Did mining companies miss the battery metals boat?

read in 5 min

Hey – David here. In this edition of DRIFFT you’ll get:

💡What’s New: New players new bets, US and Chinese mining advances.

🤔 Opinion: Did mining companies miss the battery metals boat?

🛠️ Tools: Level up with these opensource tools.

🎓 Tutorial: NASA teaches you how to do earth observation for free.

Want to feature your service or product in DRIFFT? Grab an ad spot here.

💡What’s new

• Caution!–Investment managers are shilling inflation and govt. battery tech spending to sell investments.

• Elon v. the French on mining investments–now taking bets!

• How many Chinese mining partnerships will we see in coming years?

• When there’s a gold rush, invest in stores supplying the miners.

• Did you know NASA has an annual app building challenge?

• Deep seabed mining explained

• Survey of AI in advanced robotics, which is critical for future mining

• Biden admin clarifies 1872 mining law opening mining on fed lands.

• New Zealand tepidly joins the deep sea mining rush.

• Meanwhile, major companies divest of deep sea mining.

🤔 Opinion

The WPost recently suggested that big mining companies missed the boat on battery metal demand. Or have they?

Naturally, I’m skeptical. Markets typically underestimate the ability of mineral supply to meet demand. So what do the mineral companies know that we don’t?

Let’s take a look at what’s happening:

• the world economy is projected to turn down, which is a bear flag for mineral commodities.

• a change in US administrations could have a large impact on energy initiatives.

• countries are increasing their royalties and taxes as huge profits are made.

• the deep sea mining industry, including equipment to service it, is growing rapidly.

Also, we know that government incentives (including changes in legal footing) are being made to encourage domestic production for batteries and tech.

To me, the delay in mineral market response is indicative of two things:

1. Company managers are acting responsibly. They know they can produce less mineral and still make higher profits as commodity prices soar–all while extending the life of their assets, the mines.

2. Markets know that waiting will force the hand of government to relax restrictions and bring out incentives to meet their needs.

IMO, this is going to mean a lot of opportunity for environmental monitoring, exploration technologies, carbon capture, etc. Get ready!

🛠️ Tools and Data

Opensource tools and data to speed your research and tasks.

1. Geospatial Data Catalogs - a list of all resources for earth observation data, https://github.com/opengeos/geospatial-data-catalogs

2. GeoMesa - Spark for distributed geospatial computing, https://www.geomesa.org/

3. GeoWave - store, index, and search multi-dimensional data in sorted key/value stores, https://locationtech.github.io/geowave/

4. RasterFrames - earth observation data access, cloud computing, and DataFrame-based data science, https://rasterframes.io/

🎓 See What’s Possible

One thing every day for 365 days makes you unstoppable.

I found a series of free online NASA classes on utilizing their satellite data for useful tasks.

My favorite graphic from the week

…reminding us that when governments need something badly, there are big opportunities for those who are liquid.

source: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-approximate-wealth-of-Tony-Stark

Share DRIFFT

Know someone looking to level-up their AI and opensource game in mining? Just copy and paste this link: https://drifft.beehiiv.com 

Thanks for reading! I am here for you. Want me to look into a particular topic? Email your suggestions and feedback to get in touch and I will

Dig deeper,

David