Episode #58 - Jamie Liang, President and CEO at TerraVolta

Speaker A: The Energy Transition podcast takes you directly into the cutting edge of the global energy sector shift with a specific focus on the critical role played by oil and gas, as well as the pathways developing around a lower carbon future. Your host, Dan Pickering, founder of Pickering Energy Partners, is joined by Josh Lowry, president of Upright Digital. Each episode engages industry thought leaders in an exploration of market moving trends and topics, including new technologies, esg, capital markets, inclusion and diversity, workforce innovation, regulatory influence, and the voice of the people. Join us as the Energy Transition Podcast looks at the state of the traditional energy and oil field, service sectors, emerging technologies, and the path ahead in a world of lower carbon energy development.

Speaker B: Welcome to the Energy in Transition Podcast. My name is Josh Lowry. We are coming to you live from the urban office studios in the Heights area, Houston, Texas. My name is. I already said my name is Josh, didn't I? See it's been a minute.

Speaker C: I don't know, I don't think I did.

Speaker B: I'm going to just keep going rolling with it. My name is Josh Lowry. I am joined as usual with a co host extraordinaire, Mr. Dan Pickering.

Speaker C: Josh, how goes?

Speaker B: Yeah, well, clearly by the intro, it's

Speaker C: been a minute, it's been that we, uh, got a lot going on, lots happening. Tell us, tell me about jj.

Speaker B: Jj JJ is Jerry Jones, the. And the official title that they make you say is the president, owner and general manager of the Dallas Cowboys. And he is the lead owner, uh, stock shareholder of Comstock Resources. So we are part of, uh, ewtc, the Energy Workforce and Technology Council. Their annual meeting is next week, which is April 9th. For those listening, depending upon when you do. Um, but we are having their opening reception and I'm from Dallas. I know that you're a huge Texas fan. I am a huge Dallas Cowboy fan. So when we were talking about planning this meeting, um, I was like, I want to get Jerry Jones to come to this meeting. So the EWTC has a. Their, one of their highest awards they can give and they have bestowed this award upon Jerry Jones this year. And he was gracious enough to come accept it. And so he's going to be at this annual meeting this next week with, uh, Jay Allison, CEO of Comstock and also Harold Ham. So huge, you know, news in the world. If you're a young kid from Dallas, which I. Or was a young kid from Dallas,

Speaker C: you're no longer young.

Speaker B: No, no, no, I'm not, unfortunately, but really excited about it.

Speaker C: Um, that's awesome.

Speaker B: That's great.

Speaker C: It's pretty a great event.

Speaker B: I Don't know how close they're gonna let me get to him. I'm trying not to fanboy out on him, but, uh, it's. It's gonna be pretty cool.

Speaker C: Yeah. So the Dallas Cowboys.

Speaker D: Yes.

Speaker B: We think the glory is still there

Speaker D: in my head for sure.

Speaker C: Yeah. That's awesome.

Speaker B: How have you been?

Speaker C: Good. You know, I've got. I did had an event today.

Speaker B: I'm.

Speaker C: I'm as dressed up as I've been in. In months and months for a podcast. So I'm going to. I think that's going to take me to a new level today. Well, discussion.

Speaker B: You know, before we go there, I

Speaker D: wanted to point out.

Speaker B: That's a great. You're such a pro. Uh, make sure you follow us on all of our channels, both YouTube and Spotify, because I'm actually wearing a great Pickering energy partners, quarter zip vest here today. Thank you very much for that.

Speaker C: You're welcome. You guilted me on that. I did it publicly, which, yes, I

Speaker B: was happy to do, and now I'm publicly wearing it.

Speaker C: It was very, uh, very effective. I got back to the office and said, we got Josh a vest, so. Well, thank you very much. Thanks for sporting the gear.

Speaker B: My pleasure, sir.

Speaker C: We're going to have a good day today. Absolutely. So, uh, we're happy to welcome in Jamie Liang. Jamie is the CEO of TerraVolta Resources, and for those of you that like to look at your computer while you're listening to the podcast and kind of follow along the website. Jamie. Www.t e r r a v o l t a dot com. Correct.

Speaker D: You got that, Terravolta.

Speaker C: Um, so we're going to spend some time talking about lithium, but as we always do, we, uh, want to get to know you before we get to know your company and what you're doing. So tell us a little bit about, uh, Jamie Liang, your history, and how did you get to be CEO of TerraVolta?

Speaker D: Sure. Yeah. And, Dan and Josh, thanks so much for having me this afternoon. It's, uh, great to be here and, uh, look forward to the conversation today. So, uh, a little bit about my background. I grew up. I was born and raised in California, so a, uh, city that most people are familiar with nowadays. It's Palo Alto, and right in the heart of Silicon Valley. Before it was Silicon Valley. So this was in 1980. And, uh, so my parents immigrated. My dad. My dad's from Hong Kong.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker D: My mom's from Macau. She grew up in a village in Macau. And my dad knew from. I think when he was um, an adolescent that he wanted to be a physics professor. So he, um, he. He did great in school. He got into UC Berkeley, and he attended there for his undergrad and his PhD. Um, so he is a space physicist is what my dad does. And so he traveled, um, around the country as a professor, as an assistant professor, and ultimately landed a job at Stanford University. And so that's where, um, I was born.

Speaker C: Jamie. A family of underachievers?

Speaker D: No, it's. Yeah. And my mom was a biochemist, so I come from a family of scientists. Um, so was born and raised there. It was a great time and place to be living, to be alive. And frankly, before it became Silicon Valley, it was just this land of innovation and ingenuity. Uh, really represented what the American dream was about. Uh, I was too young to appreciate that, but what I did know was that there was a lot of new stuff in technology and computers. All that surrounded me. The stuff that my dad's colleagues were working on in the Stanford physics department. It was a really exciting time, uh, to be there. And ultimately, though, he got tenured at Rice University in Houston, Texas. So, uh, that was in 1989.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker D: And so at that time, he ended up uprooting the family. And I was still in, uh, in elementary school at the time, and ended up becoming Houstonians, which was, um. Maybe he had the foresight, but we became from. We went from being Californians to Texans. That was ultimately a great thing for us.

Speaker C: He made the move that everybody's making now.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Um, and he did it for work, not necessarily for taxes, but, um. So. And you're a Rice guy, if I remember.

Speaker D: That's right.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker D: And I grew up in that area and, uh, did my undergrad there. So fast forward. I always wanted, uh, to be in business. So that's my parents. I guess I wasn't smart enough to become a doctor. So much to the chagrin of my dad and my mom. I didn't go get my md but ultimately studied economics and found my way into the wonderful world of investment banking on Wall Street. But it was a really unique time, too, when I graduated, because there's. That was when Enron was happening. That was when El Paso, Duke Energy, a lot of the accounting scandals. And so it kind of turned me away from the traditional energy, oil and gas that I grew up with here in Houston, and ultimately did project finance. So I was financing major infrastructure projects, both in the public and the private sector on Wall Street. Um, energy projects, or. Uh, no, it was all the above. It was ports Roads, airports, utilities, all sorts general core infrastructure projects.

