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0:00:02 – Announcer

Wall Street Unplugged looks beyond the regular headlines heard on mainstream financial media to bring you unscripted interviews and breaking commentary direct from Wall Street right to you on Main Street.

0:00:16 – Frank Curzio

Hey guys, I have a fascinating interview coming up and it’s with Dr Scott Tinker. Maybe you haven’t heard of him. I haven’t heard of him before last week and I was at a field trip in the middle of the DJ Basin in Denver when I met him and the company had him do a presentation, talk about the macro part of energy, and at first glance, just listening to that, you might say, oh okay, it’s boring. It was probably one of the top ten presentations I’ve ever seen, which is saying something, because I’ve seen thousands of these, read thousands of them. I’ve presented everywhere, in numerous countries around, and it was from the perspective that was non-biased, about energy, talking about clean energy, which is no clean energy, but not so much where.

Oh, these guys are idiots if they’re thinking about solar, if they’re thinking about EVs and things like that. I mean, this guy has been doing this for 40 years. He’s the CEO of Tinker Energy Associates, chairman of the Switch Energy Alliance. Switch is a couple of documentaries I produce. He has numerous videos and education material on basically every form of energy. He interviews some of the top people in the world within these fields on that site. He used to be a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, direct emeritus of the Bureau of Economic Geology, just a global energy explorer, an educator, he’s done over a thousand close to a thousand keynote lectures to audiences around the world. You’ll see, even during this interview he’s just spoke at I believe it was California, he’s going to other countries I mean, the guy just speaks every place and, from his perspective, also did a TED Talk in 2022, but from his perspective, his goal is talking about the dual challenges of producing more energy, which is needed, and not just needed. But you could see, you know, okay, developed world and we live in America and stuff like that. But there’s a lot of poor countries where, you see, the lower cost of electricity leads to greater economic growth, and we can see that with Europe, where they’re not growing nearly as fast. Over the past 20 years, like 20% compared to what? Like 300% for the US, 500% for China, because the cost of electricity is so high. So how do we do this? How do we get it to everyone around the nation, which helps poverty, but coming from a non-biased source?

This is what this podcast is about. It’s going to both sides. I listen to both sides of the story and I feel like everyone knows the climate change story and how the world’s going to end and stuff like that and scaring the shit out of people. And then you have the other end saying like it’s all hoax and there’s a massive, massive middle guys that you have to pay attention to. So you know Scott is great at this and his. So you know Scott is great at this and his presentation was fascinating. I want to know what you thought afterwards. But let’s get to that interview right now and hopefully it blew you away as much as it blew me away when I was interviewing here. It is right now, Dr Scott. Thank you so much for joining us on Wall Street Unplugged.

0:02:57 – Scott Tinker

It’s great to be here with you, Frank, thanks.

0:02:59 – Frank Curzio

So I first met you about a week ago where we were at a field trip for a company and this company is a DJ Basin in Denver, Colorado. I went to go see their operations and fracking operations, which is really cool in the field, and they had you speak before we went out on that field trip and before that I haven’t heard of you. To be honest with you and then with your presentation, I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I have to say what you done in your presentation. They were talking about the macro energy and it may have been one of the top 10 presentations that I’ve seen, and I mean that and probably why you had a TED Talk, probably why you’ve had literally a thousand of these speeches and keynote speakers.

But what I love the most about it, Scott, is that you approach energy from a non-biased standpoint, where a lot of times we’re hearing, even politically, it’s zero emissions, carbon emissions Is it a hoax? Is it not a hoax? And you’re using data and facts and figures. That just blew me away. And I want to start there with the whole climate change and energy.

Someone’s been covering this industry for such a long time and called themselves an educator. Could you give us your opinion about clean energy, what we need to know about it, how it’s going to help the world. Is it actually clean? Questions like this that you address that I haven’t heard anyone address from a non-biased point, just blew me away. But I want to start with that and really get in deep with some of the things when it comes to individual clean energies like solar, like wind, like EVs. But I want to start with the clean energy theory because it feels like the last 10 years it’s been so distorted. You have two sides that are just like. It’s real, it’s not real. What’s your perspective on this? And I know it’s a very big question to start out with, but that’s the first one I am going to ask you.

0:04:38 – Scott Tinker

Yeah, well, sure it’s good to be here. I haven’t seen these questions, so it’s good to come at you live with them. You know there’s lots of words out there like green and clean and sustainable and all sorts of words, and they really don’t mean much. I try to be as specific as I can. So I think when people talk clean these days, at least in the wealthy world, the developed world, they’re talking about low emissions to the atmosphere, CO2 and methane. That’s what most people think. But if you think a bit more broadly I’m old, I grew up with the land, the air and the water as the environment that we needed to protect, and we still do so.

To me, there’s four pillars of that the land, the air, the water and the atmosphere and we’ve got to try to protect all of those. No form of energy is perfectly clean, if you will. They all have different kinds of impacts on the land, the air, the water and the atmosphere, and the goal, the objective function, is to balance those out and try to protect our environment as much as we can.

0:05:36 – Frank Curzio

So I want to tackle each one of these individually, because we look at EVs. Evs are the future. We’re going to see tens of millions of cars produced We’ve seen that already but nobody really talks about the batteries. They talk about the lithium and the extraction of lithium, but some of the things that you said where it’s how many batteries I want you to tell us how many batteries actually go into a Tesla vehicle and get into the raw material, part of how much EVs in terms of mineral intensive they are compared to, you know, combustible engines and things like that. Because when you look at the facts and the figures, it’s okay. Again, we’re not taking any sides here, but look at the facts and figures. You understand a lot of this stuff isn’t as clean as you think, right?

0:06:16 – Scott Tinker

yeah, well, optionality matters in energy and everything really. So I don’t mind EVs. They have a role to play, not the only role. The challenge with them is the fuel is not very dense, and by that I mean on an energy per weight basis, Frank. There’s not much density in a battery, a lot more density in fuels like gasoline and diesel. So that means you have to have a lot of weight fuel weight in the car to do what gasoline would do. 1,000 pounds in a battery.

