Discover the untapped treasure trove of Europe's lithium and borate resources as we sit down with Peter and Alex Palkovsky of Euro Lithium. In a conversation that spans from the picturesque Barcelona to the snowy stretches of Vancouver Island, we uncover the Palkovsky's groundbreaking discovery of a substantial borate deposit with significant lithium content. Their commitment to eco-friendly extraction processes promises a future where Europe's raw material needs are met sustainably—imagine a world where mining contributes to carbon neutrality, or better yet, carbon negativity!
Wrapping up our journey, we spotlight the inspiring sustainable project in Serbia, where local resources, skilled labor, and supportive government policies set the stage for a transformative impact on the European economy and environment. My guests share their optimism for a greener future and the vital role the next generation will play in carrying forward the torch of environmental stewardship.
Join me for a riveting session that ignites curiosity and fuels the passion for a more sustainable and innovative world.
Discover the untapped treasure trove of Europe's lithium and borate resources as we sit down with Peter and Alex Palkovsky of Euro Lithium. In a conversation that spans from the picturesque Barcelona to the snowy stretches of Vancouver Island, we uncover the Palkovsky's groundbreaking discovery of a substantial borate deposit with significant lithium content. Their commitment to eco-friendly extraction processes promises a future where Europe's raw material needs are met sustainably—imagine a world where mining contributes to carbon neutrality, or better yet, carbon negativity!
Wrapping up our journey, we spotlight the inspiring sustainable project in Serbia, where local resources, skilled labor, and supportive government policies set the stage for a transformative impact on the European economy and environment. My guests share their optimism for a greener future and the vital role the next generation will play in carrying forward the torch of environmental stewardship.
Join me for a riveting session that ignites curiosity and fuels the passion for a more sustainable and innovative world.
Hello and welcome to the Electric and Eclectic podcast show with Roger Atkins and some truly smart and amazingly interesting guests.
Speaker 2:And the byproduct would be a very green, sustainable lithium and bory material. That would be the absolute cat's meow. It would be the most beautiful project on the planet.
Speaker 3:Well it would if you give more than you take. Then what's not to like, right?
Speaker 2:And because the spore rates are water soluble, you're not talking about any CO2 emissions. And if we can find a way to extract the lithium in a very safe manner, that's perhaps even CO2 neutral or negative right. All of a sudden you can say we have the most sustainable products for the critical raw materials. Switch over in the world and they're in Europe. Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin.
Speaker 3:Hello and welcome to the latest Electric and Eclectic podcast. I have two guests with me for a change, and indeed two very special guests, because their father and son are absolutely related Peter and Alex Palkowski. I've known both of them for some time.
Speaker 3:Peter, I initially met in Hungary at a benchmark event benchmark mineral intelligence event and he represents a company called Euro Lithium, and straight away that those two words attracted me and intrigued me and began a journey that I've been on for some time now, including going to see the resources that we're going to talk about shortly. But what I really wanted to do is understand the backstory of what now is potentially going to happen in a big way, something very significant for the European continent, which is close to hand resources of lithium and ball rates. And we're going to talk and understand all of that, what that actually means and what that prospect and opportunity is. And, along the way of explaining that, get to know both Peter and Alex very well. Let me just let me just check where they're both talking to us from today. Let me let me start with you, alex. Where are you today, because I know you're not with your dad in Canada. Where are you right now?
Speaker 4:Hey Roger, thanks for having me on the podcast. Currently I'm in Europe. Barcelona is my home. When I'm in Serbia or in Brussels, so in the moment I'm in Barcelona.
Speaker 3:Right, very good, and Peter, I think I know where you are, but please tell the. Please tell our listener.
Speaker 2:Well, roger, hello and thank you for hosting us, and I'm currently talking to you from Vancouver Island, off the coast of British Columbia in Canada.
Speaker 3:Wow, that can be pretty wild country, can't it? In terms of the weather, you know, snow, extreme weather, am I right You're?
Speaker 2:completely correct. We just had a significant record snowstorm, some very cold off-load winds from the Arctic, so we just had minus 10 degree weather for a number of days and a good, I'd say, half a meter of snow. So yes, it can be, but normally it's a temper climate and not too bad for Canada.
Speaker 3:Yeah Well, canada is a very big country. By the way, I don't know if you saw this recently, but I have a couple of friends who have driven an electric car from the north pole to the south pole. They recently achieved that incredible feat and obviously you know hugely significant and large part of that right at the beginning after their journey in the north pole was down through Canada. Did you see any of that on the news? Did that appear in any kind of news in either Spain or Canada?
Speaker 2:That incredible journey this couple made Sadly, in Canada, in North America, I saw nothing. And that wasn't the only couple that made a big journey. There was a couple, also from Holland, that ventured all the way down to Cape Town in South Africa, all fully electrically, utilizing mostly slower panels that they carried with them to accomplish trip. They really took very little power from any utilities on the journey. So no, not a single word, sadly to say with the media.
