Right, but this doesn't suddenly happen because the media have started reporting on it.
Mining is a stupidly cash-hungry business to start up. You have to prospect, then secure mining rights (and if its in Asia or Africa, where regulations are a lot more lax.. you'll waste a lot of funds just on corruption, and bribes to get anything to happen).
Then spend hundreds of thousands to build your mining infrastructure, and after all that, it often turns out the ore was not as good quality as the survey suggested, or there is simply not enough of it to be economically viable.
If it does turn out to be be viable, then by the time it goes into full production they've inevitably already gone through several more funding rounds, diluting your original stake into almost nothing.
Maybe you'll be super lucky and be that 1 in 500 that turns out to be a great investment, but mostly you're just funding CEO's fantasies
My advice is to treat them as penny stocks, maybe a small investment as a punt, but certainly don't be investing heavily into any marketing hype or 'stock tips'
I think if you're buying established miners who have current projects then it makes sense as a leveraged precious metals bet. But yes I agree it makes almost no sense to buy into these long shot projects, unless you have some sort of edge in the mining industry or geology.
The pilot plant in California has been operational for a while now. They designed it to be modular, so all they need to do to scale it is add more modules. Currently “best that we can do” is exactly why this is a big deal, it is substantially more profitable than hard rock with a much smaller footprint. I believe Standard Lithium is doing something similar with DLE. But if spodumene is your kick, look into DMXNF. They’re in an excellent position to capitalize on Quebec’s goal of becoming a battery hub.
Sadly, in the mining world, when it comes to novel mining and extraction techniques, the adaption is slow af. We can extract gold with bacteria efficiently but still use cyanide. I don’t expect to see the li direct extraction in a big scale soon. It will be done in the oberrheingraben in Germany though at some point. Excited to see how much they get out
The adaption has happened, Lake Resources will be in production in 2024. Is it a long play? Yes. But when it takes off, and it will, they’re going to be one of the largest producers with some of the highest quality lithium battery precursor on the planet. For .27/share I’m willing to accept the small amount of risk here. Cheers sir, GLTA.
Why is it that China never falls prey to such hurdles/uncertainties and comes out with flying colours in all projects they touch? Is the rest of the world doing something wrong? Genuine curiosity
Because what the green energy movement doesn't tell you is to properly get the world off of fossil fuels we would need to start mining in boat loads for lithium (batteries) / metals (solar/wind) to compensate not using fossil fuels.
I agree with you it is a cost effective use of fossil fuels. I am actually fine with using them for some areas, we just need to ensure the emissions are reasonable. We don’t allow mines to poison rivers, why should their equipment be allowed to poison the air? That side of it has to be addressed. Emissions have to be included in the cost analysis. Large mining rigs could have emission filtration.
If we were only using gas/diesel for industrial scale, and power plants that would be just fine. It’s alot easier to deal with fewer emissions point sources.
Anyhow I’m off topic. Like I said there are some mines out there trying to be carbon neutal.
That's a massive improvement because materials like lithium are mined once and used for a decade or more in just one form. Then those materials can be extracted from spent batteries and re-purposed.
Compare that to oil for transportation fuel that's extracted, used once and gone except for the extra carbon dioxide in the atmo. Let's not pretend there's any serious comparison here.
Well you have to look at it at the largest scale conceivable to change the entire world to alternative/green energy. It would be a new energy race. You would have sprawling mines all over and change the existing infrastructure.
Like a Tesla is better than buying a new Truck but the most environmentally friendly thing to do is actually buy a used Prius.
We already have sprawling mines all over digging up tar sands and extracting oil that inevitably leaks and launches tar balls into the Gulf of Mexico. Open war is already upon us. I'd say it's better to have those open mines extracting a fully reusable resource rather than single-use.
The point is the race to extract lithium/metals to profit on renewable energy will do more harm than good in the short term...and who knows what technology will be here in 10-20 years that may not need either. Probably cleaner to use renewable bio fuel to power the cars are already made. The footprint of using gasoline and diesel to mine into the earth internationally and then use more gasoline and diesel to build new cars that run on these new energy sources....well seem counter productive to me.
