# BNEF Pioneers Award 2023: Metals and Materials

An episode of [Switched On](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1469286286), 3 Jan 2024, 52 min.

Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/01a10738-3608-4dec-883c-ae3c00026b36/db32e55d-f398-43a2-a0e9-b0ec00acc2c2/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=6d114f63-833d-4b78-bbf5-ae3c00026b44

BNEF Pioneers is BloombergNEF’s annual climate-tech competition identifying game-changing innovations with the potential to accelerate global decarbonization and halt climate change. Last year, awards were given in three categories: accelerating the deployment of hydrogen, building a net-zero food production system, and sustainable metals and materials for an electrified future. On today’s show, Dana is joined by guest host Benjamin Kafri, BNEF’s Head of Client Relations and Innovation, to explore the third of these categories. Together, they interview representatives from Jetti, Nth-Cycle and Li-Cycle, the three Pioneers Award winners dedicated to cleaning up the world’s metals and materials supply chains. Complementary BNEF research on the trends driving the transition to a lower-carbon economy can be found at BNEF<GO> on the Bloomberg Terminal, on bnef.com or on the BNEF mobile app. BloombergNEF's 2024 Pioneers Award page - https://about.bnef.com/bnefpioneers/ BloombergNEF's 2023 Pioneers Award winners - https://www.bnef.com/insights/31219 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

## Transcript

[0:00] Speaker 1: Hi, this is Dana Perkins and you're listening to Switched
[0:03] Speaker 1: on the BNAF podcast, and on today's show, I am
[0:06] Speaker 1: actually going to be joined by a co host, Benjamin Caffrey.
[0:10] Speaker 1: One of the things that Benji does for us at
[0:12] Speaker 1: BNF is keep an eye on innovation and lead some
[0:15] Speaker 1: of our work there that then brings us to the
[0:18] Speaker 1: Pioneers Awards. If you want to find out more about
[0:21] Speaker 1: the Pioneers, we actually have information on the BNF website.
[0:25] Speaker 1: It's BNF dot com forward slash Pioneers. But let's give
[0:29] Speaker 1: you a little bit more context here on the show.
[0:31] Speaker 1: Instead of having me do it, let's go straight to
[0:33] Speaker 1: our conversation with Benji. Benji, thank you for joining us
[0:36] Speaker 1: on Switched on today.
[0:37] Speaker 2: Hi, Dana, thanks for inviting me.
[0:39] Speaker 1: I want to ask you first of all about how
[0:41] Speaker 1: BENEF approaches innovation, which is through our Pioneers program. Can
[0:46] Speaker 1: you explain what the Pioneers are?
[0:49] Speaker 2: Yeah, well, thank you, Dana. So it's great to be
[0:52] Speaker 2: here and great to dedicate a podcast for our Pioneers program.
[0:56] Speaker 2: BENEF Pioneers program is really our way to set a
[1:00] Speaker 2: recognize and learn from exciting innovative startup in the climate
[1:05] Speaker 2: tech area. That help our world to transform into a
[1:09] Speaker 2: lower carbon economy.
[1:11] Speaker 1: So each year we try and take this wide world
[1:14] Speaker 1: of clean tech innovation and actually focus it in on
[1:17] Speaker 1: a couple of themes so that the different companies that
[1:20] Speaker 1: we're looking at and that the winners really reflect areas
[1:23] Speaker 1: that we think are actually we really in need of
[1:26] Speaker 1: innovation for the energy transition. So what theme are we
[1:30] Speaker 1: going to drill into today, and perhaps you can also
[1:33] Speaker 1: give us a little more detail on well, just maybe
[1:36] Speaker 1: a highlight of what the other themes were in the
[1:38] Speaker 1: pioneers for the twenty twenty three winners.
[1:41] Speaker 2: Thank you, dan I. Yes, so that's true. Year we
[1:44] Speaker 2: try and focus on unsolved climate innovation gap. So we
[1:47] Speaker 2: choose three of these themes, and then we have a
[1:50] Speaker 2: force category which is a wildcut, so we like to
[1:54] Speaker 2: be surprised with exciting other climate tech innovators out there
[1:58] Speaker 2: that apply the theme for this year, we're accelerating the
[2:03] Speaker 2: deployment of clean hydrogen, so not only on the electoralizer
[2:07] Speaker 2: side of thing, but also looking across the whole value
[2:10] Speaker 2: chain of hydrogen and where innovation comes from. The second one,
[2:14] Speaker 2: which was really the topic of today, was around sustainable
[2:18] Speaker 2: metals and materials for an electrified future, so really looking
[2:23] Speaker 2: not only at how to make mining more sustainable, but
[2:27] Speaker 2: also how to secure enough supply for that transition. So
[2:30] Speaker 2: analysis show that basically in order to get to net
[2:33] Speaker 2: zero we need five times more of the current supply,
[2:37] Speaker 2: so a big challenge, and then we need to do
[2:38] Speaker 2: it in a less carbon intensive And then the third
[2:41] Speaker 2: one was about the carbonization of food system.
[2:45] Speaker 1: So Benji, you and I have been with BNF for
[2:49] Speaker 1: some time now, and I believe that you were involved
[2:52] Speaker 1: with the Pioneers from the very beginning. So give us
[2:55] Speaker 1: a little bit of a history lesson on the pioneers.
[2:57] Speaker 1: How long have we been doing this?
[3:00] Speaker 2: I think one of the unique things about Pioneers from
[3:02] Speaker 2: being a point of view, is that we have been
[3:04] Speaker 2: doing it for a while. We've been doing it for
[3:06] Speaker 2: thirteen years now, and we've been through the first kind
[3:10] Speaker 2: of clintech at one point, oh you know, hype and
[3:14] Speaker 2: bust and the evolution of the innovation emerging every year.
[3:18] Speaker 2: And we have close two hundred and fifty Pioneers winners
[3:22] Speaker 2: alumnis and actually, interesting fact, most of them been very successful.
[3:26] Speaker 2: So we have around forty percent of them that had
[3:29] Speaker 2: exits others through IPOs or M and A and then
[3:33] Speaker 2: close to this same ratio of ventures still going.
[3:37] Speaker 1: So I've actually only been lucky enough to be involved
[3:39] Speaker 1: for the past two years as one of the many
[3:42] Speaker 1: judges that actually look at all the applicants. But I
[3:44] Speaker 1: think it would be useful for our listeners to better
[3:47] Speaker 1: understand the sort of companies that we're assessing and looking
[3:50] Speaker 1: for in terms of really size and how disruptive their
[3:54] Speaker 1: technology could potentially be for the energy transition.
[3:58] Speaker 2: So for us, I mean the materia of the ponies
[4:01] Speaker 2: is to first look at who's original and what's kind
[4:05] Speaker 2: of innovative about what they do, And we are not investors,
[4:09] Speaker 2: so we have the luxury to really pick what's interesting,
[4:12] Speaker 2: and we have the other luxury of relying on our
[4:15] Speaker 2: amazing expertise and colleagues around the world and just be
[4:20] Speaker 2: able to focus on what's cool and interesting. The second
[4:23] Speaker 2: criteria is really around the impact they will have on
[4:29] Speaker 2: the transition to a lower carbon economy and net zero
[4:32] Speaker 2: and a lower carbon world. And the third they do
[4:35] Speaker 2: need to have some positive momentum, So basically we need
[4:39] Speaker 2: to know that they're able to take their original innovative
[4:42] Speaker 2: ideas and with the potential of impact, but actually help
[4:47] Speaker 2: fulfill that potential. So these are kind of the three
[4:49] Speaker 2: criterias we focus on.
[4:51] Speaker 1: And with that, let's jump into our conversations with the
[4:54] Speaker 1: winners of the challenge around metals and materials. We'll first
[4:59] Speaker 1: start with a my innovator named Jetty, and then we'll
[5:02] Speaker 1: next go to a battery innovator called end Cycle, followed
[5:06] Speaker 1: by another battery innovator, life Cycle. Let's hear from our
[5:09] Speaker 1: first guest, Mike Outwind, the co founder and CEO of Jetty.
[5:14] Speaker 1: Jetty are a natural resources company that have developed a
[5:17] Speaker 1: catalyst that can efficiently release copper from lower grade ore,
[5:20] Speaker 1: increasing a minds production for one of the most in
[5:24] Speaker 1: demand and essential metals for the energy transition.
[5:34] Speaker 3: Hi Mike, Hi Benjim.
[5:36] Speaker 2: I want to kick off with that personal question kind
[5:39] Speaker 2: of what brings you to Jetty in the industry. I
[5:43] Speaker 2: know you are on the investment side before what's your story?
[5:46] Speaker 4: Well, I'll actually take everything back to two thousand and eight.
