What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
The Global Battle for Critical Minerals and Why It Matters for Technology
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
What powers the smartphone in your pocket or the electric vehicle in your garage? In this eye-opening conversation with Ernest Scheyder, author of "The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives," we dive deep into the hidden world of critical minerals that make our modern technological existence possible.
Scheyder, who spent decades covering the energy industry before turning his focus to critical minerals, reveals how control of these resources is reshaping global politics in ways many don't yet recognize. China has strategically positioned itself as the dominant processor of most critical metals while American expertise in this area has steadily declined. This imbalance creates not just economic vulnerabilities but geopolitical risks that echo the oil conflicts of the previous century.
The scale of modern mining operations is almost incomprehensible. The Marenzi Mine in Arizona—North America's largest—features multiple pits visible from space and waste rock piles larger than the Egyptian pyramids. Yet these massive operations represent just the extraction phase. The complex processing required to transform raw materials into usable components for batteries and electronics demands enormous additional investment. Unlike the relatively standardized oil industry, each critical mineral follows a unique journey from ground to gadget.
At its core, this story revolves around communities and choices. We face fundamental questions about what we value more: technological advancement or cultural heritage, economic development or environmental preservation. The 1872 mining law still governing extraction on U.S. federal lands was signed before electric lights existed, highlighting how unprepared our policies are for the tech-driven future we're racing toward. As Scheyder provocatively states, "If you want AI, you have to have mining."
Ready to understand what's really powering your digital life? Listen now and join the conversation about the resources that will define the 21st century economy and the global competition to control them.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everyone, really fascinating chat today with the author of the War Below Lithium Copper and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives. Fascinating topic, ernest. How are you? Hey, I'm doing well, it's great to be with you read and so timely given everything that's in the news today around tech, geopolitics, electric vehicles and beyond. Before we dive into the book, maybe introduce yourself a little bit about your bio and background and how you came to this topic.
Speaker 2:Sure thing. So my day job is as a journalist. I've been a journalist for about two decades and I spent the initial bulk of my career writing about the oil and gas industry. I started being a journalist in New York and then I eventually moved to North Dakota where I was writing about how oil and gas technology developments were really changing the way the United States produced energy. But I switched my professional focus a few years ago to look at critical minerals because I became very curious about where and how the United States and the world hoped to get the materials that were going to be used for batteries, for electric vehicles, for all electronics. It was a nascent space the oil industry is much bigger but it had some existential and some logistical and philosophical questions that I thought were important for our country and our world really to answer. And so I dove in in my full-time job as a journalist to looking at the where and how we hope to get these building blocks.
Speaker 2:And I think, in general, most people when they think about critical minerals they think, sure, okay, that's cool.
Speaker 2:I think lithium goes into my cell phone, or there might be copper in the wiring in my house, or I think, you know, and maybe antimony has something to do with energy, I just don't know what and so they might just broadly say, okay, cool, like I think you can go get that.
Speaker 2:But when it comes to specific sites, when it comes to saying you know, hey, evan, like we're going to need to put this copper mine at a place where you went camping as a kid or you might have religious or cultural connections to, then you started to see a lot of opposition to proposed projects, and the more that I wrote about them in my day job as a journalist, the more that I realized this was a bigger story that needed to be told, and so that actually was how the War Below came about.
Speaker 2:The book is a book of narrative storytelling look at people and places at the center of this global energy transition and it's not really a book about mining per se. To me, the two main themes in the book are community and choice. What are the choices we're willing to make if we want this tech-focused future, this electrified future? Who are the communities that are affected? What does it look like to have a conversation amongst Americans and really all citizens of the world about where we want to get these vital building blocks? We are increasingly a tech-focused culture, and that can't happen without more critical minerals, so we've got to be having these discussions.
Speaker 1:Fascinating and in researching the war below was there like a particular event or individual that kind of moved you or surprised you in the preparation.
Speaker 2:I got to say it was my honor and privilege to meet with a lot of different folks across the country and really the world when I was reporting out this book. Each person really gave their time to me and time is a great resource, obviously and so I was just honored for the entire. You know everyone that participated in the book. For me, I mean I think I might call out one or two people that really, for me, crystallize this idea of choice. I mean, there's a mayor of a small community in Arizona that really wants a large copper mine to be developed.