Now I say a battery, it’s really a pack of batteries. Think of, well, on the big ones, the big sedans, think of 1,000 cell phones in one car and that’s kind of your little EV, a Tesla S, the big sedan, has about 6,000 to 7,000 cell phones in one car and that’s a lot. So if there are 1.4 billion vehicles in the world today and vehicle cars and scooters and anything with a battery and a motor is called a vehicle, but let’s say 1.4 billion, we’ve electrified about 60 to 65 million so far. There’s a lot more to go, depending on where you want to push that. Let’s start doing math. A billion vehicles 5,000, to make it simple is 5 trillion new batteries and in 15 or 20 years they wear out. You have to make them over and over. So this is not a sustainable thing in the classic sense that people might think.

All that stuff, all those metals to make those batteries, comes from the Earth. We mine it somewhere in the world. China controls the processing of that. We manufacture those into batteries around factories, we put them in vehicles and a lot of transportation in all those steps and then they wear out and we dump them into landfills. And you’d say, well, don’t we recycle them? No, we really don’t much, because that’s expensive. We dump them in landfills and we do it again. So this is the challenge. There’s about 600% more metals in an electric vehicle than in a combustion engine, and not in the chassis, it’s in the fuel, in the battery 600% more metals. And that may be okay again, for some uses, but not for all uses.

0:08:24 – Frank Curzio

And you bring up a great presentation. If you guys could see this on a YouTube channel, we’re going to bring up amazing slides and this is what blew me away when I saw your presentation. We look at the raw materials for power and transport. You say you know transportation and when you look at EVs, I think it was 700% more mineral intensive. And you provide all the minerals here lithium, nickel, manganese, cobalt, graphite, blah, blah, blah. Silicon, everything else but you also talk about solar and wind are 600% more mineral intensive than conventional fuels.

How come that doesn’t get more publicity in the media, where we’re just pushing these clean fuel agenda and it’s okay.

We’re not saying that you don’t use them, but let’s be honest and transparent about them, because at the end of the day, you’re a guy that I see and for me and I may be wrong on this but your chief concern you travel to 65 countries. I feel like you’ve been doing this for you know what three, four decades, maybe even longer but it’s how to provide energy and enough energy where everyone has access to it. We’re looking at 600 million people do not have access to electricity and these are things that you care about. You visit these poor countries and showing how energy is the future, no matter what kind of energy, but you want to do it on a responsible way where it’s helping the environment as much as you can. How come this doesn’t get more publicity? You think where the truth about how much we’re 700% more mineral intensive for EVs than combustible engines and 600% more mineral-intensive than conventional fuels for solar and wind. How come that doesn’t get more attention?

0:09:51 – Scott Tinker

You’re asking me to be a psychologist. I’m a scientist, so we probably both understand that there are agendas out there and energy underpins everything in the world. So the political agendas, the NGO agendas, the academic agendas, the industry agendas, even the church has an agenda around energy. So this is a global phenomenon. You mentioned something very critical. You mentioned 600 million people without access to electricity at all. Very critical. You mentioned 600 million people without access to electricity at all.

But it’s actually much worse than that, Frank. There are only about 1.3 billion of us in the developed wealthy world. 7 billion people live in some state of energy poverty, from extreme none to intermittent, not affordable, not reliable to them. 7 billion, most of the world, and that’s unsustainable. That’s about the only time I ever use that word when you see such disparity in wealth, because energy is directly tied to wealth. The more energy you consume up to a point, the more wealth you generate per person, per country. So when you have a lot of people pinned in energy poverty, not much energy, not much wealth, and the rich world just keeps pulling away, that doesn’t end well. It never ends well.

We’ve got to get energy to the whole world, and I’m not talking about light bulbs and mud huts. By the way, I’ve installed those Solar in Conchuca, Colombia, the indigenous Arhuaco village. They need it, they got started, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about energy prosperity. So we’ve got to get the whole world to come there, and I just don’t think most of us not our fault we were born into circumstances where we don’t understand what the rest of the world looks like and how they actually live. We won the lottery Okay, all the developed world. But we’ve got to begin to recognize the impact on the whole world of that kind of disparity, and energy really underpins all.

0:11:55 – Frank Curzio

Yeah, and you have a great presentation that talks to this, because when people speak about this, I feel like there’s a lot of opinions. But what you’ve done is you really provide facts, and I love one of these things that I took from one of your papers is you talk about the high cost. Electricity tends to drive down economic productivity and you show it. We see the result of this trend over the last two decades, where Europe’s economy has grown by about 20 percent, while the United States has grown by 200 percent, China by 500 percent. When you’re looking at Europe, how do you describe Europe? You had a lot of the slides I’m not putting up right now that I saw from that presentation that you showed us a week ago in Denver.

What’s Europe getting wrong here? Because you’re seeing the high cost of electricity and our electricity costs are all going up, but it still seems relatively cheap. I mean, how could Europe change that? Because there’s a direct relationship to how the higher cost of energy are leading to to slow economic growth compared to all the other developed worlds. How do they change this policy? Do they change this policy? Is it possible for them? Because it seems like you know this is a pretty big deal, especially if you wanted to invest in Europe. Yeah, I spoke out in california yesterday and they’re essentially in the same place as western Europe.

0:13:03 – Scott Tinker

Um, western europe leaders are passionate about the environment. They believed what they were told, that solar and wind and batteries would be both more affordable and more reliable. They are neither. And again, I’m not against solar and wind. They have roles to play.

But the data they were shown was something called the levelized cost of energy, the LCOE. That’s the cost of electricity where it’s generated, at the plant gate, at the turbine, at the panel, at the natural gas power plant, at the coal power plant. That’s the cost of the electron there. You still have to get it from there to a consumer. And because solar and wind aren’t always available not judgment, just the physics the sun’s not out and the wind doesn’t blow you have to have something there redundant to back those up and they have to be called on in real time to provide all the electricity that is needed when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. That’s very expensive. Reliability of grids with intermittent sources is very expensive. Of grids with intermittent sources is very expensive. That’s why the cost of electricity in part is much higher in Western Europe and in California than it is in places that have less penetration of those. Again, solar and wind have a role to play. Texas has a lot of wind, but you have to balance those out.

