How to handle the coming e-waste avalanche

REBECCA AHRENS

I’m Rebecca Ahrens.

JOE RENSHAW

I’m Joe Renshaw.

REBECCA AHRENS

And this is the Our Industrial Life podcast.

[Intro music]

REBECCA AHRENS

All right, Joe, what are we—what are we talking about today?

JOE RENSHAW

Today we're talking about the recycling of critical minerals. Do you know what critical minerals are?

REBECCA AHRENS

Yeah. I know vaguely what critical minerals are. We're talking about things that go into electronics and batteries, like lithium, stuff like that?

JOE RENSHAW

That's exactly right. Yeah. There are basically a bunch of metals and rare earths that are absolutely crucial to the functioning of lots of electronics and lots of technology that will be powering, you know, the green transition in general.

There's a few interesting things about these minerals, but the first thing to know is that the deposits in the world are weirdly concentrated in a few countries. So, for instance, most of the world's nickel comes out of Indonesia.

REBECCA AHRENS

I did not know that.

JOE RENSHAW

I know right? You would never guess. And most of the world's lithium—where do you think that comes from?

REBECCA AHRENS

I know there's a lot of mining happening in various South American countries. I'm going to put my money on Chile.

JOE RENSHAW

That's correct, yes!

REBECCA AHRENS

Is it?

JOE RENSHAW

Yes.

REBECCA AHRENS

Nice. I've been doing my homework.

JOE RENSHAW

Well, it’s sort of correct. Australia actually produces the most lithium, but Chile and Bolivia actually have the biggest reserves. And actually, funnily enough, there's also a lot of lithium on the seafloor in the same part of the world. So, off the coast of South America.

REBECCA AHRENS

Hm. Interesting.

JOE RENSHAW

Cobalt is another one that is incredibly concentrated—this time in the Democratic Republic of Congo. So all of these critical minerals are weirdly concentrated in these, to all intents and purposes, random places. But almost all of the processing and refining of these minerals is done in China. And it's no coincidence that they also dominate the EV and the battery market as well. So these—the supply chains come from all over the world. But they really, for the most part, end in China.

REBECCA AHRENS
Hm.

JOE RENSHAW

Obviously there are a lot of EVs being built at the moment—a tremendous amount. I mean, if you look at the graphs of the gigawatt-hours of batteries produced, I mean, every year it's just going up and up and up. And we're in this weird moment where we've been producing lots of batteries for the last five years. These batteries last ten years. So we're in this period where we're building them, building and building them. They haven't started to reach the end of their life yet.

REBECCA AHRENS

But they will.

JOE RENSHAW

But they will soon.

REBECCA AHRENS

I assume we want to reclaim those critical minerals that are in the batteries in some way, right? Like, we're not just throwing them in the landfill, for example.

JOE RENSHAW

No. Well, we are probably more than we should be at the moment. But it's something that a bunch of countries and companies are coming up with solutions to this problem, to this recycling problem. Because not only is it important for dealing with this huge mountain of waste, it's also a potentially significant source of supply for these minerals that, as we've just talked about, are heavily concentrated in a few countries.

REBECCA AHRENS

Hm.

JOE RENSHAW

But there is a problem with recycling. I mean, it seems like it's the magic bullet.

REBECCA AHRENS

Yeah.

JOE RENSHAW

The problem is that recycling itself is a multi-stage process, and—but there is a particular bottleneck in the recycling process. And that is the refining process that we just talked about.

REBECCA AHRENS

That mainly happens in China.

JOE RENSHAW

That mainly happens in China, yes.

REBECCA AHRENS

At the moment.

JOE RENSHAW

At the moment. So in many ways we're back to square one, especially when it comes to the issue of highly concentrated supply chains. And added to that is obviously the environmental impact of all this transportation and the environmental impact of the re-refining of these metals, right? Because, as I said, they happen in these huge smelters that are incredibly energy intensive.

So this month, I spoke to Megan O'Connor. She's the CEO of Nth Cycle. And Nth Cycle are a small company, only a few years old, but they seem to have a solution to all of the problems we've been talking about. Their refining technology can, they say, refine any metal on the point of the recycling site where it's collected—and it's powered by electricity.

REBECCA AHRENS

Fascinating.

[Music]

JOE RENSHAW

The first thing to say, Megan, is thank you very much for talking to us. We really appreciate your time, and I am personally really looking forward to this conversation. So, you were recently named on TIME magazine's list of the 100 most influential climate leaders. Congratulations.

