Mike Henry
Appearances
Redefiners
Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
They are essential today. to the functioning of the global economy, to ongoing economic growth, population growth, and certainly going to be critical to the world's ability to decarbonize, but also to things like artificial intelligence. These big data centers are incredibly copper intensive, and it's going to be one of the drivers of long-term copper demand.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
And so the world's going to need a lot more metals, of certain metals and minerals over the next 20 or 30 years. And those metals and minerals are becoming harder to find and more costly to develop. And I don't think that there's been a good, a solid understanding of that.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
Now, with the growing awareness of this, I and others are out there advocating to the public, to capital markets and to policymakers that,
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
about the need for us all to come together and to figure out how we can go about finding these mines, developing these mines more quickly and efficiently, because doing so is going to be essential to meeting the world's needs for more metals and minerals in a low-cost, timely fashion.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
If we don't do that, we're going to see more by way of supply disruptions, spikes in commodity prices, and ultimately the energy transition The AI transition is going to end up being more expensive for the world than it needs to be.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
There's always more we can do in this regard, but it's one of the other little known facts perhaps about the industry is that it does big technologically advanced things already. You know, if you think about finding these deposits 400 meters under the Earth's crust or a kilometer or two kilometers under the Earth's crust, that alone is hard and requires the world's most advanced technologies.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
Then getting the ore out, processing it, getting it to the market in an efficient fashion requires requires really advanced technology. We have driverless trucks on our sites. These are 400-ton trucks that are driving around our sites with no driver at the wheel, all working autonomously. And we've been doing that before you had autonomous vehicles on public roads.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
Now, there is a big opportunity in artificial intelligence. In fact, I don't think we yet realize how significant the opportunity will be. We simply know it's going to be great. Now, we're already applying AI in finding new resources, in figuring out how to best extract them, in managing our supply chains and optimizing our processing plants and so on. But we know there's more to go.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
And part of unleashing the potential of artificial intelligence is, as you say, going to be a culture and capability change in the company, as with all industries and all companies. Now, how do we go about doing that? Of course, it's building capability in in the company. So we are training people in this regard. It's through establishing the success cases right across the company.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
It's through ensuring that the senior team really understands this. And so we have a specific effort underway today to re-baseline us all in terms of our understanding of artificial intelligence so that we're better equipped than to lead the 80,000, 90,000 people across the company on this journey.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
So it's happening, Clark. And I would start by, again, for the sake of transparency, saying that we're on a journey. We first deployed the BHP operating system back in 2017, 2018. And the philosophy behind it was, it's a people-centric system, so let me start by saying that. It was really to say that BHP operates in a highly dynamic environment.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
We're operating all over the world in tough jurisdictions, in tough circumstances where you're dealing with a geological uncertainty, weather uncertainty. We operate cross-culturally with different workforces, workforce compositions. And against that backdrop, we need to equip our people to be able to make the best possible decisions in the face of that uncertainty on a day-to-day basis.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
And we need to equip them and engage them in a way that better harnesses their experience and ingenuity.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
Leaders in BHP need to see themselves as being enablers of their teams, being coaches, of course providing a degree of direction, but really moving away from a top-down command and control type culture to one where we're able to engage our people more effectively and to trust their ability to drive improvement in the business day in and day out. We spoke about COVID earlier. This was one of the
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
great proof points through COVID was that given how quick the world around us was moving, we needed to trust people on the front line to make the right decisions. We made decisions more quickly, we were a safer business, and we became a much more productive business. I overlay that then with everything that we're trying to achieve through the BHP operating system,
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
which has a series of principles behind it and a series of practices that everybody gets trained around. And this starts with high-level company strategy, how we align it to what's happening on the ground with that strategy, and then how we go about equipping our people to drive business improvement day in and day out. And that's allowed us to become a leading operator in the sector.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
where we're known for our operational reliability and operational excellence. One example of that is our iron ore business has been the lowest cost major iron ore business in the world now for five years running. That helps us to build trust with shareholders, and it creates a greater foundation from which we're able to do the big things that we do as a business. And of course,
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
