Episode 228: Rene LeBlanc

Hi, it's Joe Lowry. Welcome to another episode of the Global Lithium podcast. Today is episode 228. My guest is Dr. Renela Blank, who is a vice president of commercial and product strategy with Lithium America's. Renee has been on the podcast before. He is one of those rare people who has great technical knowledge combined with market knowledge and he's been in the industry long enough where he has a real sense of history. I first worked with Renee at FMC Lithium. Renee went to Tesla for a couple of years and has been with Lithium America's now for a little less than a decade. This episode will be a little less than an hour. We cover a lot of ground. So without further ado, Renee LeBlanc. Renee LeBlanc, welcome back to the Global Lithium podcast. Thanks for having me on Joe. I know it's been a surprisingly long time but it's good to be talking with you again. That's on me. It's been too long. It's been almost four years. I was shocked when I looked it up but we will write that egregious wrong today because Spotify tells me I've got a lot of new listeners in the last year, let alone the last four years. Why don't you briefly reprise your backstory? Sure Will. I guess a good place to start is probably back with education. I'm an old chemical engineer out of the University of South Carolina. I worked with a couple of electrochemistry groups there before I went to pharmaceutical and then joined the Lithium industry hard to believe over 20 years ago now. I ended up working primarily starting at Besmer City, which is where I met you the first time and got to get involved with some of the folks that were developing the battery industry out of Japan and Korea and Asia and then after working there for 12 or 13 years went on to work for a small car company out in California by the name of Tesla for about two years for our work with Kurt Kelty and his team to help develop some of the supply chain and then came to Lithium America is where we've been building different lithium assets over the last four or five years so it's it's been a wild ride on both sides of the equation whether it be producer or user and honestly it's it's been a ton of fun seeing how the industry's gone well there aren't many people that have two decades of experience and the Lithium industry today doesn't really resemble the Lithium industry that you entered and it certainly doesn't look anything like the Lithium industry I entered because I started before the Lithium ion battery was a thing. How have the customer specifications and demands evolved since you and I sat in meetings where Sumitomo metal mining didn't like the fact that thief samples and various points in a super sack were the same assay and didn't like the angle of repose and things like that I mean how much tougher through the whole us supplying the Tesla supply chain to being on the other side of the Tesla supply chain to now being at the next great Lithium asset take us through that all admit it's it's amazing how things have gotten a lot tighter more difficult over the years as you know it all comes down to the end performance of those batteries and the Lithium chemicals that go into them whether it's lithium carbonate or hydroxide directly impacts that performance and a lot of the customers right now worry a lot as you know about consistency and the specification of that material whether it be things like the elemental composition which in some cases those specifications have gotten up to two orders of magnitude tighter even since I left my days at FMC and progressed on the year all the way through to things like particle size distribution in order to control blending for the production of cathode so as things go forward I think we're going to see that kind of continue to evolve just because there's so many more cathodes that are being made in the world I remember early days when we were talking about how LFP was going to be the thing with you on followed by you know FMC was all NMC all the time or NCMA back at Tesla and now here we are coming full circle again back to LFP and LMR and other new chemistries they're coming out to try and find their own niche in the space but we will get to cathode in a few minutes in a more detailed fashion but let me just ask you if you look at a flow sheet whether it's a hard rock or a brine flow sheet take deli out of it for right now the flow sheets don't look much different in in big box perspective but the demands and the processes I would say are much different can you talk to that how has processing changed even though from a big picture level it looks very similar to what we saw in the 90s that's a good point Joe I mean really a lot of the unit operations that are out there are tried and true they've been around for decades or even a couple hundred years in a few cases the the big trick always comes down to how those things get controlled and managed and what order those things go together in the flow sheets we've built over the years whether it be the ones that we worked on together during our FMC days all the way through to now you have very different demands on the plant and very different demands because of both the customer the resource that you're at and what's available nearby to use so for something like what we're working on with Nevada right now that and then spending a lot of time recycling water for example we see it's a surprising how much money went into equipment and hardware