Speaker 2:Now, this copper mine is opposed by many Native Americans for religious and cultural rights reasons. But this mayor, who he's a very, very strong Democrat, she's very open about her political views, surrounded by a county full of Republicans, she spends much of the narrative lobbying President Biden to approve this copper mine, and so, you know, sort of going against the tide, so to speak, because President Biden had opposed this copper project. And so for me, this mayor's insistence that her town's economic health and economic vitality is the most important thing was something that I found really interesting and fascinating and certainly included it in the narrative. But the book is full of interesting people, because to me, I mean, these stories are about so much more than mining policy or what investors or tech companies do. It's about the people at the core here and trying to help respectfully and responsibly share their perspectives with the entire world. Not saying whether one's right or wrong, but really just letting you, the reader, decide, and that was for me the greatest privilege here in writing. The War Below.
Speaker 1:Fantastic, what a great story. And you know there's always been a struggle around strategic minerals in history, but it seems at least you know, for me over the last few years it's taken on part and parcel of international conflict and diplomacy. When did that happen, do you think? Or has it been always been there? It's just been sort of under the radar.
Speaker 2:Well, I think you know I mean a lot of this stuff has been coming to the forefront recently and we need only look at recent headlines, with President Trump signing the executive order to boost US critical minerals production. Certainly, critical minerals are big talking points in Ukraine, greenland and other diplomatic measures that Washington has undertaken right now. But if we take a step back to the 20th century and the years after World War II, the United States government actually invested heavily in the critical mineral space, especially in rare earths. Rare earths are a grouping of 17 minor metals that are not as rare as the name implies. What's rare is to find them in large quantities and there is one such deposit in Southern California, right over the border from Las Vegas. It's called the Mountain Pass Mine and the US government helped develop this, helped fund scientists that helped develop it, and the mine grew to be the largest supplier of these rare earths in the world. The reason we had the color TV, and especially the color red, is due to a rare earth, europium. So in the 1960s, when color TV started to take off, that was due to rare earths and that research was funded a lot by taxpayers me and you. But over time, towards the latter part of the 20th century, the US government just invested less in the area, invested more in things like biofuels and at the same time, there was less interest from students and universities to actually want to go into rare earths or just critical minerals in general, so you had fewer students enrolling in mining, engineering programs and related areas.
Speaker 2:At the same time, China realized that our global economy was moving to a materials-based one, and it did almost the opposite. It invested heavily in mining, engineering and education. It invested heavily in minerals processing and so really, as this muscle atrophied in the United States, china was bulking up, and where we sit here today, I mean, china is the world's largest processor of most metals considered critical by the US Geological Survey, and it's been using that as a huge economic weapon to encourage manufacturing to come to its borders, as well as sort of use it as a tool in diplomacy with other countries across the world, and so that's the main. That is a main tension point here, and I think when we sit here today you know in 2025, we can sort of seem like whoa critical minerals are just popping into the headlines, but there's been a lot of movement the past 40 or 50 years on these areas, and China, right now has been using them really, really strongly to advance its own aims.
Speaker 1:Yes, the Great Divide is coming, with China and the US, maybe the rest of the world. Were there any particularly interesting moments or revelations going out in the field? I imagine you visited quite a lot of interesting destinations and places, and people Tell us about that.
Speaker 2:Sure thing. So I think the average person might not ever have the opportunity to go to a mine, but if you or your audience gets a chance to go, I highly recommend it. It's a fascinating space For one chapter of the book. I visited the Marenzi Mine in Arizona, which is owned by a company known as Freeport Mack Moran. It's a copper mine and it's the largest mine of any metal on the North American continent. You can see this thing from outer space. It's got multiple pits, so I think when people think of a mine they think of just one pit.
Speaker 2:This one's got seven or eight pits strewn throughout this part of rural Arizona. It's got giant tailings facilities that are bigger than the pyramids. The tailings facilities basically store waste rock. So after you take the copper out of a rock deposit, you've got to do something with the leftover rock and you create essentially a giant tailings pile that has to be monitored for seismicity and other structural safety measures on a constant basis. These tailings piles are massive. You can see them huge from a distance. It's just insanely big.
