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Lithium - A quick once over episode artwork

Feb 20, 2023 35 min

Lithium - A quick once over

from Simblified Hosted by IVM Podcasts

From being a quiz question answer about 4 decades ago to being part of our everyday lives, Lithium is likely to be the most important thing in the near future. Join your Simblified hosts as they talk about how much Lithium there is in the world, how it might change it, is it really green and most importantly, will the recent find of large Lithium deposits in J&K be a big revolution for us Add one part news, one part bad jokes, one part Wikipedia research, one part cult references from spending too much time on the internet, one part Wodehouse quotes, and one part quality puns, and you get Simblified. A weekly podcast to help you appear smarter, to an audience that knows no less! Your four hosts - Chuck, Naren, Srikeit, and Tony attempt to deconstruct topics with humor (conditions apply). Fans of the show have described it as "fun conversations with relatable folks", "irreverent humor", "the funniest thing to come out of Malad West" and "if I give you a good review will you please let me go". Started in 2016 as a creative outlet, Simblified now has over 200 episodes, including some live ones, and some with guests who are much smarter than the hosts. Welcome to the world of Simblified! You can contact the hosts on: Chuck: twitter.com/chuck_gopal / instagram.com/chuckofalltrades Naren: twitter.com/shenoyn / instagram.com/shenoynv Tony: twitter.com/notytony / instagram.com/notytony Srikeit: twitter.com/srikeit

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From being a quiz question answer about 4 decades ago to being part of our everyday lives, Lithium is likely to be the most important thing in the near future. Join your Simblified hosts as they talk about how much Lithium there is in the world, how it might change it, is it really green and most importantly, will the recent find of large Lithium deposits in J&K be a big revolution for us

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Lithium - A quick once over

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I, V, M. Wow. Or perhaps enough wildest fantasies. Maru will be legalized across the country and it will turn out that quota produces the best quality stuff in the world, meaning that youngsters from all over the country will turn to the city to hang loose rather than what they do currently, which is hang with the loose.

Today we have some rare earth elements on the show. First we have a substance if absorbed in small quantities can cause in the repressible amounts of wordplay. Indeed he once or so high on himself he started selling himself out to the minimum pitter saying, I will make wordplay for money before someone told me to stop acting like a roose verbal slut to which he would play. Are you saying that my element is a son of a old Tonya semesters?

And then we have a man who is always in his element but then weaves a compound story before ending with the story of a man who tries to act hip in front of his daughters' kids' story, daughters' friends calling them Monet-qul. No? Do that big nose. And Adam Narigram would house us and I'm speaking of not here.

And of course, Chuck is very famously a rare. Yeah, I just generating more groans than old furniture. I'm not sure. I'm not sure.

And the price of the petrol. Chuck is famously a rare down to earth element. So, well played. Well played.

Yeah. Down to earth element. That's not the best. Yeah.

Chali is now to earth. Chali is down to earth. Yes, Chali is down to earth. Yes, we are today talking about the news that India is going to be at 15 trillion dollars economy at the end of next year because we have apparently found a very in demand element within our shores or mountains.

And so what is common to these things? Heat resistant glass, grease, antidepressant drugs. Lithium. Lithium.

Yeah. So, antidepressant. It's also an antidepressant. Grease has lithium.

Huh? Grease has lithium. There is something called lithium grease which we have used. So, it's an expensive grease which is using some kind of application.

Nice. You can also mention the one that's discography. That also has a song called lithium inside. So, that could have made the question even more interesting.

I feel it. Appealing to the gunch rock audience in the demographic in the audience. So, you have spent the last time. How prevalent is lithium in the world?

So, lithium. Now, because thanks to other, thanks to the heart working Indians. Yes. But I was wondering, is there a correlation between being lower in the atom and other and prevalent?

So, it is. Hydrogen, helium and carbon. Yeah. It is.

And there is a reason for that, right? So, when hydrogen atoms collapse on each other, they become helium atoms collapse on each other. They become here elements and so on. Hey, it becomes.