It allows us to be more consistent over time as well, because with that embedded in the DNA, the very fabric of the company, we're less reliant upon individual leaders and it will change over time.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
And that's why I said up front, Clark, we're on a journey. And I'd love to be able to say that every part of BHP has progressed at exactly the same pace on this, but that's not the case. Because this is a huge project, culture change and capability change, it's natural that there's going to be some parts of the organization that move more quickly than others.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
Now, what have we seen is when leaders really embrace the BHP operating system, and not just from an intellectual perspective, but from a emotional connection to what it is that we're trying to achieve by way of better engaging and enabling the frontline of the business, that's where we see the implementation of the BHP operating system done most reliably and most quickly.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
I think where we've had instances where leaders may get it intellectually, but it's seen as an add-on to existing work rather than a way of working, sometimes the headline metrics suggest that the implementation is going well. And we only find out a year or two or three down the road that actually it hasn't gone quite as well as we expected.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
And we start to see a regression in capability of the business. So this is something that we measure at every operation across BHP. We regularly assess how well the operating system is being implemented. And in a number of instances, we've seen that it stalls or it regresses and we have to go back in and redeploy. And so the real lesson for me is that one, culture change takes time.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
It requires a huge level of organizational commitment from senior leaders on down. And for something like the BHP operating system, it has to be both an intellectual and emotional commitment to it for it to be implemented effectively.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
It's definitely become more uncertain and more complex in recent years. And we're an industry that has benefited from multiple decades of relatively free trade and an absence of industrial policy, which at times can serve to distort markets. The reality of the world that we live in today is... Governments are needing to focus on cost of living crisis globally.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
There's geopolitical concerns at play. And we've seen this resurgence of trade protectionism and industrial policy. That's the real world that we live in. And from a corporate strategy perspective or a company perspective, the way that we deal with that is, number one, being out there sensing volatility.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
the world around us and making sure that we're bringing back into our kind of day-to-day thinking the way that we run the business and understanding of the currents that are at play in the world around us. And that can be at the local level all the way up to the global level.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
Secondly, we have to ensure that we are seen as a business to be creating value for the broad range of stakeholders that we interact with, including but beyond shareholders. And so we've focused on having a very distinctive social value proposition. And thirdly, we need to be out there as leaders advocating for our industry and for sound policy. Part of that is education.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
We spoke earlier about the lack of awareness in some quarters as to what mining is about and its essential nature. I've spent time, as have my team, on the road out engaging policymakers and other stakeholders on trying to build that understanding of mining. Off the back of that understanding, then to talk about what sound policy looks like,
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
that both enables the industry, but also meets the very valid concerns of policymakers at the national level through to the local level.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
So let's think about this, Clark. As a mining company, you think about what we're doing. We're going into some of these remote communities and we're investing billions of dollars in these projects that play out over 20, 30, 40 years, sometimes longer. And we only gain access to those resources in the first place if we have the support of governments and communities.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
So we have to have a value proposition for them. Now, social value has been at the center of BHP's thinking for two or three decades. But a couple of years ago, we put in place a refreshed social value framework. It ended The distinctive nature of the social value framework is that it treats social value creation not as something that stands alongside the business, but this is core business.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
We need to be thinking about how we can go about creating best possible value for shareholders and best possible value for the range of stakeholders that we have. And in order to enable that, it needs to be something that is owned by all decision makers in the business. And so it's not about us sacrificing economics.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
It's about investing discretionary effort in ensuring that we can maximize our economic outcomes, but at the same time, ensure that we're supporting, in this case, local stakeholders by way of local businesses, oftentimes indigenous businesses or First Nations businesses, so that they benefit from our existence as well.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
Thank you, Clark. Very happy to be here.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
We do. So it is endless. And that's why it's important that it's part of core business. But the other point I would note is that in many instances, we're increasingly engaging in co-creation. or co-design of outcomes such that we build trust with stakeholders and they feel that they've had a say in the way that outcomes are pursued.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