Speaker 2:After you take the rock out of the ground you have to crush it, which takes this giant milling equipment. Then you have to lightly process into what's known as concentrate. That can be then turned into what we think of as copper sort of the wiring, the sheets, the pipes, et cetera, et cetera. Now I just truncated that whole big process there. But just imagine these huge, huge facilities to not only take rock out of the ground, you have giant, giant dump trucks, larger than a house, and you have hundreds of them milling about this site at all one time, and then they take it to a facility to crush this rock down, where it's then further processed in there. So it's just amazing when we think about where copper just in this one example comes from.
Speaker 2:I also had an opportunity in the book to go to Bolivia, because Bolivia is sitting on more lithium what's called a lithium resource than any other place on the planet. And when we talk about the global battle to power our lives, which is the subtitle of the book, bolivia has begun to realize that it can use this as a diplomatic tool. And so I follow a US CEO who's trying to get access to Bolivia's lithium as he essentially drives around the country, going from place to place as part of his networking activities, and you get a sense there of how interested and how intrigued and why lithium is so important now as a diplomatic tool where our economy is going. Because whoever controls the production and processing of these critical minerals, evan, is going to control the 21st century economy the way that control of oil defined the 20th century economy, and I think we see that more and more and more with all of these headlines coming out there.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. It's on the lever of history, particularly war history, and you go back through the entirety of human history, and resource security, resource scarcity, of course, plays a part in human history. How do you look at parallels in history when it comes to these critical resources? Anything we can learn there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when I think back to the 20th century, I mean oil revolutionized our economy. There's no way around that. I mean it obviously raised the interest of living, quality of life et cetera across the globe. But let's have a few reflections on that. We didn't necessarily reflect on the best ways to produce oil, where and how, are there some places too special to have oil extraction et cetera? And so what did we get out of that? We got multiple armed conflicts in the 20th century over oil. We got climate change, certainly because we didn't think about what the emissions could do to our planet. We had a large cartel that controls roughly a third or more of the world's oil production in OPEC. And those are just three things that we didn't think through. And, as a consequence, if we don't think through those sort of related areas now as the economy, is shifting to include more materials.
Speaker 2:What are we going to get out of that? The consultancy S&P Global has warned that we could see wars in the 21st century over copper. Which just sounds kind of crazy on the surface to think about a war over copper, but I think that just sort of lays bare how important it and other critical minerals are going to be to power all these tech devices of the future. Now, unlike oil and gas, which once they're used for combustion or other purposes, they're burned off and gone forever, critical minerals can be recycled, so that's a huge positive right there.
Speaker 2:You know, lithium doesn't lose its ability to retain an electric charge just because it's been sitting in a battery for 20 years. So the ability to recycle more and more, I think, is going to be extremely important for the tech industry, especially with AI demanding more power, more servers more batteries, et cetera, et cetera, but still we know that we're going to need a lot more what's known as virgin material or mined material for the foreseeable future.
Speaker 2:When you just look at estimates from the International Energy Agency and other intergovernmental bodies, the demand projections are just through the roof. Now, at some point, we're going to reach what's known as a circular economy, the idea that you can take old cell phones and recycle them and make a new cell phone or a new electronic device out of the materials inside and not need to have a new mine. But what anyone you know, some people might say oh, that'll happen by 2050 or 2075. We just don't know is the answer. Anyone that says they have a firm date on that is probably not speaking with a lot of authority. What we do know, though, is we're going to need a lot more mining for the foreseeable future to power all these tech devices. So we've got to be having a discussion about what are the standards that we want? What do we expect of our policymakers and politicians and the manufacturers that make the products that we buy? And so that's part of the conversation I'm hoping to spark here, with the War Below.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, the conversation has begun. Are there any misconceptions or myths or sort of fake news stories that you've addressed through the book that you managed to correct through your writing?
Speaker 2:Well, I think there's a perception, rightly or wrongly, that critical minerals extraction and processing is sort of a similar process to oil and that is just. Nothing could be further from the case, whereas I think the average person might understand that, hey, you take oil out of the ground and maybe it goes into a refinery and you get either kerosene or gasoline or sort of other derivative product. Maybe they might have a general understanding. I mean, for critical minerals, the extraction and production and processing varies widely.