[5:49] Speaker 4: I started working at a energy technology startup that year
[5:53] Speaker 4: while I was still in school. They had developed a
[5:55] Speaker 4: process to turn low grade coal and biomass into natural
[5:58] Speaker 4: gas while capturing your esteem of CO two for for
[6:01] Speaker 4: sequestration and the CEO who is my co founder at
[6:05] Speaker 4: Jettie now, Andrew Perlman. He also had a venture creation
[6:08] Speaker 4: firm which was responsible for creating some of the leading
[6:10] Speaker 4: clean tech one point zero companies spanning areas like geothermal,
[6:14] Speaker 4: bile fuels, water desalination. And so I actually spent half
[6:18] Speaker 4: my time working to support those companies and finding pain
[6:21] Speaker 4: points and ideas to start new ones, and then you know,
[6:24] Speaker 4: the other half bringing at the energy technology startup. So
[6:27] Speaker 4: I found myself at a really interesting intersection of advanced
[6:30] Speaker 4: technology development, the natural resources industry, entrepreneurialism, venture capital. And
[6:36] Speaker 4: you know, some really interesting things took place in those
[6:40] Speaker 4: first couple of years at the startup and the venture
[6:42] Speaker 4: firm that really underlie why Jettie exists today, why I
[6:45] Speaker 4: find myself doing what I do leading the company, you know,
[6:49] Speaker 4: many years later. And so you know, in the first
[6:51] Speaker 4: month that I was at the energy technology startup which
[6:54] Speaker 4: was turning coal the gas and then I mentioned biomass
[6:58] Speaker 4: earlier and natural gas that that point was at all
[7:01] Speaker 4: time highs. So thirteen dollars perm and BTU. The company
[7:04] Speaker 4: was on a rocket ship back by top top investors
[7:06] Speaker 4: like Cliner Perkins, Close Adventures, top strategic partners like Doubt Chemical.
[7:10] Speaker 4: But within two years gas had fallen to around two
[7:13] Speaker 4: dollars and fifty cents perm MV two. So what happened.
[7:17] Speaker 4: Hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling had matured as technologies and
[7:21] Speaker 4: opened up an extraordinary new resource in show formations across
[7:24] Speaker 4: the US. So let's just say it was a little
[7:26] Speaker 4: bit of a surprise. You know, we were a bit blindsided,
[7:29] Speaker 4: And the result is that I was inspired along with
[7:31] Speaker 4: my co founder, to be the one surprising the natural
[7:34] Speaker 4: resources industry the next time, as opposed to being on
[7:37] Speaker 4: the receiving end. And the second major event that I'd
[7:40] Speaker 4: say impacted my thinking was was how the first clean
[7:43] Speaker 4: tech wave played out. It was pretty imparient after a
[7:46] Speaker 4: couple of years that capex intensive technologies funded by vcs
[7:50] Speaker 4: just couldn't get off the ground. And the way people
[7:53] Speaker 4: had expected plants that cost billions of dollars to build
[7:56] Speaker 4: using brand new technologies and played out for the first time,
[8:00] Speaker 4: it just wasn't going to make it. And so my
[8:03] Speaker 4: co founder and I we agreed that any company we
[8:05] Speaker 4: built in the space in the future, had to be ultracapitalize,
[8:08] Speaker 4: had to leverage existing infrastructure, had to be simple enough
[8:11] Speaker 4: and not it disrupped existing flow sheets so that there
[8:14] Speaker 4: was a high likelihood of it actually being accepted. We
[8:17] Speaker 4: thought those were hurdles that we had to get over
[8:19] Speaker 4: to tap any success again deploying advanced technology into the
[8:22] Speaker 4: natural resources sector. So, you know, with all that perspective,
[8:25] Speaker 4: I went out in search of some major pay points
[8:28] Speaker 4: facing the natural resource sector, and eventually I found the
[8:31] Speaker 4: chocolate pyriate problem in the copper mining industry. And the
[8:35] Speaker 4: background this problem is that seventy percent of the world's
[8:37] Speaker 4: remaining copper resources are trapped in or inaccessible to existing technology,
[8:42] Speaker 4: So trillions of dollars worth of copper, and I said,
[8:45] Speaker 4: h yeah, I think that may be big enough. We
[8:47] Speaker 4: were very very oriented by by market size back then
[8:50] Speaker 4: in terms of you know, starting companies, and that seemed
[8:52] Speaker 4: like a big enough pain point for us to go after.
[8:55] Speaker 4: You know, the industry had been trying to solve this
[8:57] Speaker 4: problem for decades without any luck, so maybe it was
[9:00] Speaker 4: a little audacious for us to think that we could,
[9:02] Speaker 4: but nonetheless we forged forward with it. So I sold
[9:05] Speaker 4: my you know, now co founder on the idea. We
[9:07] Speaker 4: went out and supported various projects to sponsored research at universities.
[9:11] Speaker 4: We were trying to develop a method for extracting copper
[9:14] Speaker 4: from that chocoal pyrite that trapped for plaguing in the industry,
[9:17] Speaker 4: and all the initial attempts failed. We spent a couple
[9:20] Speaker 4: of years sponsoring urse research. We just couldn't get anything
[9:23] Speaker 4: to work. There was always a fatal flaw. We considered
[9:25] Speaker 4: walking away, but you know, I reached out. My co
[9:28] Speaker 4: friend actually pushed me to reach out of this one
[9:29] Speaker 4: last professor at the University British Columbia who had a
[9:32] Speaker 4: top materials engineering department and they'd been working in this
[9:35] Speaker 4: area of chocoal parate leaching, and so I reached out
[9:37] Speaker 4: to the professor and he had a postdoc on his team,
[9:40] Speaker 4: a gentleman by the name of Ama Garaman who is
[9:42] Speaker 4: now the CEO of Cyclic Materials, and he had recently
[9:45] Speaker 4: made some really intriguing scientific observations running tests and during
[9:50] Speaker 4: this time he had developed the world's longest nana wire
[9:53] Speaker 4: from chocoal py write this mineral. He was creating thin
[9:56] Speaker 4: film solar cells out of chocolate part so he really,
[9:58] Speaker 4: really knew chocolate right, and in one of his experiments
[10:02] Speaker 4: he actually identified this family of compounds that appeared to
[10:06] Speaker 4: have a catalogic effect on the charcoal pyrite, causing ten
[10:09] Speaker 4: x more copper to exit the mineral than without those compounds.
[10:14] Speaker 4: So he said, this is something pretty interesting. I haven't
[10:17] Speaker 4: seen this before. Maybe there's something we could do with it.
[10:20] Speaker 4: And so at that point we wanted to see if
[10:22] Speaker 4: we could actually develop a technology out of the science,
[10:24] Speaker 4: and so we created a collaborative development agreement with the
[10:27] Speaker 4: University of British Clubia, and by the summer twenty fourteen,
[10:30] Speaker 4: so heading towards ten years ago, the results we're looking
[10:33] Speaker 4: promising enough and we hadn't found any fatal flaws which
[10:36] Speaker 4: we'd ran into before, and so we thought we could
[10:39] Speaker 4: justify actually raising capital, and we incorporated Jetty and we
[10:43] Speaker 4: secured the funding. And we have taken everything that we
[10:46] Speaker 4: learned from those early startups that were in the portfolio,
[10:50] Speaker 4: all those Queen Tech one point zero startups, all the failures,
[10:53] Speaker 4: the successes, how to construct them the best, how to
[10:56] Speaker 4: put fantastic teams around them, protect your intellectual property, make
[10:59] Speaker 4: things simple and have low capex. All of that went
[11:02] Speaker 4: into Jetty, so Jedti truly had a massive leg up,
[11:05] Speaker 4: and so that's how I found myself in the cover sector,
[11:09] Speaker 4: building a technology company that can really disrupt it.
[11:13] Speaker 1: You know, ben ef we definitely look at metals in
[11:16] Speaker 1: future demand, and copper is one of those that you
[11:19] Speaker 1: can find in wind, solar batteries, grids. It's a critical
[11:23] Speaker 1: commodity for the energy transition. But mining activities are also polluting.
[11:28] Speaker 1: So in addition to increasing the accessibility of this important metal,
[11:34] Speaker 1: can you also talk a little bit more about the
[11:35] Speaker 1: problem that Jetty's also able to solve when it comes
[11:39] Speaker 1: to pollution and emissions.
[11:41] Speaker 4: Sure, well, I'll actually cover that in two parts. I
[11:44] Speaker 4: think one of the what's the problem that we're trying
[11:46] Speaker 4: to solve as a company. I think that's unlocking these
[11:50] Speaker 4: restrained copper resources that are needed for an increasingly electrified future.
[11:55] Speaker 4: That's the vision for the company. Fundamentally, as you mentioned,
[11:58] Speaker 4: we believe that the world needs more oper to handle
[12:01] Speaker 4: the expected surge and demand from clean energy technologies, you know,
[12:05] Speaker 4: that will drive decarbonization. Just going further into the angle
[12:08] Speaker 4: you're pursuing there, a three megawatt wind turbine can use
[12:12] Speaker 4: up to four point seven tons of copper. The NEB
[12:15] Speaker 4: requires two point five times more copper than a conventional
[12:18] Speaker 4: internal combustion engine vehicle. And in fact, I think Bloomberg
[12:22] Speaker 4: and e F forecast that copper demand is going to
[12:24] Speaker 4: grow about fifty three percent from now it's twenty forty,
[12:27] Speaker 4: but the supply is only projected to rise by sixteen percent.