just to make sure that we can maintain within what is available locally we also see the same thing when it comes down to how the plant gets operated and the teams and how they view the focus on quality or consistency as well as some of the other operating parameters so not to use an adage I know you've heard me say probably too many times in our friendship together but it's a lot like a difference between a souffle and a pancake it's the same ingredients in both right but nobody's paying 40 bucks for a pancake then if you were going to continue with that analogy what makes souffle carbonator hydroxide versus pancake hydroxide is carbonate in reality it comes down many times to consistency and being able to produce the same thing every time and be able to respond to the customer's changes it's almost like a service organization whereas the customers are coming up with new cathodes or they're coming up with new requirements you can bring that back to the facility work with the teams that are there in order to translate that into operating parameters and capabilities and to be able to even measure some of these things can be a challenge so even I have both seen where some of the customers keep talking about wanting to get to zero which just isn't a number but if you've got enough money your time you can measure anything right so really it all comes back to that driving mat across the board and the culture to make sure those things stick when we were at FMC and Japan dominated the battery industry and later with Korea was the number two none of those battery producers would use Chinese material China had been producing lithium hydroxide and lithium carbonate for a long time because well for hydroxide in the case of hydroxide they're nuclear program so it wasn't really a new thing although it was actually based on what we did in the United States and you know ironically now the whole the West is flipped the narrative very few people know the history of all this what has China done in the last two decades that you've been involved in observed and you know you've dealt with Chinese producers and customers what have they done that has turned the narrative of people that have only been in the industry five to ten years to say oh they just have this gift well they didn't really have a gift because they made garbage for a long long time it really did and I'll tell you I think it was their willingness to try new things to try anything and continue to plug at it until I got it right it's been like you said a 20 year ride for a lot of those producers to develop themselves and get to this point when I first came into the industry and was just getting involved with some of the battery work effectively you had three main producers globally I mean everybody else was kind of a yeah that's neat but they weren't making enough volume that their quality wasn't consistent enough good enough to be able to supply these markets but now with their willingness to try anything from taking recycled material or what was considered a waste stream by other producers or even to try things like you know directly shipping brine into the country they kept plugging at it and with the support they received both from the government over there and the focus they were able to build that knowledge and that capability over time and I think you know the to your point about how that narrative has changed over the last four or five years I think it's possible for North America and Europe and South America to build that industry again but it's not going to be fast it's gonna take us time to bring that back well with all due respect to some of the people that worked in uh Cherryville and that's from her city I often say to people that ask me about we can't just hire those people that did it before and my answer is uh most of them are dead and I would have to say that at this point I'm not sure anybody that worked in the our old mine is still alive but hey um if you're a survivor it's it'd drop me a line and it'll have me on the podcast but recently Mr. Beset was I think and I don't know if he said in Davos or right before he left but that we would be independent in critical metals in 18 to 24 months and you know I would love for that to be true but I you know I said something on Twitter when that quote was put out you know that's just that's hyperbole of the current administration but what do you think a reasonable time frame for that is if we're willing to put the money up the capital and the training and the just the tough slog well and to that point Joe I mean I think about where the industry was when I first got in and it's hard to believe that the world right now uses more lithium carbonate months than we made in a year and some months they might be using more in a few weeks than we made in a year so if you're talking about trying to bring back significant volume to the United States you know even the project we're doing which is a large one right now about a past 40,000 tons a year is only about three percent of the global market if we wanted to really bring that back you're talking years for new assets like ours to come online it takes a lot of devotion dedication from a lot of skilled people to make this stuff work and I think there's some good opportunities whether you're talking about what we're working on or some of the things that are going on with a smack over right now or some of the other other things that are happening