Speaker B: So you went for your MBA UPenn, then from there you go to New York?

Speaker D: No, actually that was uh, after my undergrad. Yeah. Yeah, so after Rice University. But I did do my MBA up in Philly many years later and that kind of pushed me back into this path of entrepreneurship. Okay.

Speaker C: Sorry.

Speaker D: I was trying to get the timing. Oh yeah, okay. Yeah. So I always had that passion inside of me, but I did spend about 11 years on Wall street, both in New York and in Houston.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker D: So I got that experience and um, you know, I did end up doing some structured energy financing.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker D: When I was back in Houston. Um, and that was just a fascinating experience really. I saw the, the shale boom as it was happening that was probably in mid 2000s. And I uh, knew that. Well, it was a funny story. What happened was my wife who was um, a private equity. She had done some energy investing here. She, by happenstance after the financial crisis ended, uh, up founding. Co founding an, an oil and gas company. And so I was, was really excited about this. I was enthralled. I, I was envious. That's what I wanted to do. But I was just a lowly investment banker at the time. And so uh, I went back to business school and I said I am going to study entrepreneurship and management and. And then ultimately that's when I decided to go become an entrepreneur in the oil and gas sector. So that was in 2013.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker D: And I think you know, Dan, you and I, I'm sure we met around that time. We uh, we formed an upstream oil and gas company. It was a private company called battlecat Oil and Gas, which is a great

Speaker C: name by the way.

Speaker B: Great name.

Speaker C: I mean, yes, that's gotta be worth millions alone on a cat.

Speaker D: You know. Animal. Animal company names never fail.

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker D: So we, we formed it. We were an Eagle Ford shale focused operator, an upstream operator. Eagle Ford was more of a mature basin at the time, but we were still exploring. We were still trying to extend the boundaries in the Eagle Ford and ah, applying new technologies to make that work. And, and so around 2014 we raised some capital from private equity and just in time. Yeah, exactly. My timing is always perfect as you can tell from the story. But that was right before the crash happened in Thanksgiving of 2014.

Speaker B: Oil.

Speaker D: We had put together a position we thought might work at $105 a barrel. Oil crashed at $27 a barrel. And we said, hey, this position doesn't work. What in the world are we going to do? And I'VE always been of the belief that you learn a lot from failures, from the market challenges and obstacles than you do from the successes. And so here we were faced with this pretty large challenge of digging ourselves out of this hole. And so we just put our head in the sand. We said we're going to use data analytics, we're going to do all the research and the modeling, uh, subsurface, and we're going to find better ways to both acquire new positions, better ways to get more out of the ground. And the whole industry was doing that at the time. Um, and so we hunkered down. We ultimately acquired some positions a couple years later. This is probably circa 2015, 2016. And we built a position, um, and companies like EOG, Conoco, they started drilling around us. We drill the successful well and ultimately we sold, um, for a profit. We made some good money to, uh, we sold it to a public company. And that was in 2017. Uh, we did it again. Yeah, it worked out, I mean, oil. So this was, I, like I tell the story window there, There was a little window, but no, oil was still $45 a barrel. So we, we built the company in dollar. Under $5. We started it and then we sold in 45. And somehow it was. We pulled the rabbit out of the hat and we made a little bit of money on that one.

Speaker C: That's great.

Speaker D: And we, we did the rinse and repeat. We did it again, except without, um, a private equity group. We, we did it ourselves. And that one was, it was a big success. We sold that one in 2019. And then I had an inkling I wanted to move out of the Eagle Ford Permian Basin was hot, right? And was a little bit, um, looking for something besides upstream. And I said, what about midstream infrastructure? I had done some work in the infrastructure sector, so, uh, supposedly a little bit more secure, stable, stable cash flows. Um, and so I joined a water treatment and infrastructure company. This was, uh, in 2019. And it was then during that time period where I had this catharsis or epiphany that I wanted to go back to upstream, but maybe start to transition from the traditional oil and gas industry to the. Whatever else is out there. And in this case, it was the critical minerals that could potentially power the energy transition. So that's when I had this thought. Does the US after having looked at the shale revolution and what we, what the US Was able to accomplish there, becoming the world's largest oil producer and applying new technologies, getting more out of the ground, is there a Way does, does the US have its own domestic critical minerals underground? And that's how, that's really the genesis of Terravolta. Now, um, and I'm getting a little long winded here, but what happened was we had to get all the stars to align to get this to work, right? We had to find the lithium deposits. We had to make sure there was technology to extract it.

Speaker C: And Jamie, were you, did you. How'd you sett on lithium? Why lithium versus something else?

Speaker D: Well, that was what we actually found. Right. And lithium at the time, well, it's gone through so many price spikes and, and, and collapses at this point. But at the time, this is around 2021, 2022. So postco, the demand for, from EVs, from China, from Europe, the mandates, uh, the growth here in the United States, it looked like there was a very large, very strong growth component. And lithium for lithium. Lithium is at the time the most expensive part of the battery cell, which is the most expensive part of the electric vehicle. So there was an economic rationale for looking at lithium. Um, and then furthermore, as I started to look into this, we did have domestic resources, right? They were just. And I want to make a distinction here too, because lithium's not a rare earth, actually abundant. We call it critical because it is critical to the national security of the country. Um, so it is deemed a critical mineral by the United States. But it's abundant. It's in the ocean, right? But it's hard to extract. It's very, very difficult to extract. And historically it's been done by two methods. First is hard rock. So think of your picks and shovels. Open pit mine, and you blow up the side of a mountain and you, you, it's called beneficiation. So you extract the waste and you, you get this pure concentrate of what's called spodumene ore. And that's where most of the lithium comes from today. It's globally, Globally and it's. Australia has got a huge open pit mine called Green Bushes. And then you have the brine resources. And these are in South America primarily. And there you have to build these giant evaporation ponds. We're used to seeing evaporation pits and frack pits in the oil field, but think of like 10,000 football fields of this stuff. Huge, huge, massive projects. Environmentally invasive, right? And it takes 12 to 18 months to evaporate this stuff. It's really a, uh, challenging problem to solve because in order to evaporate stuff, you can't have any rainfall. It's got to be the most arid places in the world, but yet the processing requires a ton of fresh water. So think about that for a second. So that's where a third of the lithium comes from. And so 2/3 hard rock, one third approximately. Okay, yep. And so is there a solution? Uh, first of all, do we have it domestically? And secondly, can we economically produce this stuff here in the United States? And a ton of research was, was done. This was, uh, when I was first coming up with the idea for Terravolta. The US Actually used to be the leading lithium producer in the, in the world, of course.

