#11 Dr Simon Michaux, critical minerals and available energy

Dr. Simon Mishove, an Australian mining expert working in Finland, discusses his research on critical minerals for the energy transition away from fossil fuels. He supports the idea of limits to growth and believes that the current growth and consumerism model is a long-term problem for humanity. He quantifies the materials needed for a post-fossil fuels world and criticizes the lack of feasibility plans and coherent strategies in Europe. He finds that the transition would require a much larger electrical power grid using less efficient systems. His research has been presented globally. Welcome to the Voices of Franklin podcast. I'm your host Steve Williams. Today I'm talking to Dr Simon Mishove, an Australian mining expert working in Finland. Simon did his PhD in mining engineering and now works as an associate professor at the Geological Survey of Finland. Simon is well known in certain circles for being one of the few people to bother to try and work out how many critical minerals might be available to humanity for the so-called energy transition away from fossil fuels. The news is not all that good in terms of what will likely be available economically and Simon works in the tradition of limits to growth which we'll discuss as we get into the podcast. Okay, without further ado, over to Simon Mishove. Hello, Stephen. It's very nice to meet you, mate. Thanks. We're here today, Simon, to talk about your research for the last 10 or more years and that will lead us into talking about your work in something called the Venus Project. But first things first, you are working in the tradition of limits to growth? Yes. You accept not only the initial work or the book published in 1972, but the subsequent updates that most of that group did and of course the follow-up work by people like Graham Turner in Australia and Gaia Harrington. So do you want to say a few words about limits to growth before you launch into your research? Sure. So limits to growth was a magnificent project well ahead of its time. I'm in contact with Dennis Meadows. The Club of Rome has actually contacted me based on my other work which I can describe shortly and we're in the process of trying to work out how to merge my work with a guy called Harold Thurdrop. And if we can do that, that will be the next limits to growth report submitted to the Club of Rome which will basically say, they were right, we've got a problem. So I hardly support the idea of limits to growth. We absolutely need to keep the conversation going and we need to develop the work further. I'm actually trying to do that. I suppose we should tell people that the limits to growth report did not predict that certain things would definitely happen. They provided certain scenarios for the future depending on what choices we made. It showed a trend that human society was going through over two centuries from 1900 up to 2100. So it was to show the trends that human society was undergoing and it diagnosed the sorts of issues that we were approaching. It didn't give any dates. There's been an awful lot misquoted in the media about what they were promoting. The underlying issues that they were actually highlighting really does actually show that the whole idea of growth and consumerism and it's not only an illusion but it's long term. It's a structural problem for the human species. That's what the outcome was. It didn't predict any dates. It didn't predict any hard trends and hard outcomes. It said we will have these issues. I guess we tend to focus, at least I do focus, on the business as usual scenario and the risk of collapse at, as you say, not at a certain point but increasing the risk of collapse if we follow the business as usual scenario and it pretty much looks like we have followed business as usual. So instead of saying collapse, I would say, because I'm actually part of that world. I was working in the corporate mining industry. I would say something along the lines of the business as usual system will get harder and harder to do in a death by a thousand cuts and so it'll be little by little and then suddenly all at once. So what we call collapse is not something next Tuesday about tea time everything falls over. It's not we're going to be in a world of trouble where one damn thing after another is going wrong for an extended period of time and then something serious will break. Now what happens then is, well instead of business as usual, we just do something else and the longer we take to get to that point, the harder it's going to be and the more difficult it's going to be for more people. So it's like a sliding. So it's an inevitable evolution of how we live. Okay. So my understanding of your work is that you're one of the few people who've tried to quantify what materials might be available economically in a transition to a post-fossil fuels world. Is that correct? Yes. Yes, correct. So first of all, I'm an associate professor of geological survey of Finland and when I left, I used to be in the mining industry in Australia in feasibility studies and research and development in the University of Queensland for a long time. I left Australia in 2015 to learn industrial recycling and the circular economy. But when I landed in Europe, what I saw there really, really surprised me. In Australia, there was the view that Europe was very progressive and they understood things and they were just more advanced than multiple fronts. But when I got there, there were some amazing blind spots that we in Australia understood very well and took for granted. And for example, they don't do mining in Europe at all. There is a little bit of mining but it's frowned upon. It's seen as dirty and unclean and that they believe it's beneath them to do anything like that. What they do do is they buy products off the market of products mostly made in Southeast Asia, China in particular. Most manufacturing in Europe is done on components manufactured in China. So there's a series of blind spots. And I also used to sit in these very