in North America and South America but I think it's probably years in my opinion it's a decade-ish in my opinion and that's only because if we just look at the examples of what's come online and people will say we have a China does it so quickly China has built over the last 20 years excess conversion capacity and when you're talking about capacity coming online quickly you're really talking about mind assets making a precursor that's going to China or just not even having a mind plan in Africa digging it up and shipping it to China but I would posit that that was a quick fix to the 2022 under supply and that as a sustaining protocol for a three or four million tonne market that doesn't get the job done with that framework and the fact that Thacker Pass what what when is the current plan startup of Thacker Pass so far we are still on track for end of 2027 early 28 for first production things are advancing quickly at site it's it's kind of nice when you go up there to see how things are changing later this year we should have right around 2000 craft working on site constructing a place and it's hard to believe but some of the pre commissioning and early commissioning work starts later this year so it's a long run to assemble everything I'll admit it takes years to build something like this even after the funding's put in place but and it takes a large crew of dedicated people to get all this done I think we did a podcast it was right before covid in Reno in January of 2020 we did run in Las Vegas two years before that so the actual beginning run to full production will have been more than a decade and the project actually started almost a decade before that in its original form spot on it was originally discovered by chevron back in the day looking for uranium and they didn't find any and that was back in the 70s I know I've been working with a company now for almost nine years it's hard to believe and it's taken us this entire time to get to the point where we're in construction now that we're in a a turning market and I read the Bloomberg article today talking about the high end of pricing being closer to 23 now then you know it wasn't it was just a few months ago it was barely 10 so it does seem like the turn has happened and now China's having a hard time figuring out which lever they're going to pull to keep the price from running too much but we're in a we're in a world where this is the third cycle in 10 years however the market now in 2026 will be six times what it was in 2020 that's the math I've got yeah and so bringing one or two projects out to tip the balance isn't going to work anymore if the growth this year is somewhere between let's just say 360 of high fours some have said 500,000 some say 300,000 there's a range because there's a lot of uncertainty pick your number 400,000 tons is 10 phase ones of factor bass exactly exactly and do you think that all the pundits out there that are saying while China can just do it because they can how realistic do you think that is honestly I think it comes back to how much of a low hanging fruits already been taken you kind of mentioned it earlier a bit with Africa and some of the resources that they are over there were stockpiles potentially sitting on the ground and existing mining operations and honestly it was impressive to see them pull it 200,000 tons together over a two or three year period yeah they did and you know honestly I would have guessed it would have been a lot less if you'd ask me back then so China speed is a thing but once you get into certain areas of the world or certain types of assets it just has this inherent timeline that gets taken whether it be from permitting or funding raise issues or what have you so to try and bring on the equivalent of 10 factor passes over the next year is a tall ask for any country or any word well I firmly believe that China speed outside of China is pretty much combingling it with kryptonite because if you look at what zygians done at 3Qs or gangfens time lines in argentina they're pretty much like everybody else's and whether that brings culture governmental influences the whole thing into it if you look at the assets China has versus the assets in the rest of the world most of this has got to come from outside of China I mean China's China's done a great job of tapping out what they have of course every time you start to get short they announce that they found all these massive great resources that never seemed to materialize but I don't want this to be China bashing because it's not but I do think the western press gives China way too much credit in lithium I won't talk to the whole broad critical metals industries but I won't say it's different this time because high prices will ultimately fix high prices but I think the cycle is going to run a lot longer this time what do you think I honestly agree with you Joe I hope we don't I know it'll sound a little weird being on the producer side but I actually hope the price doesn't run to crazy high levels again because like you said high prices do fix supply in this case and they fix themselves but the concern for me is always trying to have that duration of focus because like we were talking earlier when we're developing a project that might take five years a decade when you go through a cycle or two you'll hit a period where the market fell and trying to move to that next step becomes nearly impossible and I think that's one reason