Speaker C: Hey Josh, you learn something new every day. I did not know that.

Speaker B: I'm just wondering if there's the appetite when you say the two thirds there for the, the two descriptions you just gave. I'm sitting here thinking of the American media if they got a hold of two of those.

Speaker C: Yeah. Can we open pit mine drag 10,000 football fields?

Speaker D: Yeah, that, yeah, yeah. And, and the answer is clearly no.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker D: We, we've got a lot of not in my backyard issues going on today. There's, there's absolutely no way that, that um, someone's going to prove a giant open pit like that. So if there is a better way to do things, uh, it could potentially be feasible here in the United States. And so that's what led me to this exploration process. Direct lithium extraction.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker D: DLE is, I'll use that term throughout this conversation.

Speaker B: That for me, by the way.

Speaker D: Yeah. So D L E. Direct lithium extraction is a real time way to process lithium from a brine. What that means, it effectively uses a sorbent, which is like a, like a filter, effectively to take those lithium ions from the water and selectively remove them from the water. And using chemical processes that have been around forever in the water treatment space. And so in around 2018 to today, there have been a number of innovations within that sector or subsector, uh, of technology for lithium extraction and that allows you to eliminate the need for these giant evaporation ponds. And that was just coming around. And so if we were to apply that to a, uh, high quality resource of brine, then you would be able to make this work. So think about, much like oil and gas and there's a lot of analogies here. You drill a well, instead of flowing back hydrocarbons, you're flowing back water. And then you're applying the technology to extract those ions and then refine them into what then goes into the battery. So it's either lithium carbonate or lithium hydroxide. That'll go into the battery and all these ideas had to come together and it was really that nexus or confluence of technology, resource, um, the wherewithal, the people to make this happen here.

Speaker C: And it seems like just listening to your discussion of what you've done, you did project finance type stuff, you worked for a water midstream business, you've been in the oil and gas or extractive industry. So I mean you're pulling it all together to do lithium.

Speaker D: That's exactly right. And I, I think it's, I, uh, I'm, I'm, I'm very blessed because not often in your career can you take, have you worked on all, you've developed all these skills where you can directly apply them and, and try to innovate and come up with solutions. And so I feel really fortunate that we've been able to do that here.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's great.

Speaker B: That is great.

Speaker C: Well, let's take a step back if you don't mind. Just, I mean you kind of teased us with lithium EVs. It's important you said kind of big price cycles, et cetera. Um, tell us where we're at today in the lithium industry and how big is it and then we'll get to Terravolta because you're going to be, you know, you're attacking this market. Sure.

Speaker D: So unfortunately right now we're in a trough. Um, although we see troughs as opportunity. Right.

Speaker C: And which is what every person in the business that's exactly when they were stuck is like this is terrible, but

Speaker D: it's a great, we gotta be on.

Speaker C: It's our time.

Speaker D: Right, Right. And you know how I talked about my timing being impeccable? Sarcastically, I actually do think the timing for, for Terravolta is the first time in my career perhaps that we've, we've actually had really good timing because these are developing a mine some would argue is, can take up to 30 years. Right. From initial discovery to completion of, of refining. And I would say it's more like seven to nine years on average.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker D: So realistically for a mine, for a mine, right. And there haven't been any new mines developed in the United States and this project we, we, we would love to do within uh, five years, within a time, a five year time horizon. So do I care about, and I'm digressing a little bit, but do I care about the spot price today? Not really. It's less relevant today. Now we are in a trough. Lithium carbonate prices today are about $10,000 a ton.

Speaker C: Okay. So that's the pricing Dollars per ton is how we think about the metric. Okay. And it's 10 grand now.

Speaker D: Yes. And it is, uh, to be specific, it is. That's the lithium carbonate equivalent pricing. So lce.

Speaker C: And that's, that's just how we normalize price across these various correct ways. Okay, the 10K.

Speaker D: Yeah, about 10K. Right.

Speaker C: And, and the demand and as high

Speaker D: as, uh, it's been as high as close to 90,000. Wow. A ton. And I would say over the last 20 years it's probably average between 5 and 6,000.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker D: A ton.

Speaker C: So it's higher than average. A lot lower than the peak.

Speaker D: Yep.

Speaker C: And at, uh, today at 10k, I mean are companies making money?

Speaker D: They are not, Dan.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker D: So that's a, ah, challenge with the industry as a whole. A lot of the major projects are being cut back. So you can shut them off. You shut off the production and there's just an oversupply. There's a glut of lithium in today's market. Uh, a lot of this was driven by the Chinese. So the Chinese control the market. It's essentially a monopoly, although it's or oligopoly, it's. They own about 80% of the processing refining capacity. So they have flooded the market with very marginal supply, marginal equality.

Speaker C: Marginal.

Speaker D: Well, yeah, it's actually, it's, it's very high cost.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker D: And so they're, they're a loss leader in today's market.

Speaker C: Why would they do that?

Speaker D: So they can control it. Keep everybody else, keep everybody else out. Protectionist.

Speaker C: I'm going to lose money for a long time so I can eventually.

Speaker D: Well, it wasn't long. So they took them about six months or so before they said, I'm going to turn off this. It's called lepidolite. It's a, it's a, it's not spod. Me, no. But it's a different type of, of rock. And so they said and it, it probably cost them 18, 15 to 18,000 a ton to produce that stuff. But they, they oversupplied.

Speaker C: Huh.

Speaker D: They wanted to control the market and realized, hey, we're now losing money, we're going to shut off the production. And so we do anticipate prices to, to go up.

Speaker C: Wow. Okay, so they, I mean, I'm Josh, I'm drawing OPEC analogies here.

Speaker B: And would you have thought lithium was oversupplied right now?

Speaker C: Well, yes, because I, I follow the 90,000 to 8 to 10,000 move. Okay. So the only answer is there's a supply demand mismatch.

Speaker B: But, um, it would come down. I just wouldn't have thought it was that oversupplied.

Speaker C: It's, it's crazy how commodities, you know, think about oil and gas. Oil went from 120 to went negative at some point. I mean, when commodity hits an oversupply, price doesn't go down 5%, it goes down 50 or 70% or something like that. Uh, particularly when you got a player who's trying to make, wants to make a move. Huh. Uh, okay, so the Chinese have tried to discourage capacity additions. Correct. Like it's, Is it working?

Speaker D: It did work.

Speaker C: You're still trying to go. But are others shutting?

Speaker D: Yeah, we don't have a mine coming online tomorrow.

Speaker C: Right, right.