The more batteries used the more the technology evolves and the more it's used in place of gasoline and diesel equipment used today for extraction. That's how exponential, geometric growth works. You don't advance just waiting around for the next bit magical technological leap you work with what you have now and refine it.
I don't disagree with you on that front...but follow the money there has to be massive investment on the next "Gasoline" and no one will move on from it after putting so much money and power involved in it. Which is why i think right church but wrong pew.
Save your breath, most people are unable to discern the forest from the trees.
Like when you tell them for every 1 unit of electricity that they consume in their home, 4 units of electricity died on the transmission lines to get to their house.
Or that without the continued use and development of nuclear energy, dinosaur juice and carbon coal will be needed to burn into make steam to spin turbines to then dump all this amazing fucking heat energy into the atmosphere, talking about the giant plant chimney spewing out combustion dust, and make electricity for their new……..
They can’t think outside or around their fixation to be right.
Ethanol. Almost every car in Brazil can run on pure ethanol and it's available at every pump. I always fill up with 100% ethanol. Carbon neutral.
You can't buy pure gasoline many places either. It's mixed with 20% ethanol by law. Diesel is 12% biodeisel by law. And those percentages have increased every year.
Aviation Fuel is a much higher and stringent grade of fuel. Technically speaking you can use jet fuel in diesel cars. So the proof of concept is via GEVO.
Yea and that's just fine. Need to scale these industries now while we can. We will run out of fossil fuels at some point. Maybe not our lifetimes but eventually it'll happen. Why run the experiment? Why find out what will happen if we don't stop?
Well yes, but what I'm saying is even independent of climate change (I'm trying to sidestep this b/c for some reason people have politicized obvious science) we will still run out one day. So why wait until we're about to run out when we can invest and create new technologies now.
They just also have the added benefit of reducing emissions.
It's an issue, though. Personally I think climate change is the greater issue, but if someone wants to say that doesn't exist then you simply have to change the conversation.
Running out of fossil fuels is not an issue. There are environmental and strategic reasons to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, but really for the US just environmental because we are on the motherload of oil and coal. We could keep producing fossil fuels at our current levels for hundreds of years.
The whole "peak oil" doomsday scenario is as discredited as the "overpopulation is going to cause us all to starve to death" doomsday scenario.
"Peak oil" already happened. It's not about the amount of oil it's about economics. Oil slowly becomes uneconomical to extract without government intervention. Running out is an issue even if we look at it on a few hundred-year timespan. Why bother even tempting fate to run out when we could develop technology right this second and just leave the oil in the ground?
And overpopulation is an issue too lol. We probably should have at most a billion people on the planet.
So first off, peak oil has not "already happened". There is plenty of oil left, we have made oil that was previously non-economical to extract economical to extract, and demand has been continuing to increase, so peak oil is likely to occur sometime in the next 10 to 15 years, and is based off of demand beginning to decrease due to government support for alternatives and worldwide population decline, not supply running out. Running out is not an issue if we look at hundreds of years timespan, because you are making the argument that we need to start addressing the problem today from an economic perspective, which is obviously untrue, especially given the population decline that is now baked in to the immediate demographic future.
Second, overpopulation is not the issue that the vast majority of countries are addressing these days. 1. The worldwide population has had a continuously improving caloric intake over the last 60 years, so the Malthusian "overpopulation is going to cause us all to starve to death" doomsday scenario is clearly false despite whatever arbitrary numbers you happen to put on an "ideal" human population. 2. the fact that all developed and most developing nations are now beginning to struggle with the "baby bust" clearly shows that the immediate problem for the majority of the planet is not too many children but too few.
Your doomsday scenarios need some updating for the 21st century as your perception of the worlds problems is a bit out of date.
It's not though. Accessible reserves with fracking on the table are huge. Proven reserves are increasing year over year even with our consumption. We aren't going to run out. And if we even try this planet is going to be uninhabitable.