like you said the cycles seem to hit almost like clockwork on this you know three-year basis right now well all the banks have finally come around to the fact that almost all the banks that there's going to be a shortage but now the the difference in what the banks say will be the demand in 2030 is greater than the entire world demand was in 2020 just the delta between there's a lot of varied opinions out there but almost all of them now are over three million or at least three million tons two more than that that's a huge number it was three hundred thousand tons ish in at the beginning of this decade that's right and when you started in the industry it was less than fifty that's exactly right that's where I was going because when I started I mean it was I mean you couldn't even run a current large scale gigafactory with what we made when I first started yeah for perspective the FMC lithium operation if it had a super year it could push less than 14,000 tons so that's that's where we were we were not the biggest producer but before SQM came into the market in the very late 90s it was just us and Abel Marl's operation in Chile and in silver pig Nevada and this was a very very small industry and then when SQM came in the thought was FMC will go out of business because nobody needs more than what the Otacama can produce the vision of the lithium industry was was pretty limited back then and that's even after the lithium ion battery had come into being and was growing very rapidly but at that time the growth was predicated on small cell phone batteries not electric vehicles as I often do I bring history into the podcast but let's move back to the present Zalandas offers technology and services that support both direct lithium extraction and conventional evaporation ponds minimize the environmental impact of your lithium site through Zalandas data driven insights and tailored solutions for each extraction method go to Zalandas.com for more information that's ZEL AND EZ.com and we've already alluded to it wasn't that long ago that the big lithium producers the big battery guys and this is a high nickel world you're not going to need carbonate in the 2030s is all going to be hydroxide yet we've from that perspective have regressed back to the fact that the least expensive least energy dense cathode is now dominating the world would you like to unpack that for us? Yeah I mean it's it's been fascinating to watch over the years because like you said it was all about yeah I mean from an engineering perspective it was all about energy density can you make a battery that stores a lot of power doesn't lay a lot or fits into a small space and now as time's going on people have really started to tie on to the idea that it's actually the affordability of these applications so it doesn't matter if you're talking about electric vehicle or battery energy storage you've got to get the cost of the whole system down enough in order to make it something that is economical and something that can honestly present enough benefit to put the type of investment into so you look at something like lithium iron phosphate and constituents that are in there iron and phosphorus are relatively inexpensive to something like nickel and cobalt and even sometimes manganese but manganese is a little less now so a lot of that work has kind of gone towards developing an industry where that initial cost to that battery pack which is most of the cost of whether it's an electric vehicle or a stationary storage system is reduced as low as possible in order to allow more access so I think it's going to be fascinating to see because like you've kind of said earlier Joe I remember listening to people tell ask me why we were possibly looking at doing lithium carbonate on some of these projects if all the world was ever going to need was hydroxide right and now here we are and people are asking will I've got hydroxide but are we going to get this carbonate from and it's really created this weird world for us where people are in some cases taking hydroxide and trying to convert it back to carbonate just to get the feedstock thing I think the original Thakrapass PFS anyway was hydroxide was I think the original smackover PFSs were hydroxide and now the carbonate you know now the plans carbonate I don't really know anybody in the United States that has a project that's a serious project that's focused on making hydroxide yet when and I just came back from Korea when I talked to big battery purchasing guys the technical guys are talking about doing LFP but the purchasing guys are still fixated on hydroxide which is the disconnect that I've always seen in Korea in China they'll switch in between products several times in a year if they have to if that's what the market demands because a lot of those plans are designed to have kind of an extra bit of piping and switchovers so that they can go from one to the other and a lot of them always produced the second product based on the waste product of the one and upgraded it so I guess just in saying that that does show you a structural difference between the way China thinks about things in the way the way we do it's just like you don't waste any food and you don't waste any lithium let's talk a little bit about a video that I think we both saw in the last week of Tesla's new conversion facility in Texas which has been talked about for a long time so this warp speed they talked about in doing the