We're looking at the Co2 emissions that our
industry is involved with, and we really need
to find solutions to generate the zero-carbon
products that consumers and the market want.
We really are going to take this as a new
concept to a much broader audience, hopefully
win versus the other competing mining projects
in this space.
Why do you say that is positive? Isn’t that
going to be distracting to your main task,
which is to get your project up and running?
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We caught up early today with Mark Selby,
CEO of Canada Nickel Corp. They are listed
on the TSX-V. We talked to them today about
a press release that came out talking about
NetZero. NetZero as a trademark that they
have applied for. It's also a company which
they have set up – NetZero Metals. What's
it about? Is it a gimmick? Is it a game? He
tells us it's actually a little bit more serious
than that. Off the back of Elon Musk's quarterly
call last week, where he talks about buying
up all the Nickel available if it can be produced
in a green and sustainable and efficient way.
This is maybe a different way of looking at
the marketplace. The difference between clean
and dirty Nickel, Sulphide Nickel versus Laterite
Nickel. What will the funds say? Well, we
discuss a variety of other parts of this discussion,
argument.
Take a look at the description below, if there
is anything that interests you in particular,
click on the number beside that topic, that's
called a timestamp and that will jump you
to that part of the video, otherwise enjoy
what Mark has to say.
Mark Selby. How are you, sir?
Good. Thanks, Mr. Gordon. How are you?
It feels like only yesterday we spoke, but
that was I suspect that was our Nickel insight
weekly session.
There you go. The weeks do merge together
these days when you're at home with COVID.
They do roll on. But today we are talking
to you with your Canada Nickel Corporation
hat on, because I saw your press release,
you are talking about NetZero Metals. What
is it? Is it some gimmick?
No, we have had this in the works for the
last few months. What we realised is, we're
in a pretty unique position where we have
the rocks that make up 90% of a deposit actually,
naturally absorb CO2 when exposed to air.
We are in a region where all the electricity
is hydroelectric power. Any electricity that
you use in the mining process is zero carbon.
And we are in an area that actually has a
long history of doing downstream processing
in the region, so we can actually build a
downstream processing plant, which is often
where a lot of these emissions are generated.
We are going to take advantage of the fact
that our waste rock and tailings should be
able to soak up that CO2. When you step back
and look at it, you go, ‘Oh, okay. What?’
We can actually deliver zero-carbon materials,
zero-carbon Nickel, zero-carbon Cobalt and
zero-carbon Iron. And, Mr. Musk's tweet last
night, not last night, last week, really drove
that home in terms of they need environmentally
sensitive Nickel, and it's not a 2050 issue.
It's a today issue.
I need to dig deeper than that because those
factors have always been there in your project
- why now? What attention are you trying to
draw? Is it just trying to draw attention
to Canada Nickel Corp? Or is there something
bigger to it than this?
I think, at the end of the day… in a past
life, we realised that Dumont could be that,
so now that I'm running my own show, realising
that, yes, this is possible and to step back,
and really, this is the thing the mining industry
should be doing. I think what the industry
needs to realise is there's an ever larger
number of people who are your consumers who
look at Co2 emissions in the same way that
we did looking back in the 1970s and 1980s
when a lot of mining companies and industrial
companies in general used to think, ‘Oh,
just dump the gas in the air, dump the liquid
waste down the stream. That’s great, we've
got a stream, that'll just carry it away for
us. We don't have to worry about it.’ And
we look back and we think all that was so
horrible, but there's a whole new group of
consumers who are looking at the Co2 emissions
that our industry is involved with, not just
generating ourselves, but the products that
we make, and we really need to find solutions
to generate the zero-carbon products that
these consumers and the market wants and needs.
Elon Musk came up that statement last week,
and that's had a massive effect on the price
of Nickel, your share price, and it has got
people's attention, looking towards Nickel.
But you have got a Nickel Sulphide project.
We have talked in some of our weekly insights
sessions around laterites, and we have done
one show on dirty Nickel. So he's helped people
understand that he will invest in Nickel projects
if they are sustainable, if they are done
in an environmentally friendly way. Aren't
they all environmentally friendly, as far
as mining goes?
