“Much of the world's oil doesn't go to people just driving their cars to the mall. I mean, a big part of it goes to the trucks that pull everything around, to the ships that sail everything around, to the airplanes that fly everything around, to the plastics and to the precursor materials that go into everything that you wear. I mean, the buttons on your shirt, the soles on your shoes. It’s… everything.” ~ Byron W. King
TRANSCRIPT:
Joel Bowman:
Before we get started, Byron, I was just looking at the time zone differences here. I know you're in Pittsburgh. I didn't realize that Pennsylvania was a commonwealth or designated as a Commonwealth. I thought that was a yolk only we once and former colonists labored under. I didn't know that it extended to Pennsylvanians, too.
Byron King:
It's one of those things that goes back to colonial days, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Commonwealth of Virginia, and the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Then there are 46 states and four commonwealths. Although Puerto Rico is considered a commonwealth as well. It has colonial roots. I used to know the answer to that or I used to have an explanation for it, but I actually don't recall why that is. Ben Franklin-ish kind of things or something.
Joel Bowman:
One of those historical anachronisms. Byron, you and I have known each other for a little while now, longer than I've care to mention. I don't want to date our young dapper looking selves, but you are a man who wears many hats. A historian, an energy investor, a international geopolitical commentator, Well, for listeners who perhaps recognize your name and probably they've seen you around the traps for the last couple of decades, I'd say, writing alongside Bill and some other well-known cast of characters throughout the newsletter publishing world, do you want to just fill us in a little bit by way of a bio to get started? And maybe talk us through up and until how you got to meet Bill and came to working with and writing alongside him?
Byron King:
Thanks very much, Joel. It's really a pleasure to speak with you and certainly to be on your podcast. I have been part of the Agora Familia since, I believe, around 2002 in one way or another. I've been on the payroll. I was on the payroll at Agora from about 2007, and so the next 15 years. I met Bill Bonner as a subscriber. I was just a reader of The Daily Reckoning. One day I was reading my Reckonings and he made some comment. This is about 2002 or so, he made a comment about the war in Afghanistan. I was just a reader. I was Joe reader out there, and I was a free reader. In fact, I wasn't even ...
I thought, "I have a bunch of friends just got back from Afghanistan and I know a few things about what's going on over this." So I send him a little email, "Dear Bill Bonner, we've never met. You don't know me. But I have a bunch of friends just got back from Afghanistan. Here's what's really going on." Next thing you know, we had this discussion going on. Next thing I know, he's printing my emails to him in The Daily Reckoning and I was his friend. Then eventually I became his friend in Pittsburgh. I was a dear friend. Like, "Oh my goodness. This is starting to warm up."
Joel Bowman:
You're moving up the ladder here.
Byron King:
Next thing you know we started having this very nice correspondence. Then one day I went to one of the Agora conferences, The Vancouver Investment Conference. And I talked to Addison Wiggin, an old name from the past. Very still around, doing well. And I said, "Addison, hi, I'm Byron King. I'm your unpaid correspondent in Pittsburgh." And he says ...
Joel Bowman:
That's right. Unpaid correspondent. I remember that.
Byron King:
He said, "Would you be interested in starting in writing for us and we'll pay you?" I'm like, "Yeah, sure." "Just freelance." "Yeah. Okay." So I started writing Whiskey and Gunpowder with Dan Denning, who we know, Jim Amrhein, he's still around as well, and myself. I said, "What do you want me to write about?" He said, "Well, you seem to know a lot about energy and military stuff. So my first article I ever wrote for Whiskey and Gunpowder was the Ghost of Colonel Drake. Colonel Drake being 1859, drove the well in Titusville. Kind of the birthplace, the DNA of the modern oil industry. Although people in Canada say they drove an earlier well and people in West Virginia say they drove an earlier well. But Colonel Drake gets the credit. We started Whiskey and Gunpowder. I would write about energy and the oil industry. We were writing about military things, US strategy. I mean, the war in Iraq.
I remember this one article I wrote about the Sicilian invasion of ancient Greece when the Athenians invaded Sicily. And somebody says, "Why are you writing about the Athenian sailing across the Mediterranean to invade Sicily?" And I said, "I'm really not writing about the Athenians sailing across the Mediterranean to invade Sicily. I'm writing about the war in Iraq, I'm writing about the war in Afghanistan."
Joel Bowman:
This is actually a Trojan horse for me to get my point across, to go back to the Greeks.
Byron King:
I would write about Herodotus and I would write about ... But it was fun. We picked up a lot of names, and Whiskey and Gunpowder was a highly successful newsletter. Then one day in 2007, the phone rings, I picked it up, and it's someone from Agora. And they said, "Hey, Byron. The guy that edits our energy and mining pub, outstanding investment, just quit. You want the job?" I'm like, "Is it a real job?" "Yeah." "You pay me?" "Yeah." "You guys have healthcare coverage?" "Yeah. Don't give that job away."
Joel Bowman:
Sounds like a real job.
Byron King:
Literally, I hung up. This was in the morning, about 8:00 in the morning. I got in the car, I drove to Baltimore, which is about four and a half, five hours depending on traffic. I had lunch. I came home and I told my wife, I said, "Hey, I got a new job." She says, "What kind of job?" I said, "You know that Agora Group down in Baltimore?" "Yeah." I said, "They offered me a job." She's like, "Do they pay you?" And I said, "Yeah." She said, "Healthcare coverage?" "Yeah." And she said, "Great. Because you hate your other jobs so do this job."
Joel Bowman:
I liked that she had the same filters as you. That you get paid, there is healthcare...
Byron King:
I get paid, there's healthcare coverage, and we'll do some fun things. Anyhow, that was 15 years ago and I'm still around, part of the Agora family. I think first time I met you was we actually went to Titusville together.