MEGAN O’CONNOR

Thank you so much.

JOE RENSHAW

And a big part of why you are on that list is your company Nth Cycle, which you co-founded. As I understand it, Nth Cycle is addressing a critical problem in the supply chains that underlie a lot of green technology that we rely on now, and that we'll be relying on even more in the future. So, can you talk us through the supply chain problem as it exists today, and how Nth Cycle might be solving that or changing that?

MEGAN O’CONNOR

Absolutely, absolutely. So the large issue that we have in the supply chain right now, at least for critical minerals, right. And these critical minerals, like cobalt, nickel, copper, manganese, are the true building blocks of the clean energy economy. So, right, they’re in lithium-ion batteries, they’re in wind turbines, they’re in solar panels, right. All these critical technologies to help us move away from fossil energy.

And one of the largest challenges we have is that there's simply just not enough supply of these materials, right. And they’re abundant, I guess, in the Earth's crust. But it's hard to extract these materials and it's hard to do that in certain places around the world.

And so what Nth Cycle has done, has developed a technology that allows us to more easily extract and procure these materials—like the cobalt and the nickel, as I mentioned before—and do it from a variety of different sources, right. So, not just from the mining space, but also the recycling space, right. So this is a great secondary source of materials that we can start to pull from.

But the big bottleneck that we had in accessing these materials was, you know, the refining piece. And so we've developed a refining technology.

So we take, say, an end-of-life battery, or other types of nickel scrap, and we chemically turn it back into those individual metals so that we can create a more robust supply chain so that we don't have to sort of run out of these materials as we're trying to ramp up production over the next several years.

JOE RENSHAW

The refining process, at the moment, happens predominantly in China. Is that correct?
 

MEGAN O’CONNOR

Yes. Predominantly overseas, in a variety of different countries—the majority of it in China. And the way that metals are typically refined today are with the very large, centralized facilities. Think, you know, football fields’ worth of space. And they use, you know, very traditional acids, solvents, chemicals.

And so the technology that Nth Cycle has developed allows us to have a much more modular and greener solution than what you typically see for traditional refining.
 

JOE RENSHAW

Why does the West not have traditional refining capabilities? Or, why is it so concentrated in certain parts of the world?

MEGAN O’CONNOR

No, that's a great question. So if you think about the types of—I think of them as assets—that these refineries are typically situated next to, they're very, very long life, you know, massive mines, right.

So you see those more so overseas, right: Australia and in Asia. They have these very large, you know, mines set up that it justifies the cost of these, you know, large, centralized refineries. So they're sort of situated next to or close by these mines because it's built for that one purpose, right.

So these are multi-billion dollar, you know, refineries. And so it needs a very long life, you know, primary asset to sit next to it to justify the cost, not just of the, you know, continued operations, but the CapEx in general.

And so, in the West, we don't really have any of those, you know, large, long-life type of primary assets. We have what are called short-life mines. And so those are a lot of the mines that are trying to be developed here in the United States and in other parts around the world, where—again, lots of valuable metals and materials in there—but they're not quite, they don't expect to have as long of a life as you would see overseas, which is why you don't see a refinery stood up over here because it doesn't justify, again, that cost.

And then, similarly, when you look at the recycling space, right. Think about how distributed, you know, all of our end-of-life materials are, like cell phones, right? And then think about, you know, your laptops, and then even EVs, right? And then what are we going to do with all these wind turbines? They're not all magically in one place. And so it's really hard to justify the cost of these, you know, big centralized refineries, because transporting all of these end-of-life—and sometimes hazardous materials—is expensive. It adds to carbon emissions. And so that's typically why you don't see any of these refineries stood up.

And we have a couple in Canada, right. It's not to say that 100% of refining is overseas, but it's not very common over here because of that reason.

And that's really why Nth Cycle developed this technology: was to try and solve that problem of, look, we have really valuable resources here. We have end-of-life, you know, recycled materials. We have these primary assets, like in mining, in the ore, that we want to develop and turn into real mines. But we need to figure out a way to do that, not just economically but also more sustainably, right. Because there's a whole, you know, carbon issue and waste issue associated with refining as well.

JOE RENSHAW

Yeah, I mean, it's a really important point. And I can—I get the impression that the environmental motivation is really important for you. Is that right?

MEGAN O’CONNOR

Absolutely. I think, you know, we don't want to make the same mistakes we've made in the past, right, with any industry.