Speaker D: If we did, we'd be in trouble. So the largest mining company here in the US Is Albemarle, and they've had to shut a lot of their production. So it's actually quite a challenging environment. Um, you know, you talk about past experiences and, and, and learning from those challenges. We're hunkering down. And so we're the industry. We. The industry. We as a company. TerraVolta.

Speaker C: Yep.

Speaker D: And so we, we're not expecting to, to build our facility and to get lithium production online for a few years. So it could be, it could be fortuitous timing if you look at it that way. Right. It drives out the competition. You can learn, uh, you can do more diligence on the technology side. You can continue piloting.

Speaker C: So how fast the market growing, Jamie? I mean, one way you soak up over capacity as demand grows. Sure. Um, I mean, are EVs growing fast enough that it's soaking up this excess capacity or.

Speaker D: Yeah. So globally, EV demand is growing fast. Right. It's. I think it's a 20 to 30% CAGR. Right. The US it's probably 10 to 20%.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker D: Annual growth, it's still growing. And that's still a rapid pace of adoption, in my opinion. So the demand pool will be there. And the question is, where are we getting that resource from? Because if, if we're in this trade war, we. The us.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker D: And so if we're in this trade war with China today, and it's real, it's a trade war with a lot of countries today. We're not going to be able to get that lithium from China. And furthermore, we don't want to get the lithium from China. It's a national security issue. And so we do need to produce domestically. So I think when you look at the global markets and the macro, what we really need to be focusing on is domestic production or an onshoring the supply chain.

Speaker C: So the expectation is the market will tighten and you're sitting in the US Ready to add supply. But, I mean, tell us what you got. Tell us what Terravolta's asset base, you know, looks like generally, and how. How'd you find it? How'd you figure it out? What are you doing with it?

Speaker D: Yeah. So the story behind, uh, our exploration efforts, it goes back to some initial research we were doing. And in the 1970s, this was around the time of the oil embargo. This is a fascinating story. So I'll tell y'. All. There was this consortium that was held in, I think it was in Colorado. And the United States said, we don't believe there's enough oil today. Uh, and we don't have access to oil, so we need to think about electric vehicles. This could have been a story that was told yesterday or a year ago. In fact, it was 1976. And so they met. This was the United States Energy Research and Development Administration. It is now called the Department of Energy. And they got the United States Geologic Society and some private sector participants, and they had this consortium and they said, we need to find lithium in the United States. So they did some exploration work and they did find certain, uh, there's a lot of it in the ocean. There's some from what they were calling oil field brines. Right. So they were producing oil. There was some associated. Produced water from the wells and. And they tested those and they actually found higher concentrations of lithium. And this was in the Smackover Formation. So this is East Texas and Arkansas. There's actually some deposits up near the Bakken Shale and the Marcellus Shale. So it's actually all over the country, uh, within. They were calling them oil field brines.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker D: And the problem was there was no way to economically extract them.

Speaker C: It cost a lot to get the lithium out.

Speaker D: Correct. The technology had not been, um, had not evolved. It didn't exist yet. So that, that research just sat dormant until actually it was 2015 when the US started exploring for lithium again. There's a company in California near. It's the Salton Sea, so Imperial Valley, right near Mexico, that California, Mexico border. And there's a company called Symbol Materials. And they said, I'm going to. I have developed from old DuPont patents this way to extract lithium directly from the brine. And we do have some lithium there in the Salton Sea in California.

Speaker C: So they were. They were kind of the front runners on dle. Correct.

Speaker D: Knowledge here in the United States. Yeah. And as a matter of fact, China had been doing this a decade prior.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker D: Yeah. But here in the United States, they were really the first mover. And there's a whole story about symbol, which I won't go into. But they eventually went bankrupt. They tried to develop a commercial facility, um, they rejected an offer from Tesla and the rest is history.

Speaker C: Reject Tesla at your peril.

Speaker B: Yeah, it feels not like the thing you'd want to do.

Speaker D: No. And so those patents eventually got sold into what is now oxy.

Speaker C: Okay, yeah, interesting.

Speaker D: Yeah. So that was the first, uh, DLE company started. And then you started to see as prices increased, of course, capital markets got involved, innovation, more DLE companies. And so you, you. That's when terravolta, uh, started 2022. We were an early mover in the smack overplay, so there were probably a handful of us.

Speaker C: Okay. And, and so I, I have this mental picture of you with a sleuth hat on, you know, digging through this 1970s research to say, you know, the gold is here, the lithium is here. Um, so I assume there's some version of that. You called it exploration, which implies checking out the geology and whatnot. Um, so in 2022, you're early in the smackover. So what's that mean? Do you do leases? Is this just like oil and gas, where you, where you lease from landowners or do you buy the land or

Speaker B: what do you do?

Speaker D: Yeah, it's a great question and one that we were asking ourselves every day. How does this even work? Is there is a regulation, is there?

Speaker C: So this is three years ago, by the way.

Speaker D: Yeah, it seems like a long time ago. It feels like 30 years ago, but it's actually three years ago. And so what I did first was try to assemble a team of guys a lot smarter than I was. And that's been my, uh, mo And I was very fortunate once again. Um, a land guy who, as we were talking, is a friend I knew, um, personally and I had talked to a number of land folks and it was going to be complicated because the regulations didn't exist, especially in, in this state. Here in Texas, in Arkansas, there was a framework.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker D: Because they had this bromine industry, which is analogous to this, a brine related. Yeah, ah, brine related industry. And so that, that existed in Arkansas, but there was a lot of land work required. The technology aspect. Does DLE actually work? Can it be done commercially? And a friend of a friend, or a mutual friend I should say, introduced me to, uh, our head of Technology Ross Thompson, who had just sold his water chemicals business to a public company. And I said, hey, are you interested in this idea? Can you, can you synthesize some of the publications on dle? And he said, this is really neat stuff. And so he said, let's partner up together. And so we had the building blocks and then of course I had subsurface and reservoir from my previous oil and gas experiences. I said, hey, can you, can you help us out? Can you validate this thesis I have? And so when we had built the team, we said, let's start figuring out a way to take leases.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker D: As much like we do in oil and gas.

Speaker C: And. Jamie, I'm going to interrupt. So this is. Are, uh, you bankrolling this out of your pocket at this point?

Speaker D: Yeah, that was.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker D: So that was. You really are taking the class? This is. Yeah, internship. That's exactly right. That's exactly right, by the way.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker D: Oh, yeah, no, thank you.

Speaker B: And I will encourage everyone listening your. Your website. I've got my notes, whatnot. Your website's excellent. It.

Speaker D: Oh, thank you.

Speaker B: It does a great job of uh, like if you're. The way you're explaining this, if you do want to follow along with what you were talking about earlier as you're listening to the podcast, it's what we do is in there. The team is in there. So kind of can. You can follow like with visuals on the way. So I highly encourage you to go to the website. So.

Speaker C: Terravolta. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker D: Check it out.