Joel Bowman:
I was going to mention that.
Byron King:
I think it was 2005.
Joel Bowman:
I think it was probably back in 2005 because I'd read that piece that you wrote in Whiskey. I just mentioned it to you somewhat offhandedly maybe on the sidelines of an editorial meeting or something where we fleshed out these ideas. Within a week, you had sent an invitation saying, "Hey, if you're keen on having a look at this, why don't you come on up and we'll do an old school dynamite frack? I've got some buddies in the industry who can show us around." That was a real hoop. A blast, I got to say.
Byron King:
And that's what we do. You were up there and one or two others. I had my two children with me. And we went up to Titusville. It was a beautiful, gorgeous fall afternoon. The trees were beautiful and gorgeous, leaves of Western Pennsylvania. We go out to this a working oil well. I knew these fellas. They were doing an old time ... Well, it was an early frack, but it was an old time exploding the well. Literally, they would drop a charge down there. they called it a torpedo. And they would drop it down to the oil bearing zone. And then they covered it with water to keep all from blowing up out of the hole. And boom, they exploded and they fractured the well.
They started doing that in the 1860s. There was some colonel or some general from the Union army, got wounded in battle in the Civil War. He couldn't be in the army anymore so he came back. But he knew a lot about explosives so he went to work in the oil fields. And so they came up with it. So fracking, in a sense, has been around for a long time. Although, today with hydraulic fracking, it's quite different than exploding things. For all the listeners, readers, viewers out there, it's an old story, it was a fascinating, old story. And that's how we started, that's how we really got up close and personal to the oil fields.
Joel Bowman:
For sure. It's very interesting because that dovetails very nicely into the something that I want to get into with you here. And that is an email that you sent around, like the old days, send on a letter and it spawns all these different branches here. Down here in South America, we say, [foreign language 00:11:54], to go for the branches. But anyway, the email that you sent earlier in the week, and I've got the article here was linking to a column that cited a well-known Goldman commodities analyst, Jeff Curry, who's been around the traps for, goodness, I think 30 odd years, maybe more, very well-known. And he said he's been examining the commodities markets, of which you're very familiar, and said he hasn't seen anything like it in his entire career.
And I want to get this quote right here because it's a pretty powerful one. He says, here it is, "I've been doing this for 30 years. Never seen markets like this." Here's the key takeaway, "This is a molecule crisis." He said, "We're running out of everything. I don't care if it's oil, gas, coal, copper, aluminum, you name it, we're out of it." And I guess we're starting to see that reflecting itself in prices across the board with oil at its highest mark since 2014, I think. A basket of commodities covered by Bloomberg, a couple of dozen of them from ags to metals, to energy all across the spectrum were really, really ramping up here. So I guess, first, is that similar to your reading, with your experience in the commodities markets? These big shortages that are driving prices? What do you see when you look out across the horizon?
Byron King:
Well, I mean, I'm old enough to have been around for a few things. There are cycles and then there are really humongous cycles. So we're in a humongous cycle. Not to say that it won't be resolved, but I mean, as people say, the cure to high prices is high prices, the cure to low prices is low prices. But there's more to it than that really, because we're changing the whole investment paradigm industry in what is passed for the industrial revolution for the last 200 years. I mean, when Colonel Drake drilled his well, getting back to the 1859 and Colonel Drake, I mean, people lit their houses with whale oil. I mean, petroleum was this exotic stuff that they skimmed off of creeks and they sold it as a patent medicine.
There was no petroleum. So to the modern mind or the modern ... A lot of people think, "There's no petroleum. I guess there were no gasoline engines. I couldn't drive to the mall." That's right. You didn't have any internal combustion engines and you couldn't drive to the mall, but there was no mall. And when you got to the mall that wasn't there, there was no stores selling clothing made out of plastics. And you didn't have natural gas to heat your house and you didn't have electricity for your light bulb, to illuminate.
The industrial age has been a coal age but a petroleum age as well. Because you can't have electric wire without copper, but you can't have it without something to wrap around a copper, which is plastic. Much of the world's oil doesn't go to people just driving their cars to the mall. I mean, a big part of it goes to the trucks that pull everything around, to the ships that sail everything around, to the airplanes that fly everything around, to the plastics and to the precursor materials that go into everything that you wear. I mean, the buttons on your shirt, the soles on your shoes.
Joel Bowman:
Every molecule.
Byron King:
It's everything. The medicines, you think you're taking an antibiotic and you can label it as that. But if you really go back to where it all started, that antibiotic began in an oil well somewhere because the materials in which they ... The medium in which they grew the bugs that they wound up pressing in to it, the little plastic bottle that it came in. I mean, if you didn't have that, we would live in a very different world. Actually, we wouldn't be here. Somebody else would be here. We would've gone off, would be some alternative universe.
Joel Bowman:
Is there a shortage of molecules?
Byron King:
Yeah, of course. Of everything we can get into.
Joel Bowman:
For sure. I guess, right out the gate, an obvious question presents itself and that is what do you, as someone who is a trained geologist at one of those fringe institutions, I think, it was Harvard university. One of those ...
Byron King:
Wild and crazy place.
Joel Bowman:
So what do you say to people who essentially advocate for a world in which all of those processes, those very, very careful processes that you just outlined in which we take these raw materials, these petroleum-based materials, and turn them into finished goods, and all of the energy inputs that are needed along that value chain, what do you say to people who want to go back to an era pre that? To a so-called carbon neutral era? I mean, it seems like we're asking for trouble there.