Speaker 3:Well, we'll try and do something about that along the way, because I know them well, like I say, chris and Julie Ramsey. They're a married couple that have gone on various expeditions and in fact they'll be on stage with me at Geneva at the Geneva Motor Show and VIP Day, talking about exactly what we've just briefly alluded to. But let's talk about Euro-Lithium because, like I said the first time I bumped into you, peter, euro and Lithium. That just sounds so important and so contemporary and so significant when Europe right now is challenged with trying to reconcile all that's gone on in China and Asia in particular around the critical mineral supply chain. So can you just give the listener a brief insight as to what you've been busy with and I hope I'm not wrong in this for what? 15 years now, peter? Is that correct?
Speaker 2:That's correct exactly Exactly since about 2008-09, when I began this journey of attempting to find my own deposit, and initially the focus was, of course, on the Lithium side of things.
Speaker 2:But the geologists that I managed to round up for the journey were world-class geologists that were focused on what's called sedimentary basins old lake beds, if you will, which I'm sure your listeners are very familiar with. A lot of Lithium is found in lake beds that are evaporating or evaporated, but they had scoured the entire planet looking for something else which is also found in these lake beds sometimes, which are sodium borits, which are extremely rare, far more rare than most people realize, and really have only been discovered in quantities of any size four times in the history of mankind, and two of those are operating today one's in Turkey, one's in California, the other one's also in California, but it's a very small deposit compared to those, and now this one that I have, which is the fourth single large deposit of these sodium borits in the world, happens to be in Europe. It also happens to have a significant amount of Lithium.
Speaker 3:Wow, Wow, that is some story. And, Alex, when did you get involved in this then? Because if it's been going 15 years and I'm guessing you're your age you haven't always been involved, so what point did you get involved and what are you doing now? Can you give us a flavor of that please?
Speaker 4:Absolutely. So I jumped in to the fold about five years ago. I mean, I guess I've been following this story for some time, as Peter has done, but more casually until five years ago. Before I jumped in with Peter, I was working in renewable energy, mainly in capital markets and project development. So building solar projects, the wind project, hydro, pumped hydro around the world with a big company called Brookfield Asset Management out of Toronto. So I was there for several years and then jumped on with Peter when I started to understand the supply chain constraints of the energy transition. At Brookfield I was mainly focused on deployment and financing, but then when I started to look up the supply chain and bottlenecks, I started to realize that the battery issue was going to become quite enormous, especially for renewable energy, given the growth projection of EVs at the time. So I jumped on with Peter five years ago and have been helping wherever I can, but mainly in finding the right people, finding the right capital and moving the project forward as best we can.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, I can absolutely see the connection there. Solar has been liberated there's no doubt about it by China in terms of price and availability, etc. When it comes to the electric vehicle proposition, batteries specifically, again, china is now playing a pretty dominant part in that. So, yeah, I can see the connection there in going in that direction. So, listen, let's a bit further on, get into more of the details of what the project is, what your aspiration is, about some of the conversations that we've had, certainly when I came over and had a look and got my head around and understood how environmental you can make mining.
Speaker 3:But before we get into all of that, and the one thing I would like to say is the reason why I like you guys and like what you're doing, apart from the things I've mentioned before, is that this is a family enterprise, this is a personal business, this isn't a great big multinational conglomerate, which is very unusual, I guess potentially unique Maybe, in the arena that I spend a lot of time observing. And what does that mean? Well, that means that if you're spending 15 years, you're probably spending a lot of money. And money is about ambition, of course it is, but it's also about passion, it's also about commitment. It's an absolute illustration of what you are about and what you're trying to do.
Speaker 3:Some of what you've described there, alex, in terms of the projects before you've been more involved with this and it truly says a lot about you both and certainly about the business, which is what attracts me to it. Definitely, 100%. But, peter, can I go right back to the beginning? You started out as an entrepreneur, which is very inspiring to the family and everybody else. Can you talk us through what you did in the paint industry, because you were pretty radical with both your approach, your product and the success you had with that. Can you share that with us, please? Yeah, no, I'd love to.
Speaker 2:So eventually my parents and I moved from Choslovakia to Canada in 1969.
Speaker 2:And eventually my father found his way across the country with different engineering jobs, to Vancouver Island, in fact, and it's where I spent my high school years, and because we were on the ocean and a lot of water, I was in scouts.
Speaker 2:I spent a significant amount of time doing different marine activities, not just fishing but also scuba diving, snorkeling, et cetera and I really fell in love with biology, marine biology especially, and my father was always an avid hobbyist. He kept aquariums and so I took that up with him as a young boy and had a lot of aquariums in the basement of our home and it was very fascinated by habitat and breeding habits and different species. And it's all to do with water and fish and the marine environment in particular, and how sensitive it was, how temperatures affected breeding habits, how it affected food supply habits, how pH of water was significant for the species living within it, and so that led me to basically study marine biology at university, and when I did two years in Victoria, I was offered an opportunity to go to Quebec and learn French. So I did one year in University of Le Val. C'est là j'ai pris mon français, so en bilinguals, which I'm very proud of.