[12:30] Speaker 4: So there's a huge structural shortage that's forming. And although
[12:34] Speaker 4: it's going to take you know, many solutions, we believe
[12:36] Speaker 4: Jetti's the industry is best hope right now to deliver
[12:39] Speaker 4: the supply that need to bridge that gap in the
[12:40] Speaker 4: cleanest way. And that's we're all pivot into talking about
[12:43] Speaker 4: specifically what we do and why why we believe we're
[12:46] Speaker 4: truly producing clean copper. So there's all that dropped material
[12:49] Speaker 4: that I've mentioned before, that's seventy percent of the world's
[12:51] Speaker 4: formating copper contained in order that's inaccessible. And so what
[12:55] Speaker 4: happens at these minds, that extraordinary amount of material is
[12:58] Speaker 4: is mind It's it's blasted in the pit, put into
[13:00] Speaker 4: a truck, diesels expended, navigating out of the pit, moving
[13:03] Speaker 4: it to a big waste pile. It's loaded into that
[13:05] Speaker 4: waste pile, and then if you're not leaching it, if
[13:08] Speaker 4: you're not actually getting any copper out of it, it's
[13:10] Speaker 4: left there and it's an environmental liability. And so many companies,
[13:14] Speaker 4: certainly the companies that we work with, manage these waste
[13:18] Speaker 4: piles very diligently and ensure that they're not environmental liabilities.
[13:22] Speaker 4: But I think what Jetty does is it puts a
[13:24] Speaker 4: lot of focus on these waste streams because we're turning
[13:27] Speaker 4: them into revenue streams, and so it allows us to
[13:31] Speaker 4: improve I think, the management of these waste piles. But
[13:34] Speaker 4: also if you think about this material, it's getting mined anyways,
[13:38] Speaker 4: it's oftentimes in the way of higher grade or that's
[13:41] Speaker 4: going to go to a concentrator, and so what we're
[13:44] Speaker 4: doing is actually changing the denominator where for all the
[13:47] Speaker 4: emissions that are already being spent, all the water consumption
[13:50] Speaker 4: that's already happening at these mines, were increasing the copper production,
[13:53] Speaker 4: and so we're driving down the emission's profile water consumption
[13:57] Speaker 4: profile for the entire asset. We're effectively trained positioning it
[14:00] Speaker 4: into being a cleaner asset as a result of the
[14:02] Speaker 4: technology's presence. Also One thing I note is that we're
[14:05] Speaker 4: a hydrometallurgical technology. Our catalyst bolts onto a system that
[14:10] Speaker 4: is run by solution coming into contact with a big
[14:13] Speaker 4: pile of ore, as opposed to a pyrometallurgical process, which
[14:17] Speaker 4: is using extreme heat and chemicals and to break down
[14:22] Speaker 4: and crushing and grinding and milling or and smelting in
[14:26] Speaker 4: order to produce the copper. In the hydrometallurgical world, we
[14:29] Speaker 4: use a microbial system that's existed for three billion years,
[14:34] Speaker 4: lithotrophs and acidophiles that metibolize the iron and copper and
[14:38] Speaker 4: sulfur that's in the ore to release the copper. We
[14:40] Speaker 4: use these solutions that are produced by the ore naturally
[14:43] Speaker 4: to run that process, and then all the copper that's
[14:46] Speaker 4: exiting the heat is solubilized and it goes into a
[14:49] Speaker 4: solvent extraction an electro winning process where over a week's time,
[14:54] Speaker 4: you plate the copper in these in these pools, and
[14:56] Speaker 4: then you have your ninety nine point nine nine nine
[14:59] Speaker 4: percent pure cop product that can be sold to the
[15:02] Speaker 4: market to go into chips and electronics and whatnot. And
[15:05] Speaker 4: so we really think that we're a lynch pin for
[15:09] Speaker 4: allowing the industry to leverage this very low capital and
[15:12] Speaker 4: operating cost technology to also bring about this clean copper
[15:16] Speaker 4: production in a way that the industry hasn't seen before.
[15:19] Speaker 4: So I think those are some of the ways that
[15:21] Speaker 4: we're doing it better than has been done previously, and
[15:23] Speaker 4: we're helping our partners be better stewards of the resources
[15:27] Speaker 4: that they're entrusted to process.
[15:29] Speaker 2: Mike's where are you on the kind of scaling and
[15:32] Speaker 2: commercialization journey? Is this actually happening on the ground with
[15:37] Speaker 2: real clients.
[15:38] Speaker 5: It is?
[15:38] Speaker 4: It is right now. We have two commercial operations that
[15:41] Speaker 4: have been running for years in Arizona in the US,
[15:44] Speaker 4: and at the first one we were able to double
[15:47] Speaker 4: the amount of copper production within one year that was
[15:50] Speaker 4: coming out of an area under leach. At that site
[15:53] Speaker 4: a three hundred million ton stockpile. And so starting back
[15:55] Speaker 4: in twenty twenty, we had proven to the industry that
[15:58] Speaker 4: for the first time, after decades of investigation by the industry,
[16:02] Speaker 4: it was proven that you could actually extract copper from
[16:05] Speaker 4: this stranded or it was possible. And so with that
[16:06] Speaker 4: we were able to attract interest and investment from some
[16:10] Speaker 4: of the world's biggest mining companies such as PHP preport
[16:13] Speaker 4: mac brand tech companies such as BMW and Mitsubishi became
[16:18] Speaker 4: some supporters of the company as investors, and so we
[16:21] Speaker 4: very much are commercial. We're building our third commercial operation
[16:23] Speaker 4: right now in the north of Chile. This site is
[16:26] Speaker 4: going to produce just around ten times more copper than
[16:29] Speaker 4: either of our first operations have and then there's a
[16:32] Speaker 4: pipeline of twenty additional projects behind that. So jet jetty
[16:36] Speaker 4: is a proven commercial technology that is starting to make
[16:40] Speaker 4: an impact right now on the industry.
[16:42] Speaker 2: How exposed are you to the commodity side of things?
[16:45] Speaker 2: Is there a price of copper that underwach doesn't make
[16:48] Speaker 2: sense for you to operate?
[16:50] Speaker 4: Well, you can look at higher metallurgy and leaching as
[16:54] Speaker 4: really the low cost option for the industry to produce copper.
[16:58] Speaker 4: Normally at a big mind, you have two different sides.
[17:01] Speaker 4: You got the concentrator, the pyro metallurgy, where you you
[17:04] Speaker 4: mil the rocks down into into micron size and then
[17:07] Speaker 4: put them in a chemical bath and apply heat and
[17:09] Speaker 4: you're able to create this concentrate that then gets shipped
[17:12] Speaker 4: to a smelter normally in Asia, and so that's the
[17:14] Speaker 4: higher cost approach. It's justified because they're usually working on
[17:18] Speaker 4: higher grade or there's more copper in you know, a
[17:21] Speaker 4: ton of ore than in the lower grade material that
[17:23] Speaker 4: oftentimes goes to the waste stockpile or or if there's
[17:26] Speaker 4: enough copper in it, to the leech stockpile. And over
[17:29] Speaker 4: there you're really just using this acid solution and water
[17:33] Speaker 4: and the microbes do a lot of the work for you.
[17:35] Speaker 4: You know, you're able to leverage this already existing biological
[17:38] Speaker 4: system that's there, and so leaching produces as copper cathode
[17:42] Speaker 4: at the end, and it's oftentimes at half the operating
[17:45] Speaker 4: costs as the pyro metallurgical side, and so we we benefit,
[17:49] Speaker 4: we think in all parts of a cycle. If the
[17:52] Speaker 4: copper prices go high, people want to produce just more
[17:54] Speaker 4: and more and more, and so they're going to push
[17:56] Speaker 4: to do more projects as they can or to pump
[17:58] Speaker 4: as much copper production out of the site as they can.
[18:01] Speaker 4: So they're going to put the foot on the accelerator
[18:03] Speaker 4: for our leaching projects there and then in lower copper
[18:06] Speaker 4: price environments, and we experienced this a couple of years ago.
[18:09] Speaker 4: Actually we've been operating since twenty nineteen commercially, so We've
[18:12] Speaker 4: been through highs and those of copper price, and what
[18:15] Speaker 4: we saw when copper price plummeted is that there was
[18:18] Speaker 4: a significant increased interest on behalf of the miner to
[18:22] Speaker 4: ratchet up production from the leach side because well, that's
[18:24] Speaker 4: lower cost copper, you've got better margins, and they'll pull
[18:27] Speaker 4: back a little bit on the concentrator. So we think
[18:29] Speaker 4: we were very, very very well positioned to participate in
[18:33] Speaker 4: any part of the cycle.
[18:34] Speaker 2: Really and what's your plan for the future.
[18:37] Speaker 4: It's really focused on additional rollout of the technology some
[18:41] Speaker 4: of the world's largest mines over the next couple of years.
[18:44] Speaker 4: As I mentioned before, we've got this very strong pipeline
[18:47] Speaker 4: of opportunities that we're transitioning into project phase right now.
