Ernest Scheider
speaker
31 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Ernest Scheider’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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My name is Ernest Scheider. I'm a journalist at Reuters where I write about critical minerals. I'm also the author of a book called The War Below, Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives.
Well, I think there's a realization by President Trump and those in his orbit that the United States produces relatively few of these critical minerals within its own borders. And that countries like China and others have large reserves and produce and process a lot of them.
And so as our world becomes increasingly electrified, we're going to need a lot more of these critical minerals, not just in the United States, but globally. And so there's definitely a realization that we need to have more of these, not just for things like laptops and cell phones and electric vehicles.
but also for key pieces of equipment used by the military, you know, fighter jets, submarines, laser guided missiles, et cetera. They're all made with critical minerals, some of them very niche and specific critical minerals. But the United States produces and processes very few of these today.
So that's part of the reason why you're seeing the administration in Washington and especially President Trump make a big push for new, fresh supplies.
So when we think, Noelle, about the periodic table of the elements and stay with me here, you don't don't fall asleep.
There's a whole host of items on that periodic table of the elements. And so copper might be the one that people might know the most about. It's used in wiring, it's used in motors and many other electronics. Lithium is used in lithium ion batteries, as the name of course implies. But the lithium ion battery really started to take off in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Record for up to 12 hours on one battery with a Sony Stem and a Handycam camcorder. For decades before that, it was used in things like greases or in pharmacologic. So its use has definitely mushroomed in recent decades. Nickel is used to make stainless steel, but its use in the lithium ion battery has become extremely important in that same timeframe as well.
Rare earths are a subset of critical minerals.
They're a group of 17 minor metals found on that periodic table of the elements, and they're used to make magnets that turn power into motion. So the thing that makes your cell phone vibrate is a magnet made from rare earths. So broadly, when we look at critical minerals, copper has been one of the most important for many, many, many years.
But when we look at all these other assortments of these niche areas like lithium or cobalt or rare earths, They've just exploded in popularity because of this electrified transition that our entire global economy is going through right now.
One of the things that I like to talk about is just think about all of the gadgets and gizmos in your house, Noelle, that are powered by lithium-ion batteries today that weren't even 20 or 30 years ago. So a great example is a leaf blower. Leaf blowers historically have been powered by two-stroke engines and that are just really bad for the environment.
They emit this noxious plume of pollutants that contribute to climate change. And so many governments across the planet are actually outlawing them or phasing them out. Washington, D.C., for instance, has determined that they should be banned. The answer, many people say, is get a leaf blower powered by a lithium ion battery.
And so you're starting to see these sprout up at home improvement stores across the United States and really the world. Here's the question that I have, though. Where do all the critical minerals used to make that electric leaf blower come from? Do we know that the copper is ethically sourced?
Do we know that the lithium was produced in a sustainable manner that honored ESG and environmental commitments? And what about the other critical minerals in there? And we don't know.
As part of my book, I actually went down this rabbit hole of trying to figure out where do all the critical minerals come from in these leaf blowers and other household appliances now that are powered by lithium ion batteries. And I couldn't actually find an answer because tracking that supply chain was extremely difficult. So this is not just about electric vehicles.
This is about all the devices that we use every single day that are increasingly powered by these lithium ion batteries. They're all built with critical minerals.
Yes, yeah, exactly. So for many of these critical minerals, they're extracted the way that you would extract, say, gold or silver, sort of that you actually, you know, you have a big, you know, caterpillar or other piece of large earth-moving equipment that would take the rock out of the ground, and then you would process it in a series of chemical steps.
That is the case for most of these critical minerals. Some have different methodologies, though, by ways that they are produced. Lithium, for instance, can be produced by basically filtering out lithium from brines or salty waters. And these are often found in places of South America, like in Chile or Bolivia or Argentina. But there's no way around it that broadly this involves mining.
And mining is just not popular, depending on who you talk to. Mining is loud and it's intrusive and it can have an effect on the environment. But we have to have mining in order to have this electrified future. So there's a huge tension there.
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