And one example of this would be we have a coal mine in New South Wales. that is reaching, well, within five years from now, will reach the end of its economic life.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
In deciding how we go about the process of closing that mine and transitioning it, given the reliance of the local community on the mine, given the fact that we've got 2,000 workers, many businesses serving that mine, we announced early on the intended closure. And then we pulled together a process by which we can co-create
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
the approach to closure and the approach to transition with local stakeholders. And that's served to build a lot of trust. It's also served to better inform some of our thinking and how we go about this. And at the end of the day, it's going to create better outcomes for the range of stakeholders that currently depend on that mine because they'll be able to have their say in the process.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
I've been asked this before, and it's hard to boil it down to one. I have been super fortunate over the course of my career in terms of the leaders that I've worked with. And by that, I mean I've worked with some very big thinkers, with people who've had a lot of aspirations,
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
and who've demonstrated a huge degree of trust in me as a leader and have been willing to trust the direction that I was setting. And so I wouldn't boil it down to one point. I would boil it down to one factor, which is that the trust that I recognize that has been placed in me over time is something that I've sought to demonstrate as a leader as well, because I know the power of it.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
There's three areas that I would point to in terms of specific innovation efforts within BHP. One is the Ventures Arm that you've called out. We established that from memory back in 2020, maybe 2021. So the explicit intent around the Ventures Arm is to be investing in small startups in the resource finding, extraction, processing, and decarbonization space.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
And through that, for us to gain early insight potential to support or disrupt different supply chains across our business. That will help inform strategy. In some instances, it will give us early insight into opportunities that we may wish to pursue. And of course, we want to generate an investment return on these.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
And we had a six times return on a carbon capture opportunity that we invested in early. So the track record so far has been pretty strong. In addition to that, we borrowed a concept out of pharma to apply in minerals exploration. So we have an exploration accelerator called Explore, where we engage with 200 plus companies annually. They pitch their ideas to us. We select 10.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
We've been doing that for a few years now, where we provide them with some funding and capability building to enable them to pursue their concepts. And again, this gives us greater insight into what's happening in the world around us in the very early stages of exploration.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
And then finally, we have an innovation arm within the company that's investing time and effort directly in technologies that may enable the business and in a disruptive way over the long term. Now, in pursuing all of these, there's the direct benefit that we derive from them.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
But it's also been part of us trying to stimulate a culture of innovation, excitement around what lies ahead and passion for innovation right across BHP, not just in the people working in those three parts of the company.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
The reality is there's benefit to having your innovation efforts a little bit standalone from the mainstream. And I do think we've made progress on embedding innovation through the fingertips of the organization.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
So as you said, Clark, I was born in Canada, but I've spent the vast majority of my career overseas between Japan, Australia, Holland, Singapore, then back to Australia. And I've been fortunate enough to have my whole career in the resources sector. So even with Mitsubishi Corporation, I was working in their resources division. And it is just... a spectacular, rewarding industry to be part of.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
When you've got people who are dedicated to pursuing some of these out there ideas, who are unleashed a little bit and trust and supported by management, either within the company or because they stand outside the company, you do then tend to see an acceleration.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
The challenge for us then is how do we go about stimulating more of that right throughout the company, but also how do we go about taking some of these ideas when they've reached a certain stage and rolling them back into the company, because I think sometimes they can get stalled on implementation, even if they're good ideas.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
And this is an area that we continue to work on, and I think where we've made great progress. When I combine that then with the BHP operating system and its focus on business improvement, the potential to be unlocked here is quite significant.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
I want BHP to be a company where people are able to take risks, to push the boundaries, and have a rewarding career with the company. It would be a shame if people believed they needed to move across companies in order to get those opportunities and to do exciting things. I think BHP is increasingly a company.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
where people are able to get opportunities across different disciplines, different geographies, and where they feel trusted by leaders to pursue some of their big ideas. And that's evident in some of the concepts that we spoke about earlier, where ventures are. That's relatively new to BHP. This Explore concept is new to BHP.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
And some of what we've been doing across the broader company in terms of the risks we've been taking at a high level around portfolio through to what happens on a day-to-day basis in the business, deployment of technology and so on.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