[18:50] Speaker 4: We have a couple very large minds that we've been
[18:53] Speaker 4: testing with for quite some time. One of them is
[18:56] Speaker 4: Escondida by BHP, the world's largest copper mind. Like our
[19:00] Speaker 4: technology has the potential to make a real impact there
[19:04] Speaker 4: and at many other large minds. So we are in
[19:06] Speaker 4: execution mode as a company. We're looking at delivering these
[19:09] Speaker 4: high quality projects for our partners and have a real
[19:12] Speaker 4: impact at their sites to drive down their costs and
[19:15] Speaker 4: be able to bring about I mentioned this before, be
[19:17] Speaker 4: able to bring about minds worth of copper production from
[19:20] Speaker 4: an already existing asset, so that the industry has less
[19:23] Speaker 4: of a need to do the exploration to find new
[19:24] Speaker 4: minds to better use the resources that we already have.
[19:28] Speaker 4: We think we're a real facilitator of resource maximization. So
[19:31] Speaker 4: we are an execution, commercial project oriented company right now,
[19:36] Speaker 4: and we want to do it at the most significant
[19:38] Speaker 4: level as we can. So that's what you can expect
[19:41] Speaker 4: to see from us for the next year, is playing
[19:43] Speaker 4: this role as a lynchpin for the industry to bring
[19:46] Speaker 4: about that needed copper production.
[19:48] Speaker 1: Mike, thank you very much for telling us a bit
[19:50] Speaker 1: more about Jetty, your technology and how you're unlocking the
[19:53] Speaker 1: availability of copper for so many industries that rely on
[19:57] Speaker 1: this really important metal.
[19:59] Speaker 4: Welcome Dantam.
[20:05] Speaker 1: Now let's hear from our next guest, Megan O'Connor, the
[20:08] Speaker 1: co founder and CEO of end Cycle en Cycles. Metal
[20:12] Speaker 1: refining technology transforms feedstocks, including scrap and end of life electronics,
[20:18] Speaker 1: into high purity critical metals in their modular, commercial scale
[20:22] Speaker 1: electro extraction unit.
[20:24] Speaker 2: Called the Oyster.
[20:30] Speaker 1: Megan, thank you so much. For joining us today.
[20:32] Speaker 3: Yes, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be on.
[20:35] Speaker 1: Well, Megan, I want to know a little bit more
[20:36] Speaker 1: about you, so talk a little bit about really how
[20:40] Speaker 1: you came to this industry, and let's talk about you
[20:43] Speaker 1: before we talk about the technology and the business.
[20:45] Speaker 3: Sure. Sure. So I'm one of the co founders and
[20:48] Speaker 3: the CEO of end Cycle.
[20:50] Speaker 5: We started the company back in twenty seventeen, and really
[20:54] Speaker 5: the history of the company and how we came to
[20:56] Speaker 5: this idea because I'm a first time founder, so I
[20:58] Speaker 5: was in academia before this actual I was getting my
[21:01] Speaker 5: PhD when I met my co founder, Chad Basidis, who
[21:05] Speaker 5: was a full time professor at Harvard at the time,
[21:07] Speaker 5: and he had developed this really cool technology that's now
[21:10] Speaker 5: at the core of what we do at Encycle, but
[21:12] Speaker 5: he had developed it for completely different application and wastewater treatment,
[21:15] Speaker 5: and it was all luck I think that I saw
[21:17] Speaker 5: him just giving a talk on the technology and I thought, Wow,
[21:20] Speaker 5: this is really cool how he sought to combine these
[21:23] Speaker 5: age old processes from the chemical industry for this application,
[21:28] Speaker 5: but didn't really think much else of it at the time.
[21:30] Speaker 3: A few months later, I found myself at this event.
[21:33] Speaker 5: Called the Green Electronics Summit at the university I was at,
[21:36] Speaker 5: and I was a professor who had been able to
[21:37] Speaker 5: invite really the lead in the consumer electronics industry, I think,
[21:41] Speaker 5: like Apple and Dell and all these companies who were
[21:44] Speaker 5: trying to be really green and transparent with their supply chains.
[21:46] Speaker 5: And so they were all at this event talking about
[21:48] Speaker 5: the sustainability issues they saw coming down the road over
[21:51] Speaker 5: the next five to ten years. And this was back
[21:53] Speaker 5: in twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, so it was over ten
[21:56] Speaker 5: years ago, or almost ten years ago.
[21:57] Speaker 3: And I should say, and you know, I fought my
[21:59] Speaker 3: way into that room.
[22:00] Speaker 5: Because students weren't It was not open to students, and
[22:03] Speaker 5: so I bagged my way in and they finally let
[22:05] Speaker 5: me be the bribe for nine hours, so taking notes
[22:07] Speaker 5: for nine hours. But it was so worth doing that
[22:09] Speaker 5: because over and over again in that room, I kept
[22:11] Speaker 5: hearing the same two themes, the same two problems from
[22:14] Speaker 5: every company that spoke.
[22:15] Speaker 3: The first one was waste management. All of these companies
[22:17] Speaker 3: are producing, whether it's laptops or cell phones or some
[22:20] Speaker 3: type of consumer electronic device, and they were all worried
[22:23] Speaker 3: about what was.
[22:23] Speaker 5: Going to happen with all of these devices once they
[22:25] Speaker 5: reached their end of life. Right, we don't have a
[22:27] Speaker 5: waste management solution right now. Our solution is to collect
[22:30] Speaker 5: everything and then ship it overseas, either to be landfilled
[22:33] Speaker 5: or quote unquote recycled in some capacity. And the second
[22:36] Speaker 5: theme I heard was these folks were worried about supply chain.
[22:38] Speaker 3: Right.
[22:39] Speaker 5: They all use cobalts and nickel, these critical mineral that
[22:42] Speaker 5: I think a lot of people here but might not
[22:43] Speaker 5: know what they are. And these are really like the
[22:45] Speaker 5: building blocks of the clean energy economy. And they were
[22:48] Speaker 5: worried about the small amounts that they used in these
[22:50] Speaker 5: consumer electronics.
[22:51] Speaker 3: And they said, imagine a world ten years from now when.
[22:54] Speaker 5: Hopefully electric vehicles will be much more abundant on the road,
[22:57] Speaker 5: and they use orders of magnitude more of these metals.
[23:00] Speaker 3: And they're not the only technology that do.
[23:02] Speaker 5: Right, we have winterbines that use these metals different critical
[23:04] Speaker 5: mineralized to day, but in the same category we have
[23:07] Speaker 5: solar panels. And where are we going to get all
[23:09] Speaker 5: these materials from when there's already an issue with supply
[23:12] Speaker 5: chain and we're not even really building any of this
[23:14] Speaker 5: technology yet. And so I walked at that room feeling
[23:17] Speaker 5: pretty inspired to actually completely change my PhD projects. I
[23:20] Speaker 5: was not working in the critical mineral space at all,
[23:22] Speaker 5: but to try and figure out a way to sort
[23:23] Speaker 5: of solve these two issues at the same time with
[23:26] Speaker 5: developing a way to refine end of life materials like
[23:29] Speaker 5: end of life batteries, to turn them into the materials
[23:32] Speaker 5: that we need right to create a much more robust
[23:34] Speaker 5: sustainable supply chain here domestically and within the Western world
[23:37] Speaker 5: in general, because we all face the same issues over here.
[23:40] Speaker 3: And so I.
[23:40] Speaker 5: Walked up into my PhD advisor's office and I asked
[23:43] Speaker 5: her if I could push my project thinking back to
[23:46] Speaker 5: Chad's technology, so to bring it back to Chad, and
[23:48] Speaker 5: I said, Chad, I wonder if this technology could work
[23:51] Speaker 5: for metal refining, and he said he thought it could
[23:53] Speaker 5: and he was.
[23:53] Speaker 3: Happy for me to work on it. And so that's
[23:55] Speaker 3: what I did. For the next three years. We co
[23:57] Speaker 3: developed it, and that's what I wrote my dissertation on.
[23:59] Speaker 5: And then we got to the end of that journey
[24:01] Speaker 5: and I graduated, and the next day I started the
[24:03] Speaker 5: company because I felt like there was so much potential
[24:06] Speaker 5: and need for innovation in the critical minerals refining space,
[24:09] Speaker 5: which is really where we sit.
[24:10] Speaker 2: Wow, that's so tell us a bit more about how
[24:14] Speaker 2: do we recycle batteries today and kind of about how
[24:17] Speaker 2: unique your solution is. What are you doing that is different?
[24:21] Speaker 3: Absolutely so if you look at the world of refining,
[24:24] Speaker 3: we call ourselves a metal refining company because really all
[24:28] Speaker 3: material is pretty much refined in the same way, whether
[24:31] Speaker 3: it's end of life materials like a spent lithy mind battery,
[24:34] Speaker 3: and even if you look at the front end of
[24:37] Speaker 3: the value chain and how we pull metals out of
[24:39] Speaker 3: the ground with mining and refine them, it's actually very
[24:41] Speaker 3: similar processes in which both of these either end of
[24:44] Speaker 3: life or beginning of life materials are processed.
[24:47] Speaker 5: And especially in the Western world, typically what happens is
[24:49] Speaker 5: they are collected by quote unquote recyclers.
[24:52] Speaker 3: So these are just folks on the logistics.