Speaker 2:Very good and I finished up in McGill. But that was in the early 80s and the economy in North America was in real dire straits and, of course, I'm being the son of immigrants. I didn't have access to a lot of capital, so I had to find work right away and that led me to coming back to Vancouver and getting into just painting people's homes. I had a bit of experience painting at school in the summer, so I hired some young guys like me and we began painting and we're actually quite successful. We did a lot of different structures, homes. In fact, in Whistler we painted a lot of the big hotels and a ski town chalets and lodges.
Speaker 2:And what I noticed in the industry which I was simply doing to make some money to get things started was that the products that you were using were all solvent based. You had to have perfect conditions, had to be dry, they had to have 24 hours to cure, but the cleanup of the material, of the equipment and yourself was extremely difficult. You had to apply more solvents, thinners, kerosene, et cetera, to clean your brushes, rollers, spray guns, et cetera, and so it was expensive. But the worst part was when you did a very large job, let's say like a massive hotel which took four or 5,000 gallons of stain. You ended up with hundreds of gallons of residual material from leftover paint and cleaning the equipment, and when I went to dispose of that material, I was simply told to throw in the garbage dump. This is the early 80s.
Speaker 3:And.
Speaker 2:I just thought wait a second, what do you mean? So there really wasn't any mechanism in place for people to dispose of the leftover paint or the paint cleaning equipment and chemicals. So I made a very simple water-based sodium hydroxide cleaner that would just break the solvents up into small particles so they were the much easier to handle and you could dispose them quite easily just through a sewer system. It's a very simple chemistry. I like how to buy a wash, and that product was inexpensive. It cleaned the equipment extremely well and it solved the problem of what do you do with all the cleaning material. Well, people began to see that product. They began asking where I bought it. I said I didn't buy it, I made it.
Speaker 4:I put a stipulate block of a bio wash.
Speaker 2:But that concept then grew into manufacturing more water-based products. So we began to manufacture stains and paints and paint removers, but all based on that name of bio wash and being water-borne water-based water chemistry, which turned it to be extremely, if you will, brilliant in a roundabout way that I didn't even think about initially, which was when you use water-based paints. They dry quickly. You can apply them to a damp surface because they don't need perfectly dry wood, for example, you can clean the equipment with water and if you have a job you're doing or a manufacturing plant making whatever, you can apply two or three coats within a few hours because they dry so quickly and ship the material to your customer wooden windows, frames, doors, etc. So this water-borne concept has so many advantages that I was absolutely flabbergasted. Like I said, from manufacturing to use to shipping, you avoided all the hazard and flammability of the existing industry.
Speaker 2:It took a while to convince consumers to begin buying other products, but today, as you know, Roger, I'm sorry, but almost everything on the planet when it comes to the chemical industry has gone waterborne. So it was an accidental idea of trying to make something inexpensive and simple, but my drive, my goal, was to try and avoid these leftover solvent-based paints from ending up in the water system, in the ecosystem, in the wetlands, etc. Because a gallon of oil does a lot of damage in a wetland. That's really how the whole thing began.
Speaker 3:Now I can see the connection and your passion is clear in the way you describe it. I mean that is quite a jump from being there with a bunch of guys painting stuff to thinking, hey, hang on a second, we could do this better. I mean that is classic entrepreneur, inventor stuff, where you just see a problem and then you do something about it. I mean we all and I have, and I'm sure maybe the listener has seen problems, but that's where it stops. You don't actually get stuck in and do something about it. Can you briefly recount that story? I remember you told me about some work you were doing with some people or demonstration of doing in Seattle, because, yeah, that's quite a story. Can you recount that for us please?
Speaker 2:So we went on to design a number of other products that were waterborne for other industries, especially the industrial industries and I know the way you're speaking of. You're thinking particularly of the Boeing story, which maybe we probably shouldn't go into too much here because it'll be public knowledge, but one I can tell you about very easily is the Vancouver Airport, which had an issue as well of removing. Boeing wants to remove aint from the aircraft, which of course the more quotes you put on, the heavier it gets. So we designed a very unique material to do that, which worked through the coding, but I really can't publicly talk much more about it than that.
Speaker 2:But I can tell you about the Vancouver Airport, which came to us through a bid looking to remove the rubber from the runways of the YVR Airport. Because when planes land, every time you hear that chirp or see the smoke, you'll see a patch of rubber on the runway. And there's regulation and limitations of how much rubber you can have on that runway. And so they put a tender out and we designed a waterborne product to basically soften the rubber, which you could then agitate and suck up with big vacuums. And the funny part of the story is that water-based products need heat, they need warm conditions to work, as you saw of us. But water, of course, is more critical because it can freeze.