reveal that they were operating seemed like a bit of a stretch but they they've announced a lower cost and I did air quotes there I'd sound a video podcast so let me just announce that I did air quotes a lower cost simpler spod you mean the hydroxide process and they characterize it as the first direct plant which is not true anybody from Tesla or the Tesla Roddy fanboys it was done decades ago in North Carolina in not through carbonate but there was a direct process from spod you mean to hydroxide it was run by FMC's competitor which is now Abel Marl and then we still we never stop making hydroxide in in North Carolina we make it from carbonate but so Tesla's claims about their big breakthrough they have a different process and Renee if you would like to articulate where the differences are and that spod you mean to chemical process please do and they they were talking about their byproduct is is better and I didn't really get that either honestly because I can tell you that I used to be responsible for selling the byproduct from Besimer City and we had a customer base that wanted it that was located very close to us it went into putting the blue and blue jeans and went into glass and the biggest complaint I ever got about that product was it got there got to the customer it was still hot it was it was too hot and many complaints from the glass plants that they didn't want they wanted us to have it cooled off before we delivered it so I'm not sure why Tesla's byproducts better honestly with the process they went with it is a pressure of each soda ash based process so the classical one we ran in Besimer was a sulfuric based and the both of them require getting up the temperature in the front end you still have to basically change the structure of the rock in order to let the lithium out so it requires getting it up to almost 1100 degrees Celsius in other words thinking hot yeah very like you said and then once you get it down to temperature you're going to end up reacting it either under pressure or soda ash like Tesla's doing or you've reacted with sulfuric acid to pull the lithium out then you move forward to process it either carbonate or hydroxide after doing some purification steps in a simple form so like you said I mean that remainder of that rock that was left over had a lot of really good uses out in the world for years and the sulfuric process actually resulted in something that was fairly stable at the end of the day pressure leach was always an interesting one because I know that with like the album or facility and some of the engineers you and I both knew from that unit they used to talk about how that pressure reactor would want to corrode and wear badly and it got to a point where I mean out of the moral it switched over to making lithium hydroxide from carbonates as well especially after they got a lot of calm up and running so you know it's interesting to me to see how people are trying to approach production lithium chemicals differently but to be honest the bulk of the cost still is what did that rock cost you to begin with so I mean you and I've talked these numbers for years in a general market people like to talk about 6% lithium concentrate you hear that number getting quoted all over the place even and one company makes it one company makes it you got it everybody else is around 5% 5.2% out in the market so it takes you almost 9 tons of rock to make one tunnel lithium carbonate equivalent in the world so if you take your favorite number for assumption even if it's current spot price of call it 2000 it's done to make math easy you know you're talking $18,000 a ton just in your rock cost no matter where your plant situated or the process you're running so you know add a couple a hundred a couple thousand dollars a ton more to that and it starts getting up to the market price pretty quick if you're not careful I'm thrilled to see conversion in the United States I don't want to be unclear about that but this whole first principles rhetoric it always seems to come the wheels always seem to come off when team Elon starts talking about lithium whether it's converting's like printing money that was proven to be a fatuous statement and now with this little video declaring victory talking about speed much much much slower than it would have been if it had been built in China and it's said it's you know basically an essential element of energy freedom in North American our rock is it it isn't even domestic rock and would the price would the price going up as Renee just alluded to this is a high cost operation anyway you put it if you want to plug it into the cost curve make your budget mean price assumption over a long period of time and what Tesla has done gives them hydroxide assuming it's actually high quality and that hasn't been proven yet either but I think they'd have been better partnering with somebody in the smack over with brine or having taken a piece of lack when it was out there for the taking not that long ago I know everybody is fixated and I do also believe Elon Musk is a genius and he's done a lot of great things but I will still say lithium remains Mr. Musk's Achilles heel and this converter in my mind only proves it especially the way they've characterized it and that Renee LeBond didn't say any of that I did okay we have recently seen the transition from oversupply to at least balance and now probably under supply the energy storage system growth has been