[24:53] Speaker 5: Side who have various channels to collect these materials. They
[24:57] Speaker 5: might shred them down to make them less hazardous, to
[24:59] Speaker 5: be a to shift them really overseas or at least
[25:02] Speaker 5: very far distances. We don't have much refining capacity here,
[25:05] Speaker 5: at least in the US, so it typically shipped overseas
[25:08] Speaker 5: to be smelted into intermediate materials. So smelting, if folks
[25:11] Speaker 5: don't know out there, it's think of it like a
[25:13] Speaker 5: large furnace. It's very high temperature, high pressure to really
[25:16] Speaker 5: thermally separate out a lot of these metals. And then
[25:18] Speaker 5: it typically goes through a what I call final refining step,
[25:21] Speaker 5: which is called hydro metallurgy, which is a fancy word
[25:24] Speaker 5: to say they use a lot of chemicals and solvents
[25:26] Speaker 5: to purify the metals into their purest form that we
[25:30] Speaker 5: sell it at. And so, as you can tell from
[25:32] Speaker 5: just that description, it's a very long process to get
[25:35] Speaker 5: these materials into a usable form, and these materials are
[25:38] Speaker 5: shipped across the world several times, and so what in
[25:41] Speaker 5: cycle When we looked at the supply chain, we said, okay,
[25:44] Speaker 5: if our goal as a company and our vision is
[25:46] Speaker 5: to get as much of these materials into circulation as possible,
[25:49] Speaker 5: a where can we.
[25:50] Speaker 3: Pull them from?
[25:51] Speaker 4: Right?
[25:51] Speaker 3: Recycling is one avenue, but mining more of them but
[25:55] Speaker 3: in a sustainable way is another. And so we wanted
[25:57] Speaker 3: to build essentially what a smeltered does us, which is
[26:00] Speaker 3: take all of this different type of material, but do
[26:03] Speaker 3: it in a much more sustainable and localized way. So
[26:06] Speaker 3: instead of having to build a large centralized facility and
[26:08] Speaker 3: ship all of your materials, regardless of what they are,
[26:11] Speaker 3: to that centralized facility, we wanted to develop a modular
[26:14] Speaker 3: system that could actually go on site with wherever these
[26:17] Speaker 3: batteries are or.
[26:18] Speaker 5: At a mining site, so that you don't have to
[26:20] Speaker 5: worry about the cost of shipping these because that's usually
[26:23] Speaker 5: a huge barrier to actually getting these materials refined in
[26:26] Speaker 5: anything usable, and then the environmental the carbon that is
[26:30] Speaker 5: associated with all that shipping around the world several times.
[26:32] Speaker 5: And so that's really how we've changed the way that
[26:35] Speaker 5: not just battery recycling, because I would say a lot
[26:37] Speaker 5: of the battery recyclers out there, you know, quote unquote
[26:40] Speaker 5: are vertically integrated, so they're collecting batteries, they're shredding them,
[26:43] Speaker 5: they're chemically processing them with off the shelf very traditional
[26:46] Speaker 5: technology and turning them back into battery materials.
[26:49] Speaker 3: And we work with a lot of.
[26:51] Speaker 5: These folks because we see ourselves as really just the
[26:54] Speaker 5: technology partner, and so we want to be able to
[26:56] Speaker 5: help them process with an innovative, you.
[26:58] Speaker 3: Know, much more efficient low car.
[27:00] Speaker 5: Urban technology, and we want to be able to process
[27:03] Speaker 5: more than.
[27:03] Speaker 3: Just batteries, because unfortunately, even if we.
[27:05] Speaker 5: Recycle one hundred percent of lithium ion in the next
[27:08] Speaker 5: day ten years, it's not going to quite get us
[27:10] Speaker 5: enough of this raw cobalt and nickel and other materials
[27:13] Speaker 5: like copper that we need to suffice demands. And so
[27:16] Speaker 5: what end Cycle is doing is trying to pull from
[27:18] Speaker 5: all the different industrial scrap resources that we have to
[27:21] Speaker 5: think catalysts from the oil and gas space, or heavy
[27:23] Speaker 5: and nickel. We are looking at the steel industry with
[27:25] Speaker 5: the slag we're because thats the nickel, We're looking at nickel, alloy,
[27:31] Speaker 5: scrap materials, all of these materials that go unrecycled. That
[27:34] Speaker 5: with our modular unique technology, we can go on site
[27:37] Speaker 5: and process that into materials that can either go back
[27:40] Speaker 5: into a battery or into other clean energy technology spaces.
[27:43] Speaker 1: You reference the modular system and the ability to actually
[27:46] Speaker 1: physically place it next to where the work actually needs
[27:50] Speaker 1: to take place, reducing emissions associated with shipping. Can you
[27:53] Speaker 1: put it in context in terms of what are the
[27:56] Speaker 1: emissions benefits? How big is the carbon benefit of this system?
[28:01] Speaker 4: Absolutely?
[28:02] Speaker 5: So, we had a third party consulting firm help us
[28:04] Speaker 5: with this to verify that our emission could be much
[28:07] Speaker 5: much lower, and it's really attributed to the way the
[28:10] Speaker 5: technology work in that we use electricity to produce the
[28:13] Speaker 5: chemicals that we need versus having them made from fossil
[28:17] Speaker 5: and then ship to site to be used. And so
[28:19] Speaker 5: that's really where the bulk of our reduction comes from
[28:22] Speaker 5: in emissions and in terms of numbers, we are forty
[28:25] Speaker 5: four percent cleaner than traditional hydrometallurgical processing that's used in
[28:30] Speaker 5: recycling today, and then we can be up to ninety
[28:32] Speaker 5: two percent lower carbon emissions than the traditional mining route
[28:35] Speaker 5: for nickel for laterit mining.
[28:38] Speaker 1: Can we talk about the economics here. We're at a
[28:41] Speaker 1: point in history where people are definitely interested businesses are
[28:44] Speaker 1: interested in paying a premium for recycled content. But looking
[28:48] Speaker 1: into the future, this will need to be cost competitive
[28:51] Speaker 1: in order to get it at wide scale. Where do
[28:54] Speaker 1: you see the cost competitiveness now compared to virgin materials
[28:59] Speaker 1: and where do you see it going in the future.
[29:00] Speaker 5: So when we started this business, we knew right because
[29:03] Speaker 5: these centralized facilities have been around for decades, right centuries
[29:06] Speaker 5: in some cases, and we knew that we needed to
[29:09] Speaker 5: at least be cost competitive or have the same essentially
[29:12] Speaker 5: treatment charges for those familiar with the industry that a
[29:15] Speaker 5: smelter would, because that's really what we're trying to replace here.
[29:18] Speaker 5: So we are very proud to say that even in
[29:20] Speaker 5: our first facility, we will be at cost with what's
[29:24] Speaker 5: smelting charges for treatment charges, and so this is a
[29:26] Speaker 5: very cost competitive solution with the additional benefit of the
[29:29] Speaker 5: carbon savings. Right, So we're not even accounting for the
[29:32] Speaker 5: premiums or other things that we might see that are
[29:34] Speaker 5: coming out of the regulatory environment in Europe or the
[29:37] Speaker 5: Inflation Reduction Act here in the US. Right, we really
[29:40] Speaker 5: wanted to basically stand on our own two feet and
[29:42] Speaker 5: show that we can essentially shrink what a centralized facility
[29:46] Speaker 5: looks like but have the same unit economics, right because
[29:48] Speaker 5: one of the major issues of having a centralized facility
[29:51] Speaker 5: here in the US is that we don't.
[29:52] Speaker 3: Have large assets to pull from.
[29:54] Speaker 5: So typically these smelters are set up next to a
[29:57] Speaker 5: very large I think fifty plus year mind to justify
[30:00] Speaker 5: the capital expense to build one of these, which is
[30:03] Speaker 5: typically in the billions of dollars, and we wanted to
[30:05] Speaker 5: show that we can have the same unit economics excuse me,
[30:07] Speaker 5: with a modular system that can process a fraction about
[30:10] Speaker 5: these other facilities are built to handle, but then to
[30:13] Speaker 5: be able to scale over time. So we really looked
[30:15] Speaker 5: at other industries that have modular systems and tried to
[30:18] Speaker 5: mimic that to grow with the battery recycling industry, for example,
[30:22] Speaker 5: because we don't need something that can process sixty thousand
[30:24] Speaker 5: metric tons a year.
[30:25] Speaker 3: We need something that can process about five thousand metric
[30:28] Speaker 3: tons a year.
[30:28] Speaker 5: We don't want that stranded access capacity, and so that's
[30:31] Speaker 5: really where we think we have achieved.
[30:33] Speaker 3: What we've set out to do.
[30:34] Speaker 5: Is showing that the unit economics work at this scale
[30:37] Speaker 5: as well as at a large scale if we were
[30:39] Speaker 5: to go to a mining site.
[30:40] Speaker 2: So you mentioned the first facilities, and so where are
[30:44] Speaker 2: you on the commercialization journey? Where are you now?
[30:47] Speaker 5: We have our first facility that will be under commissioning
[30:52] Speaker 5: right now, will be up and running and producing nickel
[30:55] Speaker 5: mixed hydroxide product, which is a nickel product that can
[30:57] Speaker 5: be used in the battery industry in a variety of
[31:00] Speaker 5: other nickel heavy industries that will be running at the
[31:03] Speaker 5: end of Q two of twenty twenty four.