senior meetings in Brussels and listen and hear about the circular economy and green transitions is what they now call, you know, what they plan to do. And what astounded me was the complete lack of numbers. There was no feasibility plan for industrial reform to phase out fossil fuels. Because we've been talking about it for a long time and a lot of the technologies that we want to use like wind turbines and solar panels, they've been around for a long time. And so what I was expecting is after 10 years of talking about this that when we get there, I was expecting to see, well, this region will need this amount of power and we're going to phase out fossil fuels. And so we're going to deliver that power with these systems and it's going to happen in these regions. And when we get that power, this is what we're going to do with it to replace fossil fuels. None of that was there. They were talking in what we called in the mining industry, arm waving. They were talking in vague platitudes and in vague details only. So for seven or eight years, I sat there listening to all this stuff and I was increasingly appalled about how deluded these people were and the amount of money that they were throwing at these things. The H2020 research project, get this, had 99 billion euros as a budget. 400 universities and institutions across Europe, it fed a lot of researchers. And so what ended up happening there is everyone had a hobby horse that they got funded, but there was no coherent plan. And what worried me was some of the things they said were patently obviously difficult. Now coming from the mining industry, it can take 15, 20 years, sometimes longer to get a mine going. It takes five or six years to build a power station. And that's knowing there were things we know what to do. A nuclear power station, which they make in Europe, that takes, you've got about seven years build time, but it seems to take like 25, even 30 years incubation time to actually sort of get it going. The time that they thought they were going to do it. And I used to hear things like by 2017, in 2017 I said, so by 2030, we will have 100% fossil fuel phase out. And it just, there was just this massive gap. So I left Belgium, the money, the funding ran out and a job started up in the Finnish geological survey, where I was to look at what's called mineral intelligence. What are the patterns in the mining industry and everything attached to it? What minerals will we need? How much, why, where will we get them from? So I then actually put down all the idea that if we were to phase out fossil fuels, what would that actually look like? Because I was able to visit them every second word at the time was battery, battery, battery. Everything had to be batteries. But I'd ask simple questions like, or how many vehicles are there in the global transport fleet? And they couldn't answer me. So we know for Europe, we know for the United States, but no one sort of summed it all together in the whole world. So if you don't know that, how do you know how big the industry is? Therefore, how much material will you need? And if you don't know what physical actions those vehicles did over a period of time, how will you know how much charging capacity will you need and how much extra charging capacity? These questions weren't answered. So I set about and worked out just a basic math, from the bottom up, how many cars, trucks, trains, planes, automobiles, what do they do? What industrial systems did we do across the calendar year of 2018, given that if we were to knock out fossil fuels and drop in a renewable or a non-fossil fuel technology that is known, that if we were to do it next year, what would it be? And how many units are we talking about? How many solar panels? How many wind turbines? What energy split we'll be using? So I went through all that. And what I found was we need the extra electrical power to phase out fossil fuels is more than twice the existing fossil fuel system. So we want to bring in a massive electrical power grid, much larger than what we have now, using systems that are simply not effective, not as logistically effective as what we have now. And so there's this level of delusion, just as there was this level of delusion of our current dependency on fossil fuels. And they just refuse to look at certain things, the people sort of I was working with to actually map these things in the circular economy. Anyway, so I presented this stuff and around the world, about 260 times now, I've presented this work to people all over the world. And I found three things. About 30% of the time, this was government and ministers of parliament, various nations, their aides, senior civil servants, groups like the Department of Energy in America, the Energy Wind in Germany, all that. So first of all, they were shocked. Second of all, they were unprepared and unable to debunk what I was saying, even when they had the time to do so when I was presented more than once. And here's the pertinent point. Every single time, they looked me in the eye and they asked me what they should do. So what worried me was, it's not that these people are stupid, it's just that they're trapped. The system has a momentum to it. And everyone's job has a momentum to it that doesn't allow them latitude to do anything. You can only make so much change before someone around you will replace you. And so I also found that they were simply unaware of a lot of the problems I was documenting. They just didn't seem to know. And they had no clue with no plans to get one. And what had occurred to me was they were telling me a list of what has to happen here. So they were telling me what needed to be done, who needed to do it, who will not do it, where it needed to be done, and where it can't happen. So what I was going to say is any leadership at the moment, especially in the Western world, is not going to help us. The system won't allow. And anyone who comes up with any sort of crazy ideas that threatens the incumbent philosophy, a paradigm, will be hunted down and destroyed economically. So what