the tipping point what I don't like about the narrative is that just because the America's failed aside from Tesla America's largely failed in EVs but the Chinese certainly haven't and the Chinese have so much capacity now they are taking over the world except for the United States as an exporter of electric vehicles when you look at the key points of demand what are your thoughts on ESS and how do you view the EV market because I think it's still pretty strong I'll tell you I know I tend to look at a lot of the same sources that are out there that a lot of others are and you do hear a lot of I'm gonna say doom and gloom around the United States around the electric vehicle market but the numbers that I've been hearing out of places late production in China is that they had a 45% rough increase in electric vehicle units last year to 20 million granted like you mentioned a lot of those now are getting exported whether that be going to Europe or Canada and with some of the recent shifts and sentiment by those governments to allow those vehicles in the country it's gonna be interesting to see how that dynamic changes between the United States and the rest of the world effectively as far as battery energy storage goes it's been a relatively small market over the years as you know this year I think it just made it over 20 something percent if you look at it on a lithium consumption basis but it's also the rapid growing sector right now that people are forecasting and some of the forecasts that you look at out there are I mean just in the energy storage space are wildly different from each other only a year or two out I mean sometimes multiples of each other depending upon who's doing the forecasting so I think that says that there's a lot of interest and honestly there's good reason why there's a really good study that was put out there by Erika a couple years ago after they had their brownouts in Texas and how they had added battery storage in here a lot of their big consumers and without doing a lot of major expensive grid upgrades have actually been able to increase the the consumption on the grid by 30 percent and they save something like $750 million on people's electricity bills just by putting batteries in and the right place so I get the excitement I see the economics behind it but it's going to be interesting to see if some of these forecasts are not very optimistic I think is the way it is in some cases yeah if I looked at the role motion data correctly if you look at it on a per capita basis the United States actually had more installations of energy storage systems on a per capita basis not a gross basis than China did in Australia by far beats everybody on a per capita basis so where the US story is whether rightly or wrong with the press portraying it did you know Trump's anti-EV or whatever well Trump is certainly not anti-energy and he's certainly not anti-energy storage systems and battery systems the one part of the narrative that I think may become true but isn't true yet is that this is driven by AI because I think AI is actually a very tiny part of our real installations but because everybody likes to talk about AI that seems to suck all the oxygen out of the room when people talk about energy storage you have any more comments on that you have battery storage at your house we actually do have a small amount I'm hoping we're not going to have to use it this coming weekend for this this ice storm they're talking about for both you and I but it's actually something that I think is like a lot of things in life if if there's good reason for people to do it it's going to get good traction and if there's good economics behind it there's hard it's hard to argue with and like you said I think this is a core part of kind of the all of the above strategy for energy for the current administration and it's something that I think is key and crucial for a reliable grid in the long term but like you said I am not even though I know there's lots of large users for AI data centers that are going in all over the place you see articles all the time about it I think that the big drivers are still utility scale storage right trying to optimize the investment they've already got but there's a lot of fertile ground for that to keep growing in my opinion and I I've said this many times and I'll repeat myself yet again that I predicted in 2010 that ESS would be as big as EVs in 2025 and I was wrong but I got to trend right because it's going to I believe it's going to happen at some point whether it's 2035 or 2037 but it just in my mind makes perfect sense and I haven't installed a power wall yet either but I plan to have some kind of backup in the coming year and I will have that before I have a EV so again my apologies to my audience that I do have an electric one more electric leaf blower in electric ski boots but I do not have an EV. Let's talk about the Thacker Pass is the near-term hope for lithium independence but it's going to take more than Thacker Pass has. Even with a phase two a phase three and I think we've characterized Thacker Pass I think Tom Benson has I think John said it too it's actually the the largest lithium resource in the western hemisphere if not the world but the smackover is is probably the the story that gets the most attention I think it really has exons there, chef runs there, equinors there and it has great potential but we're still waiting for pure DLE to produce