Byron King:
They're not just asking for it, they're calling in the artillery on their own position. I mean, it's completely totally destructive. I mean, if you want to say we need to be better about using our energy, you want to be more efficient about energy, you want you want to change life. Well, yeah, except when it comes to changing lifestyles, I mean, how do you plan to do that? Are you going to lock the world down for two years and hold everybody at the point of a gun, and if they drive their trucks in front of your parliament building and honk their horns, you're going to arrest them all or something? I mean, how do you plan to really get this done other than to make life miserable for everybody? To borrow from Ernest Hemingway, "Slowly and then all at once."
I mean, that's a very, very, very long talk, you know what I mean? Before we come here, I showed you a ... This is a piece of copper. This is elemental copper, literally chopped out of the ground with a rock hammer. This is a rock hammer, which helps to prove that I'm a geologist. Literally chopped out the ground in the Keweenaw Peninsula, the upper peninsula of Michigan there. I mean, this is copper. America's first mining boom was in about the 1840s in upper Michigan, upper peninsula, where people went up there and literally chopped this stuff up. This is the copper that that era of America used for its tea kettles and to line its ships and to make its wagon wheels and make copper nails to hold the shingles down on people's slate roofs and stuff like that.
We don't have this anymore. Well, I mean, you can find it as an exotic specimen every now and then. I mean, this is 99% copper. Today, copper mining, people are mining fractions of a percent of grade of copper. How do you mine fractions of a grade of copper? Well, you go to a mountain somewhere in the Andes, big mountain in the Andes, and you put all sorts of explosives in the ground and you blow it up and you haul this rock out in the great big, huge trucks, and you crush it, and you process it, and you go through all sorts of chemistry. And eventually at the end, you wind up with copper, which you make your electric wire or what-have-you.
At every step of the way, the explosive, the trucks, the facility where they crush it, the facility where they process it, the facility where they turn it into copper, all the trucking along the way, the ships that haul it across the ocean or whatever, if you don't have some stored energy in the form of hydrocarbon or various materials that come from hydrocarbon for your chemicals, that's not going to happen. So people will say, "Well, we're just going to go to electric cars." Your electric car uses about four times, maybe five times as much copper as your normal conventional internal combustion car. I mean, you're talking about increasing ... Just in the auto sector, you're increasing the use of copper by four X and five X. So when the man says there's not enough copper, that's partly what it means.
Joel Bowman:
And that's just one, of course, that's just one metal. This is just one element we're talking about.
Byron King:
One element on the periodic table. That's just one. I mean, we could go to other things. If you want to do exotic stuff. This is a specimen here, this is a titanium ore. This is rutile. Titanium dioxide. This is a beautiful specimen. I mean, no way I'm going to throw this one in the crusher. These crystals are as big as my thumb. I mean, if you want this thing, maybe I'll take 2,000 bucks for it as a mineral specimen. But it's not for sale.
Joel Bowman:
Where does this come from?
Byron King:
Well, this came from Graves Mountain in Georgia. Again, chopped out with my hammer. It's a unique geologic locale, but we don't have any of these anymore. When I say we, pretty much anywhere in the world, you don't find this stuff anymore. Maybe one or two here and there. You can go to Graves Mountain on a Saturday afternoon dig and maybe dig out a few of these things. But most of the world's titanium comes from very, very disseminated mineralization. What do you use titanium for? Well, it's everything in the white paint, all the way to a landing gear on airplanes. So where does most of the world's titanium come? It comes from Russia. I mean, let's all get mad at Russia. Let's all blame Russia for everything so that they can shut off titanium. They'll shut down Boeing in about three days if we don't have any titanium to build the jets with. Now we've covered two elements on the table. There's 90 others.
Joel Bowman:
So we've got a couple of ... I mean, you've touched on a few points here, but a couple of key takeaways thus far, I think is A, we're not just raking this stuff up off the front lawn anymore. These are hugely energy intensive processes in order to be able to get this stuff from whatever highly pressurized cavern. It is a subterranean, extreme environment up to whether it's painting your walls or driving your car, what-have-you. But the second component and from the Andes and to Russia, you've now mentioned, is not all of these elements, these raw materials are in geopolitically friendly jurisdictions. Which adds a huge price premium or at least a certain amount of market volatility that might be this kind of at the whims of just hoping things go the way that you want them to go. But that's not always the case.
There's two angles to that geopolitically unfriendly jurisdictions. There are the geopolitically unfriendly jurisdictions where their government has contrary interest to our government, there's that kind of thing. But then there are the geopolitically unfriendly jurisdiction like Minnesota, where a very significant mine for copper, nickel, cobalt, there's several different proposals in Minnesota have all been shot down. They've all been killed off by the environmental lobby. Another geopolitical jurisdiction, California. You got to try opening new mines in California. Nevada, you can mine Montana, Idaho as if the ... The US and to some extent, Canada. Even Canada has become an unfriendly place to try to do any major projects because ...
Byron King:
It's not just that the permitting is so hard, it's the level of opposition. You get sort of I call it permanent capital. You know how BlackRock goes out and buys up entire neighborhoods, buys all the houses and nobody can ... You have to rent now. You can never own a house because BlackRock owns them all. Well, you get that same east and west coast permanent capital. And it funds these environmental lobbies and they come in, and their job is to stop projects. It doesn't matter the merits of the ore deposit, it doesn't matter the merits of the geology, it doesn't matter how many water quality analyses you do, how many air quality analyses you do, it doesn't matter how carefully you're going to run your mind or whatever.
And if you've ever been around a modern mine, you'll see the absolute lengths to which the modern big guys go to to be safe and be careful and not be environmental stewards. There's those sort of geopolitical issues. And you know what? It's not even just a mining thing. I mean, a lot of people say, "We need more titanium. We need more copper here." It's a mining thing. It's sort of a mining thing. Your deposit is where it is. If it's not there, you can't mine it. If it is there, you still might not be able to mine it. It's a mining thing. But then, all you've done when you've blown up the rock and hauled it out in a truck is you've hauled out a bunch of rock. Now what?