Speaker 2:The way that you take copper out of the ground and make copper pipes, for instance, is vastly different than the way you take lithium out of the ground and turn it into a part that can be used to make a cathode in a battery, for instance, and so each of those steps are unique and requires a lot of money to be invested, not only in the extraction but the processing. So, whereas before you might be focused on oil and saying, ok, we're going to drill an oil, well, and then we're going to build a refinery, sure, okay. So that's a pretty straightforward process. But if you're trying to increase production of critical minerals and processing across the globe, now think about all the different facilities that you have to make, not only to mine it, but then to process it and then to turn it into a form that can be used in the tech industry. So just the amount of money that needs to be spent is ginormous here is ginormous here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I bet, and you know not to fast forward too far, but given all the recent discoveries and advancements, in mining and you know searching for critical minerals. You see these blockbuster news stories every day about billions found in this region or that region. Are you optimistic about the ability of, let's say, the US to meet its needs for this foreseeable future, or are there some big roadblocks or red flags that you see out there?
Speaker 2:Well, evan, I'm an optimist by nature, so I have to think that things will only get better. What I would say, though, is let's just take the United States. Many of the laws, especially on the federal level, have been on the books for a very long time. For instance, the law that governs hard rock mining in the western United States was signed in 1872 by President Ulysses S Grant. Now, president Grant never saw a light bulb turned on. He didn't envision electric vehicles, he didn't envision, you know, other high-tech devices that we have today, and so that law was designed to encourage population development in the US West, and if you've been to California recently, you know that the law has achieved its intended purpose. And so what would it look like to have a federal mining policy? Again, we're just talking about the United States here. What would it look like to have a policy that is fit for the times? You know, I mean mining companies that lay claims on federal lands don't have to pay any royalties to the taxpayers. Now, that's different than oil companies, which do have to pay royalties to the federal government if they're taking oil out of federal lands, and so obviously, that's a perk that oil companies would love to have. You know, there's some other differences as well in that mining law. Again, it was written in the 19th century, well before this high tech age, well before AI or any other modern tech inventions, and so it's just it's it's written for a different time, policymakers in Washington that we would like to have laws and other policies that are actually built for the 21st century high-tech economy that we have right now. I think just having those discussions is, for me, is part of the way of moving forward.
Speaker 2:Various administrations have tried to take different efforts. We saw, certainly under President Biden, the Inflation Reduction Act was signed and that's designed to offer tax incentives to spur more electric vehicle production in the United States, as well as mining in the US or in countries with US free trade deals, ie ally nations. But that law does leave out some countries. For instance, the United Kingdom does not have a free trade deal with the United States. Huge parts of South America, I mean. I mentioned Bolivia earlier. It does not have a free trade deal with the United States. So as it thinks about where its lithium should go, it's not actually looking at the United States, it's looking towards Asia, and that's because there's no economic incentive to develop it more. The US does have a lot of supplies of critical minerals within its own borders and there are areas that haven't even been explored more. We just don't know what's there. So the president, and President Biden before him, have called for more exploration, more digging to determine what's actually in the ground.
Speaker 2:But there again you've got the rub Like once you get it out of the ground, evan, that doesn't necessarily mean that you can just put it into a battery. You've got to have the processing facilities. Mean that you can just put it into a battery. You've got to have the processing facilities. You've got to invest that money to have those processing facilities that can turn that rock into a form that's usable for these high-tech devices. And so if people don't want to mine in their backyard, they're probably not going to want a lithium processing facility next door. So to me it gets back to again this idea of choice and these conversations that I think we really have to be having. If you want AI, you have to have mining.
Speaker 1:Well, that's quite an interesting note to leave it on, and I see the book is doing really well. In fact, you even have an audio book, which I prefer. You have Kindle options, so folks go out and buy the book. And what else are you up to on your side, ernest? I'm assuming you do speaking and consulting and maybe working on other books.
Speaker 2:So in my day job as a journalist, I'm tracking a lot of the policy developments out of Washington right now, and so that's been keeping me extremely busy, and I've got some other writing projects on the side More to come. I'll keep you posted, all right.
Speaker 1:Will do Thanks'll keep you posted, all right, will do. Thanks. So much for joining. Really appreciate you and the work. Really interesting stuff. Thanks everyone for listening and watching and sharing. Take care, cheers.