Matt Tilleard

From now until 2050, we need to extract every year around 230 million tons of end-use materials.

So it sounds like a lot, but every year currently, we extract over eight billion, with a B, tons of coal.

Every year, we extract five billion tons of oil and three billion tons of natural gas, every single year, just to fuel our existing energy system.

So that 230 million looks manageable.

Now, we are going to need more of material like copper, lithium, graphite, cobalt.

But this is the second point of relative abundance.

We've got plenty of this stuff.

When geologists estimate the likely resource, they show that it easily exceeds our projected demand.

Even rare earths are not rare.

They were called rare because they were rarely found in their pure form.

They were always found with another material.

So sure, they're rare, but they're rare in the same way that Burt is rare without Ernie.

But is oil very different?

Our identified resource of oil is actually pretty abundant relative to demand as well.

And our identified reserves of oil are similarly held to critical minerals in a very concentrated set of hands.

So what is different?

Well, two things.

One, the resource that we have identified of oil is the result of searching for it intensively for over 100 years.

and we know that oil in general is quite rare in the Earth's crust.

We know that most critical minerals are actually geologically abundant in the Earth's crust, and we've really only just begun exploring for many of them at scale.