Pioneering the UK's First Lithium Refinery: Richard Taylor's Journey to a Sustainable Future

Embark on a compelling exploration with Richard Taylor of Green Lithium, as he chronicles the establishment of the UK's first Lithium refinery. This episode promises to immerse you in the innovative spirit of Teesside's green industrial revolution, where you'll witness the power of a united team's unwavering dedication to sustainable practices. Richard's journey from concept to reality is a masterclass in adaptability, showcasing the importance of a skilled team.

As Richard unfolds the story of Green Lithium, he brings to light a newfound appreciation for natural resources and the insatiable drive to foster a cleaner future. You'll gain insights into the strategic formation of a delivery-focused team, the environmental implications of site selections, and the discovery of a green byproduct with the potential to revolutionize the construction and manufacturing industry. The chapter on sustainability highlights the significance of awareness and education in natural resource management, as well as mentorship's vital role in crafting the next wave of environmental stewards.

Finally, Richard shares the perspective-shifting opportunities awaiting in the green lithium industry, inviting listeners to contribute in various capacities – from internships to investment. His reflections on carbon reduction strategies and inspirational figures emphasize the importance of incremental change and learning from historical successes. The conversation culminates with an inspirational message: the path to a greener future is not linear, but with passion and perseverance, progress is inevitable. Join us for an episode that not only educates but ignites a spark of optimism for the sustainable advancements shaping our world.

Please subscribe to the channel for more content! Theo James are a Manufacturing & Engineering Recruiter based in the North East, helping Manufacturing and Engineering firms grow across the UK. Please call us on 0191 5111 298

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello and welcome to another episode of the manufacturing leaders podcast with me mob right now, managing director of Theo James recruitment. What's an episode we have for you today? And there's a key reason why I record these introductions straight after the episode because I'm full of the energy and passion of the interview itself. And this was amazing and I pretty much sat back and listened to the journey of Richard Taylor, founding director of Green Lithium, the UK's first ever Lithium refinery, which is going to be up in the northeast of England, in Teesside, and it was an incredible journey. We took it right back to Richard's life really in terms of why he wanted to build a business which utilised the world's natural resources and how we built that business and how we pivoted the business for Plan A to Plan B, which is fascinating and some real, a lot of learns there for people who are considering, you know, building a business or creating a life in that sort of way. We talked about how he put an incredible team of people together and putting the right people in the right places and how important of leadership and delegation. We discussed then how important it is to create a culture and a set of values and actually the importance of creating that set of values with the team not a top-down approach and really highly against it and then a whole vision and purpose of the business attached to those set of values. It was an incredible journey and story about why he chose Teesside, the plans for that site ahead which is fascinating and actually the importance of every business out there has an opportunity now to utilise their journey, their story of sustainability and get a plan in place, and there's a lot of lessons that you're going to take from this.

Speaker 1: 1:51

So please sit back and enjoy the episode. I'll be honoured if you wouldn't mind subscribing. Please just click that like and subscribe, in particular to do so. It really helps me get great people on the episode, like Richard. So I hope you enjoyed the episode. Please sit back and listen and watch. Thank you very much. Right, a warm welcome this morning to Richard Taylor, the founding director of Green Lithium. Morning Richard, how are you?

Speaker 2: 2:18

Morning. Yeah, great Thanks.

Speaker 1: 2:20

Great to be here. Excellent. I'm really excited about this. I really am. I think it's going to be a powerful episode. So first question is the same question Ask everyone who comes on what does it mean to you to be a leader?

Speaker 2: 2:39

It's somebody that can bring people together under a common vision, and really I have put what I've done down to three things, which are persistence, resilience and people. And if you get those three things right and, as I'm sure, this is probably pretty common in a lot of business leaders that you've brought on here, mark but it's the people that you bring together that make these things happen. I learned very early on I'm dyslexic. I learned very early on that I was good at some things and other things I wasn't, and so I really enjoy this idea of strength theory where, in essence, you get a monkey to climb a tree and an elephant to pull it down and you don't bring people together to waste their time asking to do something they don't really enjoy.

Speaker 2: 3:48

I like people to come together as a team and work in a way that that's what they'd want to do when they get out of bed in the morning.

Speaker 2: 3:55

That's what would inspire them, not think, oh, I've got some massive anxiety over that big spreadsheet because I'm no good at numbers and this and the other. Oh, I've got a writer report and I can't do that. It's got to be. You've got to bring the team together that you know that can have got their strengths in all areas and cover all bases. And building that, like we have done at Green Lithium now, from being it just myself and myself and my co-founder and you know, and sharing sort of 50% of the jobs each how we did that, I don't know and then building out to a team of now 22 full-time employees and, you know, hundreds of contractors, is amazing and it's fantastic to see everyone working under that vision and, you know, with basically transitioning us to a more sustainable planet, which is what we're doing at Green Lithium, by building the UK's first Lithium refinery, which will provide all that lithium to all the electric vehicles that we're going to need to decarbonise the planet.

Speaker 1: 5:04

I'm really excited by. I can't wait to get into this and get into the vision and the purpose and everything behind this, and I'm going to stop myself, I'm going to straight into it and I'm going to go back first, but I'm definitely going to come back to this vision piece. I think it's really important. But you know what you're doing now is is really exciting and you know I can't wait for an alter to see all all happen. But let's go back a bit To you in terms of where, where did this start? Where did it? Where did the penny drop for you that you wanted to get into this type of industry and this type of specific work? Because this is quite different to one of the mill manufacturing, I would say.