I’m not sure our decision makers either fully understand the challenges here or have decided to act otherwise because of their constituencies. So some of the very loud voices have been promoting this and continue to do so. Look what happened in Spain. We still haven’t been told really yet, but people do know. Physics knows what happened in Spain just last week. Yeah, blackouts, blackouts.

So, this is the challenge of large, large penetration of intermittent sources and trying to back those up Now. Optionality is great. I love the idea of having natural gas and nuclear and even some coal in parts of the world and solar and wind and hydro and geothermal. Optionality is great. Makes for a more robust portfolio. People on wall street understand portfolios completely, but you wouldn’t bet, you wouldn’t put all your money in one stock only and hope it’s a winner.

0:15:22 – Frank Curzio

Right, just crazy yeah, that’s a good point. And when you see these, so you talk about the, the politics I think we all know. You know politics, ok, constituents, we get it right. A lot of money behind, a lot of lobbying dollars, and they’re going to do it in their best interest, I think, which we’ve seen over the past few years. I think everyone has seen it. But but let’s talk about some of the agencies.

The big agencies that cover this provide statistics and you take their statistics and say, okay, wait a minute, since your number’s got a data guy. You say, okay, you know, we want to use more lithium, we want to use EV batteries, and you come up with this chart right here where, okay, so, based on these forecasts, right, these data you know that you’re using is supposed to be independent from you know that track, all energy and things like that. You look at worldwide lithium demand supply and you know, know, you push this out to 2035 and say, okay, you guys are talking about, you know, world filled with EVs, and you know. But yet, when you look at the total demand which is expected for EVs and you look at the worldwide lithium demand and supply, you’re looking at total demand and you have supply here, where you have unfinanced projects, recycled supply, operational supply and we’re not even doing recycling yet.

I think you said really, but unfinanced projects. I mean you’re looking at demand, outpace and supply by more than double and you’re not even going out that far. You’re going out to 2035, right? I mean, why Forget about the politicians? We know what their agenda is, we know what their motivation is, but what about the guys in this industry that are supposed to be independent to provide statistics? I look at this, you look at this, and say, okay, this doesn’t make sense. So if you show it to them, what do they come back and say to you?

0:16:49 – Scott Tinker

Yeah, and those are not my data. I have.

0:16:55 – Frank Curzio

I probably have a reference down there for who, who that data came from, but I’ve had mineral intelligence.

0:17:00 – Scott Tinker

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, um, that doesn’t even really include the demand from AI and data centers. Okay, and the electricity demand there is going to be phenomenal, as we all know, and it needs to be on all the time. You can’t have air conditioners going off in data and AI centers or things don’t work, so half of that energy is air conditioning or heating and half is the equipment itself, so the demand goes up even higher. I don’t think people want to really understand it.

What I typically hear is well, there’s plenty of lithium in the world. There’s enough lithium in the oceans to do all this. Well, yeah, and there’s enough gold in the oceans too, but it’s really finely disseminated and expensive to get it out, and so it’s kind of this detachment of resource and economics that happens. We have a lot of lithium in the United States, a big deposit in Maine, in Spodumene. I’m a geologist, you know great deposit, but they won’t mine it. Frank, they don’t want to mine. Okay, that’s a choice, but why are you also mandating electric vehicles? This is the detachment that goes on between the resource, the economics, and what we want or think that we need. And we’re coming to reality here, because who’s supplying all of this stuff?

China, China, brilliantly, not China-matching, in fact. I’m complimenting China. They don’t have that much natural gas and oil supply, so they went out and purchased the rights to process all of these metals in the world. They process about 80% of the world’s key metals and rare earth elements in China. This is a brilliant strategy that Belt and Road and other initiatives. They need EVs. They’re making about half of the world’s EVs today. They need the batteries that go in them. They’re the leading manufacturers and producers of solar panels and wind turbines. They need that. They want to export that to the world.

Good for China. China will mine. Now there might be human rights issues involved here. They can also do it very cheaply because of labor costs and all sorts of other things that China enjoys that competitive markets don’t. So this is the challenge. I think we’re kind of closing our eyes and saying we’ll just get this stuff from Asia, we’ll bring it here and we’ll deploy it and we’ll be green. Well, this isn’t green, especially on an emissions game. This is a shell game Because China, when producing all this stuff, uses coal, a lot of coal and other things too, a lot of coal, so their emissions go into our one atmosphere. We’re not helping the climate by exporting our production and manufacturing somewhere else and bringing it here on diesel barges, amazon trucks, one item at a time, to our businesses and our homes.

0:19:55 – Frank Curzio

It’s nuts, okay it is nuts and I just put up a chart here. She’s showing, and you know, resource extraction processing. But the processing part is with china, where you know guys, if you’re not seeing this again, it it’s on a YouTube channel, rare earths is counts, for you know, this is the processing in China Over 85%, it looks like. Lithium is close to 60%, cobalt is over 60%, nickel and copper, you know, pretty much 35 to 40%. And I guess a funny question to use. You know we’re in the middle of negotiations and it sounds like that we have like you know, things are going well now with China. They weren’t.

But from someone who looks at this from the mineral side and seeing how much we need China and China needs us, when you see the back and forth in tariffs, are you kind of laughing and saying, ok guys, when are you just going to come to a solution? Because it seems like you both need each other. But just seeing the processing with china and the fact that, yeah, how much they process in terms of mining and minerals, I mean there has to be, there had to be a deal. It’s probably always going to be a deal. But just the back and forth, I mean, what were your thoughts when you’ve seen the tariff nonsense and stuff like that, because someone who’s really behind the scenes, it’s probably laughable for you yeah, I a lot of opinions about tariffs and I have some of my own.

0:21:07 – Scott Tinker

I think they’re let me take it slightly different. Yes, we need China and China needs us. We need Asia, Asia needs us. So far, we’re a great market for the things that Asia produces, so that’s symbiotic. And they make a lot of stuff more affordably than we can here, so that’s a symbiotic relationship. If you listen closely, as you do, and many do, there’s interesting partnerships forming between China and Russia and India.