Now you need an entire industrial chain. You need the mills, you need the processing facilities, you need the refining facilities, you need the downstream facilities that keep adding value to it, add value, add value, add value. And the people who know how to do this in the world today, we call them Chinese. We don't call them Americans. We hardly ever call those kind of people Americans anymore. There are very, very few places in America where you can go to school and actually learn about, for example, rare earth refining. I mean, at one point, there were no places to go. Now there's Colorado School of Mines and a few other places around the country. China has entire universities that are devoted to teaching people chemistry metallurgy, hydro metallurgy, extracting these minerals. And they're capturing that part of the value chain.
I'll just add one thing because I know we're going to talk some more of it. China is actually getting out of the mining industry. They don't want to dig up their ground as much anymore because they've got a huge environmental problems, water problems, food problems. They don't want to do that. They would rather buy the materials, process them in China down to a certain value add level, and then sell them to Western companies and sell them with strings attached saying that, "If you guys don't build a factory in China, if you don't share your technology with us, we're not going to sell you the materials you need." That would be the rarers, the permanent magnets, the phosphorous for lighting systems, things like that. We could talk about that all day.
Joel Bowman:
For sure. And if I'm not mistaken, China has some enormous percentage of the world's rare earth deposits, 90 plus percent or something. Am I in the right ballpark there?
Byron King:
You are absolutely in the right ballpark. I mean, you see a lot of figures and a lot of these figures are fudged figures. Well, China used to control 95%, but now it's only 80%. Well, really, when you get to the sweet spot, to the stuff that you can actually have a magnet and put it in the alternator of your car or have a phosphor and put it in your light bulb, things like that, China's back up around. They're way, way, way over 90%. What they're doing is, for example, in the US, there's a company called MP Materials, which mines rare earth ore at a place called Mountain Pass, California. It's a legacy operation going back to the '50s. Otherwise, they would never be able to build it today.
But they literally mine the material, they crush it, they concentrate. They put it on in trucks, they haul it down to the port of Long Beach. And when those ships get done unloading in Long Beach and Los Angeles, they put the material on those ships and they send it back to China and we never see those molecules again. I mean, China isn't processing those on behalf of MP Materials. That's not what they call a tolling agreement. They're just selling them the ore, China gets it. And then they export it in the form of high value added materials, whether it's your microwave oven or your air conditioner or ...
Joel Bowman:
They send us back iPads and sneakers.
Byron King:
Yeah.
Joel Bowman:
I mean, all of these little tiles add up to a pretty dismal looking mosaic for the future of energy independence. If not only the US but in the west as well. So talk a little bit about how ... Because you touched on BlackRock just before and the idea of permanent capital and they're having such a mammoth share in the market. I'm talking BlackRock and Vanguard and these gigantic funds. When they move into the kind of mindset that is very high focused on environmentally sustainable governance, or ESG is another buzzword around now, when they go long on that type of regulatory framework, what does that do for American energy independence, and how much is it sending folding those cards to jurisdictions abroad?
Byron King:
Well, there you go. I guess you'd call it postmodernism. The philosophical postmodernism has transformed itself or it has beamed itself down as this ESG movement. And you get permanent capital, you get really big funds, really big organizations. They own a whole bunch of shares of all these different companies, pick her name, whatever you want. You had the one funded, owned enough shares in Exxon that they could influence other shareholders and they got their people on the board of Exxon. So all of a sudden Exxon went from saying, "We're an oil and energy company and this is who we are and this is what we do." To saying, "We're going to be carbon neutral and we're going to throttle back on this and that."
Joel Bowman:
That was just in the summer of '21, I think.
Byron King:
Just three, four months ago. Six or five months ago. Or you look at other big companies, Shell Oil, the Dutch company, or BP, British Petroleum, as it used to be called, as President Obama used to call it during the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the British Petroleum, BP is their name. They're basically saying, "Well, we don't want to be called names, we don't want people to think harshly of us. We're going to be deinvesting in our traditional business opportunity. We're not going to drill as many wells. We're not going to explore as much. We're going to walk away from certain project, we're going to walk away from this big, huge gas project off of Mozambique or we're going to walk away from this opportunity offshore, Brazil or wherever."
What it means is they are intentionally, consciously underinvesting in their business. When you say, "Who cares about Exxon?" "Well, I care about Exxon." I do not own a single share of Exxon. I don't think I ever have. Maybe I've bought and sold, I don't know. But I do not own a single share of Exxon. But I do care that they produce oil, gas, chemicals, plastics, what-have-you because I live in this world.
Joel Bowman:
You want to turn the lights on. Wear some shoes.
Byron King:
I like it when I flip the switch and the lights come on.
Joel Bowman:
Button your shirt up.
Byron King:
I like having little bull plastic buttons on my nice shirt. But when they underinvest, maybe we won't notice it today ... Well, we won't notice it today, tomorrow, next week, next month. But if they underinvest for the next year or two, by year three, we're going to begin to notice. Well, guess what? First of all, during COVID, there was a lot of underinvestment just because people are sick, can't work, can't show up to the office. Entire areas were just off limits. You can't fly anywhere, you can't drive anywhere, you can't cross borders. There was a lot of underinvestment for two years just because of COVID.