No, that’s the big thing, we alluded to
it in different things. Nickel has a dirty
Nickel issue in that the bulk of the growth
over the last five years and where the bulk
of the growth going is going forward, has
come from Nickel pig iron projects in Indonesia,
and to make Ferro-Nickel, to make Nickel pig
iron, you use a huge amount of electricity
and all those projects are using coal-fired
electricity that degenerate it all. Each one
of those projects is using somewhere in the
order of 25t to 30t of coal to make 1t of
Nickel. That in turn is 90t of Co2 emissions
per ton of Nickel. So all of a sudden you
take 50kg of that Nickel that's related to
that and all of a sudden, you're strapping
4t of steel to a Tesla that's got 50kg of
Nickel under the bottom, I'm not sure that's
what Elon Musk had in mind when he was, wanting
to build Tesla to change our impact on the
environment. And, consumers don't want to
buy a car and end up having a whole pile of
CO2 that comes along with it. The fact that
that's where he went to immediately after
saying we need as much as we can, as soon
as we can, is really, that is a fundamental
issue for them, that they just can't get enough
clean Nickel to meet their objectives.
Basically, Indonesians, Chinese, they don't
care. They can get funding wherever. What
about laterite projects outside of those jurisdictions?
Do you think that they are going to find it
just that little bit harder to get funding,
or do the big institutions and funds not mind?
And they are really just concerned about the
bottom line?
Well, the coal-based Ferro-Nickel projects
in general are going to really struggle here
because, not only on an economics perspective,
you're now competing with these massive facilities
that are being built in Indonesia. Your project
itself is at a disadvantage scale-wise to
these businesses. You now, if you're using
coal in the rest of the world to generate
your Nickel, if the Indonesians are going
to dominate the Chinese market, and you're
left supplying your product to the rest of
the world, are you going to have a market
there when you either have to start paying
for the carbon that you're generating? Or
whether people will say, ‘no, as long as
I have an alternative that's zero or lower
carbon, I'm not interested’.
There are Ferro-Nickel projects that do have
access to hydroelectric power or access to
natural gas so those, obviously, have a much
lower environmental footprint than the coal-based
powers. But, those are the design choices
people are going to have to make in terms
of the projects that they choose to fund going
forward.
Who gets financed first - Sulphide projects
or Laterite projects?
Sulphide projects, particularly the ones that
have the benefits that we do at Crawford,
where you have these rocks that do absorb
CO2. And, I encourage people… there's a
whole pile of research on carbon sequestration
using serpentine rock-based systems. They
are actually looking at injecting CO2 into
solid rock, as opposed to just using the tailings
and the waste rock that are leftover. It's
a real solution. I think increasingly as we
move forward here there's going to be much
more capital available to those projects that
are able to deliver a zero carbon or low carbon
versus those projects that generate 90t of
carbon for every ton of Nickel that gets produced.
But what are you trying to do here? Because
not only have you announced a wholly-owned
subsidiary - NetZero Metals, but you have
also applied for trademarks. Are you trying
to get investors more aware of specific issues,
or is this just for your own benefit?
We've been talking now about carbon for several
decades, and several decades in, industry
still hasn't managed to do it. If you look
at most of the larger resource companies they
have got, ‘By 2050, we're going to be net
carbon neutral,’ That's 30-years from now,
and that's a lot of carbon between now and
then. And this year we changed all the light
bulbs in the office to be LED lights, but
fundamentally they are making iron ore and
coal that go to make steel that are going
to generate several tons of carbon for every
ton of product that they are shipping out.
It's time for those large companies to look
themselves in the face and say, ‘okay, how
do we, as an industry, find end-solutions
to be able to deliver zero carbon production?’
We're talking, we are going to build downstream,
look to build downstream facilities in the
area next to this mine, because, the off gas
from these processing plants is the issue
and we'll have an ability to take that off
gas and route it through the tailings and
waste rock and make that carbon issue disappear.
Other companies should be thinking about that
and should be able to do, should be looking
for those opportunities to do it as opposed
to, we're going to get to it in 20 or 30-years.