Speaker C: Okay. So you're. You're uh, pulling together this team.

Speaker D: Yes. And we start taking leases. So we. Drat. We have three legal opinions saying this is the right way to do it. And so we start taking leases in Texas and Arkansas.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker D: Um, each state is different, but we have different lease forms. And uh, this was a huge risk. But as we started growing the position, uh, I realized I wasn't going to bankroll the whole thing myself. This is going to require institutional capital and thankfully I. A lot of experience with private equity. And we ended up, um, talking to some sponsors and bringing in an investor to help bankroll the. The company. Around the same time that we were closing our financing, ExxonMobil comes in and they, they bought a big position in Arkansas, very close to our Anchorage.

Speaker C: Yep.

Speaker D: And they said we are entering the lithium business. Now, it wasn't a total surprise for us because we had been talking to Exxon for a year before the announcement. And so, uh, and they were getting interested in the idea and there were Some others as well that were interested in lithium production here in the US and the smackover had become more prevalent. People had started hearing about the resource and the concentrations. So that really validated our thesis that we can actually produce lithium.

Speaker C: Yep. And, and Jamie, so at this point, thinking back to shale days, um, you know, nothing like the validation of someone buying, you know, some big smart guy buying leases near you. Uh, did you, I mean, did you have your position at that point or were you halfway there or a quarter of the way there? I mean, it's great if they show up and it's awful if you're at some other way home.

Speaker D: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, we, we joke about closeology and uh, there was certainly some of that going on, but we, we still had to validate the resource. And the question is, how big do you grow the position? How much resource do you need? So, so what's under underground?

Speaker C: When it works you need infinite amount. When it doesn't work, you don't want much.

Speaker D: That's right. It's, yeah, you know how it, it's done, Dan. So that, that's a great question. How big do, do you grow the position? And I think it's just one of these unique circumstances where we drilled a, a pilot well, it was successful and we were concurrently continuing to grow the position and it just kept growing and growing to where we had this tremendous resource that we had the rights to. And um, you know, I, I would say that we're one of the largest, if not the largest resource position in the SMACO racing today.

Speaker C: Okay, so we've seen Exxon, Exxon has made public pronouncements about this and it's, they've got a big position. You're saying you've got a big position. Um, how, how do you find out how good it is? Because we've, you know, we, I'm using the shale analogies because it sounds like it's, it's appropriate and you know, you saw people in shale days get big position. You know, um, Chesapeake, Aubrey McClendon bought some, a huge amount of acreage that wound up going nowhere. So how do you validate it or how do you test it or prove it up?

Speaker D: Yeah, much like we do in oil and gas. Right. And, but there's a distinction here. So you, you, you drill a well and these are conventional wells.

Speaker C: Okay. And so these are, these wells cost, like shale wells. Wells meaning. Well, ten million dollar wells.

Speaker D: No, it's about half that cost. It's between, you know, five and seven million dollars depending on how much you want to put into it, how much science you're doing. And what you do is you do all the subsurface work. Right. So that includes the extensive. We do the wireline logging. We did a quad combo on this one. We did all the fluid sampling, and it was great. It was a success. In fact, it exceeded our expectations in every regard.

Speaker C: Which tends to mean what brine concentration?

Speaker D: Well, there's. Or porosity, permeability. So, okay, you're saying ability or the flowability, including the geochemistry, which is the concentration. So what you look for there is the high lithium concentrations and the lower levels of impurities that make it harder to extract the lithium.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker D: And what you have to do then is once you, you extract the brine, you got to run it through a piloting program to figure out if the technology works as efficiently as it can.

Speaker C: You abstract. Well, how much lithium can you get out of a. Is it a barrel, a gallon?

Speaker D: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we, we typically say liter. You know, we do it in liters, milligrams per liter is the concentration. And uh. But we're, we're flowing totes of this stuff.

Speaker C: Yep.

Speaker D: And then you run it through these pilot. Uh, we, we did off site piloting. We didn't do a modular on site. We ended up just shipping off and piloting it. And somehow, uh, or other, the results came back better than we anticipated. The efficiency on these daily technologies were great.

Speaker C: So they matched the technologies matched up with what you had.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker C: Above expectations.

Speaker D: Correct.

Speaker C: You said somehow or the other, which makes it imply that there's. I mean, obviously anytime you're exploring for something, there is an element of, uh.

Speaker B: It almost sounded like luck.

Speaker C: Yeah, there's an element of luck. But what you're saying is you did all the work, you drill these wells, you come back and it's like our concentration levels are better than we thought.

Speaker D: Correct. Yeah. And I think I'm, um, I would classify myself as the pragmatic optimist. Right. I, I'm. And what's happened in the industry is you have to look at it through the lens of skepticism because there are a lot of. So today there's probably about a hundred DLE companies out there.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker D: They're all touting, they get.

Speaker C: You consider yourself a DLE company.

Speaker D: We are not.

Speaker C: Yeah. Okay, so these are guys saying my chemistry gets lithium out of brine. Correct. Okay.

Speaker D: 100 of them. Yeah, there's about a hundred of them today, so. All kind of variations on the same theme. Some work better than others. It really depends on the brine quality, the resource quality. But we've. We've had to, over the past few years, scour the whole universe of those and test as many as we could, um, and thoroughly diligence all that technology to make sure it works. And you don't really know until you have a resource and you have brine to test it with. So in this case, we, we were able to flow back the well, get a lot of brine to test, and we ended up piloting with a handful of companies across the world. And what I can tell you is that those results did come back better than we anticipated. So really, really high efficiency rates. So if you have high concentrations, good permeability, so you can flow the fluids, um, flow a lot of this fluid, and then you have high efficiency on the recovery or the yield of the lithium, then your project becomes feasible.

Speaker C: And so for you guys, you're there. You know that. In other words, you feel like you have, you got a shot at making this happen with the combination of your bride and DLA technology.

Speaker D: That's right.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker D: Yeah. And it's not just us. They're actually a. You know, Exxon is working.

Speaker C: I was going to say, I assume Exxon thinks the same thing.

Speaker D: That's right. And then, Then, uh, you know, there's. Equinor, came in with another company, Standard Lithium.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker D: So they have a joint venture and they're working on the same thing.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker B: I have a stupid question, but I just can't get past what type of company was the one that didn't sell to Tesla?

Speaker D: Yeah, that's. I would say they were, uh, more of a daily company.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Because. Yeah.

Speaker B: Say there's 100. That's what I was trying to put together there. And there's a hundred of those. Did they not see that there was 100 coming and when Tesla came to them, they didn't see that on the horizon?

Speaker D: Yeah, I would stop. No, I, I know they. And I don't.

Speaker C: Josh has heard. Not a single word he said since

Speaker D: they had a Tesla. You heard Tesla.