[31:05] Speaker 3: So we're very excited. We'll be the first nickel refinery
[31:07] Speaker 3: in the US and so we'll.
[31:08] Speaker 5: Be processing end of life materials at the facility and
[31:11] Speaker 5: it's in Ohio.
[31:12] Speaker 6: Wow.
[31:13] Speaker 2: And what's coming up next the side of the new facilities.
[31:16] Speaker 2: I saw in the press potentially a B round that
[31:19] Speaker 2: you are working on.
[31:20] Speaker 3: Yes, So as.
[31:22] Speaker 5: A pre revenue company, right, we're always fundraising and so
[31:25] Speaker 5: we are excited to be expanding in terms of projects.
[31:28] Speaker 5: So we hope to deploy several other projects after this
[31:31] Speaker 5: first Ohio facility. It has been running not just here
[31:34] Speaker 5: in North America, but in Europe as well, and so
[31:36] Speaker 5: we're in the process of looking and scouting for locations
[31:40] Speaker 5: in Europe to start growing our business over there as well.
[31:42] Speaker 5: So that's really the upcoming exciting things I should say
[31:45] Speaker 5: for Encycle.
[31:46] Speaker 1: And one of the last things I want to do
[31:48] Speaker 1: is do a bit of a definition game, because I
[31:50] Speaker 1: find that as soon as you start to get into
[31:52] Speaker 1: any industry, there's a lot of different terms. Certainly a
[31:54] Speaker 1: lot of different acronyms, but a lot of different terms
[31:57] Speaker 1: that not everyone is familiar with. So can you start
[32:01] Speaker 1: by explaining black mass, why and what is it?
[32:05] Speaker 5: Absolutely I agree with you there's a lot of interesting
[32:08] Speaker 5: terminology in this space. So black mass is basically a powder.
[32:13] Speaker 5: You can think of it as the product of shredded batteries.
[32:15] Speaker 5: So lithiumine batteries come in, whether it's from an ev
[32:18] Speaker 5: PAC or it's from a self owner laptop, it's dismantled
[32:21] Speaker 5: in some capacity. It's then shredded and mechanically separated. And
[32:25] Speaker 5: so the black mass is really the graphite from the
[32:28] Speaker 5: and outside of the battery. Then you have, depending on
[32:30] Speaker 5: what the chemistry is, you have the cobalt, the nickel,
[32:32] Speaker 5: the manganese.
[32:33] Speaker 3: You might have a little bit of copper in there.
[32:35] Speaker 5: So it really, I mean, it's a very generic name
[32:38] Speaker 5: in that it really does look like black mass.
[32:40] Speaker 3: It looks like black powder.
[32:42] Speaker 1: It's putting the name on the tin. The other the
[32:45] Speaker 1: other terms that are used here, and you mentioned earlier hydrometallurgy,
[32:49] Speaker 1: which is one of the incumbent ways of actually going
[32:52] Speaker 1: through this chemical process. Your company is using electro extraction,
[32:56] Speaker 1: but what is pyro metallurgy.
[32:58] Speaker 5: So pyrometallurgy is is where they use heat. So as
[33:02] Speaker 5: the name suggests, they you typically use very high temperatures
[33:06] Speaker 5: and sometimes high pressures to really melt or burn a
[33:09] Speaker 5: lot of these materials to separate out the metals from
[33:12] Speaker 5: maybe the rest of the materials. So, for example, for
[33:14] Speaker 5: black mass, you can essentially burn away the graphite and
[33:17] Speaker 5: you'd be left with the metals. And so that's a
[33:19] Speaker 5: typical method in which black mass is processed today.
[33:22] Speaker 1: It is CCS technology used for something like pyrometallurgy. Are
[33:26] Speaker 1: there other things going on that you're seeing as ways
[33:29] Speaker 1: to decarbonize that are essentially maybe even competitors to your technology.
[33:33] Speaker 3: I think we're seeing a lot of interesting technology come
[33:36] Speaker 3: out because again, as they mentioned before, this industry really
[33:38] Speaker 3: hasn't seen innovation in many, many, many decades, if ever,
[33:42] Speaker 3: and so I think a lot of folks are trying
[33:44] Speaker 3: to figure out a way to espucially, what we're doing
[33:46] Speaker 3: is modularize the system because they're realizing that, hey, the
[33:50] Speaker 3: weights that we're going after are just simply not all
[33:53] Speaker 3: aggravated in one place.
[33:54] Speaker 4: Right.
[33:55] Speaker 5: The transportation is a huge, huge limitation, and you really
[33:58] Speaker 5: have to get to large scale for theseralized facilities to
[34:01] Speaker 5: operate profitably.
[34:02] Speaker 3: And so you're seeing a lot.
[34:03] Speaker 5: Of interesting plays on hydrometallurgy to a lot of different
[34:06] Speaker 5: new solvent extraction technology, which is really the very very
[34:09] Speaker 5: end point where they use lots of solvents to pull
[34:11] Speaker 5: out these materials in their purest form. You're seeing modularized
[34:14] Speaker 5: versions of that. You're seeing some new takes on how
[34:17] Speaker 5: we do the front end of hydrometallurgy, so the different
[34:19] Speaker 5: acids and combinations of acids that you can use to
[34:22] Speaker 5: make that's a cleaner process. And so again, I don't
[34:24] Speaker 5: know if we necessarily see them as competitors, because I
[34:26] Speaker 5: think we will need all of these solutions to really
[34:29] Speaker 5: decarbonize this entire industry.
[34:30] Speaker 3: Because we think about our market as the.
[34:32] Speaker 5: Metals industry for like Cobalt and Nike at least today,
[34:35] Speaker 5: and these are massive industries right and there's a lot
[34:38] Speaker 5: of room for many players. But we hope to be
[34:41] Speaker 5: the refining partner that helps with at least that first
[34:44] Speaker 5: refining process which is replacing the pyro metallurgy and the
[34:47] Speaker 5: smell things I mentioned before, Whereas there'll be players downstream
[34:51] Speaker 5: from us that will take the material that we produce
[34:53] Speaker 5: and refine it even further. And so I think there's
[34:55] Speaker 5: a place for all of us, I think, in this
[34:56] Speaker 5: value chain, and I think that's how we're going to
[34:58] Speaker 5: truly decarbonize, is working to get.
[35:00] Speaker 1: Other Megan, it's so great to have you here today,
[35:02] Speaker 1: and it's always exciting to talk to innovators about what's
[35:05] Speaker 1: coming up next. We are all going to be watching
[35:08] Speaker 1: end Cycle and thank you for explaining the technology.
[35:11] Speaker 3: Yes, thank you so much for having me on today.
[35:13] Speaker 3: It's been great.
[35:19] Speaker 1: And now onto our third and final interview with Tim Johnson,
[35:23] Speaker 1: the co founder and executive chairman of life Cycle. Life
[35:27] Speaker 1: Cycle specializes in lithium battery and resource recovery using their
[35:31] Speaker 1: spoken hub facilities, which also create a secondary supply of
[35:35] Speaker 1: battery grade metals. Tim, thank you very much for joining
[35:43] Speaker 1: the show today.
[35:44] Speaker 6: Thank you very much for having me.
[35:46] Speaker 1: Let's start at the beginning of your story. Could you
[35:49] Speaker 1: tell us a little bit about how you came into
[35:52] Speaker 1: the battery industry.
[35:53] Speaker 6: Yeah, absolutely so. My background is a mechanical engineer, and
[35:57] Speaker 6: so I sawed out my life actually within the metallurgical world,
[36:01] Speaker 6: and I was very fortunate back in the late two
[36:03] Speaker 6: thousands to get involved in the development of a lithium
[36:07] Speaker 6: project actually in China. It was the first fully continuous
[36:10] Speaker 6: lithium carbonate plant that was built. And then on the
[36:13] Speaker 6: back of that, we built a especially lithium practice and
[36:16] Speaker 6: so started working with clients and helping them develop lithium
[36:19] Speaker 6: assets all over the world. So it has been, you know,
[36:21] Speaker 6: a journey from was called it traditional mining and refining
[36:25] Speaker 6: to today recycling, which is really what I focus on
[36:28] Speaker 6: and taking the skill set from one and applying it
[36:30] Speaker 6: to the other.
[36:31] Speaker 2: So can you take us through how do we actually
[36:34] Speaker 2: recycle batteries? What's the process?
[36:37] Speaker 6: Absolutely, there's essentially two steps to recycling batteries today when
[36:41] Speaker 6: we were talking general terms, it's pre processing and post processing.
[36:45] Speaker 6: And the pre processing step is all about turning batteries,
[36:48] Speaker 6: all different forms of lithium mine batteries essentially into an
[36:52] Speaker 6: isolated product which we call black mass, which is a
[36:55] Speaker 6: very unimaginative explanation of what the anode and cathode materials
[36:59] Speaker 6: from within in the lithium mind batteries look like. We
[37:02] Speaker 6: then take that forward into the post processing step or
[37:05] Speaker 6: the refining step, where we're taking the black mass and
[37:08] Speaker 6: now we're converting it back into usable materials that can
[37:11] Speaker 6: go back into batteries. And there's a whole range of
[37:14] Speaker 6: different technologies. We as LFE cycle have a bespoke set
[37:17] Speaker 6: of technologies that we developed for these applications, but there's
[37:20] Speaker 6: a wide variety of technologies that exist out there in industry.