at scale on a consistent basis and I'm talking to you Aaron met everybody's watching you but we're we're still not seeing the exports at a level that shows the kind of production that you are supposed to have so what do you think when you look at exon B&N, chef run B&N, they're perfectly comfortable with long project scenarios and they don't have capital constraints of juniors that either have to get into production or go bust. What's a likely scenario in your mind to developing the smackover because it's no DLE no smackover? I think the shortest answer is it's it's one of the best projects that I can think of outside of backer pass right now um to be to be fair um even though having run and supported and operated a DLE-ish facility right we did have ponds you know that I mean you John and I worked on that for years together and it took quite a bit from 1997 on to about 2002 which granite was before my time with FMC to get that plant fully lined out it takes a while to build the knowledge around a new unit operation like that and I think by having the oil and gas majors there in the smackover with the team that they've bring not only the balance sheet but also the technical capability from other industries that they've done the same type of thing yet um again as an old chemical engineer we don't necessarily talk about DLE they're just unit operations it's a different hammer in the toolbox right so you know I'm kind of excited to see how they pull this together I will admit that um there are challenges we've all seen with this whether it usually manifests and timeline right but you know it's something that I think they could definitely be successful at I am a believer in DLE it sounds like you've been talking to Patrick Hallworth though because he always likes to talk about I think he says there's 2200 PhDs in Xion or whatever the the technical prowess and that's certainly certainly part of it um you know I I think shot out to Ali Thurmanid Equinor there's a lot of smart people involved and you know and now you got the Chevron guys in too so and ladies um so yeah I'm a believer I just think that you got to have the first 20 or 30 000 ton project and then you go from there but when you look at how long it practically takes to build and start these up this becomes a 2030 story I think yeah I think there'll be a commercial operation before 2030 but when you talk about we need to get to three million tons we need to get to 3.5 sure this macover is a big part of the 2030s story of that but that's why I think this cycle lasts longer than the last two this episode is also brought to you by mlc are you looking for the highest purity calcium products to produce battery grade chemicals look no further mlc is your reliable partner check out lyme4lithium.com for more information about mlc's calcium solutions and expert support that's l-i-m-e the number four l-i-t-i-u-m dot com what did I miss good question Joe I think right now the the only other thing I could really think of this morning is kind of around how the view looks for the demand side of the equation going forward right like you had mentioned earlier you know China has a lot of extra capacity they they have to export that to get it out the market and I'd love to hear your opinion on what you're seeing out there and what you think that overall impact might be well I think there are a couple of things and one is that because China can make nicely equipped low-cost EVs you're talking about South America, Southeast Asia you're not just talking about the European market you you're talking about really the world and they're they're going to be serving those markets at very very marginal profit which is going to enable them to get to the price point and when you take a look at the whole world market you subtract the US they're literally everywhere else now Canada's on board apparently now or unless Carnie changes his mind when I'm in the UK and I get into an Uber it's usually electric and it's usually not made in Europe and I just read something good day about Santiago's bus fleet and it's three different Chinese companies bigger trucks in China I mean there's just every time you start peeing the onion there's just more stuff the myopic American approach to this I mean whatever happened to Biden's F-150 people in the West tend to look at it through the American lens because the press writes so much about it we're just not that important in the car world anymore and I hope GM prospers I hope that Ford figures out which ends up but from a lithium perspective it doesn't really matter because the demand's going to be there anyway the thing that I really find interesting though is on the ESS side and you can't really say we want to China free ESS battery installation in the next few years it's going to take a while to catch up so and I'm thinking that most of our ESS is going to be CTL cells for a while and maybe I'm wrong but I really don't see how that happens otherwise so I think the only way you might see see it non CTL cells in North America personally as if some of these facilities that have been built before EVs could pivot over and potentially use their Ford's already talking about that correct and I firmly believe that that's the signals I was getting in Korea it doesn't even have to be EV because they're seeing that that's a market opportunity if there's nothing else I will bring this episode to a close with a rapid fire question that's certainly