Have you got any other supporters here? Because
I suspect that the BlackRock and Fidelities
of this world who are changing their investment
criteria, would be interested, if they understood
this. Are you going to take this forward?
Are you going to be the champion for this?
Yes, one of the things we talk about in the
release is leadership changes, so we really
want to target mining. It's about getting
the right people. It's about finding the right
deposits. And it's about competing for capital
in a way that allows you to have ‘the best
capital and the lowest cost capital, the most
patient capital’ and so forth. So if this
initiative allows us to tap into a much broader
range of networks to be able to get those
type of investors, and you're going to see
changes at our board level where we are going
to start to bring in people who have those
types of relationships and who have that experience.
So that, we really are going to take this
as a new concept to a much broader audience,
and, hopefully win versus the other competing
mining projects in this space.
Why do you say that's a positive? Isn't this
going to be distracting for your main task,
which is to get your project up and running?
No, from a mining perspective, it's about
A) - getting the right people. B) getting
the right asset, and C) getting the right
capital. You need to focus on all 3. Too many
mining companies just get caught up in the
technical and not really focused enough on
the people and on the capital part of it.
I would encourage people to listen to Tesla's
last conference call because every topic they
came to was around talent; we need more of
these types of people. We need more of these
types of people. If you're an entrepreneurial
actuary we want you to come help us build
an insurance business. So that's the mindset
that we need to have, and this is a stake
in the ground in terms of, this is going to
be a major thrust of where we're headed. We
have trademarked these terms because we are
first. They don't exist today. And then in
terms of creating a separate entity, because
, I've been talking to the people in the EV
chain now for the last three or four years,
and it's clear on 2 fronts: 1) - they are
not as interested in deploying capital to
the mining side of the business, but oh boy,
do they want as much Nickel and Cobalt as
you can produce and preferably double and
quadruple your production as quickly as possible,
please. And we will help you build a processing
plant and we will promise to buy everything
you produce. By creating a separate subsidiary
right out of the gate, it makes it a much
easier conversation, a simpler conversation
to get those companies into that specific
entity.
The other fundamental piece of this, and,
so many companies to date have got this so,
so wrong, 2) is the auto industry wants to
make the lowest-cost product possible, Elon
Musk makes it very clear. That's how they
are going to win. And so you need to look
from an end to end perspective of what's the
lowest cost way to get a chunk of Nickel out
of the ground and into a battery that isn't
a Tesla and the other 18 large automakers
who are going to be betting the farm now on
the electrification of cars. And so when you
look at that, the key is, as you take a Nickel
intermediate that's as high-grade, as clean
as possible, and you dissolve it once and
then you basically keep it in one set of processes
until it's like in a can that's ready to ship
to a plant. These people who have built standalone
sulphate plants are crazy because to take
the sulphate, the Nickel that's in solution,
you spend a huge amount of energy to crystallise
it, to put it in a bag or a drum, and then
that bag or drum goes to a plant that starts
to make batteries. And the first thing they
do is dissolve it all. I can spend 15-minutes
on why that's not a good idea. All of these
companies that we have been talking to are
very keen at basically putting as much of
the one process under one roof. They do everything
once and only once until they get to a product
that's the right thing to ship at that point
in time.
That's hard to put together. What's even harder
is getting the old boys in the industry to
back something like this, because what you're
proposing is potentially going to cost them
billions and billions of dollars on infrastructure
to get clean.
Oh, no. If you're making iron ore it's like,
well, okay, well we just ship iron ore. That's
our business. If it all ends up in China,
and China pumps out billions of tons of CO2
in the process of making that, we're not going
to build a steel plant next to a hydroelectric
facility or in a place where there is some
solar or wind, so you have a chance of having
cheap hydro available or using natural gas
involved in the reduction of it. Or look at
complete hydrogen reduction of that process,
so that there's no carbon involved, and/or
strapping on some carbon capture at the end
of that process. So that if there is carbon
that's produced, you're able to capture it
so it's not released into the environment.
Well it's exciting times, and the whole NetZero
initiative. Exciting for you. Keep us up to