Yeah. Everything is up. So, you would expect that lithium would be quite abundant. Hydrometormatoxillium.

Hydrometormatoxillium. Yeah. And now, all politicians are falling over each other to announce this. Yeah.

Actually, yeah, that cream at the pleasant surprise. Someone apparently forgot their stash of lithium and government does now latch onto it. So, it has seized the stash of 5.9 million tons of lithium and it is going to be. If they find lithium in Ladakh, it will basically be lainy.

Oh, nice. Nice. Nice. Oh, wow.

Brilliant. That's the biggest robot in the world. So, India has the fifth largest reserves of lithium in the world. Generally a good thing, generally a good thing because, first of all, lithium is not abundant, not as abundant and expected.

But it's not really rare. It's not all that scarce. The problem is that it's not evenly spread. So, most of it is in a triangle called the lithium triangle.

That is Chile, Bolivia and Argentina. Beautifully, the triangle has the coordinates A, B and C. So, you can totally give me geometry question then, what is the angle between B and C and C and B and C? Two witnesses.

So, that is the largest producer is Australia for some reason. But these guys have a lot of lithium. And... As in ABC are not mining, or like, are not processing.

They are just, so... Keep it. Mining lithium, yeah. Lithium basically occurs in two farms.

One is as an ore and other is in brine. So, that's how it is present in South America. So, it has this huge desert. And beneath the desert are cools of water which have been drying over the last, whatever, millions of years.

So, it's very, very high in concentration of salts. And it has a high concentration of lithium as well. So, basically the only way you can extract lithium is electrochemically. You can't, you know, normally how ores are, how metals are extracted are you mix and over with the reducing agent and then you light up the whole mess and then the oxygen goes with the reducing guy and the metal is left behind.

But lithium is so reactive that, you know, it will basically take off the oxygen. So, you can't do that. So, they have to use electrochemical methods. Same with the lithium.

What is the ore of lithium called? Lithium? Pedal, pedal, something. Oh, okay.

It's... It's something which would be fun to ask people when they've had a couple of drinks. So, yeah. I thought you were saying hectorite.

No, no, there is some... There is some... There is a better light. There is a better light.

And there is ospodamine. No, as a qualified metallurgical engineer, I thought I should have heard of this. I'm a chemical engineer also. Like the radio downplaying our qualifications for this particular thing.

I think you've done... You know how synergy, when you have three things or three people come together and the sum total of all their abilities is, you know, greater than their individual sum total. I think the sum total of all our ignorance is far greater than our individual ignorance. So, we are like...

That kind of ignorance energy. Oh, ignorance energy. Oh, wow, ignorance energy. Also, you said that if lithium will combine with oxygen and then take off, that completely makes sense because the O messy is typically...

Oh, so it's a... And it's from Argentina, so... Yeah, and it's from Argentina. Oh, wait, wait.

And it's a messy processor. Corrected, why don't you... But why are you... Let us get to the...

Before we get very carried away. Why is this drowha around lithium? Like, why is it so in demand right now? Why is it so...

Yeah, so of course it's got very, very valuable users as grease and whatever high temperature glass is. But there is a small use case of which is in batteries, right? So, it has the highest energy density. So, it's a lot like engineering college students, right?

Because it has... Oh, okay, it's not like engineering college students, except in one message. For example, lithium has a high energy density. Engineering college students don't have high energy.

And then lithium has something called no self discharge, which engineering college students don't have. I can tell mostly name. But one thing which they see to eye to eye is they have something called no memory effect. So, I think...

Wow, it has been known to happen that people have stumbled across our episodes while, like, say, on a podcast app. They're like, okay, I have an exam say organic chemistry tomorrow. Let me search for an intelligent podcast because the signal to voice is to be high. If the dear listener, you are one of those who landed on this episode with the, say, chemical engineering exam tomorrow or something like that, please, pause this episode for now.