out of left field it's what I've never asked before I do know you're a parent what have you learned most from your kids I could always go with the easy one of watch whatever they put in their mouth but that probably gives the audience a hint at how old my kids actually are but yeah I'll I think the biggest thing is be present in the moment kids grow so fast and they are so curious about things that you have to be there with them and although sometimes there are things that'll try and take you away from that trying to remember to keep that focus when you're with them and just focus on them is so worth it I know it's the hardest job I've ever had but probably the most fun I consider myself blessed in that my kids are old enough that there wasn't the screen threat when they were when they were elementary school junior high I mean there were there were social media had started but you know my space when they were in high school and I watched well you saw this morning I mean my when we were starting to record I got a call from my daughter because my granddaughter wanted to face die but she did she doesn't get any screen time other than that she doesn't they don't give her an iPad to watch stuff they are very in that area of their life's lights so I think that's great but it's very hard to manage with every restaurant you go into the kids little kids are buried in their iPad or whatever they have but anyway yeah that was a different type of rapid fire question but I know you're a parent so I thought I would ask Renee it's always good to catch up what what what what I did forget the one thing I mean we talked we danced around Thacker Pass we talked about when it would would start but is there anything else you'd like to say about Thacker Pass because I you know my audience knows I'm invested in lack knows I've got a relationship with lack so I get tons of people you know lack lack lack so if there's any other commentary you want to give about Thacker Pass I do like the drone footage that you put up and but yeah the the construction team and the in the operations guys do a fantastic job with that drone footage I've got to admit just because it moves so quickly I've got a photo and a presentation I was giving this morning that's from November and it's and you wouldn't recognize it today if you were looking at that photo so no I've been there in 13 months I was there and I plan to go in the next six weeks but yeah I we've got to get you out there Joe I think you're going to love getting to meet the team and and see the place and I know right now I mean with everything from engineering the core engineering for the project I mean we're past 90% complete now the we've done almost all of the the bolt procurement for the site so material is inbound and it is rapidly turning into to how many hands you can get on site to get the thing constructed internally right now we are are building the operations team I might have enacted them the audience to death a little earlier for operations and and it's great to see some of this starting to come together we are on track right now for the end of 27 early 28 for first production and and I'll tell you I'm hoping to send out a nice photograph of everyone standing around smiling on the first bolt bag when it comes out the door those are always nice photos to put up on your on your brag wall but well it it has been a journey just like Kachari was a journey when that was a lack project and no I look forward to seeing it and yeah I would have been remiss and I would have gotten gigged by some of the lack fans had I not but as I said I do plan to be out there and do a completely fact or past focused episode soon Renee thank you very much your time is always appreciated thanks Joe really appreciate the time of day and in korea getting to talk with you again on the podcast another episode is in the books it's always good to catch up with Renee there are very few people that can speak to technical market issues the history with the kind of clarity that Renee does I want to thank all the people that responded to my request to give during the holiday season I would have liked to have had more but I had a couple more than my goal so thanks to everybody that reached out to me I'm sure there were many many other people that gave that just did not contact me to tell me about it as sentiment on lithium becomes more and more bullish you get people writing about it that don't really know very much and you get people that are hyping their favorite project that even with a rising market will probably never see the light of day there are so many projects out there whether you're talking about Canada or a few jurisdictions in the United States that even an extended upcycle isn't going to be enough to get them into production you may make some money trading on the stock but if you're interested in investing I think it's always good to take a step back invest in quality assets and to the extent possible with management teams that have been successful in the past I realize that seems obvious but if the last two cycles taught me anything it's that retail investors do funny things in hot markets you won't have to listen me talk about the Buffalo bills for several months in that they were eliminated from the playoffs last week sad day for me but thanks to everybody that reached out to commit it right with me it was indeed a disappointing end to another season thanks again for listening