Is the supply of certain key metals\u2014like lithium, copper, nickel, and cobalt\u2014and \u201crare earth\u201d metals\u2014like vanadium and indium\u2014potentially a limiter on the progress of energy transition? Or is there enough of them to realize our ambitions? Are they being produced in a sustainable way? How will the geographic concentration of these metals affect geopolitics and trade as the energy transition progresses? How confident can we be about our assessments of their abundance? And how confident can we be about how much of them we\u2019ll need in the future, given the rapid evolution of many of these technologies, and the many alternate ways of producing them?<\/p>\n
Our guest in this episode brings all of these questions into a whole new focus, and shows why these questions can\u2019t be answered with some back-of-the-envelope calculation. Instead of asking whether there is enough of these metals in the Earth\u2019s crust, he says, or about how they are mined, we should be asking much more sophisticated questions about the chemical<\/em> industry, the opaque, illiquid markets in which these metals are traded, and the geopolitical implications of their trade.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Is the supply of certain key metals\u2014like lithium, copper, nickel, and cobalt\u2014and \u201crare earth\u201d metals\u2014like vanadium and indium\u2014potentially a limiter on the progress of energy transition? Or is there enough of them to realize our ambitions? Are they being produced in a sustainable way? How will the geographic concentration of these metals affect geopolitics and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[111],"tags":[233,717,716,364,714,715,526,466,64,45],"class_list":["post-2513","xen_episodes","type-xen_episodes","status-publish","hentry","category-energy-transition-show-podcasts","tag-batteries","tag-chemicals","tag-cobalt","tag-lithium","tag-metals","tag-minerals","tag-mining","tag-rare-earth-metals","tag-solar","tag-wind","xen_guests-morgan-bazilian"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n