Speaker 2:And so we got the contract to actually clean the runway for Vancouver Airport, and on the night that we're supposed to apply it it was February it got very, very cold and the temperatures began to drop down to almost zero. And so we applied the material with these big, huge agitators and irrigators, big trucks. It was thousands of gallons of material for the entire runway. Then we agitated it with a metal spinning brush, like you would with a sweeper, which is shooting sparks everywhere and making a bunch of sort of danger-looking things, but because it's all water-based, it didn't matter. There's no flammability. And the reason the airport needed a waterborne product because it sits on a wetland area and the residual material coming off the runway, if any, could not cause any harm to the wetlands. That's why they could no longer use their standard solvents for moving the rubber. In the end of the day, we got the rubber softened, we agitated it, we sucked it up, took it off and at 6 am the airport opened and I remember watching the first 747 land holding, clenching my teeth nothing happened.
Speaker 2:The plane landed, the tires got traction and everything was just the way it should be. But to your point, the world began thinking about environmental issues a long, long time ago. But this is 1990, over three years ago. The sad part of it is that if we really put our minds to it, we can do a lot of things very quickly. It's just the resistance to do them that causes the issue. People want a better, cheaper, faster way to do things, but sometimes the old school ideas get in their way.
Speaker 3:Well, people are resistant to change for lots of reasons, I think, because it takes effort, it takes time, it takes a bit of vision.
Speaker 3:But I think also, let's not beat around the bush, for the people already doing something in an industry the incumbents they want the status quo they might well know or be aware of or concede there's a better way of doing it, but if the way they do it right now makes a ton of money, they don't want people like you coming along and saying we can do it better, because then that upends their business model.
Speaker 3:And I think that goes to the heart of a lot of where we are with some of this stuff. But, alex, can I ask you my dad was great, by the way, my late dad. He was a lovely guy, he was a carpenter and joiner, but he absolutely wasn't an inventor, he wasn't an entrepreneur, he wasn't the kind of go-getting person to take risks that clearly you've been, peter and to have not only the ability to make a good sum of money by your own initiative and ambition and hard endeavor, but then to invest that money and have faith in spending that money on a long-term project. How does that influence you growing up, alex? I don't know, embarrass you in front of your dad, but how has that impacted your thinking and your behavior?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think you just have to have confidence in what you're doing, these long-term projects where there's so many ups and downs, or even in entrepreneurial ventures where you'll have great years and bad decades or bad months. I think keeping true to your intentions and your passions have always proven to be successful or at least the right way to go forward. Watching my parents grow the business when I was younger, then selling the business finally in the early 2000s, was a stark reminder that you have to keep to what you believe in and if you're true to your word and your passion, then things will align for you over time. You just have to stick with it and be persistent. So that's been something that's kept true to my life so far and sticking with what you believe in and not getting dissuaded by the downturn.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and the thing I've observed over my lifetime in regard to successful people, whether they're entrepreneurs that everyone's heard of or hard-working men and women, in whatever industry, that's the point. It's the hard work, it's putting in the time, it's putting in the hours, it's the commitment to wanting something to succeed. And, yeah, sometimes that impacts your personal life, that impacts relationships, that impacts all sorts of things, because you become very determined, and determination is good, but sometimes it has a consequence. So, yeah, let's not get too personal on things, because that's not what we're going to do. What I'm mostly keen about here just to remind our listeners, to alert people to an extraordinary resource here on the continent of Europe that absolutely needs to be fully developed and progressed in a way that works great for the community, the people that the ground is beneath, works great for the environment, because otherwise why would we be doing it?
Speaker 3:And going back to your point about the paint story and about other things that you've done, and certainly your work, alex, around developing solar, in particular, renewable energy, this sort of journey how do you both see where we are at the moment geopolitically, with China having progressed so far and fast first, with solar, I mean with many things, but let's keep it simple. First with solar and impacting the whole global system in regard to that, some of it not so good because it destabilizes a lot of the western industry. And now here we are with batteries, and of course, batteries need those raw materials. They need that lithium, manganese, cobalt, graphite, etc. What's your sense, then, of where the world sits right now geopolitically? Well, let me ask the younger of the two, palkovsky, is that question first, through the lens of a young man, how do you see where we are with China so seemingly far ahead?
Speaker 4:Yeah, ultimately, competition is good so long as it's fair. Right, when we play football, we play rugby, we play whichever sports we play by common rules and the best team or best athlete wins based on the rules that we all play by. So so long as the rules are equal, it's a good thing. However, when the rules aren't necessarily unequal, rightly or wrongly, it creates a pretty large incentive for anyone to play the game. And so I think, for young people looking across Eastward, they might feel, whether it's true or not, that the playing field is unequal, despite coming back from a privileged background or coming from a more developed economy.