Go back to famous chemical engineering handbook that will teach you a lot more for the purpose of passing. On the other hand, continue listening to this podcast because it will ensure that you have one more jobless year in college, very continue listening to this. Hey, what do you say? But, Chuck, just going back to your accusations of me being a crucible list.

Let me tell you, at the heart of simplified is... Oh, God, we hate us here all along. Wow. We just never noticed it.

Like the lithium deposits in German. Amazing, amazing. Amazing. So, that means the take us up to where it is.

Now that we know that we have lots and lots, we have 5.9 million tons of lithium. No one happened to be using. And so we took it. What do we do with it?

So, obviously, we are going to make batteries out of it. The theme is the solution according to most tech bros. So, this is the tech bro thing, right? A tech bro approach.

And actually, I confess to being one of the tech bros myself is that almost all of humanity's problems can be solved through technology. That's the solution. So, we have been screwing up the world for the last couple of hundred, actually 10, 15,000 years, but like a couple of hundred years with great intensity. And this is one way of saving the planet.

That is everything going green. And so you capture electricity from the sun, store it into lithium ion batteries, use lithium ion batteries to go around from point A to point B. Don't burn fossil fuels, don't increase carbon emissions and in a few years time, everything will be back to, you know, topii. Everything will be just fine.

So, that's the tech bro solution. It's like watching a cool video. It's not very far from the truth in the sense that electric vehicles will be a very workable solution to the problem of transportation. So, that's fine.

So, one question, you've been previously spoken about battery technology and how that's not being disrupted yet. And I think at some point you'd mentioned that the next battery will probably not be a lithium ion battery. So, that's what people, so lithium has some problems. So, one is despite having a very high energy density, some people feel that energy density is not high enough.

Not high enough for storing solar and wind power. So, if you had really... Which means like for cars, for greater range, etc, you'd ideally want something that is... Yeah, no.

So, for cars and other things, you need a power density to wait for ratio. Right? You need to be able to store a lot of power without really increasing the weight of the battery. So, that's fine.

That's fine for locomotion purpose. What if you don't have to look? You know, you just have to have a really big bank of batteries storing electrical power. You have a million square kilometers of solar panels and you want to store everything.

Batteries would be just the perfect thing. But we are nowhere close to being cost effective on that. So, people are experimenting with different materials. I think sodium is one nation.

And everyone is very hushed about it because the person or the organization that cracks this will make a lot of money. Because it has instant and universal applications. So, it's just going to make parts of money. So, everyone keeps their research under wraps.

So, what is one more question on batteries, especially lithium batteries? They are not particularly new. Are they? I haven't nickel batteries.

So, I haven't lithium batteries been around for a while. Am I mistaken? Yeah, they haven't. I haven't.

They have. It was discovered. I mean, the process was discovered somewhere in the mid-1900s. But it wasn't until I think the 70s or whatever till it was.

So, lithium has its own problems, which have been... If you charge a lithium ion battery. So, it has what is known as a positive thermal... It is something called runaway heating.

Thermal... It becomes hotter. It becomes hotter and hotter. Oh, yeah.

I have the right to see that. It has hot air and water. Light some actresses these days, right? So, every time they go to a plastic surgeon, they become hotter.

And they become hotter and hotter and hotter. And it is spontaneously explode. So, it's making my... Wow.

What? Yeah. I suspect I am being politically incorrect. No, that's why I get done for a post-exercise.

I mean, I'm politically correct. It reminds me of Donald Trump thing, right? So, Donald Trump was... Something happened.

There was a mis-universe. Some are connected with Donald Trump. I think Donald Trump's organization made her mis-universe something. And then they had to take her crown away because she was getting bigger and bigger.

And then she sued them and I don't know what happened to that court. So, my suggestion to Donald Trump at that point, he wasn't a president yet. And he was too... Instead of removing or taking a title away, he just changed it to Miss Early Universe because she was expanding it away.

Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. That lost you.

Oh, no. She had this universal. Oh, my goodness. Oh, oh, my goodness.

