The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 21 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
House: Direct air capture to synthetic fuel is a staggering waste of capital
“Absurd, absurd, totally absurd technology that will cost, that is the, that is a staggering waste of human brain cells and capital and resources. And it's, and we should be spending at, we should always be working on the most effective, the best marginal use o…”
House: Nickel prices will drop below $30 per kilogram by April 2024
“These prices will not, I would bet against nickels being at 30 dollars a kilogram two years from now, because two years ago it was less than 20, and there were plenty of good opportunities, good projects out there, new projects that would work at 20.”
House: Elevated long-term lithium prices will constrain the energy transition
“We are confident the lithium price will stay, you know, elevated in the long run, not related to the current spike, but just in the long run, elevated, because there will be constant demand pressure, and in fact, I'm, you know, sort of concerned about it. I th…”
House: Fundamental physics makes lithium irreplaceable for high-density batteries
“There's not another element out there that happens to be the lightest metal and the electropositive, most electropositive metal, which also happens to complex very effectively with transition metals. Instable layered oxide crystal structures. Like, there isn't…”
House: Reaching a fully circular battery economy will take 50 years
“We can achieve 90, 98, 99% recycling rates on these, on, on these batteries, and over time, we'll get to the point where we do not have to mine them which is really, really exciting. But that will take more than a generation, unfortunately. We need a lot more …”
House: Light-duty EV transition requires $5 trillion in new copper discoveries
“By our estimates, We need roughly five trillion dollars of new discoveries of copper, and this is, I mean, we'll come back to the, what I mean by discovery, well, let's keep going but new discoveries of copper just to fully electrify the light duty vehicle fle…”
House: Known rare earth reserves are sufficient without new discoveries
“There, there's sufficient identified in reserves that we don't actually need new discoveries of it. It's just that most of that is in China or Vietnam.”
House: Mineral discovery rate per exploration dollar dropped sixfold over 30 years
“The number of tier one or tier two discoveries made per dollar of exploration expenditure has dropped about six fold in the last 30 years.”
House: Global lithium production must increase thirtyfold to 2.5 megatons by mid-century
“Now, it doesn't have to go up, but it has to go up to, by mid-century, something like two and a half megatons. So it has to grow by a, by over an order of magnitude, a factor of 30 or something like that, depending on your estimates, as opposed to doubling.”
House: Sodium is fundamentally far inferior to lithium as an anode material
“The drop from the best anode material is lithium by a long shot, for the reasons I just described, really fundamental physics The second best anode material is sodium. And it is way less good. Way less good. And it's easy to understand why. Because the molar m…”
House: Market opportunity for new lithium discoveries is $3 to $4 trillion
“The new discoveries, about three trillion, or maybe four trillion, as opposed to five trillion. So it's actually on the same order, like the market opportunity for new lithium discoveries is about the same order of that as copper”
House: Cobalt and nickel vastly outperform all other battery cathode materials
“So cobalt's the best to do that. And nickel is a reasonable second, a fairly close second. And there's just a huge drop to the third best, best cathode material. And that's probably iron phosphate.”
House: DRC holds two-thirds of global cobalt production and reserves
“Cobalt has a very highly concentrated supply in the Democratic Republic of Congo, about two-thirds of existing production, so, you know, the rate at which cobalt's coming out of existing mines, and two-thirds of reserves, the total amount of cobalt The total a…”
House: Processing Indonesian nickel laterites costs $15 to $25 per kilogram
“Indonesia is really a high-cost producer. They produce out of a type of deposit called laterites, which are almost like metallic dirt low concentration, kind of high processing costs. It costs, you know, it costs 15, 20, 25 dollars a kilogram to process that.”
House: Lithium from clay deposits remains cost-prohibitive to process commercially
“The clays are not really a source of lithium today. There are people speculate about them becoming a major source. There's a lots of lithium in clays for sure. But there, but it's very expensive to process it, so it's not obvious that, it's not obvious when th…”
House: Material limitations will not restrict grid storage battery scaling
“So I think for grid storage, it's no problem. I don't think we're going to have material shortcomings. No problem's not quite the right way to say it, but it's, we won't material limitations won't be a serious governor on grid storage applications, or even pot…”
House: Over 15% of Congolese cobalt comes from artisanal mining
“Something like 15 plus percent of cobalt that's been estimated coming out of cobalt coming out of Congo is, is sourced in that manner.”
KoBold ranks critical metal exploration priorities: nickel, lithium, cobalt, then copper
“We'd order it as nickel followed by lithium followed by cobalt followed by copper.”
House: EVs require three times more copper mass than ICE cars
“An EV, as you probably know, requires about three X copper, three X mass of copper, than an equivalent internal combustion car.”