The world needs a whole lot more nickel - which means it also needs a whole lot more nickel mining. In Episode 2, we learn how nickel mining can be done properly, relative to our net-zero goals. And how the mining industry is now changing from an obstacle to overcome, to an opportunity we can all embrace.
The Charge is a podcast series that pulls back the curtain on the electric revolution - and puts the spotlight on its unsung hero, Nickel. Join us as we interview key stakeholders in electrification, mining, sustainability and more - discovering how and why nickel is so important to the world’s electrification ambitions, the potential issues and opportunities in mining, and how to spot winners and pretenders in the investment space. Learn more & listen at www.thechargepodcast.com.
[00:01] Eric: The Electric revolution led by the rise in EVs is driving demand for nickel on a global scale and it's only growing. But as we collectively try to achieve our net zero goals and create a clean energy future, we have to look big picture, the 360-degree footprint kind of big picture. Yes, nickel is the key to EV battery technology. But if it's sourced in ways that create negative environmental and social impacts, we're just moving problems around, not solving them. Mining has historically had a certain stigma associated with it. But as with most things, there's always a good and a not so good way to do it. In this episode, we're going to look at how nickel is mined, the pros and cons of different methods, the impacts and the opportunities. Ultimately, the world needs more nickel, a lot of it, which means we need more nickel mining, so it's time to learn how mining can be done properly. My first guest is Lyle Trytten who has more than 25 year’s experience in the nickel industry formerly serving as general manager sustainability was Sherritt International Corporation at their Alberta Nickel Refinery. Mr. Trytten, let's first address the elephant in the room. Why do people have so many questions when it comes to mining? What's the underlying problem?
[01:06] Lyle Trytten: Well, it's not so much questions that people have, it's misconceptions that they have about the mining industry and how we do what we do and the necessity for it. People just don't understand how dependent we are on mining and minerals. Like the number of elements on a smartphone is staggering, right? It's most of the periodic table. Just like you want a new phone or a bike or anything. If it's not cotton or wool, we pretty much mined it, right?
[01:38] Eric: Well, how many elements are there? Just for comparison, if you say most of them, like what are we looking at?
[01:43] Lyle Trytten: There's 100 and change. Not all of them are naturally occurring. So, there's like, sort of 80 relatively common naturally occurring elements. And like 60 of those would be something like that in a cell phone.
[01:58] Eric: That's a lot of stuff.
[02:00] Lyle Trytten: So, as we head into the EV world and stuff, it's like, sure, you've never really thought about how your car gets made in the past. And now you're starting to think about it. Okay, that's good, you should have been thinking about it before but it's a start.
[02:14] Eric: Yeah, it's kind of like an awakening.
[02:16] Lyle Trytten: Yeah. And it comes in stages, right? If you're my age, then you think back to the 90s and the sweatshop scandal for Nike, or the blood diamonds, or more recently, the artisanal mining issues and child labor and cobalt. These things crop up every few years, a new issue in the consumer goods area where we need to start thinking about the supply chain. Most of the time, we just don't want to. It's hard.
[02:45] Eric: You realize like, well, we can actually do this quite sustainably and do with recycling and finding new ways to do things, like, we don't have to be afraid of this. And we're not going to lose any of the first world luxuries that we have along the journey either.
[03:00] Lyle Trytten: None of this happens without more information. And a lot of times that comes from regulation. You wouldn't have nutrition facts on your food or EnerGuide labels on your refrigerator without government regulation, saying you need to disclose this information. We don't have that now on the supply chain impacts of things, but it's coming. And that's the fundamental change that's going to drive a lot of practices to get better is that the clarity where we understand now the impact of the supply chain of whatever it is that we're buying.
[03:37] Eric: Do we have some pretty big hurdles to cut across when it comes to all that supply chain and things?