Oh, my goodness. How did we get there? Two James Webb episodes without you reading that up. Back to lithium ion batteries.

Yes. So, basically, the segment has been around for a while, but has always been signing it, I suppose, by lack of easily availability. And now that there are commercial interests, people are mining, they've found it in South America. So, great.

Now, they're finding it in India, means even better now than the tech. And basically, all the incentives are kind of lining up and this says... So, there is one more good news. Yeah, there is one more good news for India.

We have been excessively dependent on China. And China is... I might be hasty in assuming this, but I suspect China is not very good friends with India. So, it's like...

They can't do that. Good friends. Good friends. Good friends.

Anybody put in any news? Thinking of China, I think it's... It's a good thing. Everyone.

Yeah. So... It's a good thing that German Kashmir is nowhere close to China. Yeah.

Or any other things, points of attention. And by the time, it's not the first. They have calls. No, but I think they'll...

This is going to be... I mean, you have your own source of lithium figure out how to make batteries. Yeah. So, what happens now?

Does it mean we can expect 15 trillion dollar economy by next? Yeah, actually, 15 trillion dollar economy is not not that unachievable. Basically, because a dollar is just printed like crazy, right? So, yeah, if there are five times as many dollars going around, it'll become a 15 trillion dollar economy in no time.

So, that's not really a... Yes. But I think the truth is actually, it's a bit of a break. So, we will grant him that.

He will collect his bearings and then he will report back with what all this lithium means for India's economy, green transition and indeed the world. And of course, non-awaited lithium battery powered simplified mobile. Simplified. Okay.

That didn't work out. Okay. So, what happens when someone who's lived her whole life on the court decides to bring those two girls together? I'm Sanya Mirzam and I'm bringing you a brand new podcast, Serving It Up with Sanya.

I've had some incredible conversations with friends, fellow athletes, artists and entrepreneurs. Each episode starts with a game of pickleball and once the rallies are done, the real topic is Serving It Up with Sanya, watch and listen on YouTube and wherever you get your favorite podcast. Namaste, sassure kal, bhut marning evening afternoon. My podcast is titled, says, no topic and no filters say from Father Brochar.

That's me, Monday to Friday, Saturday Sunday, and Sunday, and I'm with our kids. We chat with celebs, you'll never meet traffic jams on the streets and people from all professions. Every one day I go live with the show, ask me anything, AMA, you told the questions, I don't send better than a Mumbai recher driver, I even host a panel discussion called Cock and Bull where we dive into current affairs and wonder why anyone even cares at all. And Friday releases are always surprise episodes for you all.

So tune into CyberSayers on YouTube and all our new streaming platforms. Alright, welcome back to Sipified and Nari, what do you have for us? Yeah, so, you know, the age being found in the stages of places before it was found in Kashmir, Kashmir, it was also found in Afghanistan and good luck with getting anything out of there, because you know, they have all these internal issues. Yeah, it's much like Simplified, we know that Taliban also has...

Latiyam in it. Latiyam in it. Like Simplified and Taliban, anything with lithium in it is potentially not dangerous. It's not too explosive.

Yeah, explosive, explosive, no, not even that. I mean, I don't think even, there's a mosquito roaming around in my room and I don't think even that mosquito considers me destructive. That's a quater of all the countries that you said. Does Ecuador also have lithium reserves?

No, it doesn't. Because they're not a scooter. They're not a scooter. They're not a scooter.

They're not a scooter. They're not a scooter. They're not a scooter. They're not a scooter.

So, Nari, are the lithium deposits that we found, easy enough to mine or are there any...? Yeah, so that's what the government is saying. And it is probably because it's a pretty much settled sort of science now. You know how to extract ore with the metal with the best possible efficiency and they're going to go ahead and do it.

It will probably mean setting up a number of facilities, which is also, you know, we are sufficiently industrially advanced. Do that as well. The problem is that there is a lot of environmental damage. It needs a lot of water.

