic nodule recovery, we’re talking about operating two to three times deeper than that. That gives you a sense of just how challenging this really is.

So overall, what do people actually do?

[MB]: I’ll add a couple of other quantifiers. Most people have heard of divers getting the bends from decompression if they go deep and then surface too quickly. What many don’t realize is that this starts at only about 10 meters under the surface. Beyond that, you have to manage decompression carefully—coming up slowly so nitrogen doesn’t bubble out of your blood, lodge in your joints, cause excruciating pain, or even death. That’s just 10 meters. We’re talking about depths of 4 kilometers or more—that’s 400 times deeper.

Another comparison is offshore wind. Right now, offshore wind towers are being installed at depths of around 50 meters. We really don’t operate at great depths very often. Beyond research or small experimental projects, it’s rarely industrial. That’s one of the big challenges for harvesting polymetallic nodules: they’re extremely deep, and the pressures at those depths are extraordinary.

Anyone who’s followed me will have heard me say that when we store hydrogen, we often need to store it at pressures equivalent to 3–7 kilometers under the surface of the ocean. Those are extraordinary pressures—and that’s exactly what we’re dealing with in deep-sea mining. On top of that, it’s seawater. One of my recurring themes is that if we can avoid putting anything in seawater at all, that’s best. We only put things in seawater if we have no choice—like ships crossing oceans. Even then, seawater comes along for the ride, and we have to deal with fouling, antifouling paints, and constant maintenance.

That’s one of my critiques of ocean energy systems like tidal or current turbines: they rely on moving parts underwater, which foul quickly and are very expensive to maintain. My rule of thumb is this: if it costs 1x capital onshore, it’ll cost 10x on a platform offshore, 100x underwater, and 1000x at the bottom of the ocean. I’ve used that rule for years, and no one has convincingly told me I’m wrong yet.

So, we’re talking about extremely difficult operating conditions. And it’s not like you can just take a boat from New York and reach these sites. You mentioned abyssal plains—can you tell us which the primary ones are, and how far they are from anything else?

[LT]: The primary area people talk about these days is the Clarion-Clipperton Zone—a broad swath of the Pacific south of Hawaii, stretching laterally across the ocean toward the U.S. It’s thousands of kilometers from shore. I’d have to fact-check the exact distance, but it’s a very long way.

We’re used to long ocean voyages, and you can certainly do it—it just takes time. But if you want to do any immediate work, like maintenance on submerged equipment, you need that capability close by. That means a lot of your support infrastructure has to be situated where the extraction is happening.

If you have harvesting devices, for example, and need to maintain them, you’d want facilities on the ship itself. It’s not practical to haul up your equipment, steam for a week to reach a port, do maintenance, and then head back out. You could build a business model that way, but it would mean a lot more of your equipment is out of service at any given time. 

[MB]: As I went through this, I discovered a few things. Not only are these deposits at the bottom of the ocean, four to six kilometers deep—making them incredibly difficult and challenging—but they’re also a long way from anywhere. That said, there are some places more accessible, and that’s roughly how Lyle and I ended up spending professional time on this.

A group of NGOs, concerned about seabed polymetallic nodule processing, wanted to engage in American Samoa’s leasing opportunity that came out of Donald Trump’s executive order. They brought us in. American Samoa was seeking feedback and public consultation on the subject, and the NGOs wanted to prepare a submission.

Of course, Congress has legislation and key individuals working on this, so the NGOs wanted techno-economic insight. Frankly, the only available material was from companies promoting mining ventures and trying to raise money based on claims of extracting and processing these nodules.

So, is it worth talking about the history of mining companies raising money based on mineral deposit claims?

[LT]: That could be a few episodes on its own. Let’s just say it’s an industry with a checkered track record. Some good things have been done, and some outright criminal things have been done, with a wide range of practices in between.

In Canada, we have a fairly robust regulatory system around disclosure of information related to mineral properties for the public and investors. It applies to publicly traded companies on Canadian stock exchanges and is called National Instrument 43-101. It requires a high degree of transparency and independent assessment of claims about what you have and what you can do with it.

That all stems from a debacle in the Indonesian market more than 20 years ago called Bre-X, where a company fraudulently claimed to have a massive gold deposit in Southeast Asia. They engaged in criminal practices like salting ores and manipulating lab results. Eventually it was discovered, but not before everyone lost their shirts—except those who got out early. Entire towns in Alberta, where I live, were caught up in it. Investors were recommending it to friends and family, and it turned out to be an effective pyramid scheme. It was an absolute black eye for the industry.

There are good actors who try to do the right thing, but there are also pump-and-dump operators who release glowing information to drive up stock prices and then sell. On the other side, short sellers put out negative claims to push prices down and profit in the futures market. The space is rife with potential for bad practices because most of these are very small companies run by individuals. The world of project discovery and development up to the point of construction is dominated by what we call junior mining or junior development companies—not the majors.

This isn’t BHP, Rio Tinto, Anglo American, or the other big mining companies that actually build and operate mines responsibly. It’s individuals looking to get rich quick, and that’s been true for over a century. In the U.S., during frontier expansion, people often claimed to have found immense deposits that weren’t what they seemed.