[03:41] Lyle Trytten: Yeah, well, it's hard. Europe is starting to go this route. And they do things called product environmental footprints, where you account for everything that goes into your product. So, if you're making a piece of stainless steel, it's pretty straightforward. There's like eight ingredients in it, fine. But if you're making a complex device and you have to account for every bit of it, let's say a computer, right? If you had to account for all the chips and the case and the screen and like all these components, and where they're all sourced from all the way back down the value chain, That's a lot of work. And so, it doesn't happen without strong regulation requiring it. But it's starting to happen in Europe. And you know, we typically see things here in North America about five years later than where they go in Europe.
[04:32] Eric: When it comes to mining practices and regulations, things appear to be heading in the right direction due in large part to the increased sharing and access of information. So, in the spirit of sharing info, Mr. Trytten, how is nickel mined?
[04:44] Lyle Trytten: Really, there are two principal ore types that are mined for nickel historically, we have sulphide ores and we have laterite or oxide ores. Historically, most of the sulphide ores that we've mined have been quite rich deposits-- places like Sudbury or up in Russia, where they're rich deposits that are mined underground. So, it's more expensive to mine underground. But the ore is so good, you can pay for that. By comparison, the laterite mines, because they're formed by the surface weathering, they're not very deep, they're quite shallow. Typically, a few meters to perhaps 20 meters thick. So, if you want to mine a substantial massive ore, you don't do it by going deeper, you do it by going wider. And so, this is where we move from open pit mining to what we call strip mining. So, you remove the vegetation in the overburden, you dig up the ore and then you move on horizontally instead of moving down. And so that means you get a very large surface footprint for the amount of ore that you extract as compared to an open pit or an underground mine. And so that large surface footprint is really the essential difference between them.
[05:56] Eric: Okay, so now that we know a little more about the stakes and the styles of play, let me ask this-- in a sulfide versus laterite fight to save the world, who's the winner? Which mining approach has the better environmental footprint?
[06:08] Lyle Trytten: Yeah, so, I think we have to recognize right off the top that all mines have environmental impacts, right. This is the nature of the beast but there's a wide range of them. So, when we think about the different mine types, sulphide mines generally have a lower surface footprint. They tend to be located in areas of lower biodiversity, lower biological productivity. They're in the deserts, they're in the Canadian Shield, they're in the Arctic. These are important ecosystems but they're a little bit different in nature than say tropical ecosystems. So, the impact on the living world of the sulphide mines tends to be smaller than a similar sized mine that was somewhere more sensitive. Laterite mines are completely different. They have a large surface footprint because the deposits are thin, and they tend to be in much more ecologically sensitive areas like the tropical rainforest. Laterite mine in Australia, maybe not such a big deal because it's in the middle of the Outback. But in the tropical areas, the biodiversity is very, very high. And the species localization is very small. So, from valley to valley, you'll have different species of plants and animals. Because the area is so productive, they don't have to go very far. And especially when you're on islands, every island can be unique.
[07:33] Eric: There's no escaping the fact that all mining creates environmental impacts. And even if sulphide mines tend to have the lower footprint, they still carry significant challenges and considerations. On the flip side, the same logic applies to laterite mining, despite its obvious disadvantages, laterite mining can be done better, as Mr. Trytten said off the top so much comes down to information investment regulation and oversight. So, let's stop circling and ask the question straight up, can nickel be mined sustainably?