Speaker 4:I think there's a sense amongst young people that we don't we don't stand a chance against an excellent team that you know called Team Asia is. But, having said that, there's certainly the entrepreneurial spirit of creativity and risk taking that lives within a lot of young people, just trying to find the right path to explore that creativity and take those risks and feeling that, hey, it's OK to fall back and get back up again. So I think I think it's a daunting task, but I think it's certainly, certainly interesting, and it's competition that you have to just overcome. Whether it's fair or not, you have to do your best to take advantage of the opportunity, and if you want to drive change, it needs to be the centre of the change. Otherwise, you want to be here for the ride, then sit back and drive your Chinese made EV or otherwise and then coast through life. But I don't think young people in the West feel that way. I think they want to take charge in their life, trying to find the right path to do so.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you said a lot in there and I agree with it and you reminded me for some reason you didn't reference it but the art of war by Sun Tzu, that thing about what are the first principles, what are the things that you look at as to where you are. And, funnily enough, the previous guest to having you both on Bill Russo in China came out with a phrase when we were talking about this, saying we need to flip the script, we need to look at what China's done, we need to learn from what China's done and we can do things, some of those things, better. And I think, particularly when it comes to the focus is clearly, peter, your absolute advocate for it of the environmental aspect of things. Yes, you've got to be competitive, yes, you've got to get things out the ground in the right sort of way in terms of the economics of things. It has to be a business model, it has to be a return on investment.
Speaker 3:But if, in doing any of these things, we are just running roughshod over the whole point of the journey, which is to mitigate and reduce CO2 into the atmosphere and many other things, then we shouldn't be bothering. And if there's one thing I think we can do better than has been done in China so far, and I'm not absolutely pointing the finger at what's gone in China, but I don't think the way in which batteries are made and the materials are sourced can be held up high as a kind of great virtue, and therefore I think there's a huge opportunity in the United States, in North America and in Europe particularly, to flip the script and definitely do it better. Peter, what's your view? I don't get too political, but what's your sense of all this?
Speaker 2:The world. Economies are always, they're dynamic, they're always changing. You have populations, they educate, they age, they produce things. And I noticed many years ago, walking into a Home Depot or Walmart or Benjamin Moore stores even that Alexander's mother and I had and Whistler, more and more items were being manufactured in China and Asia 80s, 90s and like Japan. Initially the things were okay but cheaper, and as time went along they got better and better and better and then eventually they were great and they were still cheaper.
Speaker 3:And all of a sudden.
Speaker 2:Here we are today. If I walked into a Walmart and had a look at all the back of the boxes where it's manufactured, a lot of it's coming out of Asia, china predominantly. So I give the Chinese huge kudos, big credit for what they've done in my lifetime. It's phenomenal, and the products they're producing are also very high quality at good value.
Speaker 2:But to your point, roger, we know how to educate the next generation. We know what they need for support. We know what they need for structure revision to keep them enthused and motivated, and I've had some experience in life teaching young kids or working with young kids, and every single one of them wants to do something fantastic. They're all bright-eyed and cheery and they come to your seminar or conference or class with enthusiasm, and so it's just about empowering the people and allowing them to express themselves so they can go ahead and do things better. It's really what it's about. I want to be a better football player, so okay, so you watch Mets here, whatever, and see how he plays, and then you try and play better than that. Human beings want to be better. It's in our nature, Right? So I think it's competition and, as Alexander mentioned, fair competition is a great thing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's a good point.
Speaker 3:They're not very good football Chinese, are they? Yes, you mentioned Messi. I mean, we could mention a whole host of players from around the world, but somehow the Chinese haven't seemed to crack the football thing yet. I suppose I shouldn't say that we don't want to wake them up to do that, because obviously they've got a lot of people to pick from 1.4 billion or so. Can we come back into the project again? Because I'm not a geologist, although having come to visit you and the team and to understand the phenomenal amount of effort, time, money, resource you have to put into geologically mapping this resource.
Speaker 3:Mapping an opportunity to qualify that it's everything you think and hope. It is to map that out and to then reconcile that with a proper business plan to say how much of the stuff is there? How much is it going to cost us to get it? Are we going to be able to get it in an environmental way that is going to be good for the local people? You've got to focus on that, I think, much more than maybe some of the traditional industries, as perhaps done in the past. But let's not get into that can of worms. But can you, either of you, please just explain to me physically what in the ground the sodium, borates and lithium sort of look like? What is it encased in? Is it in rock? Is it in clay? Can you give us a breakdown of that?
Speaker 2:Let me start by saying that you're right, roger to find this deposit took a lot of work and a lot of exploration work and, quite frankly, I was very lucky to have been able to encounter some of the foremost geologists, who primarily came from US borax, which is the big operating borate facility in California, and they understood very well the history and geology, what you need to find in order to try and discover a sodium borate deposit. They spent decades I mean literally since the early 1900s, after they opened their operation in the 1920s in Boron, california. They were always on the march to find another huge deposit, of which they did eventually, which was in Turkey and that was actually in the 60s and based on geology and geography and volcanic activity history a lot of work. So I was able to stand on the shoulders of giants who understood the geology of the entire planet for these deposits extremely well and they were focused on the Balkans and that part of Europe for many decades looking, drilling, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 2:When they, if you will, when they discovered Yadar and the things in the world changed a little bit, they stopped looking and that gave me an opportunity to hire that team, reassemble it and go back to the Balkans and to Europe and pick up where they left off. So I kind of came in for the touchdown, if you will the punt right. I mean it was already done. I just had to put the ball between the angle and so we finished the work after they had begun. That's how the discovery was made. It wasn't easy. It still took years and years and a lot of time, money, looking at different sedimentary basins. But that is really how the deposit can be found was through the decades of knowledge of these geologists.