It involves a lot of chemicals going into, you know, so the problem with chemicals is this. The world is full of chemicals. Planet is full of chemicals. And it becomes a problem only when the concentration of chemicals in any one particular area really becomes high.

And that's what metal extraction, you know, metallurgy in general does. China is facing a similar problem. Then they have a lot of rare earth extraction facility. When they extract rare earths, they take only the rare earths and they dump the rest.

And all the rest, basically the levels of, you know, all these toxic metals, they go up a million fold in the water. And then they start becoming toxic to humans. Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a problem. Similar things are expected to happen when you start processing things like lithium on a large scale.

And it will be in a large scale because just India, I think, will need something like 100 million of batteries over the next 10 years or something like that. It's some number of that odd. And each battery, I believe, is something to the tune of 10 kilos. So you basically talking about a billion or, you know, if you take one order of microbells, 10 million kilograms of lithium.

Which is a large quantity. And 6 million approximately were found. 10 to 6 billion kilos. So we will definitely use at least 10 million or 20 million about those kinds.

I always remember how famous they know how people cannot deal with large numbers. The best example for that being 1 million seconds is 12 days, but 1 billion seconds is 32 years. So yeah, you say million, billion seems like. But like, yeah, I'm not sure if you think no humans cannot deal with large numbers practically.

So like, when you get into trillion billion, it's, but to make the lithium battery. As was evidenced by the recent Dani crash. Yeah, they cannot deal with large numbers. But to make lithium batteries, is the only thing that is needed or you need some.

Yeah. So you also need cobalt because you need your electrode. I think the cathode needs a little bit of cobalt too. And it's vital that that cobalt be there.

And that comes, lithium also comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo. But cobalt almost exclusively comes from Congo. And it's very expensive. Yeah.

So it immediately, the market value was known. Warlords and gangsters and criminals of all shapes and descriptions immediately set up shop in the Congo. And just sort of force the local, you know, local public into working for them. They are, and everybody, all these people, their supply chains are directly traced back to the cell phone.

And these guys will be mining stuff and then sending it back to China where it's converted into whatever form the cobalt is. And then it goes into batteries and goes into your iPhone or your Android phone or whatever. Yeah. No piece of tech can be completely clean.

That's it. Yeah. What businesses do, what capitalism does is it first tries to hide the problem, which is threatening their source of profit. That's why you can't blame them because their capitalism is defined by profit.

If you make money, you're successful. If you don't make money, you're not successful. So you're, you know, unless you make money, it's not you. So moment something threatens to affect your bottom line.

The first thing is to hide it. And that's what's been happening for more than a decade, couple of decades now. And now people are waking up to this and start of making noises. So you need to do two things.

One is, so they also they lie a lot. Okay. Surprise surprise. They'll say that, you know, everything, all this mining is automated and all.

And then there have been videos floating around on the internet, which clearly show literally thousands of people picking earth with a shovel and a pickaxe. Yeah. The search for Google images, Congo. You will find several disturbing images.

Yeah. So, and the first of all, their living conditions are abysmal and pay the debt. They are fully living on $1 a day, which is like 80 rupees a day. It is pretty crazy.

And the real solution to this is basically political transformation in that country, in democratic Congo. That's a completely different problem than this. So the question is, what do you do? Do you stop feeding this industry by, you know, having a demand for that product?

Or do you just try and, you know, keep buying the product, but also try to influence the supply chain so that the process is not so destructive? So Americans try to do the latter. Right. So what they do is they want a material and they want to go in and do good.

And this time around, I believe the whole situation is in the control of Chinese companies. So they don't even allow American or European powers to get in. So it's pretty much a blank. Yeah.

By the way, for those who think, why don't we just go to the second biggest player, the second biggest player is Russia right now. And the scale is absolutely astonishing. You can't see this graph right now, but the countries are the largest global mining production in the world. As of 2021, democratic Republic of Congo is 120,000 metric tons.