Speaker 2: 5:44

Yeah, well, I'll try and run through it as quickly as I can, but we'll have to take it right back to the source, I think, please. So when I was growing up, I love being outside and my dad used to take me fishing and would always be going off. I come from Livingston Town in Lancashire, on the northwest coast, but we'd always be going to the Lake District on a weekend, going in the mountains, and you know, being in nature, seeing, you know, all these big rocks and these rivers and all sorts, and you know, brings you alive. So I always said to myself, oh, I'll never work behind a desk. And then I went through school and you know, I sort of I said to my parents oh, I wouldn't fancy working in the countryside, you know, countryside manager or something like that, just because it's lovely, isn't it? And they said oh, you've got really good grades, why don't you go on, do your, do your A levels? I said all right. So I went on, did my levels and they said oh, you know, why don't you go to university? You never know if you do really well, you know you could spend you, spend your time in the countryside, all you want, type things. I said all right, so and. But you see where this goes. I wanted to study a geography type study. I didn't know, really know anything about geology, but it was that physical geography point of view. You know that the world's natural processes and then I got to university and had some great lecturers that inspired me about geology and really just opened up a world of wow world's natural resources are literally right there for us to harness to make the world a better place.

Speaker 2: 7:43

And you know my first interaction having graduated university in this was straight away into oil and gas and I went offshore. I worked offshore all around the world for two and a half years, 350 miles off the coast of the Saharan desert for two months. You know lots in the North Sea, norway, falkland Islands, all over, and what an experience. And you know these really tough places that we go to get the things that power the world. But it proved to me that these things could be done. You know it is not beyond the realms of our capability to to harness these, these things. So I then said, right, I've had enough of that, I want to go. And now I know how to find oil and gas, or at least capture the data for that by drilling and doing surveys and things, I want to go and go to the office and sort of tell people or help explore for that in a more study-like fashion.

Speaker 2: 8:53

So I did that for a year at Petrofac in London and then I brought my learnings back from Alshall and where they were asking the drillers and the people collecting the data who were working on a 12-hour shift that just come off from, say, four weeks away with the family, and straight away they were into a night shift and they were asked to fill in all these different data sets and I could just see how much of a pain, how much people were having to relearn their job almost when they came back and how much room there was there for error. And so when I went back into the office I said, well, how much of this is a need to know it and how much is well, it's nice to know it. And so we cut down what we asked for from the guys offshore and simplified it into the things that needed to be known, and then we ran that on a test basis and the quality of data that obviously came back over time was just a huge improvement because they were just focusing on what needed to be done, what was a nice to have. So that was great. I presented about that at a conference and then somebody at the conference from MERSC in Denmark must have seen that. And then I got headed on to the pro job to go to Denmark and I worked in Denmark for three and a half years for MERSC oil. We worked on the Al Shaheen field, which was the oil field just off in Qatar, just off Doha, sort of third largest gas monofil in the world. An amazing experience, amazing group of people coming together to get that done.

Speaker 2: 10:45

But I think then what happened with that is you got the feeling that really oil and gas was on a bit of a downturn and I'd always had it in my head that I'd start something. My great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents in the Industrial Revolution used to build mills in Manchester and Rochdale and Oldham and safe to say that was something of the time. But it made me think we never saw any of the wealth or anything from that. But it always made me think, well, with one of my families done it, then there's nothing stopping me doing it at some point. But I was then given a bit of advice by one of my friends' dads who did really well in finance in the early 90s in London when he came to visit university and I sort of said, what's the trick? And he said to me you're either the first or the biggest. And I thought about that and I thought, well, yeah, you can't be the first in oil and gas because it's already a massive thing, and I can't be the biggest because it's already a massive thing completely saturated. But what he was getting at with that is that you need to find an emerging market and you need to be first in on that emerging market Because if you do that, then you set the rules then and the rails. You're part of developing what that market's going to look like for the next 100 years. And I've always known that and it's something that served me very well. And if I do anything after Green Lithium, then I'll be doing the same thing, getting in with something that people just haven't had the confidence to do yet. It's definitely needed.

Speaker 2: 12:49

And the way I like to describe this is I've brought a bunch of people together to build a boat on the sand and when the tide comes in and that boat floats, people are going to say that we were clever. And really I come from the coast. As I said, I know that tide comes in and out twice a day. It's about having that. You need to be before whatever you're doing. So I've got all the other analogies. It's like catching a wave. You don't catch a wave on a surfboard by standing on the beach, but it's the similar thing. You've got to be in front of the curb. It's taken us seven years now to get Green Lithium to where it is, and it's been one brick after another, just like that. And you look back and you go, wow, there's something there. And every time you look back you're like, wow, we've got it, that extra part. So, basically, to go back to the story and stop segueing, I was at Merck and I thought, right, I need to, I want to transition out of oil and gas.

Speaker 2: 14:14

So people get locked into industries and they find it very hard to get out of them and I appreciate that and I was in that situation. All my colleagues there were thinking, if there's another oil price downturn will potentially all be made redundant and they're all absolute experts in reservoir engineering and drilling and these kind of things and these skills aren't really transferable to any other industry at a push, but not really. And so then it'd be a saturated game there, and so I thought I'm still quite young here, I want to transition out, because I already knew that what wasn't called the energy transition then it's now been coined that was coming. So I then went and worked for Deloitte in the energy and natural resources risk advisory practice and I helped them put a lens on a lot of their advisory services that they provided for, like pharma and finance, and put a lens on it how they could be utilized in the natural resource industry from my experience working in oil and gas. And I helped them with that for a year.