Speaker 3:And in practical terms now then, given all of the work that's come before and where you are, here we are, it's 2024. When can an investor, a company, an end user, you know this resource? When can it actually be taken out of the ground let's say in an ideal world, with things coming together as you would hope that they will? Is it 10 years away? Is it five years away? What's the practical reality of producing all of this now at scale?
Speaker 2:You know I'm going to Alexander to answer that question. As I mentioned initially, I'm a marine biologist. That's my background and focus. Even though I did run a big chemo company, I didn't ever get too involved in the if you will, in the design or engineering of the plants etc. Alexander, on the other hand, he comes from operations, if you will, understanding big industry. Having come from Brookfield where things have to look like planning etc, etc. I'll let him answer that question. I have my own view as a person and politics and, if you will, the industry. But Alexander is probably much more realistic of what this will take to come into production.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 4:Thanks for being put on the spot, but.
Speaker 4:I guess I did my best to explain this very long journey of developing a mine. I guess, fundamentally, it's the same as developing infrastructure you have perspective, opportunity, you do your engineering, design, permitting, financing, and you go and build and you operate. Those are the fundamentals that I brought from Brookfield to this project, and when we started looking at this or when I started looking at this in 2017, I thought about how can this be done economically? And then, secondly, how can it be done in a manner that environmentally and socially is acceptable, that I can put my name behind, like my family's name behind, that CERB can be proud of, that the community can be proud of, that NGOs and environmentalists can be proud of? And that's really been the philosophy from day one, at least in my mind and certainly at the computers from five, 15 years ago. So we've done a lot of work in these five years to better understand the positive, how it looks, what's the size. And then, once we understood what the size was, we said, okay, well, how can we get it out of ground and then process it in a manner that will be environmentally and socially acceptable to the world and not just the local community? And that's the journey we continue on.
Speaker 4:I think when you want to be a leader in environmental and social responsibility. There's a lot of ups and downs in your technological innovation process and we've spent millions of dollars making sure that we have the right technology. If it doesn't exist, then we created ourselves to make sure that the minerals, once they're at surface, are processed in a way that, as Peter and the last business had, zero waste or unimpactable or unharmful waste material that can be possibly reused or repurposed. And that design principle has led us to where we are today, which is an underground mining operation design and bringing that material to surface and using water as a basis for processing the chemical. So processing the mineral, sorry, and making sure that any waste material that's produced is at least neutral so then it could be used and to repurpose and Peter may be able to talk a little bit more about his vision for the waste material, but making sure that waste material is repurposed to provide other environmental good. Maybe, peter, you want to take it from here and talk about your concept to backfill the culpits in Serbia.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, thank you for that, alex. I've actually, as you were talking, I got the Euro-Lithium and Borate Sustainability Report from, I think, the year before last, because what you've just gone through, that rethink mining of borates and lithium I know in the document you've got underground mining, ecosmart, borate processing, lithium processing and tailings, recycling, emissions inventory and clean energy and carbon neutrality. In my due diligence of looking at this and understanding what this is, who you are and why would I lend my name to this in regard to what I do on LinkedIn, all of that stuff in there just resonated with me, as did what you showed me when I came over. So, yeah, can you elaborate on that? Because tailings in particular and, by the way, listener, if you're thinking, what are they talking about?
Speaker 3:What's tailings? That's the stuff you dig out the ground to get out the stuff you need, or the material that you've got to get through to extract the minerals that you're after, and typically on major mining projects, that's a lot of stuff. So you've got to have some plan for what are you going to do with all of this resource that's appropriate, that's economic, that's socially responsible, all of that stuff. That's what the tailings are. So, yeah, peter, go on, give us a bit more on that, please.
Speaker 2:It's interesting when you use the word waste, and I'll go back to the Biowash days. We had a manufacturer of super absorbance in the same industrial area we had the facility in. They were making diapers and the conveyor belts had spillage, had material left over which wasn't clean enough and pure enough anymore to put into a diaper, but it was a waste product from them. At the end of each shift they had a lot of it and there was no way to dispose of it because this material could absorb water at very high rates and when it did, expand it and it would hold the water almost indefinitely. And somehow we ended up in a discussion and the owner of the plant said to me look, I need to give her this stuff, I'll pay you to take it. And I thought huh, a super absorber for water. How can I make some money with that? Well, it turned out that if you packaged it, put it in a container, packaged it, put it in a simple $2 package nice bright colors, called it waste paint hardener you could take that material. If you had a paint spill or left over water based paints, of course, talking about you sprinkle on top of that paint and it would absorb the water right away and it would harden the paint almost immediately. So if you had a paint spill or left over paint, you can harden them, pull the water and you could use that latex paint now for things like fertilizer or dispose of it fertilizer for gardens not for food, but for flowers. So Austin was repurposing the waste material from this diaper manufacturer.