So just keep that number in 1920,000. Russia is second at 6, 7,600. So it's like how big the gulf is. Then there's Australia, Philippines, Canada, Cuba, Baja, New Guinea and Madagascar.

Seems like a complete scatter shot of that is right because you don't have any other countries in mainland Africa on this list. And I say that because Madagascar is there is a lot of course. And then you have like it's scattered, you have Cuba, you have Papua New Guinea, all these are like this lots of dense areas. Yeah, but that's the intriguing thing.

Now why not in neighboring Uganda or Rwanda? Why not? Why doesn't Belgium have anything like Belgium? Oh, Belgium.

Oh, Belgium. Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe. Yeah, okay, so it's literally slopes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

A shout out to Belgium, which was probably the most evil damn regime in the world. You know what? More than that. Oh man, there was this guy named King Leo Polto.

Yeah, Polto. Who decided that Belgium didn't have any colonies and all these other guys had colonies. So he decided to, he told his people to go get him a colony. And they went to what is now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Oh, wow, I crossed that bridge without even realizing. Oh, that's really cool. No, I wasn't actually. I was in the country of all nice countries right now.

But I think they're all just over compensating. No matter what Germany is, anyway. Let's quickly move on. Yeah, but what I was saying was if only Madagascar had come off with India, right?

Because the Indians have gotten into this previously part of, I mean, they went together. Oh, so now you'll have both. Yeah. Cobalt and Lithium.

Yes. And linium. And we both stopped. I mean, what does all this mean for India now?

So firstly, this is all very preliminary. It's not like this, I mean, this is in just first phase of discovery. Like it's not, we are not even sure how much of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is not a tax rate. This is a tax survey type. This is a tax survey type. This is a tax survey type.

Right. And if India is going to, I mean, even if all of it is user level, it's going to be a tax survey. I mean, even if all of it is user level, we are going to need a lot of infrastructure and technology, all that to do, set up to take advantage of all of this. Yeah.

And the thing is this, after the recent development of the last couple of years, a lot of countries, including America, decided that they don't want to be dependent on China, especially for things that can be found in their own backyard. It turns out that America has a big amount of lithium. Enough, that's the thing. Yeah.

Okay. What does that mean? What does that mean? What does that mean?

What does that mean? What does that mean? What does that mean? What does that mean?

What does that mean? What does that mean? What does that mean? What does that mean?

What is that mean? It means installing the advocacy or something. This country is ready for democracy. Yeah.

What is that? Oh, good. I wouldn't be surprised if I'm really anti-plicate. One should play a bigger role in it.

Sorry. Let us, let us America have little bit. So it has a huge deposit in a place called Thacker Pass in Nevada. So Thacker Pass and Thacker Pass in Nevada is with the blessing, it started during the Trump Administration, but it has the blessing of Biden Administration as well.

And they are on their way to begin extraction. And there is like, you know, it's like in America, anything in America, there are voices of proctor stand. You know, there are spicketing and people sort of protesting, you know, there isn't any strong. So it is very, very, so what these guys are doing is there are a huge area.

I don't, I forget how much it was, but it's like some thousand square miles. Okay. So what they're going to do is they're going to take like making it to like phased thing, like those real estate development projects. So we dig up one and fill it up and move to the next one.

And by doing that, they say that it will minimize ecological damage and this and the other. So what is happening is if they extract a lot of the, you know, lithium in that they become self-sufficient and lithium. Other countries do too. The particular lithium actually crash.

So it's not going to be all that valuable. Or what I feel. I mean, it's not like, you know, it's not like finding oil yet. Okay.

But like battery demand will cut into the rice. Yeah. Yeah. By battery demand will contribute.

It's only that, you know, battery is the entire process is inherently expensive. The battery costs tend to be high and the cost of a battery is high, not just because of the lithium in it. It's because of a lot of other things. There needs a lot of sophisticated electronics, a lot of unit cobalt, which all these 20 people in democratic republic of Congo have everything.