And as I said, these metals are so critically important to the transition. And we really have to think hard, and be thoughtful around how we source these materials, how we process these materials, where they end up, right. Because they are not an unlimited resource, right, as any of our resources. And so we need to figure out a way to continue to reuse them over time so that we can continue to build out this, you know, this new energy economy, as we all want to see, right?

JOE RENSHAW

And your solution is the Oyster system. As I understand it, there are two ways—traditional ways—of refining metals: hydro-metallurgy and pyro-metallurgy. Now I don't think that the Oyster system fits neatly into either of these categories. Could you tell me if that's the case and how it fits into this kind of refining ecosystem of different ways of refining and different approaches to the problem?

MEGAN O’CONNOR

Absolutely. So, as we mentioned before, the traditional way to refine materials is a couple different steps. So first, if you have an ore, like from mining, and it's a concentrate that comes out of the ground. It typically will go through—and every process is slightly different for different metals—but in general, it typically goes through a pyro-metallurgical process, which means, you know, they just use high temperatures, high pressures—like if folks are familiar with smelting—to get it from that concentrate into an intermediate product.

That intermediate product will then be shipped somewhere else in the world, typically, to go through a hydro-metallurgical process, where they use different acids and different solvents—typically solvent extraction—to separate out the different metals in the intermediate product, or to upgrade that intermediate product to the, you know, four nines. So the 99.99% grade material, whether it's cobalt sulfate, nickel sulfate, you know, whatever that end product might be.

And so what Nth Cycle’s technology does is takes these concentrates, whether it's from the recycling industry or the mining industry. And we're basically a replacement for the pyro-metallurgical step. So that first step I mentioned in this process. And then we even replace some of what you see in the hydro, right. And so we can enable, basically, this high, high grade intermediate product to be an input to these hydro-metallurgical facilities to help save them costs to help save them, you know, on transportation, all the things that, you know, we're looking for to create a much more, you know, shortened, robust supply chain.

So that's where you, really where you can think of, our technology fitting in to sort-of the landscape. And again, the real differentiator for us  is that we can go on site with our partners, right. So we can go on site with these recyclers and actually process that material into that high, high grade intermediate product so that you don't have to transport that material around the world, you know, three different times before it gets into that grade of purity.

JOE RENSHAW

And how does it work, then?

MEGAN O’CONNOR

So at the highest level, I like to think of our system like a Brita water filter, right. So in a Brita water filter, you have an activated carbon cartridge, right, that you pour drinking water through it. If you have any heavy metals in there, right, everything sort of gets caught in that one filter stage.

So we've taken the same, you know, basic idea of using, you know, a filter that has high surface area, and instead of pulling all of the metals out in one stage, we have multiple of these sort of filter cartridges, stacked in series, each with a different voltage that's applied.

And so we can electro-chemically separate out all these different materials, because each metal, or each group of metals, has sort of a different affinity for whatever, you know, voltage or current you're applying to that cartridge itself. And so that's essentially what our system is doing.

So we take this, you know, solid end-of-life material, like a shredded lithium-ion battery. We dissolve it in a low volume of acid. So you have all those metals that are dissolved. We then put it through our Oyster filter system and we electrochemically can select for, you know, one metal over another as it goes through the various stages to come out on the other side as the different metal products that we want.

JOE RENSHAW

So you've got stacked membranes and all of these membranes are more or less identical apart from the electrical current being passed through them, have I understood that correctly?

MEGAN O’CONNOR

That's correct.

JOE RENSHAW

Wow. And then so have you got like little—I'm picturing little, kind of, tubes at each point between the membranes where stuff is coming out, lithium or cobalt, whatever it is—is that the case? How does it—how do you get it out of the machine?

MEGAN O’CONNOR

Yeah. So it's actually—each Oyster system that we have is for one metal, right. So you can imagine we have one Oyster system, which for folks who can't see it right now—it looks like a deck of cards, right, a stacked deck of cards. So there's our electrochemical cells look like big cards. So they're about a meter tall and a meter wide, and there's 140 of those, sort of stacked in parallel to be one Oyster. So that one Oyster has, you know, one set of, voltage applied that pulls out one metal.

And then, you know, you have another oyster for another set of metals and so on and so forth for however many different, you know, metal products you want to get out of that input.

And then the metals coming out of each of those oyster systems are collected in just a very basic filter themselves, right. So, we basically just take the metals that have been precipitated out. They're still suspended in a solution, and then we simply filter them out on the other side. So there's nothing super novel about the way that we filter them on the other side.