Speaker 2:As Alexander mentioned, this is a lake bed. It's millions of years old. It's underground. We have clay in that lake bed, as most you know. If you walk through a pond or a lake you know the bottom is mucky. That clay, if it hardens, dries out. That's where our materials being held.
Speaker 2:The borax are simply salt.
Speaker 2:They're water soluble.
Speaker 2:So I think that we can actually access these materials through a tunnel, going on an angle towards it, bringing the material to surface, all of it, taking the sodium borates out, using simply hot water.
Speaker 2:We're working on many methods of removing the lithium which is in the leftover material, which is the clay once the borates are gone, producing lithium from that and then the clay which is leftover. I believe there's a way to actually work with an abandoned colpid close by our project where we can begin to reclaim the colpid by placing that neutral, safe, simple clay into that colpid, perhaps drilling down deeper and tapping the geothermal energy which we have a lot of in our area and turning that into some sort of greenhouse project or maybe a reforestation project, whatever. We're at that engineering discussion now. But if we could actually take an existing abandoned colpid that you can not do much with and use it for reclamation and processing material, you now then become the focus of reclaiming something which is an environmental issue and the byproduct would be a very green, sustainable lithium and borate material. That would be the absolute cat's meow. It would be the most beautiful project on the planet.
Speaker 3:Well it would. If you give more than you take, then what's not to like?
Speaker 2:Right. And because the borates are water soluble, you're not talking about any CO2 emissions, and if we can find a way to extract the lithium in a very safe manner, that's perhaps even CO2 neutral or negative right. All of a sudden you can say we have the most sustainable products for the critical raw materials. Switch over in the world and they're in Europe. We can ship them very quickly by electric mobility, whether it's trucks or trains, and now you have an overnight supplier of these materials. I'll just mention here it's important. Europe is 99% reliant on these critical borates, which are an absolute must in the green deal. You cannot recycle them. They're a one time use reaction and they buy all of them from Turkey.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. Well, look, much of what this conversation has been threaded through as regards to China illustrates the vulnerability of having that single source supply chain. It's just, it's not good for that party, let alone the recipients, because it puts people under all sorts of pressure and it doesn't work in that way. Do you know what? It's really a lovely theme and a flavor in all of this that shows where you've been and where you are, where you're going.
Speaker 3:This business about water and, let's be honest in a lot of aspects to do with mining, especially lithium, as it happens, where we are with water for local communities is so important. So I know again in the document I read before I met you and did my due diligence, you know water monitoring and preservation and just reading from that document, water access, accessibility and restoration, tackling local air pollution, biodiversity and cultural heritage management, community engagement I've got to be honest with you, peter. When I came over and looked around, I was quite shocked Just how much I mean isn't a very green environment at the moment. If you can trigger, if you like, a refocus in a country that perhaps hasn't necessarily focused on this for various reasons, and help them with that, again, you're giving more than you're taking. And the final point on this those three things I mentioned earlier, that your company's sort of title recharge, that final one, looking at employment, partnering with regional universities, royalties and capital investment supporting downstream manufacturing. You know this is all so important and if I haven't mentioned it in this I'm going to mention it again now. I know Apology if it's a repetition.
Speaker 3:We really have to start finding the resources to build batteries in situ or as close by as possible. Parting stuff all around the planet just is not justifiable. And given that there are resources close to hand and you know you're talking about two significant ones right here in all of this it's what we must do, otherwise we are in absolute risk and would deserve to be called hypocrites. You know what we're really trying to achieve. We're taking kind of two steps forward and two steps back, so we're achieving nothing. So I think localizing supply with consumption, with manufacture, and then, of course, inevitably at some point in time, recycling, all make sense.
Speaker 3:Going back to Brookfield then, alex, your kind of journey, and where you began when we were talking about this earlier, and like your dad says what you now understand and can apply from that here who we can't get specific about names. I know there are confidentialities and all that sort of thing. Do you have a sense of who is going to be working with you on this? Is it a European play? Is it an American play? Is it an Asian?
Speaker 3:play. Can you talk about that, or am I getting a bit political or a bit tricky?
Speaker 4:I can talk about the philosophy, at least from my perspective, but I do follow the doctrine of the one, one humanity approach where doesn't really matter where you're from, it doesn't really matter what nationality or color or age or whatever.
Speaker 4:So long as a vision is aligned on on generating wealth for the community not just financial wealth, but happiness and environmental good and that vision is aligned, no matter where they are in the world, it doesn't really matter. In my mind, the most important thing is that we have that vision that we agree on and work together on thoroughly and making sure that the community that we're so much involved with is truly benefiting from the project and truly benefiting not just economically but just general outlook on their local community, on the local environment, on the quality of their water, their quality of their air, the outlook for their country and the community of their kids. I think that's the most important thing. Whether you're from China or from United States or from Brazil or you name it, I don't think it really matters. I mean, at the end of the day, we have to realize at some point that this is one world, one society and one humanity and it's one chance we have to protect ourselves from the onslaught of climate change. That's already here.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, look, I'm glad we've got a young person on the call with us, peter, because I think it's important to just be reconciled to.