And now as we wake up coming out of COVID because I mean, the COVID is ending. It's not over, but it's ending. That's a whole another discussion, but as we come out of it, we look around and we say, "Hey, wait a minute. Geez. People have been underexploring, under drilling, under developing, underplaying their geophysics, underdoing for the last two years. And we've got a couple more years of this as we look out on the whole ESG waterfront. What happens then? Well, if you don't invest in, go out, explore, drill fine, so what do the markets tell us? They're going to have a shortage of oil in the future. I guess, I'll bid oil up to $90 a barrel, maybe $100. How about $110 or $120? I mean, I've seen estimates of oil at $300 a barrel.
Of course, when oil's at $300 a barrel, the economy crashes and everybody gets laid off. We'll see what happens. You'll see what the markets do. But then the other angle on that is that when a Western oil company walks away from developing a big oil or gas project somewhere, guess who else moves in? Either the state oil companies, the national oil companies of those other countries, Chinese capital moves in. China has plenty of permanent capital as well. They know how to write checks just as well as BlackRock and Vanguard. And if you pull out of here and you leave a vacuum, somebody else's capital will come in.
Joel Bowman:
Exactly as you would expect. As you said, we've been, goodness, I don't know how many years, but it would've been probably since the last peak in oil around 2014, thereabouts, that we've had this kind of cyclical turn. And as you mentioned, undercapitalization, underinvestment, under exploration, and now we're reaping the high prices of that under attention, I guess, to an entire sector. So let me ask you, because the people who are advocating for this, great transition, which they never fully get around to explaining how it's going to be funded, although we know the price tag is something extraordinary.
I think Janet Yellen put it in the ballpark of $150 trillion. I guess they just print those. I have no idea where they all come from. Those people will say, "Okay, Byron, it's going to be tough. We're going to have to move from these fossil ideas, I guess, of the old oil and gas and the old stalwarts in delivering our energy. But what we're looking forward to is this utopia where we've got windmills and solar panels and all the rest of it." So talk a little bit about how that doesn't quite compute, doesn't quite deliver, how the sun doesn't shine, the wind doesn't blow, and all the rest of it. Because it seems to be a big gap between wishful thinking and cold, hard reality there.
Byron King:
For sure. I mean, windmills and solar have a place in the world. I call it a niche. They are niche performers. I mean, just to do windmills and solars, what do you need? You need steel, which comes from iron ore, which comes from rocks in the ground. You need coal to make the basic steel. You need coal to make the pig iron, and then once you have the iron, you can melt it. But you still need electricity, and where do you get your electricity from? You can't do big industrial scale electric things off of solar and wind because they ... Unless you have huge capacitors that somehow store the energy. I mean, I don't want to get all electrical engineering on you here.
But to do solar and wind, you need a lot of steel, you need a lot of exotic elements, you need a lot of rare earth, you need a lot of silver. The polysilicon that is in the face of the solar panels. I mean, polysilicon is a very exotic material that the ... I mean, where's most of it made? Well, China. For windmills, you need all these big, fancy, permanent magnets in there. And these rotating machinery as the big blades go round and round and round. Where do those rares come from? China. Magnets? China. You've got other issues and these things have a life cycle. They aren't really renewable in the sense that after, pick a number 10, 15, 20 years, these machines, they too will wear out. They aren't going to last forever.
Maybe you can rebuild them. Maybe there's a recycling element to them, but right now, what happens to old windmill blades? They bury them in landfills. Well, that doesn't seem very renewable. That's just the machinery about it. But you mentioned, the wind doesn't blow the sun, doesn't shine. The sun comes up and the sun goes down. And when the sun comes up, the little solar panels are out there and you go from no electricity, no electricity to, "Good. We're making lots of electricity. Lots of electricity." Sun goes down, no more electricity.
What happens when you want to run your society during those nighttime periods or if it snows or if it's cloudy day or something like that? Well, now you need baseload power. Well, where's the baseload power come from? Well, traditionally coal. Nuclear, that'd be great. But we've really put a lid on nuclear. In the west, I mean, in Germany, they're shutting down their new plants. I wrote an article for Bonner Private Letter about that in December. Germany's energy Stalingrad
Joel Bowman:
That's right. Excellent metaphor and not a very good one for students of history who know how Stalingrad went.
Byron King:
It didn't work out well for the Germans the first time, they want to do it again. I don't get this. Some people don't learn. They don't learn too good, as the saying goes. Right now, as we speak, what happens when the sun goes down and we need to get that base load balanced again? We need to balance the load so that literally the lights will go on, so the refrigerators keep running, people's computers keep working, so that you can charge your Tesla at night or what-have-you. How do we get that power? In a lot of places in the United States, the way to get quick, almost instant electric power is you turn on your natural gas fired turbines. You have out there in the gas fields, you got the pipelines.
Again, pipelines are made out of this thing called steel. That comes from ... They're put together by big, heavy machinery that are run by this stuff called diesel fuel. And they're wrapped in these protective coatings that are made out of this stuff called plastic, which comes from this thing called oil, which comes from these things called oil fields. In comes the natural gas to the great, big, huge gas turbines that are made by Siemens and General Electric and what-have-you, made out of all sorts of exotic materials like titanium and all sorts of fancy magnets made out of materials that came from China.
We spool these babies up and we generate this electricity and now we balance the load. So by day, we are subsidizing solar power because they all have tax breaks and tax credits and everything for their solar panels and such. By day, we're flooding the market with this subsidized solar power. And by night, we're having to turn on these merchant power systems, these natural gas fired systems just to balance the load. We're really ruining the economics of a broad scale electric power industry. I mean, across the country, public utility commissions in every single state are wrestling with this. I mean, where the public utility goes to the commission and says, "Listen, we're having to pay these high rates back to the homeowners for their solar panels by day on the sunny days but that doesn't support our grid."