Speaker 2: 15:27

And at the same time or a few years, sorry and at the same time the Paris Agreement had been signed and in answer to your initial question, the Paris Agreement being signed that for me was the starting gun. That was when I knew that the energy transition was definitely happening and that was my signal to start. And so what I did? I thought any transition 2030. At the time, we're going to need all these electric vehicles. What do electric vehicles need? They need battery metals, critical minerals and the one that they need or the one that's sort of most readily abundant, and they need a lot of that currently isn't produced in that kind of volume is lithium. And so all those combinations together and knowing that lithium is a common element in the world from my geology days you know there is a lot of it about. It's just where it's about, in a concentrated form in the Earth's crust or in a way that we can concentrate it by taking vast amounts of it and filtering it out, anyway. So that's when I set up Green Lithium.

Speaker 2: 16:40

Green Lithium was originally to look at the UK, because I thought, from a strategic point of view, what would be better if we had all the lithium for all these electric vehicles we need right under our feet. And the UK is often guilty of overlooking things that it's got right here and thinking, oh, it comes from somewhere else, you know. So I went to the Geological Survey in London and I rolled out the Geological Maps and spent about a week in there understanding where there'd been historic occurrences of lithium before, and I marked them out three locations, you know, some in Cornwall, some in Scotland. And then I got on the phone and I well, I had to figure out who the land owners were and who the mineral rights owners were, and as soon as I'd done that. I got on the phone, called them up oh no, I didn't, sorry.

Speaker 2: 17:47

I called some lawyers to say what do I need to put in place here to have sort of exclusivity on these? So if I go, invest my own money in looking for this, no matter how little money that is and, by the way, I didn't get given any money at this point, this was just my savings from oil and gas I'd been made. Luckily I got made redundant from Merse because there was a downturn in the oil price and I thought, right, well, I'll put the money, I'll make the money work and put it to good use. So I'll take the first step into this. So yeah, my first real money was spent was on legal fees to look for an exclusivity agreement, you know, to see if we could go and look at some lithium in Scotland or in Cornwall.

Speaker 2: 18:35

And you learn all these things. No one told me how to do this. You're sort of learning as you go like and asking, oh well, how would I do that, how would I do that? And it's just connect the dots one after another and that's a lot. You know, when you're doing a new market and no one else has done it, there's nobody to tell you there's a certain way of doing things.

Speaker 2: 18:54

I mean, so it's, yes, other people have looked for minerals in the UK before, but they probably haven't done it for quite a while. So anyway, it's, but you've just got to figure it out, you know, and but that's that's part of the excitement, really, that's that's part of the game, which is great. And then I did that, and I remember speaking to these landlords with this exclusivity agreement, and I went up and visited them and I said, right, so you know, do you sign that, sign this, sign this document? And I said let me put it like this I said when, in the past 200 years or however long, your family's owned this country estate which was standing on, when was the last time somebody said that they're going to come here and they're prepared to spend their own money to look for a mineral that you've not really ever heard of? And if they find it, it's going to increase, you know it's going to give you a massive income stream, and if it's not, then you know nothing's lost.

Speaker 2: 19:56

And they said, yeah, right, so that they all signed, and, and that was great. And then I thought, right, well, now I need somebody that knows what they're doing regarding mineral exploration. And that's the people, for the first part of the people bit. And so I called up my friend from university, guy Hatcher, who'd gone on after university and he'd he'd worked for Rio Tinto and Barrett goals in in Africa looking for base metal deposits. And I got him. He was based in London and he was going to and from Africa and I managed to catch him when he was back over and I said will you meet me?

Speaker 2: 20:42

I was in London at time working for Deloitte. I said, would you meet me? And I took him to the blue ball pub and I'd got this presentation, this business presentation for him, all branded up with the logo there that my brother made. And I said, right, well, here's, here's the idea. And I managed oh sorry, I'd also managed to convince them to give me a private room and not pay for it as well. So it tried to try to build that, you know, making it look official and good for him. Anyway, thank God, he said yes, and and so he was on board. He wanted to come and explore for this.

Speaker 2: 21:23

And so we went and we took 95 rock samples from these two places in Scotland and we did even more in Cornwall and we ended up sending all these rock samples across to Australia where there's laboratories that can test for lithium. And it came back and it was. It said, yes, that there is lithium there, but it's in a mica. So if you've got a and basically it's low, low grade, so it's 2% grade, whereas the stuff coming out of the ground that's already been mined in Australia out of this spodumene is 6%, so you'd be producing if in the UK at 2% and it's out of the micro thing. So if you imagine your kitchen, granite kitchen work surface, you've got little flecks of reflective things, black things, that that's the mica. Then you've got quartz, which are the sort of dull white things, and then you'll either have pink or white other things and those other things are the fell spas and that's either orthoclase or plagioclase and they contain or that that's the spodumene. That's that's where the 6% lithium takes.