[08:00] Lyle Trytten: Well, it can be. I mean, it's partly definitional, how you define sustainably. But the sulfide mines have a bit of a leg up because of the ability to concentrate the ore into a high-grade product for shipping and just by location, and if they're underground and stuff. And grid connect where you can connect it to a low carbon grid and the Giga Metals Turnagain project in BC is one of these. There are some projects in Ontario and Quebec that gives you a really good carbon footprint scenario. The laterite mines can be reasonably sustainable, if they're done with good practices in strongly regulated jurisdictions. But in weaker systems, you often have an environmental system that's good on paper but maybe not enforced as well in the field. And it becomes up to the discretion of the individual operator to do what they choose to do, whether it's what they think is right or whether it's what they think is cheap. So, frankly, once the forest is cleared, it's too late to preserve biodiversity. And so, it can be done well, it's just not always done well. And many of the jurisdictions that have the largest nickel deposits also have very poor records on governance and corruption. So, you can run a clean operation in a country like that. But it is harder, and we have to expect that the burden of proof is on the operator to show that they're not enriching bureaucrats and cronies and stuff. It can be hard to manage where there is an expectation of payoffs and whether they're under the table or whatever. And then of course, there's social issues, the S in ESG. So, in Canada, we've formally implemented UNDRIP, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, and we're working towards ensuring real free prior and informed consent of impacted groups. So, in developing countries, those practices can vary quite widely and like environmental practices, what happens in the field may not be the same as on paper, when it comes to getting consent or relocating people who are in the way of the mining activities. You can relocate people well or you can bring in the army to evict them. Right? It still gets them out of the way. But we've seen blockades of projects. We've seen the Catholic Church come out and take a stand on behalf of people in some countries like in the Philippines.
[08:03] Eric: Really?
08:06] Lyle Trytten: No, absolutely. The Catholic Church at one time was completely anti mining in the Philippines. I think they've reversed that a little bit now. But they've seen a lot of negative impacts to indigenous peoples and local villages from fairly aggressive tactics by mining companies. And regardless of economic spin offs that are theorized, it was very negative for the communities.
[10:57] Eric: There is clearly a lot of potential and money in nickel which can be both a good and bad thing. In some cases, we see people, businesses and governments chasing dollars without proper regulation or oversight. But in other cases, we're seeing increased demand drive investment in innovation that sparks real change and opportunity. Solving environmental challenges isn't just about minimizing the negatives, it's about finding the positives too. This is where my next guest comes in. Meet Dr. Greg Dipple, Professor of Geological Sciences at the University of British Columbia, who works with industry on trying to incorporate carbon capture and storage into mine Development. Dr. Dipple, can you explain to us how the nickel mining process works in terms of carbon capture potential?
[11:38] Greg Dipple: For the rocks that host the nickel, most of what you mined ends up being waste. Often 90 plus percent of what you mine is waste because you're pulling out a small amount of concentrated metal. And so, there's almost a one to one relationship between the amount of material that you're mining, and the amount of waste that you're producing. And sometimes that waste material is inherently reactive to carbon dioxide, like we have in the atmosphere from fossil fuel combustion. So, if you're generating waste that can be reactive to carbon dioxide that generates the potential to use that waste as a means to both capture carbon dioxide as well as to put it into a mineral form where it is very dense, it's solid and it has a storage, safety that is very high duration, so hundreds of 1000s to millions of years. So, can be a very safe place to put carbon dioxide.
[12:34] Eric: Is this what's referred to as carbon sequestration?
[12:38] Greg Dipple: Yeah
[12:38] Eric: Okay. And is nickel mining, likely suited for this process more than others when it comes to mineral?
[12:45] Greg Dipple: Yeah, it's one of-- There's a few commodities where this has a lot of potential and nickel is one of the primary ones. A lot of diamond deposits are in similar material which also has reactivity to co2. And then the associated metals like platinum group elements and palladium and potential for nickel or for copper and those things, which potentially have value in the generation of renewable energy and so forth. There's a really good alignment.
[13:18] Eric: Yeah, on the tech side too, there's tons of benefits with this, I feel.
[13:23] Greg Dipple: Yeah. And the forecasts for what is thought to going to be needed if we're going to electrify our transportation sector, for example, or at least the personal transportation sector, then, based on current and near-term battery technologies, we're going to need supplies of some of these metals like nickel at a scale that has never been accessed in human history. You can't recycle your way out of this because we never mined that much nickel before in human history. So, there is, if we're going to go in those directions, we need certain types of metals in quantities that we have not produced them before. So that has implications for how we source those metals.
[14:05] Eric: Right. And I wonder how much has changed in nickel mining? Like, are we able to find a balance in a way to do this with the current mining processes we have?