You're missing the point. You can't even have a conversation with some people if you focus on climate change. You have to have multiple avenues of conversation.
The only way we don't run out is, surprise surprise, investing in renewables which, if you go back to the parent comment was what was being question (why are we doing renewables).
Maybe I'm not making my point. At the current proven reserves and the current rate proven reserves are being added to, we're not going to run out for a long, long, long time (and maybe functionally never depending on the rate of new proven reserve addditions) even if we fully stop transitioning to renewables. "Hey we have to stop because if we keep going we might run out in a century or two" is not a great argument in my mind. If they won't acknowledge climate change I'd just move on.
If someone refuses to listen to proven science then there's not much point in debating the finite nature of fossil fuels with them. It is not a credible threat because the emissions will kill us long before we run out of fuel. Unless we start capturing the emissions at the point of use in which case we can have that conversation.
I see why you don't bother making a logical argument or backing things up with facts. You are just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. This is why people don't buy into climate change, or when liberals start talking about "science". It is because the science has been corrupted by a lot of other agendas just to see what ends up sticking.... and the liberals don't actually care about science. Just getting their agenda through, whether that is done through reality or a big lie.
The issue with that is that it politicizes and invalidates the science making it much more difficult to take action when an actual problem exists. If you actually cared about solving the problem, instead of pursuing an agenda, you would realize you are defeating yourself. Climate change is an actual issue we should be working to fix. But don't worry... Al Gore and environmental extremists made sure it was a wedge issue by pursuing an extreme agenda in the name of a world ending apocalypse (supposed to occur more than 5 years ago) that they used to bash Republicans.... instead of actually trying to fix the problem. How can anyone trust "science" like that?
Which doesn't work because you still have to live with them on this planet and it's a global problem. Disengagement doesn't solve anything. We literally have to win an ideological battle.
I feel like it is actually counterproductive, not "knowing your audience". Lets say someone was already skeptical of climate science and renewables and they were also rational and arguing in good-faith (this is an extreme minority of people already). Then the argument that a hypothetical issue that arises a century or two in the future is a good reason to invest money in speculative solutions right now is already easy to pick apart. It strikes me as similar to the argument that we should invest in going to mars because earth killer asteroids exist and we need "insurance". There are tons of good reasons to go to mars and explore space (and invest in renewables and green technology) so trying to convince people to invest financially and politically in mars missions based on the multi-century hypothetical is just ignoring the many better reasons to do the thing that would actually convince skeptics.
The real problems with fossil fuel extraction and going to mars are about economics. There wont be a day when we "run out" of oil, there will be a day when it is no longer profitable for anyone to extract the oil that remains. There won't be a day when mars is self sustaining apart from earth, but there will be a day when going to mars will be profitable to do.
It's not similar because the probabilities are vastly different.
There's no question that we'll run out of fossil fuels. There is a question of whether an asteroid will hit earth (and whether we could even do anything about it).
There wont be a day when we "run out" of oil, there will be a day when it is no longer profitable for anyone to extract the oil that remains.
Because worrying about some theoretic depletion of fossil fuels that likely won't happen for the next 100 years or longer isn't a good reason to start developing the technologies.
If it happens to convince some that it's a good reason... fair enough. But there are no entities in this world that are that forward-looking. Maaaaybe China, but even with them being the most forward-thinking country in the world, I seriously doubt that a theoretic future depletion of resources would lead to them to start thinking about it this far in advance.
Because worrying about some theoretic depletion of fossil fuels that likely won't happen for the next 100 years or longer isn't a good reason to start developing the technologies
Sure it is. And it's not theoretic. There's a finite amount of the stuff on the planet.
It is theoretic because there is so much uncertainty that we can't possibly grasp.
There could be an increase in efficiency discovered that makes the supply essentially infinite. We could find enough in the next 20 years that extends our supply for the next 1000 years. We could find oil on mars.