Narendra Modi is looking east and west, the Middle East, mohammed bin Salman opening up a lot of things. Now there’s these coalitions forming and those are huge markets. Again, 7 billion people don’t live in the developed world. These are markets that are opening to Asia and they will have options for their products that aren’t just in the West anymore. We need China. Unless we’re willing to start opening up and mining again and drilling and manufacturing and doing a lot of the things that we haven’t done for a while, we may need China more than China needs us as this rolls out, and I think Xi Jinping understands this extremely well.

Ok, so Mr Trump may be a great negotiator. Sometimes I wonder, sometimes I see it. I think Xi may be a great negotiator. Sometimes I wonder. Sometimes I see it. I think Xi Jinping is a great negotiator and I know Vladimir Putin is. You know I don’t like all his negotiations and his actions and the way he handles most things, but he’s cagey Okay. So this is a global challenge of the first order and we I live through the Cold War. This is a different kind and we got to get pretty self-aware very quickly that our security, our security, not just energy security, but total security relies on the globe. But total security relies on the globe. That’s just how things have been set up and we got to understand that quickly and clearly. We got to be very sanguine about that.

0:23:15 – Frank Curzio

No, it’s interesting take. And I want to transition to coal because I think you have a stat here that says and this is from your 2022. Again, I watched a lot of your presentation, especially your TED talk, that 47 coal supplies 47 percent of energy needs and oil is more like 26 27, natural gas is 12. I don’t know, you know again, that was a couple years ago but the point is that the amount of coal we still use maybe we don’t use as much, right, but china does and we know that and we’re okay with that I I mean, when you’re looking at the dynamics of saying okay, ok, it’s OK for China to use coal and then, like you said, what Amazon trucks ship us, that all the products and things like that, and what are your thoughts in terms of is there clean coal? Could we help the environment? Or is just like just giving it?

You know, pass it on that saying, hey, you know, you guys deal with it and nobody says everything, everybody keeps quiet, but you guys produce really cheap because the energy you’re using is incredibly cheap, what? What are your thoughts on coal? I mean, is it ever going away? Is? Is there clean coal? Is there, you know, some kind of optionality where we could use coal and help the environment, because China’s not going to stop using, are they no?

0:24:24 – Scott Tinker

so those numbers? I didn’t see the graph. Those numbers may have been for the power sector. Ok, the power sector, the power sector, total energy. Coal is less than that proportionally, but nonetheless coal is still growing in the world. We used more coal last year than ever before. Now it’s been plateauing in its percentage and actual numbers, so it’s not growing at the rate that it was. Natural gas is growing at a tremendous rate. So when you think about fossil fuels those would be coal, oil and natural gas you see the mix changing Natural gas more, oil, stable Coal less. But combined there’s still just over 80% of the world’s total energy.

Primary energy consumption comes from coal, oil and natural gas. The thought that these are going to go away and, by the way, that’s come down from 85% 60 years ago. 85% to 80%, look. So these things don’t change quickly. Percentage terms, actual terms, still going up.

Do we need coal? Of course it’s a very affordable, reliable fuel for most of Asia and Europe. Uk built on it, Germany built on it, the US built on coal and then we have transitioned to other things. There’s a fascinating relationship. It’s really important. Energy underpins the economy and healthy economies can afford to invest in the environment and it runs that way Frank energy, economy, environment. So we almost have to accelerate through economic growth to be able to afford to clean up the whole environment. And the acceleration into prosperity is very important to me, not only for human needs and human flourishing but for our environment. And that’s a little tricky thought for most people to make. They get the human flourishing piece but they really haven’t fully comprehended that flourishing piece. But they really haven’t fully comprehended that. And I heard three speakers yesterday from three different Indian reservations. I was out in Stanford speaking and one said we need more coal to get off of coal. I had never heard it put it that way but that’s exactly right.

0:26:44 – Frank Curzio

That is interesting. That really is interesting. And even when you look at coal and we and we look at solar and wind, uh, when you look at the statistics and I’ve seen this from you know numerous sources, but you actually had a slide of this as well about the total projected global waste by 2050, can’t we talk about how, hey, you know wind and solar are and solar are good, but you know, there is a part that you need to talk about that I feel like nobody talks about. And when you bring up this chart and showing the total projected global waste by 2050, when it comes to solar, when it comes to wind, I mean you have to factor these things in. When you’re looking at clean energy policies, right, but I feel like, from a public standpoint, our politicians, they don’t really explain this part to us. It’s just like, hey, no more fossil fuels, zero. Could we ever get to zero emissions? I mean, is that even possible ever? Even if you’re looking 30, 40 years from now.

0:27:35 – Scott Tinker

No, and the reason is we need no, you can’t, but even net zero, not just zero emissions, net zero, which means we are capturing and pulling more out as much out, and that helps to offset the emissions. We can’t even get there, and that’s okay. We can certainly reduce our emissions, which would be very helpful, and the reason is you can’t electrify everything. This is a great example you and I visited a drilling site together and we went to the hydraulic fracturing piece of that and they were. All that equipment was running on electricity Huge fat, you know, pipes of electricity, incredible. And there were these two, I think they were 15 megawatt generators, two of them sitting right there producing all the electricity for that site. And then that’s, they stopped telling us.

And I looked beyond that and I saw these big trucks and they said H2, cng and things on them which is compressed natural gas and hydrogen. And I said so you’re using natural gas to make the electricity right here? Yes, sir, we are. I said so, we’re burning fossil fuels to make electricity to run all these efficient motors. And, by the way, an electric motor is much more efficient than a combustion engine. Okay, that’s important, much more efficient, but the fuel itself in an electric car. That’s a less efficient fuel, we’ve talked about that. But here’s fossil fuels, here’s the electricity, and then we’re running all these motors so that we can say, well, that’s an electrified site, but where’s the electricity? And then we’re running all these motors so we can say, well, that’s an electrified site, but where does the electricity come from? It doesn’t grow on trees. Lightning makes it naturally, but we haven’t figured out how to capture that yet. So we have to make electrons, we have to create them from various processes and we need a lot of electricity.