Speaker 2: 22:40

Anyway, science lesson aside, geology lesson aside the, what it made me realize is that, right, come back from this and think about the bigger picture. I could try and dig up the UK Right, which we all know is probably not a good idea. You know, not in my backyard, people don't particularly like that kind of thing. I could for a low grade material. This is it, you know. You can't argue. This is just what it is. It's limited to 2% compared with what's available in the other side of the world. And knowing that there would be other spodumene resources coming to production closer than Australia in the future, and then knowing that whatever we brought out of the ground, we'd have to send it to China to be refined, because they have 99% of the refining capacity in the world at this point, because they're literally 20 years ahead of us on this. So it it took that standing back and thinking, and it's about the strength theory as well. Is the UK a natural place to dig up minerals, you know, or is it going to be? Is it very unnatural? Is it like pushing an elephant up a hill? And and this is when, for me, it was the Eureka moment it was no. We don't compound the risk. We lean into the UK strengths, and the UK strengths are legacy heavy industry, especially in the northeast of England. You've got the workforce, you've got the infrastructure, you've got deep water ports, you've got the energy, you know. You've got industrial business parks there, ici, things that are just plugging in play now. And it's, you've got everything there to build a world-class low-carbon lithium refining hub. Then what would you do with that? Would you import the material of high grade from the producing mines Australia first, and then, when other mines came online closer to home? You'd be able to do that because we haven't got the amount of resources in the grade needed to be able to sustain all of these electric vehicle that should vehicles be manufactured. So this, for me, was the key. This was the Eureka moment.

Speaker 2: 25:31

So we pivoted the business model and that was it A low-carbon lithium refining hub in the UK to supply Europe and the UK with low-carbon lithium to fuel the energy transition. That's it. That was it. I knew that that was a hook line and sinker the genius. There's no way that the market is not going to need that over the next 50-200 years. No one else was doing it. So we pivoted and then we got on with it.

Speaker 2: 26:15

The way that we got on with it was by building the delivery focus team, knowing that it wasn't just about telling the story, getting bankers and lawyers to get up and sell this and get investors in. It was actually about proving to investors that we have the team to be able to deliver this, because I think there's a lot of don't tell me, show me about this. You need to demonstrate that you've got the knowledge and people that have done something like this before, especially in this emerging market where no one really outside of China has built a lithium refinery. You need somebody that knows the UK landscape or a group of people that know the UK landscape, have built multi-billion-pound energy infrastructure projects in the UK. That know how to navigate step one to a thousand on how you get something of this major national energy project built. So that's who the majority of our team have built.

Speaker 2: 27:23

We brought Sean Sargenton initially as a program director. He's got 35 years as a director for Jacobs Engineering, building and delivering nuclear power plants and nuclear facilities across the UK. Then the rest of the team, charlie Tasker. He's picked a lot of the sites for a lot of the power plants and then project managed a lot of these developments. All these people have done these amazing things in other industries. Dominic Kiran, our chairman. He's the managing director of Babcock Nuclear, 15,000 people beneath him in this, a fantastic governance, and brings great leadership to the team there on how to govern the board.

Speaker 2: 28:19

I think we've crossed our eyes. We've dotted our T's and we operate like we're a private PLC really, which is amazing given our size, from process to standardization to everything. So it's amazing bringing those people in, but also we're incredibly agile at the same time. But you do that from bringing a diverse set of people in. We've got guys that worked in finance Joe Charles of CFO, his ex Rothschilds, guy myself. We've got people from the Northeast Amy Hills she's ex Cummings, millan Thakur, ex Johnson, matthew. So all these people bringing things to the table. It's incredible and it's just that, for me, is how you really get done and that's where diversity and inclusion really come together, because they do make fantastic results. They don't have too many of the same type of person because they only think in this one particular way. I agree with that. So, yeah, that's what we've done over the past really.

Speaker 2: 29:42

So we pivoted the business model to be just focusing on lithium refinery probably four years ago and we've been building ever since. We got material from two different mines. We tested it using our process, tested the process work. So then we did another test so we could do it in pilot scales. So we showed that over time, for a matter of days, it could be run.

Speaker 2: 30:16

The main thing about this, I find, was the site selection. You can't, once you build it, you can't really change the site, and the site will determine really the costs of your product, your profitability and how low carbon you can be, and you can't change that. So, no matter how similar to a mine, no matter how much you'd love a lithium mine in your backyard, you can't have one. It's just the geology, whereas, yes, you can eventually, over a long, long, long time and a lot of money, develop a sort of chemicals processing hub. But the beauty of what we've got in the UK is we've already got that there and that's in the legacy of the steel industry, petrochemical industry and all those processing industries in the northeast of England. So we're incredibly fortunate for that and that's why this is just spot on.

Speaker 2: 31:18

People say, oh, you built it in the UK because you British. No, it's not that, it's because that's the right place to put it. That's the strongest place to put it. We looked at 25 different sites across the UK and Europe and to us that is hands down the strongest location. So we've got planning permission granted on a 52 acre port side site there. So we're 20 yards away from the port. So as far as handling what's going to be a million tons of material a year, that's even easier for us. We're not going to be taking on public roads or anything like that, it's just straight off the ship into the refinery.

Speaker 2: 32:00

And what's probably good to mention here is we take a product in that's called spudging concentrate. We will then get refined lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide out to the back of that and those two things go into batteries. But we also get an aluminium silicate, which is a geopolymer, and we have developed my P on this now to be a construction material. So obviously the UK green construction materials. It's a huge thing.