In seabed mining, the key questions are always: is the resource real, can it be recovered economically, can it be processed economically, can it make its way to market, and does that support the valuations of companies pushing it? So far, no one has managed actual extraction, so it’s hard to know what the truth is. But companies that promoted in the past have not been able to satisfy their claims.

[MB]: For that trifecta—is the stuff real, can we get it out economically, and can we process it? The first one is true. The polymetallic nodules are real. They contain valuable, high-grade ores.

I’ve spent time debunking claims that we don’t have enough minerals. I’ve spoken to people like Gavin Mudd, director of the Centre for Critical Minerals Intelligence with the British Geological Survey, an expat Australian who has worked on half the periodic table. He’s defined reserves through novel methods he developed with global collaborators, including the U.S. Geological Survey, to give us a clearer picture of what’s really there. Previously, we didn’t have a very good sense.

I’ve pushed back against the “no hopers,” the degrowthers, and the minerals doomers who claim we don’t have enough—just as they claimed we didn’t have enough oil and were going to run out. The reality is different.

So Lyle, let’s talk about your professional opinion. You engage in many of these discussions with global organizations like the IEA, focused on the resources and reserves of critical minerals for electrification. What’s your professional view—do we have enough from terrestrial reserves? 

[LT]: I’m going to back this up a little and tell you to watch your language. We need to be careful about resources and reserves—they’re very different things. Resources are what we know is in the ground. We have three classes of resources: measured, indicated, and inferred. These relate to how confident we are in that knowledge. Measured resources—we’re highly confident they’re there. Inferred resources—we’re fairly convinced they’re there, but there may be discontinuities in the deposits that throw off our tonnage estimates.

On the reserves side, reserves are defined differently. They’re a subset of resources that have been shown to be technically and economically viable to process into product, so they’re always a smaller number. Different systems exist for classifying resources and reserves around the world. Australia has a good system called JORC. Canada has one under 43-101. The U.S. has its own, a little different. Broadly speaking, they all get at the same thing.

The work I’ve seen suggests there’s no lack of resources—just like there’s no lack of oil. The concern is whether we can bring those resources to market in a timely fashion to meet the needs of the energy transition, and whether the economics work, as we saw with oil. High prices can solve small reserve numbers. Change the price of nickel from today’s $15,000–16,000 a ton to $22,000–23,000 a ton, and suddenly a lot of deposits move from being resources to reserves—they’re now in the money.

I’ve worked on one that’s difficult to justify at today’s prices but straightforward to justify at north of $20,000 a ton. Prices will cure that. Timeliness is a different issue. The timeline of the demand curve and the supply curve are both highly speculative. Forecasting is difficult, especially about the future. Anytime someone forecasts both demand and supply 10, 20, 30, 40 years out, you need to think carefully about how real that is and whether it’s relevant.

I see no shortage of resources. I see concerns about timely development, especially if we try to ramp up the energy transition faster than it’s been going. Some metals are more prone to disruption than others. Copper looks short in the long run. It doesn’t look like there are sufficient copper deposits coming to market in the next 15 years to meet projected demand. But copper prices have been strong lately, and that changes the dynamics around companies wanting to develop deposits and countries wanting to allow them.

Ultimately, a country decides whether something can happen, a company decides whether it will happen, and then they put up the money. When copper is $3 a pound, companies aren’t willing to invest, and countries don’t see much value in it. There might be jobs, but not much in tax or royalty revenue. When copper is $5 or $6 a pound, which it could be, there’s a lot more value to distribute to society and shareholders. That incentivizes everyone to move projects forward and bring them to market. 

[MB]: There are a couple of factors here. Oil, once it’s burned for its primary use, is gone. While some substitution is possible—for example, using natural gas instead of oil—the overall substitutability is quite low.

You mentioned earlier that most houses use copper wiring, but aluminum is common in transmission and is now being used in some battery packs for lightness. In fact, new aluminum bus architectures for power distribution and grid battery packs are coming out of China because aluminum is cheaper and lighter, reducing costs. And that principle holds true across many applications.

Do you want to talk a bit more about substitutability for some of these minerals?

[LT]: The problem with future demand is that it’s based on a set of assumptions about what is or isn’t substitutable—and substitutability is a huge issue. In the nickel world, for example, we saw a massive price spike in the early 2000s that shook the industry. Nickel tends to go through these cycles every 10 to 20 years—prices spike, producers make money, and consumers panic. During that period, we saw a lot of substitution away from high-quality stainless steels—the 300 series, typically used in highly corrosive environments like cookware and industrial applications—toward lower-grade 200 series stainless steels, which contain no nickel and are much cheaper to produce. They still have chromium, so they’re technically stainless, but they’re not nearly as robust. For short-term or limited applications, that substitution was fine, and nickel demand dropped significantly until prices normalized.

In the battery space, we’re seeing the same dynamic. Within EVs, nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) batteries used to have roughly equal parts nickel and cobalt. But cobalt was expensive, so manufacturers shifted toward higher nickel content for better energy density and lower costs. That gave us the so-called 811 battery: eight parts nickel, one part manganese, one part cobalt. When cobalt prices later softened, the ratio shifted again. This constant rebalancing of battery chemistries reflects the economics of the day.

