00:11:30 · JC Lozano, Ryan Deng
[00:11:30] S1: Mining projects in the next Well, 10 the next eight years. We've got two, and we'll, know, have a couple more following very quickly here. Mhmm. And so, you know, we wanna build, you know, the next generational mining company Wow. Fundamentally. And so in ten years, we're gonna be well on our way to doing that. We'll have 10 projects. So, you know, they're increasing in size. The first project is like a $100,000,000 in CapEx. The next one is about $250,000,000 in CapEx. There's some other stuff going on as well. Then we've got like, you know, we're just gonna keep moving up orders of magnitude in terms of the size of the projects, the size of the impact. [00:12:06] S0: So are there mines available to be bought in The US? Funny. When you're taking over like an old mine, my question is like, how do you identify it? How are you implementing your autonomous services? Right? Cause to me it seems like, they're doing... It's built out for just humans to operate. Right? Yeah. To drive the trucks, to shovel out the dirt. Shovel it by hand. Well, I'm sorry. Maybe not anymore. I'm not familiar with much. [00:12:27] S1: So it's it's pretty interesting. It's actually like a really good use case Mhmm. For autonomy. So on the process... So like, if you think about what mining is, right, and then what you basically do is you figure out... Somebody figures out there's like some minerals underground [00:12:41] S0: Mhmm. [00:12:42] S1: That they think will be [00:12:42] S0: How do
00:12:42 · JC Lozano
[00:12:42] S1: they figure that out? That is a great question that gets us deep into the ecosystem that is kinda junior mining. Mhmm. But basically what happens is is that geologists typically that's where it starts. They'll have a theory or hypothesis about this part of the subterranean ground has either old oceans or rivers or geologic activity, which causes minerals to sort of coalesce and form and sort of concentrate there. Mhmm. Very simplistically. And so they have a hypothesis, like, oh, we think that there's gold and then there hills, roughly speaking. Then what you do is then there's, like, a whole ecosystem that is essentially, like, you need to drill what are called exploration drill holes, where you, like, basically drill deep down into the earth. You take core samples, you analyze them, and try to figure out, okay, there's, like, actually, like, some amount of metal under there that is economically viable. That's, like, a fairly long process. Generally, throughout that process, they're sort of, like, increasing their certainty about, like, the the resource underground. So they're trying to map out the ore body Right. Trying to understand, like, it's laid out three d in space underground, which is, like, crazy we're able to do that. And then eventually, they get to this point where it was, again, geologists that started this and exploration companies. Mhmm. So they get to this point where they have, like, characterized the resource well enough underground. And as they're doing this, they're raising funding from either the private markets or the public markets. Mhmm. And then at some point, like, the valuation of that resource will kinda peak.
00:14:05 · Ryan Deng
[00:14:05] S0: I
00:14:05 · JC Lozano
[00:14:05] S1: see. And it it hits its first peak. And that's basically because people are super excited about the resources underground. Uh-huh. The challenge that those folks have is basically that they're geologists, fundamentally, exploration folks, and so the market typically starts to question whether or not they'll actually be able to bring the resource to market. So they actually, like, characterized the resource on the ground, and now you have to, like, go and mine it. Right? And then you have to process it to turn it into something valuable, and you need to do that all economically, and it's, a huge capital project. It's a lot of complexity. Mhmm. And so you get to this first peak evaluation, and then it kinda crashes out Mhmm. Because the, like, market sort of loses faith that that operational team is able to execute on it. Okay. And so... But at that point, like, you've... Like, the resource on the ground is well understood. Uh-huh. There's a lot of these. Yeah. They've typically gotten pretty far in the permitting process, so that piece is removed. And so you're able to buy these assets in kind of this, like, trough that they go through where they're like... The people understand that there's something valuable underground. They have a decent understanding of, what it would take to actually extract it. Mhmm. And so now it goes through this trough because the market doesn't actually believe they'll be able to execute on it. And so we come in at that trough, that second trough Mhmm. And we, like, we have an incredible operational team. So, like, we built the company to fill the gap of, like, we know what's underground, here's the market, we fill that gap in between of, actually bringing the project to market, actually building the thing and executing and running it.
00:15:29 · Ryan Deng, JC Lozano
[00:15:29] S0: So you're doing it, like, orders of magnitude faster and better than Yeah. Practices. [00:15:34] S1: Well, we're just doing the thing. Is that like, that is [00:15:37] S0: the part What processes are diff... What like, what parts are different, right? Because
00:15:40 · JC Lozano
[00:15:40] S1: Yeah. So to get to like the part that we're excited about why we call ourselves a software first Uh-huh. Kind of mining company is basically, our strong belief is that, like, basically, the only way you can do this with the labor force that we have in The United States and the Western world more generally is you need software and machine learning and agents to, like, automate a ton of the activities. Sure. Because we just don't have the labor force fundamentally required to, like, build the mines and refineries that we need to meet the impending demand. And so what we've basically done is we've built four software suites. One is called Capital Project OS. Uh-huh. And then there's Mine OS and Plant OS, and then one we call Biz OS, which is our business process automation. But fundamentally, all of those are addressed at different parts of the process that you need to do to, like, go and take something that is like a resource underground and actually mine it. So Capital Project OS is all about kind of using agents and software to automate a lot of the activities that go into the basic engineering, which is sort of how you build out your initial model of how you're gonna mine the thing Mhmm. All the way through detailed engineering, the way through to commission... Or construction and commissioning, and then PlantOS... Sorry, MineOS comes in next. This is our kind of like autonomous orchestration layer that basically orchestrates across all the activities in the mine. So this is both manned equipment and unmanned equipment. You have to tell where to go of every single day. Yeah. And then fundamentally, all that resource is brought to the surface, and then you put it into your processing plant. And then PlantOS is this, like, reinforcement learning layer that orchestrates and controls our facilities to refine the materials. Mhmm.