Speaker 2: 32:38

Cement accounts for 5% of the UK's carbon dioxide pollution. You know the manufacturer of cement. So basically the government is now saying to businesses and builders you need to be using green cement, and so there's a huge market out there for green construction materials. And so we've been doing a lot of work on that and can't really say anymore at this point. But it's a very, very interesting product and it's something which we're very excited about, and so that's really it. That was when I had the starting gun moment was the Paris Agreement, and the Eureka moment was when we realised it was a lithium refining hub that we wanted to get into. So yeah, that's it. I'll allow you to ask some more questions, no more.

Speaker 1: 33:45

Love that I mean that was. It was fascinating that, just in terms of kind of forgot I was interviewing, just sat back, listened on the journey, and that's why I absolutely love it. And you know what. You deserve so much credit for what you've done there. And I think a lot of people can learn from that process because you know you had a vision, you had a passion. Then you had a vision and even when that vision took a bit of a turn, you pivoted. And I think that's really important for people where sometimes things don't. You know that plan A doesn't always work, does it? Sometimes you've got to look for a plan B.

Speaker 2: 34:20

That's it, you know, and at the time it feels like you've been knocked on the canvas.

Speaker 2: 34:27

You know you feel like I've put, you know, I've gone in this direction, but the best, the best thing you can do is not flog a dead horse and pivot and so now, that's, that's one thing. Agile, that's, that's one of our core values. To be agile, it's, it's about being able to get constantly change, get really direction. It's not not going through with something, it's knowing when to just slightly tap it to that side, slightly to that side, because, yeah, you, you, you really don't want to waste time and resources, finances, going down a route that isn't actually the right route to go down. So, yeah, it's, it was, it was a good, a good learning to have.

Speaker 1: 35:19

Apologies for interrupting this podcast for a very quick 30 second picture of my business. Theo James are a specialist in manufacturing and engineering recruitment search firm based in Seam in the Northeast. If you're looking for any staff or a new opportunity yourself, from a semi-skilled level right the way up to C-suite executive, then please get in touch. We have a specialist consultant in each discipline ready to help. I'm extremely proud of what we've built over the years and I'd love to extend that service out to you. Thank you, enjoy the podcast. Do you think the team you've put together it's? It sounds like just a dream scene of people for this project, which is really exciting, and that's exactly what you need for a project like this. I guess the challenge is different people, different backgrounds, different cultures. One vision. You know it is. How important has that been to you, to when you grow the team, to keep that culture, the culture you want to breathe. What do you say?

Speaker 2: 36:19

Yeah, we spent a lot of time working on the documented vision, mission and values and I'm really glad we did. It took us a long time to get them just right. We circulated them with the team at the time. We were probably about 16 when we sort of came came, you know, formalized these and Every time I mention one of the values whether it's one team agile it makes me sort of Because we thought about them so much, they make so much sense for our business and it makes me really proud, makes me proud of the team, the fact that we all put those together.

Speaker 2: 37:09

It wasn't just a top-down. This is what you have to think and this is why we all agreed on them. And that's the thing At the end of the day. I did run the company years ago. I was the managing director, but then we wanted it to be led by a delivery expert. So we asked Sean Sargent if he would lead us, and I look after now the marketing and communication side of things. I will come to the table with things, but I love people saying to me no, I don't think we should do it like that and I say, okay, great.

Speaker 2: 38:01

Yeah yeah, it's about knowing that everybody else knows is looking from their perspective and they can see an opportunity or they can see something that they've done before, knowing that actually I'm wrong and that's great. I love being wrong. If they know what they're doing, I love it. So it's about bringing the people together, giving them the resources they need and letting them get on with it and encouraging them and help keep inspiring them with that vision, which is hopefully what I do, but I'm really just a part of the team now just heading to that vision.

Speaker 1: 38:43

That's the agility page, isn't it? Like you say, if you're breeding that agility page of values and people are always looking for ways you can pivot and be agile to improve the business versus this is where we're going and there's no way back, and I think it depends which course you come on, isn't it? If that is the case, that's fine, but it's so important I completely agree for companies to have a mission, a vision and values that aren't just given to you, that you are involved. I know it's harder with some bigger businesses, but there's no reason why a team or a division within a business can't have its own separate values because you can hire against it and work to it, can't?

Speaker 2: 39:22

you yeah, and it's you've got. I think there's got to be respect with this. Just like working in any team, you can't have too many people saying it's my way or the highway, because it becomes difficult If there's somebody that can't respect other people's views. It just becomes difficult and hard. Within that team mentality. You've got to appreciate where everyone's looking from the different angles on things, and I think if you can put things like the vision, the mission and the values in place, it gets everyone dialed in to what we are all trying to do and how we're trying to do it. So they're great guidance points as well. But we've also spent a lot of time putting in a lot of standards and process and procedures. Now We've obviously been doing a lot more when we become an operational entity. So we are.

Speaker 2: 40:33

We're going to be building the first smaller refinery over the next 12 months or so. So this is the first in the line of three that we'll be building in tea sites. So the first one will be a tenth of the size of the second one, but the second one will be the exact same size as the third one. So we're going on that stage journey up. They're all commercial sized. They'll all be washing their own faces and making profit. But it's about we want.