[37:23] Speaker 2: So what's that unique about kind of life cycle approach?
[37:27] Speaker 2: What's unique about your ways of recycling batteries.
[37:31] Speaker 6: So with our pre processing facilities, which we call spokes,
[37:34] Speaker 6: we're able to process any form of lithium mind battery,
[37:37] Speaker 6: regardless of full factor or chemistry. And the key aspects
[37:41] Speaker 6: of what we do with the pre processing facilities, which
[37:44] Speaker 6: is different to the rest of the industry, is that
[37:46] Speaker 6: we're able to process them without having to discharge or
[37:49] Speaker 6: disassemble them. And that's a really important fact when you're
[37:52] Speaker 6: looking at how to scale these industries and how you
[37:55] Speaker 6: go from processing killograms and materials to thousands of tons
[37:59] Speaker 6: of materials, which is what we do today. And we
[38:01] Speaker 6: can do that because we developed a process called submoge threading,
[38:05] Speaker 6: and submoge treading is a novel way of processing batteries
[38:09] Speaker 6: in a water based system. And what we're able to
[38:12] Speaker 6: do is we're able to deal with three characteristics that
[38:15] Speaker 6: we're concerned about when processing with your mind batteries. One
[38:18] Speaker 6: is we're able to mitigate the potential for fire, the
[38:21] Speaker 6: second is that we can handle the energy that's released
[38:23] Speaker 6: from the battery as are being broken down in a
[38:26] Speaker 6: safe way by cooling the system effectively. And then third,
[38:29] Speaker 6: we're able to chemically treat the electrolyte, which is a
[38:32] Speaker 6: potential harmful compound that exists within these lithium ion batteries.
[38:36] Speaker 6: And we do all of this without any thermal processing.
[38:39] Speaker 6: We don't have any affluent wastewater discharge from the sites.
[38:43] Speaker 6: You compare this to how lithium ion batteries have been
[38:46] Speaker 6: processed traditionally. Typically, what would happen is that these materials
[38:50] Speaker 6: would come to a facility, they would be discharged, dismantled,
[38:54] Speaker 6: and then they go through some form of thermal processing.
[38:58] Speaker 6: And one of the challenges that we are then fight
[39:00] Speaker 6: and addressed was, well, where these thermal processes, you're effectively
[39:04] Speaker 6: burning off the plastics and the electrolytes and the other
[39:06] Speaker 6: organic compounds within the battery. And if you think about
[39:10] Speaker 6: why are we doing this in the first place, the
[39:11] Speaker 6: reason why we're doing this in the first place is
[39:13] Speaker 6: to support a more sustainable future, and we didn't see
[39:16] Speaker 6: that as being congruent with the industry in which we
[39:19] Speaker 6: were trying to help support and build, and that's why
[39:22] Speaker 6: we went to our own preprocessing technology. When it came
[39:25] Speaker 6: to the refining and the post processing side of the business.
[39:29] Speaker 6: What we realized there is that there is significant challenges
[39:33] Speaker 6: with building and scaling up any sort of operation, and
[39:35] Speaker 6: so the best thing that we could do was to
[39:37] Speaker 6: take lessons and technologies that existed in the mining and
[39:41] Speaker 6: refining world and then apply it to the recycling of
[39:45] Speaker 6: the your mind batteries. So if you look at our
[39:47] Speaker 6: hub process, our refining process, it's essentially a series of
[39:51] Speaker 6: steps that are done in the tritional mining and refining world,
[39:54] Speaker 6: but brought together in a novel way. And why novel
[39:57] Speaker 6: because in our Earth's crust today, we don't nickel, cobalt
[40:01] Speaker 6: and lipya coexisting in singular deposits. They're formed in different
[40:05] Speaker 6: ways and from a geological perspective, but they are processed
[40:09] Speaker 6: using similar chemistries in different operations, and so we're able
[40:14] Speaker 6: to bring the knowledge and understanding of how these two
[40:16] Speaker 6: different segments exist that bring them together, and that's ultimately
[40:20] Speaker 6: how we developed our refining technology.
[40:22] Speaker 1: These are important innovations in what is likely to be
[40:26] Speaker 1: a growing market. B and E F research would certainly
[40:29] Speaker 1: point to the need for more batteries for stationary storage
[40:32] Speaker 1: and for vehicles. So there's going to be a lot
[40:34] Speaker 1: of batteries to be recycled. And what I want to
[40:36] Speaker 1: know is, with the innovations that you have come up with,
[40:39] Speaker 1: how much growth do you expect seeing for this type
[40:42] Speaker 1: of technology and this application and basically how big do
[40:46] Speaker 1: you see this market getting.
[40:47] Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean we're just starting to scratch the surface.
[40:50] Speaker 6: This decade of growth is really being driven by the
[40:54] Speaker 6: production of new cells and new batteries that are going
[40:58] Speaker 6: into particularly the electric vehicle and end of storage industries
[41:02] Speaker 6: around the world. So you can see the recycling demand
[41:05] Speaker 6: through to twenty thirty largely being associated with that. However,
[41:09] Speaker 6: we're now into this phase where we're starting to see
[41:12] Speaker 6: early generations of electric vehicles reach the end of their
[41:15] Speaker 6: useful and practical lives as vehicles, and now there's the
[41:19] Speaker 6: opportunity to start to recycle those ends of what we
[41:21] Speaker 6: call end of life materials from these batteries. And so
[41:24] Speaker 6: if we look forward, you know, we look at last
[41:27] Speaker 6: cycle at in twenty thirty and we say, okay, so Rochester,
[41:30] Speaker 6: a hub in Rochester is able to process thirty five
[41:33] Speaker 6: thousand times per year of black mass. That's not going
[41:35] Speaker 6: to mean a lot to a lot of people. You know,
[41:37] Speaker 6: what that actually equates to is about ninety thousand electric
[41:41] Speaker 6: vehicles worth of battery materials. And so for us, we
[41:45] Speaker 6: say that that's probably around ten percent of the total
[41:48] Speaker 6: addressable market for North America by twenty thirty. So even
[41:51] Speaker 6: though it's a very large facility, the largest that's ever
[41:54] Speaker 6: been built in the Western world, it's still relatively small
[41:58] Speaker 6: when you fast forward just a few years. And then
[42:00] Speaker 6: if you look at the size of the market by
[42:02] Speaker 6: twenty forty, it's once again it's an auder of magnitude
[42:05] Speaker 6: or multiple order magnitude bigger again, because now what we're
[42:09] Speaker 6: seeing in the next decade is really this very fast
[42:12] Speaker 6: growth of end of life materials that are coming into
[42:15] Speaker 6: the market. As what we've seen is the uprising of
[42:17] Speaker 6: electric vehicles in the first half of this decade start
[42:20] Speaker 6: to reach the end of their life in the next decade.
[42:22] Speaker 1: And do you think there'll be a dominant technology approach
[42:25] Speaker 1: to actually processing these batteries or do you think that'll
[42:28] Speaker 1: be a number of different approaches that are fit for
[42:31] Speaker 1: purpose in specific regions.
[42:33] Speaker 6: Yeah, and so I think that there's always going to
[42:35] Speaker 6: be a variety. We see this in the base metal
[42:38] Speaker 6: world as well. I wouldn't say that there's going to
[42:40] Speaker 6: be one technology that trumps another technology out right. What
[42:46] Speaker 6: I would say is there's definitely trends. And what we
[42:49] Speaker 6: see is the trend for particularly on the refining side,
[42:52] Speaker 6: is definitely towards what we call hydromenological or the wet
[42:55] Speaker 6: chemistry approach, and most of the new developments are really
[42:58] Speaker 6: focused on use this style of technology or this family
[43:02] Speaker 6: of technologies in order to process black mass. On the
[43:06] Speaker 6: pre processing side, what we're starting to see is, I
[43:10] Speaker 6: guess a convergence into really three key technology groups. You
[43:14] Speaker 6: have the live cycle which develop the submerge threading technology
[43:17] Speaker 6: which I was talking about, And you have the traditional
[43:20] Speaker 6: groups which will continue to thermally treat the amound batteries.
[43:23] Speaker 6: And then you have a third group which is focused
[43:26] Speaker 6: on what we call a Nert treading, which is effectively
[43:29] Speaker 6: using a Nert gas to reduce the atmosphere and reduce
[43:32] Speaker 6: the oxygen within the system or they're processing the batteries.
[43:36] Speaker 6: And I think those three technologies, based on region, based
[43:39] Speaker 6: on a number of different factors, will continue to coexist
[43:43] Speaker 6: in that pre processing world.
[43:45] Speaker 1: Let's talk a little bit about market conditions. It's twenty
[43:49] Speaker 1: twenty three has been a pretty turbulent year for some
[43:51] Speaker 1: clean tech companies, and I want to know what you
[43:53] Speaker 1: think the future holds in twenty twenty four and beyond
[43:57] Speaker 1: for clean tech innovators like life Cycle.