So this is the challenge, I think. When you start going to scale Such an important word, scale when you go to scale with anything coal has huge impacts, mining and burning, sox, nox, mercury, particulate, co2, oil and natural gas, the drilling, moving, burning. When you start building solar panels and wind turbines at scale and maybe electrifying half of those 1.4 billion vehicles, 700 million vehicles we have 60 today when does it all come from and where does it go? And that’s what I told 1,100 kids in a TED Talk. I said because everything comes from the earth. We manufacture it in energy collection systems and they wear out. They all do. Wind turbines 15 to 20 years. Solar panels 15 to 20 years.

0:30:21 – Frank Curzio

We dump them back in the earth and we do it over and over.

0:30:25 – Scott Tinker

It’s not renewable. And I looked him in the eyes and said there’s no renewable energy. That’s just a myth, you’ve been told. And I laughed because I didn’t know that might’ve been my last lecture.

0:30:35 – Frank Curzio

Especially if it was in California. That is interesting. There’s so many places. I want to go with this. I guess we’ll say the electricity generation part is where do you see the majority of that? Because we see electricity demand and I think electricity demand is something I studied for the last five years.

I’m very much into AI and telling everybody that the amount of electricity we need, I don’t think people understand. They think they do, but I don’t think they really understand the amount of electricity we’re going to need. Where is that going to come from? Is it going to come from more solar? I mean, you have Elon Musk saying listen, if you look at the data, solar eventually is going to be the primary source of energy. Again, he could be talking in his book, which is fine and I understand CEOs do that. But is it going to be natural gas? Is it oiled? Are we just going to release these flood gates, which Trump wants to do, where much more production is coming? Where is it going to come from? We’re going through nuclear, but nuclear, a lot of the deals that have been signed by these AI companies are really going out 10, 20 years before this stuff really starts producing. So where are we going to get? What’s the primary source of the energy that we’re going to need for uh to fuel electricity needs, not just in the U? S but globally?

0:31:51 – Scott Tinker

Yeah, electricity represents about 25% of total energy consumption globally, 25 growing to 30%. So let’s call it even a third. The other two thirds is molecules, um, but it’s a very important part and it is growing. It’s going to come from all that. You know. It depends where you live and what your resources are. Every source of electricity the sun, the wind, geothermal, hydro waves, tides, burning molecules, coal, oil, natural gas, getting heat from uranium and thorium for nuclear those are all resources that come from the earth. So people use what they have where they have it to make electricity. Again, portfolios, optionality. A stable electricity portfolio has lots of different inputs. Not everybody is blessed with a lot of inputs. Texas is. We have it all, but not everybody does the trend.

I disagree with Elon on this. The first form of energy was the sun. It grew the hay that our vehicles, oxen and mules used to pull hay. You know they pulled their own food. That was thousands of years ago. We’re going toward dense, if I were to take. This is a nice analogy.

So in a nuclear power plant there are fuel rods. You put little uranium pellets in them. That uranium pellet is about a centimeter tall, half a centimeter wide. One pellet. Okay, stuff them in, then they activate them. That pellet, that little pellet, contains enough energy to drive a car from New York City to LA and back to Dallas, to LA and back to Dallas. One pellet Okay, so that’s dense.

Nuclear is a million times denser than wood and dung and batteries. So we are headed physics. It’s hard to negotiate with physics. Physics at the end of the day wins Again, not judgment, but we’re headed toward and we have been denser forms of energy. We’ve left wood, we’ve left hay and dung coming through coal into liquids. Oil, natural gas, a gas CH4, one carbon, four hydrogens is denser than all of those by weight and even denser still by orders of magnitude is nuclear. We are going toward nuclear. That’s the way the world is nuclear. So we are going toward nuclear. That’s the way the world is going. China and Russia, no surprise, are building 70% of the world’s large nuclear reactors today. They get it. They need to electrify their economies.

The US I think the time has come. We’re going to catch up. We led in the 60s and 70s. We let it go after Three Mile Island. We are importing our uranium oxides. We’re doing crazy things On a safety basis. The kilowatt hour for a nuclear power plant is safer than any other form by far. Those are the data on human lives. So we’ve got to get past the misplaced fear. We’ve got to manage it very well. But the US needs to go again and I know this is going to work for two reasons.

The tech sector has opened up and said hey, we need a lot of electricity and it’s not going to be solar and wind, because our demand centers need it 24-7, 365, reliable, affordable, always. That’s either going to be natural gas or nuclear. Nuclear will take a little bit longer. That’s one reason. The other reason is kids aren’t scared of it. I was trained to be scared of nuclear. I got under a desk in kindergarten during the Cold War because I knew that desk would protect me from nuclear bombs. Somehow we were just kidding our children, but I was terrified. Kids today aren’t scared of nuclear. They’ve been trained to be scared of climate change, but not of nuclear. So young people are going hey, high density electric, always on, affordable when it’s built, no emissions. Give me some of that. So I think things are converging and we’re going to move now. We’re going to move into nuclear again, which is eventually where things are going to end up for the most part.

0:35:45 – Frank Curzio

And it seems like that fits your thesis of adding energy and reducing emissions, especially when you see this chart again, like the projected global waste by 2050. Again, this is someone else. International renewable energy, but just the nuclear. How you know how? Like you said, dense, how much we could produce. Again, that might take a little bit of a while, but it seems like it solves your objective right, which is to really understand these technologies.

You showed pictures of wind turbines. I think you said there’s 40,000 or something in Texas and now they’re getting old. So what do they do? They got to take them down and they throw them back into the ground, right. And then you saw solar and you showed pictures of hey, people don’t show these, but look in a hailstorm, what do you do with all these solar panels? When you got to replace them. Like, people don’t talk about that, but it seems like that is a really great solution.