Speaker 2: 41:15

We know that you can't. If you just build a massive thing off the bat, you'll have a problem with training your operators. You'll probably have a huge problem with commissioning something, because you know we've seen examples in Australia where the built two refineries out there and that's been the major problem is being. It's been the commissioning. They've had to fly in guys from China now to come and help them to commission it and you know they're two years down the line.

Speaker 2: 41:46

You know, if you're not a big company with massive pockets, you know having something off, having something not operational for that long, is not a great idea for company health. So it's, we've learned from them and we know that this step phase approach is definitely one that we are really keen on, and then we'll be able to take that smaller refinery as modular and we can potentially deploy that in other geographies of the world and then repeat the process. So the idea is we build the first one in the UK, but we definitely want to then look at building them in the other geographies that need them too. So it's a bit of a cookie cutter approach with our IP and with our methodology.

Speaker 1: 42:37

How are you finding the? You know, I guess, sustainability, renewables, and you know the sector you're in. Do you think that people start to change their thoughts and be more educated on the topic? And I guess the reason they asked this is because, if I look at my own, obviously we work with manufacturing my own knowledge of it is probably for the last six and nine months. Suddenly it's everywhere and it's not. It's becoming something which seems the importance of it it seems to be increasing.

Speaker 1: 43:05

I was on a I was actually on a podcast with Tito University with a company called GoJour Thermal and they were talking about air source and ground pumps and I had no knowledge of it and it blew my mind. And when you were talking there, right the start of the journey about the natural resource being in this country, unless you go down the route of trying to find out, or you know that was your particular subject when you were younger no, we don't know about these things. I still don't think there was enough awareness of these things around us. You know even the point I blew my mind. We can have energy from the ground and you know, blew my mind. There you're talking about the. It's all around us. So do you think that is something that you're quite passionate about, about growing the knowledge base of people in the area? What do you say in the UK?

Speaker 2: 43:52

Absolutely, absolutely. For me, the natural resource sector is like it's like opening your eyes. It's like not being able to see. Then you open your eyes and but it's, that's the natural world really. It's Mother Earth. If you want to take it and even bigger step up, you know it's everything is there for us to responsibly harness, and it really is. It's just setting that vision, bring the right people along and being determined enough to go and do something about it really. And you know we can. We can all learn a lot from that, and that's why I'm sort of bringing together like-minded people, whether it be in focus groups you know there's I'm part of a few groups at the moment chairman of the Institute of Directors Natural Resource Group and that's what we're trying to do there.

Speaker 2: 44:59

We're trying to bring together, you know, people of influence in this sector, whether it be ambassadors of countries that are rich in natural resources, ceos of natural resource companies within the UK or people in government and bringing them all together to take action, to do that responsibly harness the world's natural resources, to transition us to a more sustainable future. We've got a launch event actually next Monday, on the 25th of March, at the House of Lords, so that's exactly what we're going to be doing there. We're going to be signing the Responsible Natural Resources Declaration. So you know, who knows, in years to come that might become as important as the Declaration of Independence.

Speaker 1: 45:52

So for Mother Earth anyway, and that's the House of Lords Is that right, isn't it?

Speaker 2: 45:57

That's the House of Lords. Yeah, that's next Monday. And, again, that is something that me and a small team of people from the Institute of Natural Resources who are passionate about natural resources have come up with and we've developed and brought together, you know, our vast networks of people to make something happen, to make it happen, and it's all about that. You know, using what you've got where you are to do the best you can right now, type mentality. So you know, that's it, I think, what I did.

Speaker 2: 46:37

I did a piece the other day which was one of my proudest professional moments. Today I got to go back to the University of Leeds where I studied geology, and they asked me to go back and be the keynote speaker of careers day for my department so the Department of Earth Sciences and the Department of Earth and Environment and the students came in 50 of them on a Saturday, which is a student, you know, you really don't want to be going into university on a Saturday and they sat there and they listened to this journey that I've described to you and they absolutely loved it and at the end of it, you know, we I got the huge pleasure of saying well, if you are interested in this, then we do have internships available, and so encourage them to get in touch. Which people you know listening to this podcast, if you want, they think that an internship at Green Lithium or, you know, summer internship or a first year in industry is something that you'd like to do, then they're definitely getting touched. There's links on the website to how you can do that jobs at Green Lithium, duckkuuk. So you know we are looking and we want to inspire people to come into this sector, and you don't need to come from an earth science or a process engineering background. You know we'll be, as I say, when we start to operate this facility up in Teeside.

Speaker 2: 48:18

You know we do want as many local operators as possible. You know apprenticeship schemes, I think, could be key in that area and you know, eventually we'll be wanting to train the world's experts in Lithium refining in Teeside and then sending them off around the world to work in these little Lithium refineries that are going to be built, because they'll be the experts. This is it. This is the centre of excellence right there in Teeside and, yeah, this. So we are working, speaking with Teeside University and, you know, working also with Sheffield University on some things it's great, but it's not. You know, I'm really keen to tell people you don't need to get to University to be passionate about this kind of thing. It's all about just getting involved really and knowing, as you say, that that world's out there and it's a fantastic world that can inspire us all really, because we all live in this natural world, we all live on Mother Earth, and to be able to contribute to it is an amazing feeling.