I want this to be an exciting place for employees to be where they feel that they can build their career, can take risks and continue to derive personal growth from the opportunities that are afforded within the company.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
Oh, tough question. So Melbourne is a great city, one of the world's great cities. But my family, my partner are back in Canada. And so some point in the distant future when I like to hang up the boots, that's probably where I end up.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
Exercise. And so these jobs are tough jobs. You spend a good amount of your time on the road. It's easy to get into 24-7 work. So I'm very disciplined about exercise right throughout the course of the year and nutrition.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
Interesting question. I genuinely don't know because I love this job so much, Clark. I fell into it. It wasn't that I pursued a career in mining, but I feel so incredibly fortunate to have landed in mining. There's not been a day in my career where I wished I was working in a different sector.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
Because as I said, one day I can be literally in the field with people on the tools, talking to them about their lives, their experience in the business, local communities.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
And the following day, I can be in New York, London, Tokyo, in the world of high finance or with our customers, the end users of our products, seeing how our products can contribute to economic development and lifting people out of poverty. There is no job that compares to this job or this industry.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
There's very few industries where it goes right from the ground, the earth, all the way through to high finance, global capital markets, and of course, downstream customers. Now, how did that all play out? As with all these things, it's a little bit of a fortunate meeting of opportunity, timing, interest, and capability.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
Trust. So build trust and trust others. And that applies to your relationship with your board, your chair, certainly with your executive team, and then with shareholders. So understanding the concerns of shareholders and other stakeholders, really internalizing that and seeking to address those concerns and to build trust.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
will make you a better CEO, a better management team, and will allow you to achieve or better enable you to achieve the ambitions that you have for the company.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
Thank you, Clark. I love that summary.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
As you said, I'd worked for a year teaching English just after university in Japan, and partly as a result of that, knew I wanted an international career. Mitsubishi, very well-known and respected company in Japan. I was fortunate enough to get a job with them in the resources division.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
That took me on to Japan, ultimately down to Australia here, worked in a joint venture with BHP, and then moved across to BHP back in 2003 and just had this very rewarding career with this global company where I've worked across commercial, technical, operational, and then was given this great opportunity to lead the company back in 2020.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
I think it's a distinctive advantage. And certainly the CEOs in recent memory have all had global experience.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
In order to understand how the world works, to be able to work with the workforce that's spread over all of those jurisdictions, to be able to work with policymakers, to understand their concerns around the world, having global experience, being able to work cross-culturally, I think is a distinctive advantage and a need for anybody stepping into this role.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
Sometimes it is very difficult to get to some of these areas, but it's one of the most rewarding parts of out in these places where our existence can have such a positive benefit for local communities in terms of economic development, opportunity, being out in the field with people on the tools or explorers in the field is truly rewarding. And it's one of the things I enjoy most about my job.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
As context for listeners, Clark, I became CEO on January 1st, 2020. And as you know, within two or three months, all of a sudden we were into the depths of COVID. So it wasn't the start of the transition that I expected. And of course, it's easy to look back now and see with clarity how COVID played out. But in the moment, there was a ton of uncertainty as to how bad it was going to get.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
So we were all staring a little bit into the unknown. But I was very fortunate to have a board that was very supportive, experienced, had an experienced ex-CEO chair who was able to provide counsel and act as a thought partner in terms of how we would navigate through COVID. And I had an experienced team that I inherited who had strong values. deeply experienced around the world.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
And we were able to come together, really stepping up. Somehow we were able to navigate all of that uncertainty. And in fact, we became a safer, more productive company through that period. And some of the stories from that time are things that will live on in company lore. We had
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
It was something like 100 or 150 train drivers over the course of a single weekend elected to move themselves and their families to Western Australia with the knowledge that borders within Australia were going to be shut down.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
And they moved across in order to keep the business running because they understood how essential the business was, not only to Australia, but to the world. And that's one of many stories that I look back on and think, yes, it was a tough time, but it was a time that allowed...