[14:14] Greg Dipple: I would say that's a work in progress. Yeah, so we've been working on this for 20 years actually, in various types of mines including Nickel Mines from the very beginning. And we've found some places where there's actually quite a bit of carbon capture happening as part of basic operations. So, one of the more dramatic examples that we documented was the Mount Keith nickel mine in Western Australia which is a major producer of nickel. It's run by BHP. And Sasha Wilson in her PhD thesis here at UBC documented that they were accidentally and unknowingly capturing about 40,000 tonnes a year of co2 in their tailings and mineralizing it and then burying it within the storage facility. So that represent about 11% of their total mine emissions that was being offset by things going on in their tailings storage facility that was unintentional. And initially, they were unaware of it. And so, we know that we can develop technologies to increase those rates. So that opens up the option that some mines should be able to operate with substantial greenhouse gas reductions and even operate something approaching carbon neutral. And if you start to look at how mines are being planned for the future where they're using renewable energy for their electricity production and is already work underway and transforming all fleets so that they don't run off fossil fuels. If you start to make those kinds of changes and the carbon footprint of mining is dramatically reduced. And you suddenly can envisage that the mines that are in the planning stage today could actually be built in such a way that they would be carbon negative. So, they would not only decarbonize the supply chain for electric vehicle batteries, but they would also provide a carbon removal benefit for the rest of the society.
[16:14] Eric: Dang. I didn't realize this is a pretty big deal once if we can get this stuff moving and things like that for the future. Like you said, with this electric vehicle revolution and the electrification of everything, this is a must have. And it sounds like we're well on the way.
[16:29] Greg Dipple: It's definitely achievable with existing technology. We just have to find the right places to do it and build and design the mines to maximize process. Absolutely.
[16:39] Eric: Okay, now this is the kind of information that gives me some serious hope and excitement for the future of clean energy. Clearly, we all need some more Dr. Dipple in our lives. The idea that nickel mines could actually provide a carbon removal benefit to the world is the definition of flipping the script. But when you hear the science behind it from smart people like Mr. Trytten and Dr. Dipple, it's not wishful thinking. It's very real and attainable with the right support, of course. So, what does that support look like? Are investors able to get over the historic stigmas with mining and see the potential? Let's go back to Mr. Trytten, because according to him, it just might be happening or at least starting to.
[17:14] Lyle Trytten: A year and a half ago, I was at a conference in Toronto, and I talked to some representatives of large European pension funds, who were very keen on investing in renewable energy, energy grid, transmission projects, those kinds of things. And it was all a green thesis and I said, What about mining? I have been working on a mining project, we're going to need a big hydroelectric transmission grid to power the mine, the mine is going to be sustainable. And the answer was simply, we're not interested in mining, we might help fund the hydroelectric transmission line but we won't touch a mining project. And you're starting to see that change now, those attitudes are evolving as people realize somebody's got to fund these things. If we're going to build hundreds of millions of EVs, somebody's got to fund the mines. And so, we're now seeing both the car companies, the battery companies, the investment companies starting to look around at each other and go Well, who's gonna support this?
[18:19] Eric: Nickel is key to our clean energy future. Yes, this is a true statement but it can also be somewhat misleading or at the very least limiting. When we talk about our clean energy future, we must do so within a 360-degree cradle to grave perspective, otherwise known as the entire footprint. This is why it's not just nickel but nickel mining that is the real key to net zero. The world appears to be waking up to this reality or be it slowly. Stigmas are being challenged, and in some cases, we're actually flipping the narrative turning problems into opportunities. Mining doesn't have to be an obstacle to overcome in our pursuit of electrification and Net Zero. With the right support, it can be part of the solution. Within the world of nickel mining, investment is a key driver in creating much needed innovation in governance. And while the dollars have historically gone to the shiny or more exciting parts of the electrification story, like battery tech and EVs, key stakeholders and investors are starting to realize that nothing EV is possible without mining. Makes sense.
This is why our next episode does a deep dive into the nickel mining investments story.
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