Speaker 1: 49:37

So, yeah, and I think and I love that, I guess, once we're talking there but the opportunity that you have and actually there's an opportunity a lot of businesses have and sometimes they neglect the opportunity they do have to be involved to what purpose, to what vision? To involve in something which is helping society, the community and the Mother Earth is a massive privilege, but it's so about the generations coming through. Now. This isn't you know, this isn't virtual. It's like people really care. People really care about the world now and they want to be part of a business which is doing the right things and is sustainable and moving forward.

Speaker 1: 50:11

You know, as a recruiter, we get that data all the time that they really, really want to be and people leave companies if they don't have ethical practices. So I see it as a real opportunity now, in a difficult marketplace, to really look at the practices that a company is doing and to look how can they be more sustainable and how can they can drive with purpose and vision. It's a perfect time to do it, to capitalise on it, but it's crucial, isn't it? It's huge.

Speaker 2: 50:42

Yeah, yeah, I mean it's. I think you can do whatever business you are, but what you need to do is be very honest about where you are today, and then you need to then create a roadmap to show that, over time, you are going to be reducing your impact, either on the environment or your carbon emissions, or you're going to be more inclusive, you're going to be more sustainable. There's so many things to do, but it's about recognising the baseline where you are right now and being very honest almost more honest the better and then creating that roadmap. And we started off as one of our first bits of work was to get a carbon life cycle assessment done, which was done by a company called Minvero, and the founder there, robert Pell, has done a great job at building this business around this exact opportunity, which is companies, maybe like ours, or companies that are already in operation, to baseline where they are now from a carbon point of view. So we had to do it theoretically. We built a refinery today and we hadn't put any carbon reducing measures in place. This is how much carbon we will produce and this is the environmental impact that we would produce, and so we said, ok, right, well then, we worked with our technology, the people who were buying the technology, our engineering teams and everything and said right, this is the baseline, how can we come up with a roadmap to reduce that over time?

Speaker 2: 52:36

And so we did things like OK, right, well, the first part of the refining process is heat. So we take this spodumene and we heat it to 1200 degrees, and that, obviously, if you're using coal or natural gas like they do in China, it's going to produce loads of carbon dioxide. So being in tea side and the fact that they've got Europe's fastest emerging green hydrogen economy there meant that we can put green hydrogen into the calcinus, which has no CO2 output. So there you are, that section over time, not immediately, we can't do it immediately, but as and when it becomes available, we can actually blend natural gas and green hydrogen to the point where it's economically correct to have fully green hydrogen and we can be net zero on the calcinization. We can get a lot of electricity off the offshore wind farms on Dogger Bank and the arrays around there in the Northeast. So it's about all these things that you can do over time, it's not about having it done immediately. I think maybe we've done other things that we can do immediately, like putting bigger air filters on the equipment. So designing what we can in, but then also recognizing the things that aren't quite ready yet in their own right but can be introduced over time.

Speaker 2: 54:12

I think people are getting more aware of that, that this is a transition, it's not a switch. This is going to take time and people need to be happy that it can be done. It's not saying it won't be done, but it will be done, but it's going to be done over time. It's frustrating, obviously, because we need to take action now, but we need to take action to implement those things over time, and sort of saying it's not good enough. All that means is these projects just won't go forward and then we'll just be in a worse situation than if we would have backed them in the first place. So yeah, that's where I am on that.

Speaker 1: 54:58

Well, I've got some quick fire questions which you might not have seen. So whatever first thing that springs up, who's the best mind you've ever had, and why?

Speaker 2: 55:10

My dad my dad, because I think the advice my dad always given to me is do what you love, and me and my mum will love you whatever. And that love for me is huge. It defines who I am, almost and also always asking me are you happy? We're not happy all the time, and I remember him starting this business up and you've got so many things coming at you and there's a lot of pressure involved in it.

Speaker 2: 55:51

Obviously, you put everything on the line and it could all. If you don't do things correctly, it might not go the way you want it to. So you know, but you're happy and it's like well, in the larger things, in the larger scheme of things, of course I'm happy, I'm doing what I love, but am I happy today? No, of course not. I'm stressed and this and that, but yeah, just somebody that's always there to have you back, and I feel that that is management. You know someone that will support you and it'll tell you as well, when no one else will tell you something, that they're prepared to tell you. You know what they think on a matter and just cut through it all and even if you don't like it.

Speaker 1: 56:43

So yeah, brilliant. Biggest influence from either business, same sport and world, anyone that springs to mind. It's ever been a bit of an influence on you.

Speaker 2: 56:59

There's a couple, but for different things. So you read a lot of things. I'm a big one about looking back at history and learning from what's been done before. I think far too many people try to reinvent the wheel when we've already sort of solved it. But it was applied to a different situation. So if you can see a situation that's going to repeat itself and you look at what was successful, then there's probably a pretty good chance that if you apply that to a new emerging situation, it'll be successful there. And that's why, for me, the story of JD Rockefeller really rings true from my story that I've told today.