There’s also substitution across battery platforms. NMC batteries are excellent, but lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries—produced at massive scale in China over the past five years—have surged to about 50% of the EV market. They use no nickel, manganese, or cobalt. If that trend continues, it could dramatically reshape demand growth curves for those metals.

Substitution isn’t limited to batteries. Take wiring: when I had solar panels installed, the connection between the new and old breaker boxes used thick aluminum wire instead of copper. Physically larger, yes, but it carried the same current and worked just fine. That’s a clear case of aluminum substituting for copper.

Manganese, on the other hand, is less substitutable in iron and steelmaking today. But the future of that industry is in flux as it moves toward decarbonization. New production methods could alter the chemistry of steelmaking, and with it, manganese demand. I can’t speculate too much—I’m not a steel guy—but there’s definitely potential for change there as well.

[MB]: And then there’s recycling. How recyclable are these metals? A key factor is how long they’re in use before they become available for recycling. Do you want to talk about that?

[LT]: A lot of my practice is in life cycle analysis, and I’ve had a bone to pick for a long time. People talk about resource depletion when materials are extracted from the earth and put into products, but that isn’t really the case with many metals. Nickel in stainless steel, for example, is essentially infinitely recyclable. When stainless steel reaches the end of its life—whether from a building, a pipeline, or something else—it can be remelted and reformulated back into steel. Many alloys are the same. A significant share of the metal going through Glencore’s smelter in Sudbury is recycled superalloys from turbines, chemical plants, and similar uses. They’re simply melted down and put back into service.

The challenge with stainless steel is that its service life is usually 50 to 100 years. It will eventually come back for recycling, but not for a long time after it’s first deployed. That longevity is the beauty of stainless steel, but from a recycling standpoint it’s also a weakness—it delays the return.

Nickel-manganese-cobalt batteries, on the other hand, are highly recyclable. My work on battery recycling suggests recovery rates for these critical metals of around 95–97%. But again, they don’t come back as early as people once thought. Five years ago, we talked about a six- or seven-year useful life for batteries. Now, we’re finding that batteries often outlast the vehicles they’re installed in, and the batteries themselves still have useful life.

Companies like Moment Energy, in B.C.’s Lower Mainland, are taking old EV batteries and remanufacturing them into energy storage devices. Redwood, a major U.S. recycler founded by someone involved in Tesla’s early days, has realized they don’t want to recycle all the batteries immediately. Instead, they’ve built a large battery park to store solar energy and power their own operations using cells from batteries sent in for recycling.

What we’re starting to see is more like a 20-year life for EV batteries before they actually enter the recycling stream. They will come back, and as more metal is tied up in highly recyclable uses like batteries, we’ll move toward a more circular economy. Of course, there will always be losses—for example, metals used in pigments like cobalt-based blues and yellows, or in products that never make it into recycling. But the majority will return to the market.

The real problem is demand. Population is still growing, and the energy transition is accelerating. Over the next 20 to 40 years, demand for these metals will rise significantly. Recycling won’t meet that demand in the near term because we’re in a stock-building phase—deploying more and more devices. Some recycling recovery is happening, but it’s only a fraction of current needs. These adoption curves are classic S-shapes: once deployment plateaus, perhaps 20 years later, most materials will start cycling back and significantly displace conventionally mined supply. Until then, mining will remain essential. 

[MB]: I’m a bit less concerned about that because I haven’t seen anyone factor in the global collapse of the fossil fuel industry and the massive amount of infrastructure that will become available for recycling. The fossil fuel industry, from everything I’ve looked at, turns out to be possibly the biggest or second biggest consumer of any given type of mineral, material, or energy. The best numbers I have show that 11% of global primary energy is consumed by the fossil fuel industry. I also worked out that the pipelines buried in the United States, if dug up and put through electric arc furnaces, could supply the country’s primary steel requirements for four years.

There’s the question of whether they are once again recoverable economically. Enormous amounts of high-grade ore exist in the form of supertankers, pipelines, refineries, and similar infrastructure that will be decommissioned in a shorter period than most people realize. The lifespan for a large portion of these minerals is not the 100 to 200 years people might expect, but much shorter. For example, from your region to mine, the Trans Mountain pipeline—I project it will be bankrupt by 2040. That’s a clear example of the complete and utter waste of federal money.

[LT]: The question becomes: will they ever dig it up and recycle it, or will they abandon it in place? A real-world example of this—I started at Sherritt in 1993. They’re a major nickel and cobalt producer here in Canada. Political events of the early ’90s saw the Soviet empire fall apart. For most of the ’90s, we saw very depressed nickel prices because the Russians were destocking stainless steel. They were dismantling their old, incredibly inefficient, uneconomic chemical plants and selling the scrap metal to make hard prints. That depressed metal prices for the better part of a decade. We’ve seen it happen, and it will happen again.

[MB]: Thanks for listening. This has been Redefining Energy Tech with your host, Michael Barnard. If the insights from this episode were valuable to you, help others find them by liking and subscribing.