The Commodities Race to Go Green with Henry Sanderson

Jul 27, 2022

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On todays episode of the WTFinance podcast I interviewed Henry Sanderson, Executive Editor at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence and author of the upcoming book "Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green".

Buy the book here - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Volt-Rush-Winners-Losers-Green/dp/0861543750/

During the interview we talked about commodity demand, what rare earth materials will be vital for the future, whether there are enough materials to go fully renewable and the need to onshore. I hope you enjoy!

We depend on a handful of metals and rare earths to power our phones and computers. Increasingly, we rely on them to power our cars and our homes. Whoever controls these finite commodities will become rich beyond imagining.

Sanderson journeys to meet the characters, companies, and nations scrambling for the new resources, linking remote mines in the Congo and Chile’s Atacama Desert to giant Chinese battery factories, shadowy commodity traders, secretive billionaires, a new generation of scientists attempting to solve the dilemma of a ‘greener’ world.

0:00 - Introduction
0:30 - Influence for writing the book?
1:50 - Commodity demand trend moving away from China
3:05 - Rare metal materials that will be vital for the future?
4:25 - Will there be enough materials to go fully renewable?
5:40 - Time to get mines online
6:30 - Onshoring metal refineries
8:10 - Majority of processing in China
9:30 - Who are the major players in materials?
12:20 - The Nickel problem?
15:25 - Any other major sources of nickel?
17:40 - Could demand for commodities create continued inflation?
18:45 - Increased interest and investment in sector?
19:09 - LME Nickel issue occurring again in the future?
21:30 - Limit ups and downs in commodities
22:40 - One message to take away from your book?

Henry grew up in Hong Kong, and studied in the UK and the US. He worked as a journalist in New York, Beijing, and London. While living in Beijing for seven years, Henry co-authored a book with Michael Forsythe (now at the New York Times) about China’s largest overseas lender, China Development Bank, which lent billions to countries such as Venezuela, playing a key role in the spread of China’s power and state capitalism overseas.

Henry is particularly interested in the geopolitics of the global energy transition and how individual Chinese companies define China’s embrace of the world.

He currently works as executive editor for Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, a leading provider of data and analysis for the lithium ion battery supply chain.

Henry Sanderson -

Website - https://www.henrysanderson.net/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/hjesanderson
LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/henry-sanderson-9889297/

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