we need to do is reinvent parts of our society at a foundation structure, not just like a band-aid solution that sits on the top. We need to restructure the thing from the ground up. What's our energy? Where do we get it from? What's our energy system? Raw materials, where do we get those from? And once we get all this stuff, what do we do with it? How does money work? And what's it really for? What's the relationship between our society and the planetary environment? That's a multi-tiered thing. It's not just carbon pollution. It's actually an ecological system. I encourage everyone to look at Bill Reese's work. So what's the relationship with each other, too? Because at the moment, if you can sort of say for all human actions at an administrative level have a foundation, an absolute foundation of love, trust, respect, and honour, and all of those things are eroding in our society at the moment. So we are a deeply, deeply fractured and imbalanced and I might say sick society. And the reason I mention that is if I'm about to do what I'm going to propose, where we're actually going to look at things like change the foundation technology that runs society, that technology has the capacity to reorder society socially. Think about how different our society is now because we've got electricity or the electric motor or the internal combustion engine. So these technologies, when they've come on, have changed everything. So if we were to actually change that technology, our society will socially change to manage that. While that is happening, we can ask ourselves questions like, should we do this or should we do that? And let's have a go. Can we do better? And I'm sure we can, but we've got to start the process. So what I'm proposing is a solution set going forward. We need to shrink our industrial system and simplify what we do. These are the basic de-growth ideas. Consumption, growth, and consumerism, they're all founded in fossil fuels. Take those fossil fuels away and that's a whole lot harder. And should we do it anyway? Did we waste our resources and time by doing that? As a species, we need to grow up or we fragment. That's the choice that we are now faced with over the next couple of decades, next couple of years. So I'm actually proposing the following. I'm going to gather a small, a group of small, like-minded people, go to somewhere outside the Western world, probably at this stage, I like a lot of the sites in South America. I'm going to set up an innovation hub. That innovation hub will have a mandate to look at unorthodox ideas as well as develop new ones. So many ideas that we know are out there that don't get a look in for ideological reasons, look at them. But also, not just take those ideas, but then turn them into a pilot scale engineering demonstration of those ideas. And then we get them out there. People can then point to it and say, this works. Here is the publicly listed data of a physical outcome. And so at the moment, we are arguing mercilessly with each other about, that's not real, this won't work, or that will work. Take all those things and turn them into a reality. And then we can say, what's the best combination? I'm talking about making a gateway city that will build the tools that will make it possible to develop the next human system. So I want to merge the following, the circular economy, the steady state economy, the growth of complexity and size of our system. But can we run our society on a smaller number of industrial components? And can it shrink in size and footprint while still maintaining our existing needs? This will also be merged with the principles of permaculture and regenerative agriculture. And lastly of all, the solution presented by the Venus Project, the resource-based economy. So the resource-based economy was presented in the Zeitgeist movies years ago. The Venus Project was envisioned by Jean Fresco and his partner Roxanne in the 70s. And it got going in the 80s. The basic premise behind it was genius. If we were to build a city for people, that we would design that city based on the best that science had to offer, but optimized to the quality of life of the people in that city, what would it look like? Now, this was developed in the 70s and 80s. A lot of the ideas are outdated because we've now got a whole series of challenges now that didn't exist 40 years ago. But the basic premise is absolutely valid. And Venus is a town or city in Miami, I think. Yes. It's a town in Miami in Florida. Sorry. And yes, Miami. And they've got a demonstration site there with several domes set up that Jacques and Roxanne built. And so it's a proposed society, technologically based, but also with a proposed new social contract that's been around for a long time. I'm merging with them, and I'm working with them, and I'm on their board of advisors now. And I'm actually going to help them develop a series of ideas as a subsection of what they're already doing. So you've got the Venus Project. And what I'm proposing is a series of ideas that evolve what they have by merging all those things together. And we're calling it Venus Evolutions. Within that, one little project that is this innovation hub, which I'm calling the Prometheus Project, is to look at a very specific problem of reinventing our industry. Energy slash resources slash manufacture, optimizing a system that is smaller in footprint. Shrink the just-in-time supply grid across six continents. Can we shrink it into a single city for a small number of vitally, strategically important components? For example, can I harvest raw materials from the local environment, like within a radius of, say, 40 to 50 kilometres, using circular economy context ideas, and then turn them into useful products, for example, an electric motor? And can I do that in one city? And with some unorthodox ideas, I believe I can do a simplified version of that. Anyway, so yes, you had a question. It's going to be hyperlocal. Yes. So I want to actually be part of a network of such groups. There's groups all over the world that are looking at the idea