JOE RENSHAW

I'm assuming you can chain the oysters together in a closed loop. Or is each system a closed loop that you then have to sort of manually transfer, from one to the other?

MEGAN O’CONNOR

So we actually have the optionality to do either. So it can either be multiple in series to sort of do one feedstock or one input. So say it's, you know, nickel-based scrap, so a lithium-ion batteries or other types of catalysts. We can sort of chain these together to pull multiple metals out of that one feedstock or, on a partner site, we can have, you know, three different separate systems to maybe do, you know, nickel scrap in one, copper scrap in another and, say, you know, rare earth permanent magnet recycling in the third, right.

And so we can sort of mix and match, as it, you know, suits our customers, which is another benefit over the traditional way of refining is you don't get that flexibility or that tunability or that customization for the partners, right. Those massive facilities are usually built for sort of one purpose. And we said, look, this is great for when it's set up next to, you know, a large mining site. But when you have recycling, you tend to get all sorts of different things into one recycler site. And so let's figure out a way to truly customize it and get value out of all those different pieces, right, not just one.

JOE RENSHAW

I was speaking to someone in the aluminum smelting business a couple of years ago, and they were trying to communicate to me the scale of an aluminum smelter and how much energy it requires. And he said that it had to run 24/7, firstly: it could never shut down. It also required basically the power of a small town to keep this smelter running 24/7.

I'm guessing one of the benefits of your Oyster system is that it uses electricity and water, which are, in theory, renewable. But how much of those things does it require? How energy intensive is it?

MEGAN O’CONNOR

Yeah, our system is actually not energy intensive. So, yes, we do use electricity. So. we're typically—that's one of our main inputs besides water. But it's actually a very efficient system. And so we're anywhere between 75 and 95 percent current efficiency, which is quite high compared to other electrochemical systems out in industry.

Because, again, we're not reinventing the wheel of what electrochemistry is. Our IP, and the beauty behind our system and what we've developed is really how we've taken off-the-shelf components, you know, with very well known, you know, electrochemical reactions, and put them together to create this system.

And so essentially what we're doing is taking, you know, traditional, you know, batch processes that are slow, and by combining, you know, a few of them together into a continuous system, we've been able to create, you know, those beautiful efficiencies that you otherwise wouldn’t see, right.

And so that's really where, as you said, like, some of these, you know, refineries, like in smelting, they do require a massive amount of energy. They require a massive amount of space. It's horrendously expensive in some instances, right, for the different types of materials that we want to process. And so that's really the barrier that we were trying to break down, of: can we develop this energy efficient, flexible technology that can be moved where it needs to be moved so that it can have, sort of, the capability to solve the issue of having to be this large, expensive entity, and really pare it down, but have the same unit economics in doing so.

And I think that's really where the breakthrough has been is, you know, we're at cost parity, if not cheaper, than some of the smelting activities that you mentioned before.

JOE RENSHAW

Yeah, and that's a significant engineering achievement as well, right? I mean, you've talked in the past about how the science of the Oyster system was developed by your co-founder, Chad Vecitis, while he was a prof at Harvard.

But you've taken that underlying science, and you have, as you say, kind of converted it into a commercially viable system. I'm wondering what that process of kind of turning science into engineering was like.

MEGAN O’CONNOR

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So, my co-founder, Chad Vecitis, who was a professor at Harvard for about a decade, he developed this sort of core IP and the science behind what we do. And in his lab, right, and when he was a postdoc, even before he went in to be a professor at Harvard, you know, he came up with the idea of: what if we combined, you know, basic water filtration, right? So I think everybody can visualize the water filtration from the Brita filter example. But if we apply, you know, the electrochemical piece and, sort of, electricity to that, to that filter, you know, what are the possibilities of the sort of reactions that we could start to harness by doing that and combining these two, you know, very basic, well known, you know, properties and processes, I should say?

I saw him give a presentation with our other co-founder, Desiree Plata, who is my PhD advisor, and we sort of thought, you know: wow, I wonder if this could work for this metal-refining/metal-recycling application? Because it seems like technology innovation is something that could help solve some of these challenges I mentioned before in the supply chain.

So I approached him and and he said, “Yes, I do think that this could work for that application, but I've sort of never had a student who wanted to do that.”

And so I sort of took it upon myself to go be that student, and that's what I switched my PhD project to go work on for the next three years. And then we spun it out in 2017 when I felt that, you know, this had a lot of, you know, commercial possibility. And, of course, as three co-founders from academia, we had never scaled technology before. And none of us are engineers by training. We were all chemists.

