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Notes -
"reserves" are economically recoverable resources. As the price changes, reserves increase. There was a brief lithium bubble where ignorant players thought lithium worked like copper with multi-year lead times etc. but there is more lithium than we should ever need. Bubble -> overcapacity -> price collapse -> reserve decrease. Everyone in commodities knows how this works. But lithium doesn't give you long periods of profit because it's a salt and production ramps up in weeks. You can fill a bore with water then pump the brine out, let the water evaporate and boom lithium. There are plenty of easily accessible molecules, refining is more difficult but you weren't worried about that.
Base metals are in a far worse situation with all recent copper exploration presenting dreadful grades (significantly worse than the gold mining ventures I'm involved with). Grades are half of what they were in the 90s and brownfield expansion costs have ballooned to rival greenfield. Only 14 deposits have been discovered in the past decade! Marimaca and Glencore are still interesting here.
Now, I believe the peak oil narrative was 100% correct and fracking only caused a 10 year delay as incinerated a trillion in capital (because of short well lives and gassing out) although there are still great conventional opportunities e.g. Prio in the Brazilian presalt layer. But even without nuclear, China's found a way forward with much to most of its heavy vehicles already running on LNG instead of diesel and build outs of synthetic gas, which I suspect will build a price ceiling around $80 BOE by the end of the decade, powered by cheap solar (which certainly has a positive EROI in their deserts.) I suspect there will only be one more oil bull market. I am rather pessimistic about the West (baring Chinese largesse) here. In the US, Trump finally cut the Gordian knot and freed mines from (in some cases) 30 year permitting hell - his talk of price floors and raw material tariffs makes me suspect auto-genocide from the right too. Financing is still hard abroad (ESG inertia still keeps US funds away and EU banks still have such laws, royalty companies have also seen massive consolidation with all 14 I'm involved with going through M&A this year)...
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