So it's not going to be cheap beyond a particular point. That said, anything which is mass produced has a way of becoming cheaper and cheaper over the period of time. Computers and cell phones are a case in point. Cars also.

So if you look at the true value of cars, just, I mean, if you bought a car in the recent past, you know that the prices haven't really gone up all that much. Everything has gone up. The taxes have gone up, but it's struggled there. This is what competition and better manufacturing technology does.

It makes moment you decide to raise prices along comes some guy and under cut show 10% of the time you're like good. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, overall, I think it's a good piece of news that we've found the lithium.

Not a great part of saying that 5.9 million tons itself by itself is not going to take us to $15 trillion unless the Americans decide to print that many dollars and send it across to India, which they might. But yeah, that's what it is. Yeah. Completely tangential and related question is fracking dead.

What happened to them? So this I don't know. So I don't know. This is like something I've been unsexing finding out the answer.

If there are any oil experts, energy experts, etc. who is listening to like a big talk of the town like a few years back. Yeah. Yeah.

So what happened was last time around when fracking started fracking is inherently expensive. So fracking, you need the oil price to be about $60 or something a barrel for fracking to break in something like that. Something like that. Something like that.

Something like that. Something like that. Something like $60, $50, $70, something. And that time, I think this was maybe 2016, 2015, whenever the oil prices had gone way higher.

So a lot of fracking companies came and everything was going fine. And then a recession happened and price of oil started going down till the point it went down to zero if you remember. No tourists. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So I put it. Not in India, but in India. Yeah.

So partly it was the economy and partly it was a concerted effort by the oil producing the OPEC countries to kill fracking. So they managed to kill off fracking. They kept the prices low. Yeah.

And also maybe just kept hearing about in the media because it helped the US fight the reduces dependency on. Yeah. Yeah. That's why it did.

So now this time what happened was one of the big reasons for inflation in the United States was oil and oil drives inflation a lot of other categories. Right. So oil itself because United States uses a lot of oil to get around and price of everything become more expensive. Like energy becomes more expensive.

Electrical power becomes more expensive. Price of commodities and articles and goods in your supermarket, everything becomes more expensive because transportation becomes. So if they had restarted fracking, that would have greatly reduced their inflation. But they couldn't because it's a capital is a free market thing.

And no one was convinced. None of the oil industry people were convinced that fracking was sustainable. So they would spend a lot of money, hire a lot of people, restart all the fracking units and then Saudi Arabia will crash the price. They will be dead.

Yeah. Yeah. Any further points to add on lithium then for any youngsters listening to simplified what should they what skills what should they learn in order to take advantage of the upcoming lithium economy. The ultimate country.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

One is electrical engineering very seriously unlike us. And there should be a lot of so, you know, there is this thing said about germanium. Right. So germanium will always germanium is the material of the future and it always will be.

The thing is to be like that. But that said, it's probably not as bad as germanium. And there it so this is the thing about, you know, economy is when something starts starts moving, a lot of other things start moving along with them, even if they are not deeply connected. So I think it's a good time for for manufacturing engineering that kind of stuff in India over a period of, you know, next few years.

For several reasons. One is China has been reading Dale Carnegie's book on how to make friends and influence people. So nobody wants to do anything with China anymore. It will become right now.

Right now it is just because there is an alternative. But once you know, even tiny little alternative is not coming up. It'll it'll move up. Yeah.

So so will it be in lithium to is what I feel one thing is, yeah, if you had to light your stuff and you had lithium and aluminum and gallium magnesium, gallium, germanium. What would you use? You would use lithium because it's a light metal. Oh, that boat joke boat joke.

Boat joke. But repurposed. Nice. We like it.

Okay. That was yeah, that was entertaining and strangely reminiscent of my engineering college days. It's a lot more bad jokes. Put in there, which is the way chemical engineering should have been in the first place.

So, shall we sign off? So yeah, it's been fun presenting this film talk. Stay safe, stay lighter and stay simplified.

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This episode is 35 minutes long.

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This episode was published on February 20, 2023.

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