Do you see perception changing? I mean, it seems like it’s changing. Right, you’re seeing, especially in the US. But how long is that going to take? Because we do have a ton of production, of not production, but we do have a ton of uranium. I mean, I know you know this, but some people don’t where. 30, 40 years ago all the oil companies were producing uranium at one point, right, so we know where the uranium is. It’s just a matter of producing it. Do you see the US getting more involved in that? Do you think it could be quicker? And again, that might be a tough question, but I was curious your thoughts because it seems like nuclear solves a lot of the stuff that we’re talking about here.

0:37:01 – Scott Tinker

It does. It addresses a lot of the electricity side and it can even be used for heat. We need a lot of heat to make steel and cement and we’re always going to need molecules for fertilizers and plastics and other things. But it does address quite a bit of the electricity side. It will take some time and we’re just talking about fission. Fusion is still coming.

I’ll be in DC on Monday actually interviewing President Westinghouse talking about nuclear and the head of Georgia Power talking about nuclear. They built the two most recent reactors in the US. So it is. We’ve got to get back on track. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has to begin to regulate but not overregulate install. A lot of the protests and environmental challenges that go on forever won’t allow a CEO and a pro former to do this at all. It’s just too risky. So that has to be done well and then said that’s enough, we’re going to build these. They’ve passed all the hurdles, it’s coming, and again it’s bipartisan. Frank, the Biden administration, to their credit, was pro-nuclear near the end, and so is Chris Wright, who’s a very close friend of mine, the Secretary of Energy now, and he’s pro-nuclear. So I think when you’re pro-energy you understand the physics and the economics of these things and where we’re headed. And now it’s just a matter of continuing to move away from carbon toward non-carbon hydrogen and no hydrocarbons at all, which is nuclear All right.

0:38:30 – Frank Curzio

One last topic I want to touch on before I let you go here, because I could probably talk to you for two hours on all this stuff, because I’m fascinated.

You said, young people love nuclear, right, they’re not scared of it. However, you brought up something that is scary about mining and how young people are told about mining and how the whole climate change and how and you mentioned that how that scares the crap out of them, right, that this kind of false narrative of, hey, you don’t have to scare these people, we just have to be conscious of it. But you brought up this chart, which I found fascinating College graduates’ working preferences and you’re just breaking down my colors with definitely wouldn’t work, probably wouldn’t work, and you haven’t broken down to mining, oil and gas, construction, all the way down to the bottom at high tech and health care, and you could see high tech and health care, uh, probably would. Their preferences, definitely would you know, which is really good. But when you look at mining, holy cow, I mean, you’re looking at what 70 definitely wouldn’t or probably wouldn’t really go into that field.

Oil and gas is up there as well. To me, that’s just a crazy statistic, because what you’re explaining, the big point here, is we need minerals, we need extraction, there’s massive energy, right, we have to fill our energy needs. It’s the greatest thing ever. It’s great for economic growth. We want to do it in an environmental-friendly way. But yet our kids, who are graduates, are not really focused on this field because they see it as a negative. Uh, isn’t that going to create more, even more than today, of a supply, demand and balance? Because, you know, where are we going to get the bright minds to really go into the mining industry, to pull us to innovate, to find these new technologies, like we found with fracking and things like that?

0:40:04 – Scott Tinker

yeah, and again. Those, again, those are US data. Globally, that’s not the case. You see people I’ve been to China many times. There’s a whole. There’s a university of petroleum 50,000 students. There’s a university of coal Okay, there’s a mining university. Globally, people are going into these extractive industries and there are great jobs for them. They bus kids from middle school to these conventions and conferences in the extractive industries. So this is more of a Western Europe, us phenomenon.

And if you look at our graduate programs here in the US and things like petroleum engineering, 90% or more are international kids, students coming over to study, paid by their governments, and then going back, not our US-born students who would stay and work here, presumably. So this is a major, major challenge. They don’t see jobs here in it. We’re not mining Well, some administrations are trying to shut down oil and gas, so they’re not. Kids are right, they’re not hearing positive things and so why would they go into that?

The narrative needs to begin to evolve, recognizing that just because we mine and drill over there doesn’t make it green, and because those forms of energy are going to underpin our economies for decades to a century, we need to continue to do these things and have the talent base. This is an education challenge and I appreciate you, Frank, and people like you, being willing to share with your audiences some of these data and some of the reality. I just don’t think most of us think about it. We’re sort of our IQs and energy are pretty low in this country, because they don’t have to be high. We’ve always had it. It’s always there for us, affordable and reliable. We just assume it and we move on.

Coming in the US, ask yourself, why is that? And you hear it’s going to be cheaper, but your power bill is doubled. Why is that? You’ve got to believe your own eyes, not what you’re hearing and reading on whatever you feed yourself, but ask yourself has there been more brownouts? Is it more expensive? Why is that? Really, why is that? And that is really what we’ve been talking about.

0:42:30 – Frank Curzio

And why is it? I mean, is this just like a political agenda? Or you know, when I look at Al Gore and how much traction you know that presentation got and I know we had Leonardo DiCaprio you have actors and stuff like that to sell it even better. But for me I always pride myself in doing this podcast for 15 years is I want to get the real story. When you find the real story, I don’t care what anyone else is saying, I want to be there, I want to talk to professionals. I want to know why, like, like, it’s just constantly question yourself.

Right when I first started looking at fracking, I really thought I was going to go to these areas and visit every major shale area that I was going to go. There’s going to be dead animals all over the place when I first went there because that’s what I thought, just HBO specials saying how terrible it was. And then I learned about the technology and said, wait a minute, this doesn’t cause water contamination unless someone takes the water and dumps it in a lake. That’s different. Why do you think something like you know Algor and Natagen that gets so much attention but nobody wants to see the other side of the story? Is it just like people don’t want to understand it? Because, knowing both sides of this, look, I saw you in the field. You care, you’re visiting these poor countries, you’re showing how these people would benefit from energy, no matter what it is, and you are someone who cares about the environment. But why is it such an agenda where it has to be black and white in your opinion?