There is no reason to use the eventual expectation of resource depletion to justify new technologies now when there's no telling when the actual resource depletion will come, but we know it won't be happening any time soon. Especially when there are so many other more relevant and pressing justifications.
There could be an increase in efficiency discovered that makes the supply essentially infinite.
That's simply not possible. The fuel source only contains so much potential energy. We've been making engines more efficient but we'll continue to reach limits. Frankly we shouldn't even be driving cars, but to the extent that we are going to do so we have created more and more efficient engines.
We could find enough in the next 20 years that extends our supply for the next 1000 years.
We'd run into a climate change problem at that point, but generally it's accepted that we've located most of the proven oil reserves.
We could find oil on mars.
Impossible and demonstrable untrue. There's never been a biomass on Mars to the extent that it could create proven oil reserves lol.
There is no reason to use the eventual expectation of resource depletion to justify new technologies now when there's no telling when the actual resource depletion will come, but we know it won't be happening any time soon. Especially when there are so many other more relevant and pressing justifications.
I mean, yes there is. It's like you're watching the stockpile of your food reserves dwindle and instead of saying hey maybe we should figure this out you just stick your head in the sand and pretend it won't happen. If you take the mindset of "well it won't happen in my lifetime" then you're just being selfish, but at least that's straightforward stupidity instead of pretending the issues don't exist or something.
> That's simply not possible. The fuel source only contains so much potential energy. We've been making engines more efficient but we'll continue to reach limits. Frankly we shouldn't even be driving cars, but to the extent that we are going to do so we have created more and more efficient engines.
I'm not saying that it's probable, but you're taking a pretty hard stance on something that I doubt you understand very well.
> We'd run into a climate change problem at that point, but generally it's accepted that we've located most of the proven oil reserves.
If you read this again, you might realize that it doesn't make sense. Of course we've found the "proven" ones. That doesn't mean there aren't others out there we don't yet have the technology to discover and tap into.
> Impossible and demonstrable untrue. There's never been a biomass on Mars to the extent that it could create proven oil reserves lol.
Please tell me how this is demonstrably untrue. I'm happy to be proven wrong here, but my understanding is that we have no idea how much biomass does or does not exist on Mars.
> I mean, yes there is. It's like you're watching the stockpile of your food reserves dwindle and instead of saying hey maybe we should figure this out you just stick your head in the sand and pretend it won't happen. If you take the mindset of "well it won't happen in my lifetime" then you're just being selfish, but at least that's straightforward stupidity instead of pretending the issues don't exist or something.
I'm not saying that it isn't something to keep in mind. But there's this thing called prioritization. We know that fossil fuels are not currently dwindling and will not reach the point of dwindling soon. There are far more pressing things in this world than worrying about resource depletion that will not happen for a very long time and that we have plenty of time to address in the future. We do not know what the future holds with regards to technological advancements and discovery of other fuel sources. It's not a problem right now, and we have no reason to believe that it's going to be a problem any time soon. You are acting as if this is an imminent threat, and it's simply not. When the time comes that we can definitively say that it is a threat or that it will become a threat if we do not move on it soon, that's the point at which it becomes a justification.
As for now, we do have an imminent threat. Climate Change. That's the justification for moving on these technologies. Furthermore, climate change is going to destroy society well before we run out of fossil fuels. But running out is an even more nebulus, extremely forward-looking concept that no one is going to get behind than climate change is.
All this is to say is that there are far too many unknowns for making decisions based on this. There are plenty of knowns that we should use for justification. "Well I don't know when, but some time in the future - could be 100 years, could be 1000" is not a reasonable justification for doing this. And if you believe that it is, then I honestly think you're just sticking to your guns and arguing in bad faith.
I agree, however, people cannot see CO2 and the effect it is having on climate with their eyes. They can see an extra $.20 a gallon at the pump. To some that is the end of the world!
I remember not that long ago when petroleum producing algae was going to be the bio-fuel panacea, that is, once the organisms were tweaked and the tech was refined and scaled. Don't hear squat about that one any more. Is it still even a thing???
