Umair Irfan
Appearances
Apple News Today
Property, golf, and crypto: the Trump family strikes deals in the Middle East
The way our power grid works typically is that we have large centralized generators, and then they send power along long transmission lines and then distribution networks to our homes, our offices, and businesses.
Apple News Today
Property, golf, and crypto: the Trump family strikes deals in the Middle East
The main issue with that is that electricity has to be used pretty much as soon as it's produced, and so generators have to match the demand instantaneously, minute to minute, second by second, in order to keep the power grid stable.
Apple News Today
Property, golf, and crypto: the Trump family strikes deals in the Middle East
It has a lot of benefits. It doesn't typically compete with generators directly because it stores energy. It doesn't generate electricity on its own. And oftentimes it charges up using electricity that would otherwise go to waste. And so essentially, a lot of times it's using electricity that's effectively free.
Apple News Today
Property, golf, and crypto: the Trump family strikes deals in the Middle East
And so batteries buy us some time. They help allow some stability and redundancy to provide additional power when it's needed, when parts of the grid have to go down.
Apple News Today
Property, golf, and crypto: the Trump family strikes deals in the Middle East
Music
Today, Explained
The white gold rush
Right now, one of the hottest places people are trying to extract critical minerals is actually at the bottom of the ocean. There's a lot of evidence that there's a lot of minerals there, but doing anything underwater is really difficult and really expensive. There are some other problems to consider that are kind of unique to deep sea mining.
Today, Explained
The white gold rush
One is just that we don't know a whole lot about the ocean floor in general. It's a very difficult area to map. Wildlife, geological activity, there's a whole lot of other factors that we have to think about when we're doing mining.
Today, Explained
The white gold rush
Then, on top of that, we also have to think about the framing of how we do this, the international guidelines. Now, the Trump administration said that they're considering proposals to extract critical minerals off the coast of U.S. island territories like American Samoa and also in the U.S. 's exclusive economic zone. So it's looking at territorial waters of the U.S.
Today, Explained
The white gold rush
but some of the richest fields for critical minerals are in the middle of the ocean, basically in international waters. But because it's in international waters, the question is who has rights to those minerals? This is really sort of a scramble right now as countries are trying to jockey for position at what might be a potentially rich vein for a lot of really important materials.
Today, Explained
The white gold rush
Well, there are even more far-fetched proposals, and one of the more interesting ones might be mining asteroids.
Today, Explained
The white gold rush
There are even companies that have sprung up to try to develop the technology to do this, and there was one company earlier this year that actually did launch a test spacecraft to try to see what the technology would be like to try to get to an asteroid and collect samples and bring them back.
Today, Explained
The white gold rush
Well, these are people who are thinking really big picture, really far into the future. Obviously, we have plenty of resources that we haven't fully exploited here on Earth, and the cost is really going to be exorbitant.
Today, Explained
The white gold rush
But the idea is that we're going to continue to need and consume critical minerals for a very long time, and eventually we will either exhaust the resources we have on Earth, or as we expand our footprint in space, we're going to need to find a way to get materials into space. And right now, getting any substance off of the Earth and into space is a really expensive proposition.
Today, Explained
The white gold rush
But if you want to potentially build, say, a lunar colony or a space station, it might make more sense to try drawing on materials that are already in space.
Today, Explained
The white gold rush
This is a very sci-fi idea, but it's definitely something that people are actually investing in now and are trying to lay the groundwork for because they think it's something we'll need 20, 30 years down the line. Now, there are some very scarce materials we could potentially be getting from asteroids that we might need.
Today, Explained
The white gold rush
So things like iridium that we typically find only in meteorite impacts on Earth. There might be more abundant in space. And so there are potentially things that we know about that are extremely rare that could be very valuable.
Today, Explained
The white gold rush
You know, some people have suggested that the world's first trillionaire will be an asteroid mining magnet. Because once you have opened the door to extracting this resource, there's so much there that you could potentially use and leverage.
Today, Explained
The white gold rush
There's a lot of room for improvement here in terms of how we use critical minerals now. First is efficiency, that we learn how to use less of the critical minerals for a given object or a
Today, Explained
The white gold rush
less lithium or we blend lithium with other compounds and other metals that are more abundant in a lithium ion cell and then we make the existing lithium reserves go further in terms of storing energy one other thing that we should probably think about especially over the long term is recycling because we're not burning critical minerals
Today, Explained
The white gold rush
a lot of them are going to be retained in the devices that we use them. So a lithium ion battery still has all the lithium you use to mine it, even when the battery reaches its end of life.
Today, Explained
The white gold rush
We can sort of create this closed loop of materials that we can try to use these materials once they reach their end of life, take these devices, pull them apart, get the raw materials back out, and then put them back into circulation in new devices. And that's one of the interesting potentials we have with a lot of these clean technologies.
Today, Explained
The white gold rush
And that's also an argument for making this more sustainable turn.
Today, Explained
The white gold rush
In a lot of ways, we're going to be locking in the economy for the next 10, 20, 30 years based on what we do now. The process of getting a mine started from identifying a site to when you can actually get stuff out of the ground, that can take 5, 10, 15 years just for a mine to start production. And so we have to start making some of these hard decisions. I mean, obviously...
Today, Explained
The white gold rush
In some cases, mining does have a big environmental cost, but we have to make that cost-benefit analysis about how these mines could help us obviate and get rid of some of the more destructive forms of mining that are constantly going on today. I'm talking specifically about fossil fuel extraction, things like coal mining, hydraulic fracturing.
Today, Explained
The white gold rush
If we get our cards right, if we're smart about this, and if we actually start planning and making the investments in these technologies, we could make this transition cheaper, more effective, and have greater benefits for everyone.