And then meanwhile, we have these idle plants that we have, these natural gas plants on each side of the sunrise, sunset, we have to pay ... Those are capital costs, too. We have to pay for those. We don't use them for eight or 10 or 12 hours a day but then we have to spin them up at night. You get into public utility law that is very, very complex. The lawyers are having a field day with it, the lawyers and the economists who deal with this. Great jobs for those guys, those gals. There's a whole thoughtless sense to it all. Then you go to a place like California, which has reached something, on a sunny day, something like 30% of the California on a sunny day is solar-powered or so-called renewable power. Okay, but now you destabilize the whole grid with on again, off again power. And they're importing power from British Columbia, they're importing power from Nevada and Utah and other places. How do you do that?
Joel Bowman:
I mean, it goes back to what you were saying about Germany and what you wrote. I'll link to this article below for our listeners because it's really well worth their reading. It's a little peek into the future just as I'm down here in Buenos Aires, Argentina is a little peek into America's inflationary future if it doesn't pull its breeches up. But I think you can look into the future by having a look at what's going on in Germany. And if we keep down this path as Germany has done, not only do we watch just basic electricity heating costs go through the roof, as we've seen natural gas futures, and oil price skyrocket over the past couple of months during this winter.
But also you eventually have to revert if you put a whole load of your power load onto an unreliable, so-called renewable or green energy grid. When that doesn't come through or when the wind doesn't blow, as they found out in Texas last year, then all of a sudden you're back to dirtier fuels. Coal, in the case of Germany. Where you're undercuting your whole reason for going green in the first place when you're ... I think it was actually lignite they went back to. It was even worse.
Byron King:
They come burning lignite. Is there a dirtier fuel than lignite? The answer, no. I guess if you could burn your front lawn or something...
Joel Bowman:
You could burn a rain forest.
Byron King:
They're burning lignite to release the energy to boil water, make steam, spin a turbine and literally keep their lights on and keep their little street cars running in diesel cars.
Joel Bowman:
Crazy. So what about people who say, "Okay, this is all well and good. But man has innovated past paraffin. We've had whale oil." In some parts of the world, in Indonesia, they're still burning through forests." We used to burn various types of fuels until we got to this high grade, high ERORI of the petroleum energy return and energy invested ...
There you go. Until we got to these high ERORI fuel sources. So we've just got to have a bit of faith in technology, we've just got to have a bit of faith in innovation and tomorrow's battery cells and tomorrow's whatever. They're just going to be so much better that we just need to transition to the eutopic future and we'll all live happily ever after over there. What say ye, Mr. King?
Byron King:
Well, there's an old expression that I heard it long ago from a guy at Westinghouse, the old Westinghouse Electric Company, which was this massive company that it did everything. It made electrical appliances, it made electrical equipment, built nuclear plants. I mean, it built the nuclear reactors for Navy submarines, things like that. But they were very stovepipe company, they had a lot of different branches. And the guy said, "If we only knew what we know, we could really do much better." And when you say, "People are innovative, there's lots of patents out there." Yeah, there are. There's lots of patents out there. And if we knew what we know, we might be able to cobble something together.
That takes political leadership and that takes policy making people who actually understand this stuff and who didn't just read a couple magazine articles or didn't just spool up after reading a New York Times article or two about, "We're going to kill ourselves. We're ruining the world," and all this sort of stuff. We're ruining the world and we're all going to die, okay. I grant you that. I mean, in rare earth, for example, there was a not too long ago study that I saw, heard about. They compared patents in the rare earth arena by different countries and they adjusted per population, what-have-you. For every patent in rare earth, which are important if you're going to do renewable, for every patent in rare earth that happens in the United States, there are 35 patents in China.
Joel Bowman:
Wow. This is population adjusted as you mentioned. That's an important caveat there.
Byron King:
When it comes to who's going to own the future, the people who are going to own the future are people who are thinking about it and thinking about tying it all together. Which is not to say that China's 10 feet tall, but Chinese people are 10 feet tall, that they strongest gorillas and all this sort stuff. No, no, no. I mean, they're people, too. But they think about it. And it doesn't mean that I want the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, approach to running life in America or Canada. Even though sometimes you wonder. You kind of wonder, I mean, how much of that rule book over there have they brought over here?
Joel Bowman:
Gramsci's long march through the academies is alive and well.
Byron King:
These long march through the academy. I mean, when people say, "We have a carbon dioxide crisis." I said, "Well, all I can say for sure is that every year, there's more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere." It's a very, very, very small fraction. Some people say, "Well, it's enough to change the climate and everything else." "Well, I don't know that the models are that good." Other people who are smart have different models of it. I've spoken with Russian scientists who cover this and they think that Western scientists are just they don't know what they're talking about. And the Russians, they know a few things about the high arctic. I mean, half their, of countries in the north of the Arctic Circle.
But we have really a global environmental crisis. I mean, if you look at how much crap is just being thrown into the rivers and streams and the off flow of agriculture chemicals and things, I mean, we're ruining the ecology of the planet, I'll grant you that. I mean, it just seems to me that the policy ought to be broader than just this crackdown on what I'd call the center of gravity of modern life, which is a petroleum-oriented or hydrocarbon-oriented energy and materials economy. When you say, "We've got to turn the valves and we've got to shut in the oil wells and shut in the natural gas. We're going to put the coal companies out of business. They should all go bankrupt." The woman who almost became the comptroller of the currency that President Biden nominated be the comptroller of the currency, from Cornell Law School. She was an immigrant from the Soviet Union. She wrote her thesis on A Marxian analysis of the economy. She said that in order to ...
Joel Bowman:
Omarova, I think her name was.