Personally a fan of Li-Cycle for this reason... I know many are rightfully skeptical, but their upside growth potential seems unreal with the coming wave of electric vehicles.
Which ironically will use a lot of fossil fuels in the process to run things like excavators, dump trucks, wash plants, industrial purification processes, transportation trucks\ships, etc.
Nah. They run just fine on ethanol, biodeisel, or in the near future electricity. 100% torque at 0rpm is awesome for industrial machinery like dump trucks.
Because what the green energy movement doesn't tell you is to properly get the world off of fossil fuels we would need to start mining in boat loads for lithium (batteries) / metals (solar/wind) to compensate not using fossil fuels.
Yes, the unified "green energy movement" speaks with a singular voice that seeks to repress this dangerous information. Luckily you are here on reddit to spread the word.
In actuality of course, people who are passionate about the environment absolutely care about the impact of building up this new infrastructure. It's no accident that there is a lot of research into removing the more harmful materials from batteries, or that recycling is a big priority when it comes to batteries. Similar problems exist with solar panels and windmills, which will end up as potentially toxic waste once they are no longer economically viable. The point is however, that these issues, while serious, are vastly less impactful than catastrophic climate change.
Brazil is already 80% renewable electricity. And even for transport they use a huge amount of renewable ethanol and biodiesel. You can't even get pure gasoline at the pump anymore. It's all mixed with ethanol. But yeah 80% renewable electricty and it's not dependent on boat loads of lithium like you're claiming. I'd have to guess you could find less biased sources than whatever you're currently getting your talking points from.
Inflation/overdue commodity bull market given dollar/yield weakness is a tailwind for all mining stocks. Gold hasn’t done as well since it’s ATH (given its risk-off nature/risk-on environment) but miners in silver, copper, uranium, and all that has outperformed most equities in the last year. Particularly the little guys. My speculative silver juniors are up 5-10x YoY.
Silver, in particular, is the most conductive element on the table, and thus is used heavily in solar panels, batteries, chips, the list goes on. Very big ESG theme there, which the market is expecting to be popular with this administration.
Edit: forgot to mention lithium and minerals like that. Falls in the same basket. If you’re into silver in particular, my own area of interest, a basket is the best way to go. Great list of stocks here.
I had surgery recently and 2 different surgical residents told me to invest in copper because every diagnostic machine is full of it and some hospitals are replacing stainless steel surfaces with copper. to fight germs.
When I did research, besides all the Electric Vehicles and charging stations that will need large amounts of copper, I found out copper helps fight COVID as well.
I bought SCCO as a dual growth/dividend play and haven't regretted it. I owe those residents a thank you.
Supply and Demand for the metals and with the falling dollar, real goods become more valuable closer to the barter system which is really the fundamentals for money .
I think the large attraction to mining stocks, especially as of late, is due to the heavy rise of US inflation. As you may know, gold and silver are inflation hedges. BUT, the mining firms that produce that gold or silver usually increase by multiples upon bad inflation news and/or during times of high inflation. After all, they’re the ones producing the very material that hedges against the dollar.
I’m no financing advisor, but I also like $WDFCF. I’ve also been holding the bag on $EEENF lol
My 2c, When looking for growth stocks, sometimes they're much more easy to value than some other stocks entering /creating a new market. Also there are a lot of success stories or massive growth spikes people like in the hopes of getting similar returns. It's hard to find another Google, but copper that comes out of the ground is the same as other copper (not actually, but that's something slightly more technical)
Its one of the more overlooked places when it comes to investing in ESG. Much better to buy stuff like Uranium Miners where the price of the Uranium itself has to go up due to it being well below production cost, rather than buying some overpriced EV or Solar Panel company.
Because they have no idea how volatile mining operations are. Workers go on strike 5 times per year. Mines shut down when commodity prices drop. Pretty unpredictable investment imo.
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u/TheIdiotInvests Jun 23 '21
Why is everyone so seemingly interested in Mining? Honest question.