Nathaniel William Horadam

This is a hill I’m going to die on. And I’m going to be pedantic and obnoxious about it for the next three years.

The moderator on my conference panel today (inadvertently) referenced the Department of War.

So when she asked me a question shortly thereafter, I immediately said “Just to be clear, there is no such thing as the Department of War.”

It’s the Taco Bell ground beef of TACOs.

The “read an old book that isn’t Sun Tzu, Marcus Aurelius, or Machiavelli” Challenge

Beware the Fake TACO.

Spooked by markets, he makes stuff up to a credulous press. Gets the calming headlines, and the situation hasn’t actually changed.

🤡^2

Yeah. You can’t TACO this. You can only pretend to TACO. And at this point the Iranian regime has no reason to dial back immediately if he does.

My bad. And thanks to @ericcolumbus.bsky.social for calling it out.

It felt believable though!

Looking forward to speaking here at the UNC Clean Tech Summit tomorrow morning on...*checks notes*..."Mitigating Critical Minerals Dependence on Adversaries."

Ah yeah...*refreshes feed*...that'll be a fun one.

Buckle up, folks.

I hate to give an adversary credit, and it’s still too early to say for sure…but Iran pulling the (non-nuclear) Samson Option out of Israel’s playbook might end up being one of the more strategically brilliant military decisions we’ve seen in a long while.

“So Nathaniel, what did you end up doing with that degree in Middle East Studies?”

“Well, I got to tell a lot of people I f***ing told you so when we finally went and f***ed around in Iran”

Been offline the past 5 hours did I miss anything

Well I’m not gonna lie. When I read The Reckoning I didn’t think the modern catalyst would actually be a repeat of the 70s oil shocks but…uh…I guess here we are

Yeah the Stratfor guys have always been over the top. But that’s their entire sales pitch.

Roughly even with a slight edge to spodumene. More expansion there in recent years. The US clay projects that aren’t using DLE are all sulphuric processing (i.e. Lithium Americas, Ioneer)

Lithium highly dependent on it too.

It looks like a mid-December bowl game logo

It is absolutely needed for batteries going forward. We’re not ditching the ternaries overnight, even with this shift to iron-based cathodes.

But yes, we are curbing demand growth and limiting cobalt’s long term criticality to the sector.

Applicant Self-Disclosed 48C Projects Applicant Self-Disclosed 48C Projects

Some of these were among the self-disclosed 48C tax credit recipients (most aren’t public):

www.energy.gov/mesc/applica...

Others won MESC battery grants. Still TBD on how many projects move forward. These companies do not like speculative risk, and EV market throttling may have dialed back plans.

An untold story of BIL & IRA was how much movement it generated from petrochemical giants to plan onshoring midstream production in the battery supply chain…lots of stuff with much broader uses than just EV battery production.

But they needed the growth of that market to justify investments.

This is incredibly on point.

Spot oil prices grab the news, but it’s the impact we’re about to witness to petrochemical and derivative production that should really scare the shit out of folks.

It’s the sort of shock that could ripple through our global industrial economy for many months.

Looks like we’re opening a can of worms that’s risks inflicting far more devastating damage on our allies in the region.

I'll say I highly doubt anyone in the admin envisioned bombing major refineries and desalination plants at the outset of this.

The problem is there's no face-saving TACO on the table now, and there are forces outside his control at work. So he's likelier to greenlight total war to "win" than TACO.

And I say this as someone who largely believes our WW2 bombing of German and Japanese cities and civilian infrastructure was justified.