Robert Friedland, billionaire founder and executive co-chair of Ivanhoe Mines (TSX: IVN), criticized lithium mining at a London conference, ridiculed the West’s green energy transition and urged prayer to end the Israel-Hamas war.
Researchers at Ivanhoe start-up Pure Lithium in Boston are going from lithium brine to lithium metal in a step that could radically transform the electric vehicle battery market valued at around US$50 billion a year, Friedland told The Northern Miner’s Canadian Mining Symposium on Friday.
“We’re going to kill this lithium hydroxide and carbonate business,” he told the closing keynote session. “The current generation of batteries is going to be toast. It’s good for another three to four years,” he said. “They’re not going to be made out of the crap that’s being promoted by Canadian junior mining companies. I would short every lithium company.”
Friedland, who made his first fortune from the Voisey’s Bay nickel project in Newfoundland in the 1990s, says Pure Lithium boasts Donald Sadoway, an emeritus professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanley Whittingham, the 2019 Nobel laureate for chemistry who’s known as the father of the lithium-ion battery. They’re cooperating on a new type of battery made from low-grade brine that is inexpensive to manufacture and can handle 500 cycles of charging without losing capacity, the financier said.
“Once you have lithium metal on one side of the battery, you don’t need nickel, cobalt or graphite,” Friedland said. “All you guys are dead. Nickel, cobalt, graphite – out the window. You can use iron phosphate which is common as chips and that’s what you want, a battery to be made out of common material.”
Watch clips of the chat below:
Dylan and Xiaoping
Known for his wide-ranging chats and sometimes cranky demeanour, Friedland sat with The Northern Miner Group’s president, Anthony Vaccaro, for a rap or rant instead of a speech, quoting Bob Dylan and Deng Xiaoping along the way.
He mentioned how windmills kill eagles, the electrical demands of Google searches and a US$20-trillion price tag to upgrade the grid. The world must have copper but does it really need gold. He said the Israel-Hamas conflict could easily escalate.
“This is the most dangerous moment we’ve seen in our lifetime,” said Friedland, who’s 73 and lived through the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. “The situation that we see in the Middle East today is definitely enough to make you want to go home and pray.”
Another of his targets was the West’s focus on new energy. Ludicrous, he said, when the world’s most populous countries, India and China, declared they won’t reach net-zero carbon emissions until 2060 or 2070. And that today people still need fossil fuels for food, shelter and even the plastic in electric cars. Plus, there won’t be enough nickel to supply all the batteries needed even as cars like Teslas are built using an electrical grid that depends on coal, he said.
“We can’t use expensive and rare materials like nickel just because there isn’t enough of it,” he said. “The metal doesn’t exist, not in a way that’s green or sustainable. It’s like trying to get the contents of the Hoover Dam through a garden hose.”
Metal factions
In the United States, Friedland sees two tribes. One wants green metals to ease global warming. The other, with an eye on wars in Ukraine and Israel, wants metals to replenish armouries of copper shells and make tanks electric so they’re less visible to heat-seeking missiles.
“Can you imagine how much nickel we need for those batteries?” he said. “This huge clash is coming between the army, navy and air force wanting nickel, copper, cobalt, platinum, vanadium, rhodium, scandium – you name it – and the greening of the world economy. We’re heading for a train wreck here and the miners have this unbelievable burden that the whole thing depends on the miners.”
At times, Friedland praised China for its communal identity and a stronger supply chain than the U.S. where “the pump won’t work because the vandals took the handle,” he said, referencing Dylan. Elsewhere, he criticized the Asian country, whose Zijin Mining owns with Ivanhoe the giant Kamoa-Kakula copper mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for “nuking” Indonesia to mine nickel.
Companies are selling supplies of metals to cope with inflation and high interest rates while oil at US$150 a barrel could put Donald Trump back in the White House, he said. The world needs better trade relations to cut protectionism, and even mines in sensitive places like Northern Dynasty Minerals’ (TSX: NDM; NYSE: NAK) Pebble copper project in Alaska could be developed one day, but overall mining needs a better image.
“We need to communicate the centrality and importance of mining to anything humanity wants to achieve on the good side,” Friedland said. “We need to bring women into that enterprise, to understand it and lead it in a way that we have a chance to get to the mass media and humanize it as an activity.”
Watch the full video.
Wide ranging speech, always a good context, thank you RF for coming.