Speaker 3:It is, yeah, that sort of thing. So let's get practical for a minute. I'm not going to get into numbers, because I'm sure it's an awful lot. You've spent so much of your time in this. And again, why am I happy to be associated with you? In that you've got form. If people look at what has your company, what have you done in the past? What's your track record? Can you be trusted? You know, if you look at that story you described about, you know what you put together with BioWash, why you did it, how you did it, what that's meant since that time. You've got form, mr Palkowski, and that's good because it's good form. So what are you looking for now? Who do you want to work with? How can somebody listening to this podcast now help you be they in, you know, the capital markets or a political arena, or maybe I don't know electric vehicle OEM or something. What are you looking for?
Speaker 2:Roger, it's a. You know. Alexander put it very well, and I think what I could just add to that is that we really have a country which has a fantastic society, very capable people, and what I'd like to do is I would like to make with the SERB a project that we can all be very, very proud of. That's world class. Nothing like being on the winning team. No one gets to brag more than the winning team and Serbina, the people, the infrastructure, everything is there for this to be. The resource is just. It's a gift, if you will. It's just a gift.
Speaker 2:The project, how you make it and how you develop it, is what's important and, quite honestly, because of the infrastructure, because of the skill in the country, because of the just the fantastic culture they have and the history of who they are, this can really be something that will be talked about for decades of how it all came together and how it truly is the most sustainable and unique project on the planet, and perhaps at a benchmark, a very high benchmark, of how you extract, group around materials whilst you're actually repairing some historical issues that came about because we just didn't know any better at this time.
Speaker 2:Right, so this can end up being a model, and I think it belongs to the Serbs. They're fantastic people. They've been extraordinarily welcoming to me. It's a place I love to go to and work and I'm just now really at a point where I'm waiting to see what the political lay of the land decides to do, going forward with my project, because everything we can possibly do and now it's really in the hands of the Serbian government it's up to them now to tell us what they would like to do and accomplish.
Speaker 3:Okay, I understand, but I think you make some very good points there. Play the cards that you're dealt. That's what we all have to do in life. There are things that you would like that you haven't got, but you use what you have got to be in a part of the world, to be a country where you've got natural resources that can significantly impact your own economy, let alone the ambition of Europe, the wider Europe. And there's to Alex's point about you know, one world. We're all trying to do the same thing. We just have to make sure we don't fall over each other or bash into each other in the attempt to bring it, bringing this all together.
Speaker 3:But I think, whether one wants to call it a gift from God, whether one's called, you know, divine intervention, whatever it is, that stuff is there. So it's there for a purpose, and it's great to hear you explain and detail what you're trying to do to bring that purpose to life, to make it commercial, social, environmental, all of those things. Gentlemen, thank you so much for your time. This has been fascinating and I've enjoyed having two guests from two different generations, because I think it's very easy. No disrespect to you and I, peter, to the older folk talk about things in a certain way. It's always good to have a younger perspective injected into it. So, alex, thank you for that. Are you going out for some lovely tapas and a few beers tonight in wonderful Barcelona?
Speaker 4:Tomorrow's Monday morning, Roger, so I'm back at the office.
Speaker 3:Oh yes, of course. Sorry, of course. Well, I'm definitely not going out. We've got a raging storm on the way here in the UK. It's not minus 10 like you've been experiencing of Peter, but we're softies here in England. We panic if we have two centimeters of snow.
Speaker 2:We had a good 30, 40 centimeters. It really snowed. There you go Minus 10, which is cold for this part of the world.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but look just to conclude. I wish you both well. I wish the whole business well. Euro-lithium and Borates needs to be a part of the European story, particularly and I hope it isn't listening to you both talk and reflecting on the journey you've had. If anyone's going to make it happen, you guys are. So I genuinely wish you well with all of that. Anything you'd like to say? Just to close, peter, would you like to say anything Just as a final word?
Speaker 2:Well, thank you for taking the time, Roger, to talk to us about the project. For myself, with respect to humanity, I was going to put it very well. I couldn't be more proud of hearing him say that he sees himself as an individual on the planet. With many other human beings, we're all just really all one and the same. There's no difference between any of us. We need to work together and there's so much opportunity for the next generation to make things better and do things better.
Speaker 2:I'm excited for them. I really am. I think they can pick up where we left off and make things to be even better from all mankind and it's important that everyone on the planet benefits. There's no use having part of society being wealthy and the part being broke, because it's just no fun that way. So everyone needs to be on an equal level playing field and has to be open, democratic and free thinking world. And as a check as a check born check I can tell you I really value that, that capacity to be a free thinking human being. To me it's extremely important.
Speaker 3:Well, on that note, Alex and Peter Palkowski, thank you so much for your time. This has been very enlightening. I wish you well, like I said a moment ago, and hope to see you both soon sometime. Roger.
Speaker 2:thank you, Look forward to seeing you next time, thank you, thanks, roger.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to the show and make sure you follow Roger on LinkedIn, where you'll discover almost all there is to know about the spectacular Electric Vehicle Revolution.