Speaker 2: 58:02

It's not a coincidence that he led a pretty similar story when spindle top in California first sprung oil and it was the oil rush over there. He went out there and he tried to look for it and he realised that nine out of 10 people spent money on trying to drill for it and they said the money went down the holes, they lost the shirts. Only one out of 10 used to find oil. The rest had just run out of money and then have to go off with the tail between the legs. But then he realised that the refiners these artisanal refiners right by the oil fields and they were made out of whatever they could get their hands on these big refinery stacks I think oil refineries are probably a bit less technical than lithium refining so just these big fractionation stacks which are just like big boilers with sections on them, and when you heat them up at the bottom and put crude oil in the bottom, it fractionates out at different things, so you get different oil products coming off at different densities. So your airline fuel at the top and your road tar at the bottom, that's oil refining. And so he realized there's 120 of these guys and he thought wait a minute, this business model is just so much less risky than the drilling for it. These guys sit there as a refiner and they let the drillers and the explorers take the risk of finding this stuff, and it's only the successful ones that then come to them. And then they mark them on the grade of the natural product that comes. And if it's low grade, well then they won't pay as much money for it. But they'll be taking a known product. But then use this known process, this fractionation stack, and they'll get known product from that to sell. It's a sausage factory. That's the risk in it. It's known input in process, known input out. You know your capex, your apex, and that's it. And he realized, right, this is it. And so he started either buying up or going through whatever means possible to sort of get these 120. And that's how he made Standard Oil. And Standard Oil was obviously the largest company in the world and had to be broken up into Exxon, phillips, conoco, etc.

Speaker 2: 1:00:39

And you know, although I'm not comparing myself to him at all, it's the analog that I am sort of saying and recognizing. It's happened in the past, it'll probably happen again, and so that's one. Equally, you know, anybody that goes out there and creates a new market is good. There's Robert Freedland.

Speaker 2: 1:01:03

In a newer time he's a big guy in copper. There's a book that was written on him called the Voices Bay Hustle, if anybody wants to check that out. I loved it as a read and it tells you the story about how he went from sort of being at university with Steve Jobs and going to the farm in California that belonged to one of their uncles or something and that's where the name Apple came from, or something like that and he, freedland, ended up going into promoting penny stops or something like that, but then he ended up buying some woodland because he recognized him and a friend recognize that trees grow at sort of 10% a year. He worked out the maths and he said that's amazing, you know the sort of gain on this. But what he didn't realize is that the section of woodland that he bought had a silver mine on it, or an old one, an abandoned one. And he then went to say, well, I wonder if I can sell this to somebody. Anyway, he did, and that's where his mineral journey started, and since then he's gone on to find some of the largest copper deposits in the world and produce them.

Speaker 2: 1:02:23

So it's people like that really that they inspire me. I think seeing something that other people can't see and then being determined to go after it and having the confidence to do it is, for me, really, really inspirational on that point. But also, I listen to people's podcasts all the time and you know there are very common themes when it comes to entrepreneurs and business leaders and it's just, I take inspiration from everywhere. Really, there's no, yeah, right or wrong. You take bits. Yeah, you take bits from where you can.

Speaker 1: 1:03:05

Love that. And just finally, which has been tremendous, I'm really excited about the journey you're on. You know Greenleaf, you know in terms of where you're at, and I can feel that passion coming through throughout the whole episode. What's the plans in the next 12 to 18 months? I know some stuff you can't talk about, but what are the sort of big things that you can talk through as briefly in terms of the next couple of years?

Speaker 2: 1:03:30

Right? Well, if what I've said to you rings a bell to anyone and you want to be part of the sustainable, any transition, you think it sounds good, then we have got a retail funding round opening in April. So keep tabs on the website Greenlithiumcouk and you can be a part of that. So if that's something that you'd want to follow. So we're fundraising really now and we're going to be releasing some amazing news in the April period. I can't say anything about that, but we let's just say we need to get on.

Speaker 2: 1:04:14

We're doing the retail investment round first, that we followed by an institutional round, and that'll allow us to then build over the next 12 months, the first refinery, the smaller refinery. So we'll be putting steel in the ground and we'll be building that with our partners, our engineering partners, our technology partners, and then we will be starting to produce lithium. So this will go off to the buyers of it and hopefully get into either industrial products to start off with, like greases, and then, when we get the grade up to where it needs to be for batteries, it'll be going into batteries. We'll then look. Once we've done that refinery, we'll be looking to start immediately on building the first of the larger, two, and then by 20, 27, 2028, we'll have built 50,000 tons worth of capacity, or 51,000 and a half tons.

Speaker 2: 1:05:22

1,000 tons of capacity, that's around 67% of European demand for lithium chemicals in 2030. And then, as I say, we will look to then start building these refineries in other geographies. And so if anything I've said about the lithium industry or working with Green Lithium sparks anyone in interest, please get in touch. We do offer internships. We are looking for investors for this kind of things. There's a plethora of ways to get involved with this. So, yeah, I hope that answers the question, mark 100%.

Speaker 1: 1:06:06

I just want to thank you as well. It's been tremendous and it's a real privilege for me to be able to do this with you, because what you're building here is not only exciting, fascinating, and I can feel the growth. It's really important. And thank you for bringing it to us in an old piece as well, because it's just a fantastic place to be right now, particularly TSI with all the exciting projects it's got in the area. It really really is. And thank you to bring it up north, to northeast, because it's a great place to be.

Speaker 1: 1:06:37

But this has been an amazing episode where I hope it's been a real education piece for people, because it has been for me in terms of really understanding exactly what it's about. But more than that, it's the passion, it's the drive, it's the vision from the right, from the journey right from the start to where you are now, and that route is never straight. It's always going to pivot left and right, but you're all still going in the direction you want to go, when I think it's fantastic. So thank you, richard, it's been great. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 2: 1:07:10

I've really enjoyed it. Mark, Thanks a lot.