Matt Tilleard

It's a remote town of 55,000 people next to a major critical minerals mine.

Power for the mine and the community until recently came from heavy fuel oil generators on the mine site.

Now, CrossBoundary powers the mine with a renewable energy microgrid made up of solar, wind and batteries.

Soon, we hope that we will be able to phase out the generators altogether.

Now, let me tell you a story.

Imagine two cartels.

One is real, OPEC, which seeks to control the price of oil.

The other is an imaginary alliance of the major miners of copper and lithium today, Chile, China and Australia.

Now, if you want to run a good cartel, everyone knows you need to have a great acronym.

And so let's call it the Pisco Sour Peking Duck Fosters Cartel, or PPF for short.

Now, let's imagine that each cartel, OPEC and PPF, seeks to cut off the supply of their respective commodity to the rest of the world.

In Tolognaro, before our energy transition, this would have caused an instant crisis.

Without oil, the lights in the community go out and the mine shuts down.

But after the transition, nothing much changes in Tolognaro.

And that's because in a fuel-based world, constant supply of fuel is existential.

But in a technology-based world, without a constant supply of lithium, your old lithium batteries keep working.

You don't need a constant supply of new copper for your copper wires to keep conducting electricity.

You do not require a constant supply of new materials just to survive.

But technology gets even better than that, because it is also more circular.

Approximately zero percent of the energy from oil can be recycled.