Speaker B: It's like, why. I mean, if you. If there's a hundred, did they not see that market was developing out there? Sorry, I just.

Speaker D: Well, I think what they thought was.

Speaker A: I, uh.

Speaker D: And to be honest, I'm. I'm not sure I get my facts straight here. But they, they also owned at least some of the mineral rights to the Salton Sea, and they thought the Salton Sea was going to be this tremendous resource.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker D: Uh, that they could produce from it. Maybe the only resource.

Speaker B: Well, look, I'm actually connecting a couple dots here. The way that you say we, you kind of soft soul. Well, we were lucky enough for this to. And really that sounds to me like somebody who has done a lot of homework and opportunity. You know, luck is when the opportunity meets preparation. It works the way you wanted it to.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker C: Better than.

Speaker B: And when I hear the. That there's a hundred of these DL out there and you don't sell to Tesla, that means someone didn't do their homework and to know something was coming. So they're just. They weren't clear on where the market was going. That's what I was really trying to figure out. It's like, are these people not aware of what was going on? Did the market change that quickly? Is it changing fast, too fast for them? I don't know.

Speaker D: Yeah, well, the story behind that one, and I hope I'm telling this factually correct, was that they hired Jeffries. So they had all the big venture capital firms behind this company.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker D: And they hired Jeffries to do a sales process. And I actually got a hold of the deck somewhere there and they said this was going to be a multi billion dollar company.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker D: We have innovated, we've applied this dle and they got an offer from Tesla for a few hundred million dollars. I think the story goes. They said. Then the VC said no way. I think there was some internal management that said, yeah, let's do this. But they thought this was a multi billion dollar opportunity.

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean the grass is greener in two years always. But let's come back to. Yeah, no, no, I get it. Are you with us now, Josh? Yeah, now that I'm actually, I'm committing

Speaker B: even more like it's. I keep going.

Speaker C: So, so, so at. Tell us where you are today. You've done this testing. I assume you'll continue to test and, and figure things out. But, um, there's. There's got to be something between testing brine and then you're gonna have to drill a gazillion wells, I assume, and build some processing facilities or tell us what comes next. So.

Speaker D: Great question, Dan. So what's next for us? And there's a lot of steps, right?

Speaker C: We're always.

Speaker D: We're constantly parallel processing. And I like to think of this as maybe the early days of the oil and gas companies where we have to build out the value chain. It's not just we're an upstream company, we're a midstream company. Right. This hasn't been disintermediated yet you have to build out the entire value uh, chain. And I was saying there's that distinction with oil and gas. Well right now just because you're a resource company, it means that in order to get to a sellable product, you have to build the processing and refining facilities. So you can't just say I'm going to send it to so and so company that's going to process and refine. Actually you could, you could send it to China, but that's, that's, we don't want to do that. Yeah. And um, so you have to design and build the processing and commercial or refining facilities at a commercial scale. And those are huge uh, infrastructure projects.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker D: Multi billion dollar projects. So that's really where, when you think about the oil and gas analogy, it ends right in oil and gas. You can drill well, you can flow back the hydrocarbons and you can sell

Speaker C: those, put them m in a pipeline

Speaker D: and put them in a pipe and sell them.

Speaker C: Yep.

Speaker D: Here you gotta put them in a pipe and pipe it to this processing facility. And it's about a 16 step process that needs to go through to get it, get the lithium extracted and then further refined into a form. It's actually a specialty chemical. So it's not a commodity, it's a specialty chemical. And then you can sell that into the, the battery cell manufacturers. It's more specifically goes into the cathode portion of the battery.

Speaker C: Okay. And so,

Speaker D: so to answer your question about where we are in that process, we've done the piloting work, we are doing the feasibility study. So we're moving into preliminary to definitive on the, the first commercial facility for Terravolta.

Speaker C: Okay. And so this is not something where Exxon, your neighbor and you and Equinor, if they're your neighbor are, you're not all going to build one together. You're going to build your own or they're going to build their own or.

Speaker D: Yeah. And no. Yeah, that's, that's correct. The plan is to build our own. I think their plan is to build their own. Um, we all, we all talk, we all collaborate. I think it's important for the, to advance the industry. And I think another thing is when you look at the macro fundamentals, right. Is there enough demand? Well, there is absolutely enough demand here in the United States. And I'll throw out some numbers please. If you've cut it all gets love the numbers. Yeah, you're a numbers guy. Give me the numbers. And I am too. So if you so Today there's about 400 gigawatt hours of battery manufacturing coming in to the United States. So we're actually constructing these gigafactories. Right. There was almost a terawatt, so a thousand gigawatt hours, uh, of demand pool that were announced. And so we're building about 400 gigawatts. And so that equates to roughly 300, 350,000 tons of lithium carbonate demand per year. Uh, yes.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. KTP.

Speaker D: Yeah, that's exactly right.

Speaker C: 350,000 tons per year.

Speaker D: Per year here in the United States.

Speaker C: In the US we think that's the demand.

Speaker D: Yes. So today we produce about 5,000 tons out of Nevada. So there's one mine open today. Right. So where in the world are we going to get all this stuff that may need to come on? These battery facilities are going to come online here in the next two to four years and then there's more in the pipeline. So where in the world are we going to get that if we can't get it from China? And by the way, even if it doesn't come from China, it's, it's going to go through China to get refined. To get refined. So there is a huge demand pool for domestic lithium production. And, and by the way, our facility is roughly 25 to 30,000 tons per year.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker D: That's about the same size as an Exxon or an Equinor facility, I believe. So there's plenty of demand.

Speaker C: So we're not stuff, we're not domestically over supplying anything for quite a while.

Speaker D: Yeah, the fundamentals in the United States are completely different than the fundamentals globally.

Speaker C: Yep. If, if it winds up being an isolated market. Right?

Speaker D: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker C: Say we got to insource.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker C: So you're going to do 25 to 30,000 tons per year. And um, what's it cost to get you there?

Speaker D: Everyone has a different number and it, some say it's 5,000 a ton, some say it's 10,000 a ton.

Speaker C: Okay. In terms of, of capital spend or the price.

Speaker D: Yeah, that's actually. Well that, that would be the opex required. And then you have an additional capex. Right. We talked about the billion dollars or so to build these facilities. Um, and so you're looking at a break even price of somewhere in that $15,000 a ton.

Speaker C: Okay. So you need 15,000 bucks a ton to get there. You're going to need a billion dollars. Um, which I know you've done well, but I don't think you're a billionaire. So um, definitely not where's a billion dollars come from and what does the money need to see in the business to do it? Is it project finance? Do they need to see off takers? I mean, what's the. How do you get from here to there?