0:43:38 – Scott Tinker

Yeah, I don’t know really. The binary clean, dirty, good, bad, believer, denier. We brought in religious terms to this dialogue. I think part of it is Gabe. Al Gore probably was concerned about the quote hockey stick of CO2 emissions. Unfortunately, they made a lot of ties of that to other things.

Yes, the planet’s warming, some forced by human activity, but when you start to look at the impacts on extreme weather of that warming, that’s where the story ends in many ways. And the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change it meets every year, shows this in their own data. I can send you the sources of that. They show that with statistical confidence, high confidence. They can’t say that most of these extreme weather events have left the past yet. It’s AR6, you know, working Group 1, chapter 12, table 12.12. For your listeners, go there and you’ll see a bunch of white space. It hasn’t left the historical past yet and may not for a long time. So there’s this oh no story and that’s real. And then there’s the conflation of that with the impacts of it and then we get into the economics that the cost to mitigate that, to slow down the emissions into our single atmosphere, would be trillions and trillions of dollars, like $4 to $6 trillion a year. Some of the data I’m seeing now are more to mitigate, and it probably won’t happen for the reasons we’ve already talked about. In Asia, we want them to make stuff cheap with coal so we can have it. Adapting to climate is still expensive, but you see the results of that action and you can protect yourself from it.

So I think we’re just not having these dialogues, and part of it is the voter base, part of it is the NGO sources of money, part of it is the politics of our leading academic institutions. Part of it is what young people want a cause to fight for and believe in and be passionate about. We all did it. All starts to come, and then the energy industry itself hasn’t always been transparent, kind of opaque about things that are going on. It all comes together and it’s scary.

Let’s get ourselves our heads around something that we can do together that will have an impact. Let’s end energy poverty for real not light bulbs and mud huts, but global flourishing and let’s grow the economies and that allows us to protect our environment. Let’s do that. It’s a little more complex than net zero, but this 50 megawatt hour, 50,000 bucks in 50 years that’s our thing, 50-50-50 at the energy core. That’s very positive and we can achieve it in the next 50 years with a movement of, particularly led by young people. Get out in the world and see the impact of their actions and the results on human flourishing in the next 50 years, with a movement of, particularly led by young people. Get out in the world and see the impact of their actions and the results on human flourishing in the environment. That’s where we got to go. We got to give them a better story.

0:46:33 – Frank Curzio

No, that’s great and we definitely got to give them a better story. So I want to end with this. I want you to talk about Switch, because this is where you produce world-class collection of energy education materials programs. It’s SwitchOn.org. You have feature films, documentaries about this stuff, 101 site visits, expert interviews. Talk about that, because if people want to learn more and just go in there and take a look at this and a lot of again, it’s just data, it’s showing both sides of the story. Uh, talk about that, because it’s fascinating.

0:46:59 – Scott Tinker

I think a lot of people could really learn a lot more about you doing that as well yeah, back in 08, first term, first month, Obama I was asked to be assistant assistant secretary of energy and visited the oe and it wasn’t a great fit, uh, you know. So I actually visited twice. But that’s when, in 08, I decided to start making films with harry lynch, who’s a tremendous filmmaker he’s the brains. I’m just the pretty face on all these things. But we made a film called Switch and we visited a dozen countries and looked at the best forms of energy, each form of energy where it’s done best Solar in Spain, nuclear in France, wind in Copenhagen, et cetera, et cetera and we showed the pros and cons, the challenges in each of those and the benefits of each of those. It was the first film that kind of looked at the so-called energy transition and concluded that it’s really not happening. We just keep adding new forms and portfolios matter. Very powerful 50 countries, lots of languages got picked up in schools, k through 12, and college campuses are still showing it.

Several years later, we got back together and made a film called Switch On, because we had left off half the world. Switch On looks at the world that doesn’t have much energy poverty, and I think we were the first film to look at energy poverty. We filmed in. Our timing was terrible. We filmed in 08 and 09, during the Great Recession, and then we released Switch On in January of 2020, right before COVID. So but that brings you to six different countries and we show you the different things that are happening around the world as people try to lift themselves up from energy poverty and economic prosperity, and all that together with a bunch of other things as part of the Switch Energy Alliance, and all that together with a bunch of other things. As part of the Switch Energy Alliance, we make educational materials for K-12, for campuses, for public and for professional education, and it continues to grow. It’s a 501c3. I push my time and money into it, but we have a real staff and pay real people to do all these things.

I host a PBS show which your viewers particularly would be interested in, called Energy Switch, where we just filmed our seventh season. We’re in one hundred and ten million households nationally on PBS. I host two guests on every episode really high level people. Each of these topics we’ve been talking about and many more. They don’t agree on everything, Frank. We have civil dialogue. We reduce it to 25 minutes. We film for an hour and a half Highly produced in studio. You can stream them. We’re on podcast, but you know go dive in.

If you want to know about hydrogen, we got an episode. If you want to know about CCS, we got a couple episodes. Nuclear multiple episodes.

0:49:47 – Frank Curzio

Dive into those and hear the top leading thinkers in the world discuss these things. Yeah, and I’ve been digging in and just the presentations, like I said, uh, it’s. You know I always prepare for these interviews, right, I give my guests the respect of that. And just, you know the hours of research and stuff that I see, even the one that you put up where the lights and you show the world and the lights and of course, everyone’s seen that. Right, most people have seen that with. You know the light generation. You know where do you see the most lights in the world? Right Through the electricity.

But then you say, hey, we’re trying to reduce. People are saying we want to reduce. You know fossil fuel usage and you put a pie chart in every country of the amount of coal, natural gas, oil, fossil fuels that they use and solar wind. And if you take, bring it back on and say this is what it would look like because you know, with 80 percent of it gone, this is how dark the world. I just I love the way you put things in perspective for people, where it’s not just statistics. You’re using pictures and stuff like that to make it understand, and getting everyone together on both sides is a key here and just the takeaways for my audience is the middle extraction that you’re going to need the politics behind it.