of Venus. We call them the Venus Community. And most of them are going for reinvention of how we grow food, permaculture, regenerative agriculture. That is absolutely a vital thing to do. So I'm actually going to go after the industrial side, but eventually I want to be able to merge with all these other groups. So as we sort of go along, I'll be inviting those other groups in and giving them some funding and asking them to help us develop certain sectors. So each group is different. Each group has a different paradigm and a different target. The idea is we all sort of develop and support each other, but then trade with each other. So we're talking about a large network of community of people. Sounds a little bit like the transition town movement which grew out of permaculture and we thought we heard a lot about, say, 15 years ago. I was in the transition movement and I was actually with a group run by Shane Heaton on Mount Tambourine in Queensland. And that was a wonderful group. Transition town. And so I'm very much supportive of those paradigms as well. But what would happen if the transition self-sufficiency community was handed some disruptive technology that they themselves could manage? That's where I'm sort of at now. And what I am developing my work with the Geological Survey of Finland is an idea of the purple transition. The green transition won't work but the purple one might. Why purple? It's my wife's favorite color. Feminism. So the purple transition is the idea of four basic technology frontiers wrapped around a reimagined commodity sector. The commodity industry misunderstood what we call the resource-based economy or as I sometimes call the resource-balanced economy is a reimagined way of managing resources. But around that we will have molten salt, liquid fuel fission, which is an evolution of the nuclear industry which is a molten salt reactor using thorium as the fuel in a modular fashion. There are companies in Europe at the moment that are looking at manufacturing these and they'll be the first ones will be available in 2028. Make batteries out of something else other than lithium and I'm talking about the fluoride in your toothpaste. It could be sodium, it could be iron. There are lots of things we can make batteries out of if we choose to. The third and perhaps most important technology is we need heat to replace coal to support manufacture and we need heat of around you know 2000 degrees a lot of the time or 1500 degrees and we're not going to do that with any of the other systems at scale. I'm proposing the burning of iron powder as a direct replacement for coal and that has implications. The fourth technology is ammonia fueled internal combustion engines. Now ammonia is produced from hydrogen. If we can actually produce hydrogen from seawater with the burning of iron powder then it becomes viable once more. And so the idea is these things fit together in a network where there's no one technology that it saves the day. It's the network of how they stitch together is the magic source. And so we're looking at things like electric vehicle transport within a city, between cities, so things like large ships and perhaps the aviation industry and maybe even trains between cities, that's ammonia ICE. The thorium molten salt generates the electricity and also recycles the burning of iron powder. The burning of iron powder is actually sort of recycled from rust back to pure iron using things like syngas from biofuels but also supported from thorium molten salt. Anyway so you have a network of things together whereas this is the circular economy principles that operate like we're going to take a series of industrial actions but we're going to structure them like an organic self-sufficient farm where every action is integrated in with other actions and the inputs, the outputs, weights of one group are the input parameters of another group and they're all optimized together with the idea of having as little footprint as possible and needing as little input as possible. Anyway so underneath this idea is a series of industrial developments to the purpose of shrinking our system down and becoming more self-reliant and more self-sufficient. Right so the idea was to actually wrap all these things together and structure them in a Venus style city. venusproject.com, go and have a look at their website, very nice. What I'm actually proposing here is that we're going to operate on three fronts simultaneously but because of the practicalities we'll probably see results in a particular order. But because of the practicalities we'll probably see results in a particular order. The first front is raw materials, energy raw materials manufacture stitched together into a new system like what I just described. Smaller in footprint, simpler. Something that we can actually manage on a local level. The second frontier is how do we actually interact with the planetary environment and we change things socially. This is the growing of food and the merging of agriculture in with natural biosystems. The third frontier is the social contract. What are the social implications of what we're looking at? Can we make a better society? I can do one frontier but I need someone to lead the other two. All three frontiers would then merge together and then we move and then we're actually able to move the center of the diagram where we can start looking at a genuinely sustainable and responsible human civilization. So what I'm proposing is to build the tools as a gateway where we can develop that over time. I'm not actually sort of putting together the whole thing together. So yeah so we're mapping the tools together but some of the things that we are interested in doing for example I want to go to a desert site to do this because I want to put up a thorium molten salt reactor in the desert far away from the water table, far away from human populations so we can run it and publish it and actually have the documentation show that these things are actually viable and safe and all that. But we also want to green the desert. So the