Speaker D: Yeah. So you need all the above. Right. It's a lot of capital. And you, you need in capital markets, I mean they're generally efficient, so you're going to need to deliver returns, attractive returns. And the uh, so the, the, what the capital structure would, would look like is largely debt finance. So you get project loans.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker D: That's going to require offtake, some sort of.

Speaker C: So a customer with a contract.

Speaker D: Yes. Yeah. A credit worthy customer with a contract. You need some equity to backstop that. Uh, and that could be public or private equity. So I think then you can throw in some of, if you look at the most efficient forms of capital. Right. You can get subsidies. There are some subsidies that exist in the form of tax credits, grants and loans. Um, and tax incentives could be at the federal level or also at the state and local levels. So if you, if you start supplementing the cap stack with, with a lot of these, you can start to form a very economic project.

Speaker C: Huh.

Speaker D: For the markets today. And, and then of course you need some price support.

Speaker C: Yep. And so I, but you.

Speaker B: What, I missed it.

Speaker D: Oh, some, some price support.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker D: From, from the, uh.

Speaker C: Yeah, go ahead. And, and, and Jamie M. I mean I've been holding back, but talk to us about, about your. I mean, you've had some, some success with the doe.

Speaker D: Yeah, yeah. So we were awarded in December of last year a uh, grant for $225 million from the Department of Energy and it came from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the bil.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker D: What that, uh, entails is you apply, um, it is a grant, so it's not a loan. We don't have to pay interest, we don't have to pay the principal back. It, you don't have to pay anything back. There is a cost share component, so it's an easy example is if we put in a dollar, the federal government puts in a dollar. Okay. And we don't have to pay that dollar back.

Speaker C: So you've got to, if you're going to get 225 million bucks from them, you got to get 225 million bucks from somewhere else. Correct?

Speaker D: Yeah. Of equity capital.

Speaker C: Okay. You know, Josh, I'm guessing that it was a fun Christmas around the Liang

Speaker D: house

Speaker C: when the DOE, uh, agreed to do 225 mil. Um, is that Money in the bank now or.

Speaker D: Yeah, it's a reimbursement mechanism.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker D: So we don't hold the cash. We, um, we fill out forms and we get it reimbursed.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker B: You know, it was, um. The old administration.

Speaker D: It was, yeah.

Speaker C: Which.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: You know, I think Chris Wright, though, is going to be favorable to these as well. I feel like he's a pretty reasonable guy.

Speaker C: Chris Wright.

Speaker B: I'm sorry. D E O New Department of Energy Secretary. Secretary of Energy. Have you had any dealings with him yet?

Speaker D: Yeah, not directly with a lot of his staff.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker D: And so you think it's money.

Speaker C: Good. You're not worried about it?

Speaker D: Is. Yeah, not worried about it. In fact, Trump, uh. It was. I think it was last week, actually, put out this executive order in support of the critical. Domestic. Critical minerals. I feel like this is everything he likes. Yes. It's right up. It's right up the air.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: Factoring.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker D: Right up their alley. And, uh, so we have gotten support from. From D.C. and uh, we actually. It goes beyond that. I think the, the, uh, administration knows how critical it is absolutely to produce these domestically. They've talked about using Pentagon lands near the Pentagon to build a critical minerals processing facility. Right. That's how important it is for this.

Speaker C: Have you least, uh. Have you leased some land up there near, uh, the.

Speaker D: Yeah, not quite. Not yet, Dan. But. But maybe here in the near future version.

Speaker C: 2. Very.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: Like infrastructure projects in American manuf. Opportunities. It's, uh, like those are two phrases that I know that the current administration loves and bringing any of this stuff back.

Speaker D: Yeah, yeah. And it's, it's a fascinating case study, actually. If you go back and look at what China did 20 years ago, and they're not endowed with the natural resources we are here in America.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker D: They don't have the oil and gas, they don't have the shale, they don't have the. The critical minerals resources they had. So what they decided was, hey, I'm going to build this supply chain through, um, we're going to build these processing and refining facilities here domestically here in China. And we're going to take equity stakes that we're just going to buy up all the mines across the world in Australia and South America. So they own, uh, a lot of those mines that produce today. And so they completely dominated it. And the supply chain is a complex one. Right. You have to have refine the specialty chemical. You set it in the cathode. You, you manufacture the cathodes. It goes into the battery cell and then the Battery, cell goes into, you name it, electric vehicles, laptop, your cell phone, battery, storage systems. So there's a lot of applications. But they decided they were going to try to electrify. They're just going to go away. They're still building coal plants over there, but that's another story. They want to move towards electric vehicles. They've done a great job of it. M. And they've created this, this ecosystem now that, that, that functions uh, works great and they've profited off of it. So now all the other countries use their, their lithium and critical minerals. It's, we're at our, in the United States, we're, it's is a nascent industry. We don't have the manufacturing here. We don't have the, the exploitation of the resources. We can do it though. And my inspiration actually is the oil and gas industry. We did it here. We, we learn how to horizontally drill, hydraulically fracture and yeah, we're now the leading producer uh, of oil and natural gas. So this is what we can do in the critical minerals industry and we're in the early innings of that.

Speaker C: What's, what's your timeline? When do we, when do we ship our first specialty product lithium? Um, to, to a customer.

Speaker D: Yeah. And I hate giving specific dates, but it, it's, we're talking 2029 time frame.

Speaker C: So we're still, we're four years away.

Speaker D: Yep.

Speaker C: And from here to there we've got to finish the engineering on the facility. Takes. How long does it take to build these things? A year?

Speaker D: Two. Two years.

Speaker C: Two years.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker C: And so between here and there you got to come up with a billion dollars. You got 220 from the government. Um, which means Josh, I guess you'll be funding, you know, out of your pocket. The other 800 gallons are going well. Yes. Yeah, things, things are going well with you. But um, so we got some financing to do. Mhm. We got some drilling wells to do, I assume. Um, and we turn it on in, in 2029. So one of the things we saw with the oil and gas and we'll, we'll put a pin in, we'll put a pin in this is they would capture resource, start the development and then immediately go on and try and capture more resource. So you've, is that how it's going to work in lithium? In other words, great. You got this position in the smackover. Um, um. Are, are we going to be hearing about you in, in Nevada or somewhere else in another year where, you know, are you leasing other places or is it like, nope, Terravolt is going to focus on this.

Speaker D: Well, what I would say to that, Dan, is that we have looked at other areas across the United States. We do believe Smackover is extremely high quality resource. So that's where our focus, that's where our attention is.

Speaker C: Yeah. And I've shied away from asking you about resource potential and things like that because I'm sure it's very, um, very proprietary. But let's talk about Exxon. Exxon's nearby. They're going to develop a similar sized facility. Do we think that they have. Are they saying that they've got five years of resource or 50 years of resource? I mean, how much does that amount of acreage give them?