Byron King:
... have the future that we want, we're going to have to bankrupt all the oil companies. It's like, "Well, to bankrupt all the oil companies means our energy's going to go away. Our classics are going to go away, our agricultural fertilizers are going to away, our chemicals are going to go away. I guess that means you just want to kill us all off. Well, no, thank you. No, thank you. We're just fine killing ourselves off without you helping."
Joel Bowman:
Right. Saule Omarova I think her name was. Another of her quotes, I think she was taking the scorched earth approach. Not only to oil and gas, but I think to banking as well. She wanted something like some federal deposit accounts where, of course, the government would be able to control maybe through a central bank digital currency or some such. Where you spent your money, with whom, at what time, under what circumstances. Because of course, central planning worked out so well for the Soviets. She was a School of Moscow graduate, I think.
Talk a little bit, Byron, about a potential kind of transition fuel. It strikes me that when people talk about, "Okay, let's throw the baby up with the bath water." Let's throw the entire petrochemical industry just in the drink. First of all, there's not enough room in St. Greta Thunberg's arc for two of every species at this point, let alone the whole human race. But is there some possibility that we could transition to say, a larger percentage of our energy needs reliant on, say, natural gas or nuclear, if we could get the political will behind it and move away from either geopolitical risk in some places? I mean, you speak about the United States, there's no shortage of natural gas there. One would think that would be a perfect strategy for ensuring a bunch of jobs, reinvesting in America's energy independence and its energy grid, and having a somewhat of a lot, well, a lot cleaner source than say coal or German lignite, for sure.
Byron King:
Well, it is a rough and rocky road ahead to change. I mean, we're looking at 200 years of inertia here. We're looking at a lot of what we call the built economy, the things that run on things that we used to have. I mean, the easements and the rights of way kind of like with the railroad, they are where they are and they were established long ago. And it's if you want to build a new railroad today or change the trackage of a railroad, how do you do that? I mean, I talked to a guy once at the US Department of Transportation and I said, "What's your biggest problem when it comes to building roads?" He says, "The biggest problem that we encounter most is graveyards." Every time they want to build a road or expand a road, they have to dig up a graveyard, move all the caskets.
Transition the economy, every time you want to do something slightly different, you're going to have to dig up somebody else's graveyard. You break their rice bowl or dig up their graveyard. You know what I mean? Now we said, "The thing is we have what we have." And like I said earlier, if we knew what we already know, if people could actually synthesize what we already know, we can do this. And in fact, this is future looking in terms of where Byron is going with his writing. We'll talk about that in a few moments, if you wish. But if we knew what we know and we started to really tie things together, we could take what we have. We could take where we are and begin a reasonably decent transition and people who are part of it could make some money at it investment -wise.
We can't just turn the valves and shut off the oil industry because a third of the oil goes for transportation and a third of it goes for industry and chemicals. I mean, it's not just people driving to the mall that's destroying the world. Don't take what you see every day when you're out and about. Don't take that as the problem or, natural gas. Let me just leap frog ahead a couple of things. I mean, we must absolutely revitalize the nuclear sector for base load electricity. Lots of great ideas out there for that. There's uranium. I mean, I could get into thorium but that's a whole another ... We could spend all day talking about thorium.
Joel Bowman:
It's another episode.
Byron King:
A whole another episode to talk about thorium. Just basic uranium reactors have an incredible future for base load electricity. Another thing and another point, and this is something that I'm working on right now and I'm going to be coming out eventually, give me a month or so with a report, it's going to be on fuel cells. You take a solid oxide fuel cell. You pass the hydrocarbon over it, natural gas or you could use diesel or you could use almost any hydrocarbon you want. But because of the chemistry and the physics of a fuel cell, and I don't want to get into it, this isn't going to be mechanical, electrical engineering class here.
But because it is an immensely efficient way of removing the energy from that hydrocarbon, turning that energy into electricity and capturing and controlling the emissions, I'm not going to say that there will be zero emission. Fuel cells will never emit another molecule of CO2 again, but we will sure emit a lot fewer using fuel cells. And when you say, "Well, tell me more about this fuel cells." I don't want to get into the electrical engineering of how they work. I mean, you can read, I'll tell you more when I write about it and you can read about it eventually and you'll know about it.
But the materials that go into these fuel cells, they are familiar materials, again, from the mine mill factory side, copper, nickel, platinum, palladium, rare earths. Oh my goodness. Yttrium-stabilized zirconia. You want exotic metals. I mean, we got to have yttria-stabilized zirconia to make these things work. Is there a molecule shortage of that? You're damn right there is. But what that means that if how to get yttria or if you know how to get zirconia, you're on the right track here investment-wise. That's one example.
Joel Bowman:
Well, let me ask that because I want to get around to your writings and where people can find them. But before we do that, give us a broad sweep. I don't want to undercut any of your own paid subscribers here, but for investors who are out there, who are they've been having a bit of a turbulent ride in the markets potentially so far this year, to say the least, if they've been investing in the new shiny things and they're looking at getting back to basics as it were.
And this of course, Dan Tom have been writing about their trade of the decade, which very generally speaking is long energy, long, old energy that is. We spoke about this earlier in the year or late last year, rather, with Rick Rule, Winter Catastrophe Summit for Bonner Private Research. But when you are looking at ways to actively invest in this long term trend, what kind of sectors are you're looking at and how specific can you get with regards to sharing with us things that are on your radar?
Byron King:
Well, I'm still writing for one of the old line at Agora pubs. I work with Zach Scheidt on one called Lifetime Income Report. Every week or so, I write a little column that goes out in every month, I write another longer column for the monthly. It's a value investing kind of approach. I mean, just good basic companies in good basic sectors that can survive the tsunamis of what's going on. Nothing big and flashy, no Facebooks that are going to drop 25% one day, that kind of a thing.