site that I'm interested in, I'm looking at taking seawater, putting it into a thorium reactor with the heat to generate electricity, take the steam which is now desalinated, send it up into the hills because it's actually quite a steep site, cool it down and that becomes fresh water. Add some minerals to it so it's healthy again and then gravity feed back down into the areas where I want to green the desert. So we're routinely making fresh potable water which can green the desert while we're generating electricity, not one or the other. Right the seawater has salt in it, take that salt and you either sell it directly as salt and use it but also we can do things like separate out the sodium and the chloride, chlorine, both of which can be turned into batteries. So there's a zero mass point. I want to do things for example, the implications of 3D printing but what if we were able to source the feedstock for that 3D printing from the local environment? So from industrial waste products around us but also so from rock properties. If we're back with plasma technology and we've got lots of electricity and heat, high end heat like 2000 degrees Celsius heat and all sorts of things become possible. So I want a situation that I can get to take the waste from say a smelter and which has all sorts of slags and it's got all sorts of nasties in it which are environmentally problematic, put them into a plasma torch environment. We've done the mass balance, this is actually possible. It's all fairly mature technology. Break it down, have a small scale hydromet system to actually extract the metals out, use membrane separation to separate the materials into separate species but then actually turn that stuff into again with plasma into powder and then feed that stock into 3D printers. So in one shed, industrial waste goes in one end and useful products that could be sent into society come out the other with no or almost no industrial waste bloom. You're really trying to reduce waste in everything you do. This is the target. And so the underlying industrial structures that then the society then actually then is wrapped around make that society viable and possible in ways and then we're going to merge our practice within a responsible environmental practice. Anyway, how are we doing for time? We've only got a couple of minutes left unfortunately. So we're going to have to do a part two at some stage. Yeah, just some thoughts that have occurred to me while you're talking is that the military industrial complex is probably not going to like this kind of thing. When you said South America, I thought Costa Rica would be a great place to do this because Costa Rica scores best of all countries on sustainability indexes even though it's not sustainable either. But then maybe the military would like some of this stuff you're talking about because they are worried about climate change. They are worried about too much destabilization. They might be interested in some of this technology to suit their purposes. Yeah, so the plan for that, the military industrial complex are bastards and I want as little to do with them as possible given a choice in the matter. I am thinking in terms of how do we actually defend the settlement from various interest groups that might want to take us over and knock us down. One of the things to do is to develop things that are already established. Technology is already established and we're just going to do it. And that's the innovative part. If we do innovate something new, make it open source. And so we want to set up an innovation hub where we want to commercialize some things but also we want to open source others. And so a relationship with the local government will be very important. The ideal situation will be to be on private land but have that land owned by someone who is in good terms with the local government and have what we're doing. It may will be interesting but it's not worth the hassle to come and take when they can just buy it along with everyone else. Stay away from weapons manufacturing. Right. There is a group in Australia, might be interesting what you're doing. Do you know the science journalist Julian Cribb in Australia? Yes. His group, well they used to be called the Council for the Human Future. They've possibly changed their name but they're thinking on similar lines to you with a kind of a 10-point plan to save humanity from a looming disaster. I'll mention those in the show notes that we'll publish along with this. So how can we very quickly in the last minute or so tie these loose threads together apart from having it back for part two some other time? So it all comes together. We're all thinking this but people all over the world, none of this is rocket science. There are multiple groups around the world having essentially the same series of ideas and are doing essentially the same thing. I'm about to do a funding drive with the Venus Project. We're going to send out a call to arms. We need a large number of people to donate a small amount of money through the Venus Project website. Once we're actually up and running, we've got a plan together that we will then go and get some funding from more capital venture groups. The sort of money we need to get going is we need about $40 million to get to the point where we've done so many feasibility studies we can start construction and then we need a further $160 million to make the first slice of the city and then a further $800 million to make the rest of the city. Now they sound like a lot of money but that's the sort of cash that we sort of need to actually make these things. There is a funding structure that makes that viable. So there is a plan on the ground. The Venus Project is actually taking this in hand. We've got several plans that are reasonably mature and when we're strong enough, we will launch. And when we do, you'll see it. Terrific. I like people with big ideas such as yourself, Simon Mishow, and we will try and talk again in the not too distant future. Thanks very much for making the time. You're welcome, mate. you