Speaker D: Yeah, the. So the U.S. geologic Survey put out this estimate within, um, the last year on Smackover resource. And what I can tell you, based, uh, on our own data and anecdotal data, is that that vastly underestimates the resource of the Smackover.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker D: So there's enough lithium to supply us for 5,000 years just in the smack over. That's my belief.

Speaker B: Okay, is the smack over the Permian Basin of this resource?

Speaker D: Yeah, we hope so.

Speaker C: Okay. Yeah, yeah, that's hopefully. Yeah, I'm, I'm trying to think of, I'm trying to think of what, I'm

Speaker B: trying to get you to give up the.

Speaker C: Yeah, some, some obscure basins. Like hopefully it's, hopefully it's the Permian, not, you know, the Palo Duro or something.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker C: Um, the Barnett.

Speaker D: Yeah, for a minute.

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker D: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker C: Um, Jamie, what have we not asked you about what you're doing?

Speaker D: Well, I want to just go back to this idea of US manufacturing and innovation. I think it's imperative that because we have this natural resource, it's been proven, it exists, we have the technologies that, uh, are able to extract it. And so on the flip side of things, and I think this is really important is there's a huge job creation aspect to what we're doing. So there's thousands of construction jobs, hundreds of full time permanent jobs just at the one facility. And by the way, you know, the expectation is that we build more than just one facility.

Speaker C: Uh, Right.

Speaker D: There'll be multiple ones. We can produce 100,000 tons, 200,000 tons per year. And so we talk about bringing back manufacturing jobs, high skilled labor. Uh, this is one way to catalyze that and, and to bring this supply chain here to the US So I think that's really important and just, just to, to reinvigorate some of these communities. In which we operate are very rural, um, you know, below the poverty line. Um, I think we can revitalize these communities.

Speaker C: Awesome. Yep. And, and keep critical minerals here at home, if you will. Yep. You're, you're an entrepreneur. Give 30 seconds of advice to other entrepreneurs.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: Thank you for touching that one. That was important.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker D: And it'll probably be more than 30 seconds here because I, I, I've learned a lot over the years. I think experience matters.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker D: There's, there's a lot of literature on, um, being an entrepreneur when you're older now, not just coming out of college. So I've, like, we talked about before, had a lot of really good experiences that I learned. So it was, it was 1112 years before I started this path of entrepreneurship.

Speaker C: Yep.

Speaker D: And I think that was a pretty good timeline. And I'm still. We are learning something new every day. Right. And what I love about my job is that we, um, we're innovators, we're pioneers. So the rules haven't been written yet, and sometimes it can take a while for those rules to get established. But I think the biggest thing that takeaway, uh, that I have is that you have to be passionate. So this idea of, hey, let's not form a company just to make money. Let's actually have a mission behind it. And as I've gotten older, we realize oil and gas is great because we innovated, we revolutionized the way we extract, uh, the commodity, and we became a leader. If we can do it again and if we can have some, make some impact in this domestic industry and the world, that's really important. So that's what drives our team every day. And we're still trying to figure things out. Um, so maybe that's a little bit of advice that I'd share.

Speaker C: That's good. That's great. Josh. Should we do lightning rounds? We should.

Speaker B: I just, uh, went back and reread. I was just quickly looking this Tony, uh, Robbins is great. I love. Have you read any? I'm sure you.

Speaker D: Yeah, I've listened to him. M. Yeah.

Speaker B: Long time ago. He's been around for all of our lives.

Speaker D: And there's a, one of his loves hair.

Speaker B: He's great. He's tall. I like his height.

Speaker C: I'd love to be as tall as Tony.

Speaker D: M. I wish I had his deep voice.

Speaker B: You see, look, we all love the guy, but he talks about in one of his early books how he, he didn't realize how all the little things in his life had prepared him to be doing exactly what he's doing. And as you're sitting there talking, I was thinking about how cool it is that all the little lessons that your, you know, your parents, the move, how you got here, uh, the investment banking, uh, you know, oil and gas. You're doing exactly what you meant to do. You're meant to do. I love it. So very cool. I. I wish you the best of luck in this lighting round and in your career.

Speaker C: So I think. I think one takeaway is clear, is that if you get an offer from Tesla and turn it down, you better know the market. Yeah. And you. And you better be ready to come back on the podcast and tell us why you turned just that liability. Yes.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker C: How did you do that? You, um, want to kick it off, Josh or lightning round? Jamie, the rules, okay? Short answers only. You don't get to explain, so people get to know you a little bit better. One word at a time. All right.

Speaker B: Uh, pasta or steak?

Speaker D: Pasta.

Speaker C: Work from office or work from home?

Speaker D: Office.

Speaker B: Um, S&P 500 for 2025.

Speaker C: From here.

Speaker B: Bearish or bullish?

Speaker D: I'm going to go with neutral. With a lot of volatility.

Speaker C: He's cheating, but okay. Um, 50% of U.S. vehicle sales by 2040, over, uh, EVs and hybrids. 50% of U.S. vehicle sales by 2040. Over or under?

Speaker D: I'll take the over on that to be optimistic.

Speaker C: Okay. Wind?

Speaker B: Uh, or solar?

Speaker D: Solar.

Speaker C: Cash or crypto?

Speaker D: Cash. Arkansas or Texas? That's like asking me to choose which, uh, which kid I love more. So both.

Speaker C: Does the Ukraine conflict continue beyond year end? 25.

Speaker D: No.

Speaker B: Barbie or Oppenheimer?

Speaker D: Well, I've only seen one of them, and so I'm going to go with Oppenheimer.

Speaker C: Lithium prices in 2028, over, under. 25. Thousand bucks a ton.

Speaker D: I'll take the over on that one.

Speaker B: Will the world hit net zero by 2050?

Speaker D: Unfortunately, no.

Speaker B: Dan, uh, you want to take these next two?

Speaker C: Sure. So, AI, will it remain tamed or contained, or is Terminator a real possibility?

Speaker D: I'm going to go with the Terminator.

Speaker C: There we go.

Speaker D: He's exciting. Not to the point of apocalypse, but, you know.

Speaker C: Well, I mean, I'm not sure.

Speaker D: We'll have to.

Speaker B: Terminator.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's sort of scary.

Speaker D: We'll have to say John Connor.

Speaker C: Yeah. Will. Will the Houston Texans make the super bowl in the next decade?

Speaker D: I'll say yes.

Speaker C: Hi, Scar. Jamie, thank you for giving us hope.

Speaker D: Yes. Yes, you do.

Speaker C: Yes. That was. We really. We really enjoyed. Thank you for educating us on the lithium market on Terravolta. We wish you the best of luck. The website is www.terravolta.com. we're excited to see what's next. Jamie, thanks for being here. Good luck.

Speaker D: Thanks so much for having me.

Speaker C: Thank you guys for coming on.