Joel Bowman:
You mean we can't power the world with cat videos and the likes?
Byron King:
No. You just can't power the world with invitations to your birthday party kind of thing.
Joel Bowman:
Who would've thunk it?
Byron King:
That's where I'm at right now. In terms of what do I talk about? I talk about the classic things. I mean, I talk about gold, silver, just basic. I mean, there's definitely an upside to them but they also have what I like, which is the limited downside. And even if they do drop during a market crash, what's the first thing that recovers after a market crash? Gold. It's the most liquid thing there is. People sell their gold to pay their margin calls on Facebook or on Tesla or whatever like that because they got slammed. But then the thing is when they sell their gold, somebody else goes in there and buys it as with a lot of other things. Why do you think Facebook dropped 25%? Well, because it went no bid. Nobody wanted to buy it up there. Maybe some bottom feeding sharks came in to buy it down there. But I actually think some of those bottom feeding sharks are going to wish that they had found a lower bottom, so there's that.
I like classic traditional energy. I mean, a company like Exxon or a company like Chevron. I mean, I was writing about Exxon a year ago when the share price was about 50% of where it is now. When the dividend yield was something like, I don't know, 10%. And you say, "Well, Exxon, who needs to be told to buy Exxon?" Well, I don't know. A lot of people seem to be told to buy Exxon because the share price has gone up significantly in the last year. Somebody was buying into it. And even with the people on the board who were like, "We're going to go ESG and we're going to decarbonize ourselves." They're making all this money in spite of themselves in the current oil environment. And I don't see the current oil environment self-correcting.
I mean, it's not like government policy. Not this government, not the one we got now, not this ... They're not government policying towards more oil lower prices. I mean, you may have seen our wonderful Secretary of Energy, the former fashion model, tour guide at Universal Studios, Governor of Michigan, Jennifer Granholm, when she was asked, "What's your solution to lowering energy prices?" She literally laughed at the person who asked her that question. Somebody asked her, "How many barrels of oil does the United States use every day?" And she says, "Well, I don't really have that data." I'm like, "You're the secretary of energy and you don't know how many barrels of oil the United States uses every day? Why are you there?"
Joel Bowman:
You would think of all the pieces of information, that particular data might be one that would maybe spring forth from a well-fertilized mind, but doesn't appear that that's what we're speaking about at this juncture.
Byron King:
And it's an easy number. I mean, it's in the realm of about 20 million barrels a day to run the United States.
Joel Bowman:
It's a nice round number.
Byron King:
Nice round number. You just have to remember that. You don't have to get down to the nearest 100,000 or whatever. Just throw that out and you'll sound like you're smart, like you know what you're talking about. Where does it come from? Well, I mean the United States imports more oil every day from Russia than we do from Saudi Arabia or Mexico. I mean, nobody knows that. Again, let's get into a war with Russia here. Unless we can somehow make another Mexico to make up for that deficit. But anyhow, in terms of like, "What am I looking at?" I mean, basic energy, US natural gas, certain pipeline plays because ... Not all pipelines. I mean, if you have a pipeline to a declining energy basin, well, you have a 50% full pipeline. That's not a good pipeline.
If you have pipelines into the Permian basin, which is 98% capacity, that's a good pipeline. So things like that. I have been spending a lot of time talking with the mining place and the processing place for the battery metals, the technology metals, the energy metals, the rare earth place. As I've mentioned earlier, in North America, US, Canada, we have some mining place. We don't have a lot of the downstream place. It's just not there. There are a couple that might turn into something.
I mean, Canadian companies, a company like Appia Energy, A-P-P-I-A. Appia Rare Earths and Uranium is their full name, they have the best deposit of a mineral called monazite in North America, maybe the world. It's the highest grade minerality I've ever seen. It's unbelievable minerality. Monazite for again, not to get into all minerology on you here, but it's a fabulous ore for rare earth. The problem is with Monazite is you also get low levels of uranium and thorium so it's a radiation problem. They're in Saskatchewan. They have a relationship with the Saskatchewan Research Council, which has a licensed nuclear capable facility.
So when they process their minerals, when they get there ... They're still developmental. But when they get there, when they process the minerals, the Saskatchewan Radionuclide site, they're going to take those radioactive minerals away. That's a good thing. And we'll be left with the molecules we want, which is the rare earths, the neodymium and the dysprosium and the erbium and terbium and gadolinium and all those good stuff that make things work. I've been working on that. It's a model of an investment paradigm that feeds on where the war world is going in the future. Again, if we could only know what we knew. That's going to be ...
Joel Bowman:
I think we have a title for this episode. If only we knew what we knew.
Byron King:
If only we knew what we know.
Joel Bowman:
Well, Byron, I'm cognizant of the fact that we've run a little over time here, but I'm always thrilled to talk to you. It's such an encyclopedic knowledge of all of the aforementioned subjects and so many more. Besides, we didn't even get into half of the things that I wanted to talk about but we can save those for another podcast in the future. And in the meantime, as you mentioned, it looks like trends in motion are going to stay in motion, at least for the remainder of this administration and who knows how long beyond.
What that means, I guess, is to torture a metaphor, a rich vein for you to tap with regards to individual investments in a field that you know probably better than anyone out there. So that's good for followers of Byron King and good for followers of Bonner Private Research. We'll be talking to Byron plenty more in the future if we're so lucky. So mate, thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate.
Byron King:
That's great. I thank you for your time and your courtesy. For all the viewers and listeners out there who watch this or listen to it, thank you so much. I truly appreciate that you would give me any of your time at all. And I hope that we've helped you with your thinking.
Joel Bowman:
Excellent. Byron, thanks a lot, man. I really appreciate it.
Joel Bowman and Byron King: If we only knew what we know