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
ourselves to reaffirm some of what BHP is about in terms of the values that we stand for, how people can come together to achieve great things. And if we trust one another and engage one another in the right way, we can navigate some very big challenges.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
Absolutely. Of course. They were circumstances not only I had not faced before, other experienced CEOs had not faced before. And frankly, my board and chair hadn't faced before either. But
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
I knew that in the face of that uncertainty, drawing upon the collective wisdom and experience to help come up with better solutions and to align ourselves around the path that we were electing to take could only be a good thing.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
And the combination of that resource being available to me and the management team, and then being able to draw upon an experienced, very committed management team of the day,
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
helped us to navigate COVID in a way that, as I noted, left us in a place where we were safer, more productive, and where I think everybody across the organization was able to realize what we were capable of when faced with big challenges.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
So it's bang in line with the intent that we laid out as a management team and a board very early on. So we were clear that BHP is 140 years old. And one of the things that's allowed BHP to be successful over that period of time is we've constantly reinvented ourselves to align with the big trends underway in the world around us.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
And looking at the drivers of ongoing population growth, ongoing economic growth and rising living standards around the world, the continuing development of the economy in China, and then overlaid with the energy transition, that has certain big implications in terms of commodities that are going to be in greatest demand over the next 20 or 30 years. And so broad brush here.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
The intent around the portfolio was to de-weight in those commodities that have a greater downside risk over a three or four decade period and up-weight in those commodities that stand to benefit from some of the big mega trends underway in the world around us.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
And that meant us growing in copper, growing in potash, running our world-leading iron ore business even more productively, even more safely across BHP. And then ensuring that we had a steelmaking coal business that had only the best of the best coals that stand to benefit from the steelmakers' efforts to decarbonize.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
That required us to spin out our oil and gas business, merge it with another company called Woodside here in Australia. In doing so, we protected value for shareholders and gave them choice. We've optimized our coal portfolio. We've triggered two big investments in potash in Canada.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
And we've acquired two copper opportunities, one here in Australia that's allowed us to create a new basin in South Australia when combining those assets with an existing copper business that BHP had. We've acquired an asset in Argentina in partnership with a Canadian company.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
And we've created much more copper growth optionality on top of already being one of the world's leading copper businesses globally. with the world's largest copper resources. So we laid this intent out in February of 2020, and we've been executing in line with that intent.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
But we've only been able to execute in that way through being operationally excellent and through being clear and consistent in our strategy and building trust with shareholders to doing exactly what we said we would do.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
There's two big potash producing regions in the world. One's Canada. The other one is Russia, Belarus. We saw disruption to supply out of Russia and Belarus for a period of time. And that led to a certainly uncertainty in respect of where supply was going to come from in the future and near-term disruption to supply chains. Our first stage or first big investment in potash, over $5 billion US,
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
or we took that investment decision before the war in Ukraine. The second phase, another $5 billion, was triggered after the war in Ukraine. Both of those are underway currently. Neither of them have been driven by that conflict. It's been driven
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
by this belief that as the world's population continues to grow, which is going to require more food, rising living standards tend to require food that is less calorie efficient, so you need more agricultural inputs. We're trying to get that increased agricultural production off of a constrained footprint of arable land. It's going to require more fertilizer.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
And so the demand outlook for potash is positive and will be consistent over time. And BHP, through the foresight of leaders 10, 20 years ago, has some of the world's best undeveloped potash resources.
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Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
So, Clark, this is something I am so incredibly passionate about. I don't think that it's well understood that everything in the world around us starts as something either mined or something grown. I think in recent years, there has been a significant uptick in understanding, certainly amongst policymakers, about the importance of metals and minerals and critical minerals supply chains.