I mean you know just the technologies behind it. I mean you know just the technologies behind it. You know learning about hydrogen, learning about coal, different areas and stuff. It can lead to lots of ideas within the stock market, which is why I see you probably going on these field trips and stuff with individual companies. So to me that’s fascinating. Hopefully my audience thinks it’s fascinating, as fascinating as I thought it was. But I really appreciate you coming on. It means a lot because I know how busy you are and you educated me and I know you probably educate a lot of my audience today.

0:51:04 – Scott Tinker

That’s what this podcast is all about right, thank you, and I appreciate you’re doing that deep homework. I hadn’t seen some of those slides in a while because I always evolve my talks, but I think I’m going to pull them back, so I hope it’s been helpful and, uh, good to visit with you and let’s, please, let’s do stay in touch. I’m happy to engage whenever I can, all right sounds great, sounds great, Sounds great.

0:51:23 – Frank Curzio

I’ll talk to you soon. Thanks, buddy, you bet Bye-bye. Okay, it was a great interview, Just takeaways. Why is this important to you? Because this is a stock podcast.

One is the amount of minerals that we’re going to need to extract is freaking insane. I feel like it’s almost like Bitcoin and people who were buying Bitcoin 10 years ago saying it’s going to be the biggest thing ever, and you wait and wait and wait, and now it is where it’s 100,000. If you’re looking at copper projects, if you look at cobalt projects, if you’re looking at just even when it comes to oil and natural gas, you’re going to have to have much more extraction to fill our energy needs, and there’s thousands of stock ideas literally around the world. You know good baby, few hundred of these things that are going to benefit tremendously, and some of them that are kind of full of shit about AI and things like that and energy transition. Ai is for real. It’s a trend that’s going to be around forever, probably well past my lifetime. It’s going to require much, much more energy, which people don’t understand. I feel like people still don’t understand. I mean, we’re just on large language models. We’re not even talking about agentic ai, and then you know the, the amount of energy needed for the predictability part which is next, which is coming. That’s what we’re seeing right now. And all these large language models getting better and better almost by the freaking week. Right, I think gemini’s it’s a top list with gemini 2.5, where a couple weeks ago it might have been, you know, anthropic, and then before there’s ChatGPTt, and then it was Llama. Right, all these guys are fighting for each other and they have to continue to develop and have the best models, which is why you’re seeing all this money getting thrown into AI, Because if they don’t and they stop spending, the big technology companies could lose a third of their market cap, and these days that’s like a trillion dollars. So if you think they’re going to stop spending, they never stop spending. You see the CapEx numbers continually and what does it all feel down to the types of energy we’re going to need.

So the takeaways from this is one nuclear. I know you’ve been holding on to nuclear. I know uranium stocks and stuff like that and the ups and downs went to 100. It’s starting to come back. It’s in the 70s, now Broke 60. Briefly, You’re going to need nuclear. Any other form of energy compared to nuclear, and how it’s 24-7 baseload and how energy companies are signing deals with uranium companies to produce out to 10, 20 years from now. It’s going to be there. I’m not telling you to buy uranium. You got to wait 20 years. It’s going to be less than that.

But if you’re looking at fossil fuels, you’re looking at natural gas, you’re looking at even coal right? Is there clean coal? I don’t know if there’s really clean coal. I mean, you know Scott got into a little bit but we know that China is going to produce a shitload of that, right? So you know, if you’re really on board with you know lowering carbon emissions, it’s never going to happen as long as you have China producing massively and all the rest of the countries are okay with it. Why? Because you know they produce it cheaper. How? Because they use coal and cheaper alternatives. So you know lots of ideas and idea generations.

When I hear this, but most importantly is what I do in my podcast is I want to hear both sides of the story. Okay, you know politics aside, we talked about politics a little bit but how do you make money from this global transition into massive energy that we need? Do we need solar? Do we need wind? Yes, it could be a part, but you have to do it in an economic-friendly manner, which now we’re seeing more and more statistics. You couldn’t cite these statistics in the last administration, but now you can a little bit more. But why are we not producing more oil? Because we know what happens when we produce more oil. It’s great. Is it the best for the environment? No, that’s a tradeoff. So how do we make this efficient? And that’s what Scott does. He travels the world to try to make it better, to explain this to people and say, hey, I’m not against solar, I’m not against wind, I’m not against hydrocoms, I’m not against EVs, but here’s the full story behind them Because they’re not as good as the environment as you think and it’s costing us a shitload and costing every other country a shitload, so much that Europe adopted this stuff tremendously. And look at their electricity costs and now look at their economic growth and how slow it is compared to any other developed nation. So you know, it’s interesting to see how this ties out. But this is something that I could take and I look at and saying, wow, this filters down to so many ideas without so many different parts of energy and if you go to Switch Alliance and it says switchon.org, he has all these free educational videos and interviews and things like that. I just think it’s a fantastic source.

I started researching this the next day. I know like two, three hours passed. I’m like holy shit. You don’t even realize it. That’s how interested it was to me. Some of you may not be that interested, but just having this contact allows me to ask someone a lot of questions about new technologies, new innovations and how do we get into the right stock picks for you guys and make you money. And hopefully you appreciate that video as much as I do. Because we’re going to start doing a lot more interviews on this podcast and I hear from you let me know.

Let me know if you know someone in the field. This is someone a lot of people don’t know about, who I think is brilliant 30, 40 years of experience. I think he added a lot to our audience and educated me at least. Let me know what you thought. Frank@curzioresearch.com. But these are the people I wanna really bring on the podcast and interview behind the scenes, people who are non-biased. That could really help us, especially how I could interview someone like this, look at all his research and come out with so many different stock ideas from it and have that great source to ask him about some of these things, Because he’s in the field, visiting a company. He’s looking at individual ideas. He’s looking at investing as well, right, which is the part we didn’t get to. So really cool stuff. Again, let me know what you thought about it at Frank@curzioresearch.com.

As always, I’ll be back to you guys soon, Take care. 

0:56:30 – Announcer

Wall Street Unplugged is produced by Curzio Research, one of the most respected financial media companies in the industry. The information presented on Wall Street Unplugged is the opinion of its host and guests. You should not base your investment decisions solely on this broadcast. Remember it’s your money and your responsibility.