[44:00] Speaker 6: I mean, this is always a challenge of being part
[44:03] Speaker 6: of a revolutionary movement, and we've seen this in the
[44:08] Speaker 6: lithium world, we've seen it in the clean tech world,
[44:11] Speaker 6: and we'll continue to see this as there will be
[44:14] Speaker 6: ebbs and flows associated with the growth in this industry.
[44:17] Speaker 6: But one thing is for sure, I mean, if you
[44:19] Speaker 6: distill it down to the basics, is that we need
[44:23] Speaker 6: to decarbonize our economies as much as we possibly can.
[44:26] Speaker 6: And electrification, whether or it's through electric vehicles or energy
[44:30] Speaker 6: storage and we associated with renewable power generation is a
[44:33] Speaker 6: clear way to be able to start to address some
[44:36] Speaker 6: of these challenges. And so for us, we have strong
[44:40] Speaker 6: believers that there's going to be continued growth now in
[44:43] Speaker 6: this market. We are still seeing significant investments being made
[44:47] Speaker 6: across the value chain that support the recycling industry but
[44:51] Speaker 6: also support the development of electric vehicles. And energy storage systems.
[44:56] Speaker 6: So twenty twenty four for us, we see as a
[44:58] Speaker 6: year that will continue to press through and continue to develop.
[45:03] Speaker 6: We really see, and we've been talking about this for
[45:05] Speaker 6: a long time, twenty twenty five is almost a bit
[45:08] Speaker 6: of a magical year in some regards for this industry
[45:12] Speaker 6: because there is so much new production that is due
[45:16] Speaker 6: to come online in twenty twenty five, and if you
[45:19] Speaker 6: look forward, even if some of that slips, there's still
[45:22] Speaker 6: going to be a lot of new production come into
[45:24] Speaker 6: the market, which means new vehicles, which I think gets
[45:27] Speaker 6: consumers excited about electric vehicles and the possibilities that exist
[45:32] Speaker 6: around that. It's going to see increased demand for the
[45:35] Speaker 6: materials that go into making them on the cell level side,
[45:38] Speaker 6: but then of course also all the raw materials associated
[45:41] Speaker 6: with it. And then like anything that anything that's manufacturing
[45:45] Speaker 6: or consumer based, there's going to be the waste component,
[45:47] Speaker 6: and that's where life Cycle comes in to support on
[45:50] Speaker 6: the recycling side. So we're very excited about the developments
[45:53] Speaker 6: over the next couple of years and beyond.
[45:56] Speaker 2: Can I see what have you learned from your church
[46:00] Speaker 2: so far with life cycle it and in particular about
[46:04] Speaker 2: the challenge of kind of moving from something that works
[46:07] Speaker 2: in the lab to first of a kind commercial plant
[46:10] Speaker 2: for climate tech.
[46:12] Speaker 6: Yeah. Absolutely. I think that one of the things you
[46:15] Speaker 6: have to be open to when you're going through any
[46:18] Speaker 6: sort of development cycle is the opportunity to improve and
[46:21] Speaker 6: continuously develop. I look at our pre processing, our spoke technology.
[46:26] Speaker 6: We started the company in twenty sixteen. In twenty sixteen,
[46:30] Speaker 6: there was very very little interest for recycling of with
[46:33] Speaker 6: your Mind batteries, but we did a lot of work
[46:35] Speaker 6: going into twenty seventeen and twenty eighteen doing lab work,
[46:38] Speaker 6: doing piloting, trying to understand the basic physical problems that
[46:42] Speaker 6: we were trying to solve. We then rolled out our
[46:44] Speaker 6: first commercial plant in twenty nineteen and subsequently in short
[46:48] Speaker 6: order our second commercial spoke process in facility. Today we
[46:52] Speaker 6: have five around the world, and what we've seen is
[46:55] Speaker 6: every time that we've rolled a new plant out today
[46:58] Speaker 6: we're on what we call the generation three technology of
[47:01] Speaker 6: our commercial plants, We've made substantial improvements, and so I
[47:05] Speaker 6: think that this is something that is really important for
[47:08] Speaker 6: all the stakeholders associated with these new technologies and being
[47:13] Speaker 6: associated with us, from financing to public, to regional and
[47:18] Speaker 6: community stakeholders is that there is this evolution process and
[47:22] Speaker 6: it's important that we embrace that process to ensure that
[47:25] Speaker 6: we get the best possible outcome. And we see that
[47:27] Speaker 6: that's something that we've really done quite well as a
[47:30] Speaker 6: life cycle. You look at what we're able to do today.
[47:32] Speaker 6: We can process full electric vehicle battery packs at any
[47:35] Speaker 6: state of charge. That is something that we could only
[47:38] Speaker 6: have dreamt about when we rolled out our first commercial
[47:40] Speaker 6: plant back in twenty nineteen. So we've come a long
[47:43] Speaker 6: way and we've only been able to do that through
[47:45] Speaker 6: this continuous improvement process.
[47:47] Speaker 2: And from your experience, is there a balance between recycling
[47:51] Speaker 2: batteries locally close to the clients and feedstill and so
[47:55] Speaker 2: on versus like large facilities with economy of scale. What's
[47:59] Speaker 2: the kind of magic formula.
[48:01] Speaker 6: Yeah, So, so we see that on the pre processing side,
[48:04] Speaker 6: on the spots side, there is a significant benefit of
[48:07] Speaker 6: having those facilities close to where the battery materials are
[48:10] Speaker 6: being generated. And it's really driven by a couple of
[48:12] Speaker 6: key factors. First of all, it's quite expensive and there
[48:16] Speaker 6: is a level of risk associated with the transportation of
[48:18] Speaker 6: them and batteries. So if you can minimize that distance
[48:21] Speaker 6: you can reduce that cost and you can reduce that risk.
[48:24] Speaker 6: And at the same time, from a processing plant perspective,
[48:27] Speaker 6: the equipment that we're using, even at a let's call
[48:30] Speaker 6: it a regional level, is largely we're very close to
[48:34] Speaker 6: where the mass capacity of the equipment that you can
[48:38] Speaker 6: purchase without going fully customized is able to operate within.
[48:42] Speaker 6: So you're not actually losing significant economies of scale on
[48:45] Speaker 6: the preprocessing side. It differs, however, when you come to
[48:49] Speaker 6: the refining side, to the hub side of it for
[48:52] Speaker 6: life cycle, and we see that it's really important at
[48:54] Speaker 6: that point in time that you do have economies of scale,
[48:57] Speaker 6: both from a technical perspective with equipment also just because
[49:00] Speaker 6: of the fixed overhead and management of those style assets
[49:04] Speaker 6: the operating costs associated with it. To be efficient, you
[49:07] Speaker 6: need to have scale. And the benefit is is that
[49:09] Speaker 6: by the time we've put the barterer of materials through
[49:12] Speaker 6: the spoke facilities and you've generated the black mass. Black
[49:15] Speaker 6: mass itself is a non flammable, easy to transport material
[49:19] Speaker 6: by comparison to tour battery, so you've now dealt with
[49:22] Speaker 6: the risk factor. It's significantly cheaper to move that material
[49:27] Speaker 6: and so therefore you've dealt with the risks, you've dealt
[49:29] Speaker 6: with the costs, and you're just put in the scale
[49:31] Speaker 6: ultimately where it needs to be. And that's on the
[49:34] Speaker 6: refining on the hub side of the project.
[49:36] Speaker 1: We're going to keep our eyes looking ahead to what
[49:38] Speaker 1: the market has in store from twenty twenty five and beyond.
[49:42] Speaker 1: And Tim, thank you so much for sharing your views
[49:44] Speaker 1: today and for telling us a little bit of boit
[49:46] Speaker 1: more about life cycle.
[49:48] Speaker 6: Thank you, Dana, thank you, Benji, thank you for having me.
[49:50] Speaker 2: Thank you very much.
[50:00] Speaker 1: That we've heard from three of the winners of the
[50:02] Speaker 1: twenty twenty three Pioneers Challenge. Let's talk about next year,
[50:05] Speaker 1: and let's close off our show today by going through
[50:08] Speaker 1: the different challenges for the twenty twenty four Pioneers program.
[50:12] Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you, Dane. Super excited about twenty twenty four challenges.
[50:17] Speaker 2: The first one is relieving buttlenecks in deployment of clean power.
[50:21] Speaker 2: We then have the really big challenge around the carbonization
[50:25] Speaker 2: of building, and the third one is around sustainable fuels.
[50:28] Speaker 2: So we le the Wiener's announced later in spring, and
[50:32] Speaker 2: we are very excited about the application we got and
[50:35] Speaker 2: the process.
[50:36] Speaker 1: We'll be back here on switched on with some of
[50:38] Speaker 1: those winners. I'm sure. Thanks for joining.
[50:40] Speaker 2: Today, Thank you for inviting me.
[50:50] Speaker 1: Bloomberg ne Ef is a service provided by Bloomberg Finance
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[50:57] Speaker 1: should it be construed, as investment advice, investment recommendations, or
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[51:05] Speaker 1: ne Ef should not be considered as information sufficient upon
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[51:15] Speaker 1: as to the accuracy or completeness of the information contained
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