And so the first thing I did was I went and found really smart engineers, right, who have, you know, worked in the space, who have done this before. And, you know, they, the team that, you know, I have assembled are really the heroes, I guess, in this story in my mind because they figured out a way to get this form factor that worked so well at the bench scale—and the chemistry worked beautifully—to work as well at the scale that we needed it to, right, as you said, to fully commercialize it and get it into the volumes that we need to be meaningful for these industries, which and, you know, even for mining, right, there's a scale factor that, you know, is massive compared to what you would assume is at a bench scale.

So that's really where, you know, we tried to hone in is finding the right talent who have been there, who have done this, and who have seen these types of technologies at scale. Of course, they haven't seen anything quite like this, which, you know, there is unique challenges in that and trying to piece together these different off-the-shelf components into something novel.

But, you know, we're not trying to reinvent the wheel in every aspect. And so, you know, the team has been fantastic in helping us do this.

JOE RENSHAW

I'm just trying to get a sense of the scale, not only of the engineering achievement, but also relative to the football fields of sized refineries that you mentioned before. How big is the Oyster system, roughly?

MEGAN O’CONNOR

So our first commercial deployment, which is in Ohio, is in a building that's 20,000 ft², and our system is about half of that. So 10,000 ft² for us to be able to process 3000 metric tons of material per year, which again, for the recycling industry, is meaningful. Mining will have a slightly larger footprint.

But the idea behind this system is that you don't have to actually scale the core technology any larger. You simply add modules in parallel, right. So you see this model in other industries, right: in wastewater treatment, and so on. And it works quite well, right, to just add these modules as you need more capacity, right. And so that's, again, why we've been able to sort of break the mold and figure out, you know, how do we get our unit economics and just the overall project economics to make sense is we will never have stranded capacity, right. And so, typically, for these large, centralized facilities, you have to be, as you mentioned, right, you have to be running 24 hours a day. You have to typically be at over 90% capacity, meaning your facility’s always at least 90% full of material that you're processing.

And that's really, really hard to do in recycling, especially when, you know, all these different materials look different, right. And that's, you know, really where our modules come in. If we install the capacity that you need and we can grow it over time, right, and if you all of a sudden don't need that capacity any more, we can easily take it offline.

JOE RENSHAW

Yeah, that makes sense. But you did mention your facility in Ohio, which sounds like a bit of a departure from the model that you were just describing—the commercial model, that is. So firstly, this sounds like a big milestone for the company to have a facility, your own facility that you're running yourselves. But it also sounds like it doesn't quite fit.

So could you kind of talk me through what you're doing at that facility and why you opened it?

MEGAN O’CONNOR

Absolutely. So this is, as I mentioned, the first commercial demonstration of the technology. And so for the first one, you know, we wanted to own and operate it fully as a merchant facility, I should say, where we're actually buying the different inputs: so, nickel scrap materials, mostly, so lithium-ion batteries is included in that.

Because we wanted it to be a sort of a showcase for our customers, right, so our partners, right. They wanted to see what this system would look like at scale. And we can buy their materials to basically process and have sort of a test for both us, right, for us to get comfortable with what type of materials they have, if we were to go onsite with them—and then for them to get comfortable with the technology and what it can do for them and the outputs that it can do.

And so you can think of it as a very large, you know, sort of business development tool for us, for this first merchant facility we have. But you're absolutely right. Our model after this, now that we can showcase this to our partners, is to go on site with them and actually process, you know, right, either next door to them or in the same facility. Because a lot of these, you know, recycling partners, you know, have, you know, massive amounts of space. And so our system being, you know, 10,000 ft², it's very easy for us to sort of sit right on site with them and not have to transport that material far to be refined.

JOE RENSHAW

So we've talked a lot about recycling so far, but I understand that the Oyster system could be used to refine waste from other industries as well. And you've talked a bit about the mining industry as well. So could you explain a bit how you see the Oyster, fitting into other industries and the industrial sector in general?

MEGAN O’CONNOR

When we think about, you know, where the Oyster can provide the most value outside of recycling, right, it's all about looking for those alternative sources of metals, right. And these large refineries and processes attached to the mining industry, right, inherently create their own waste streams, right. Because they're not 100% efficient in putting in the ore per se and getting out 100% of it as product.

And so what happens to all of those, you know, really valuable metals that are in those waste streams, right? And so that's really the application that we're targeting—or I guess one of the applications we're targeting—in mining is there's all these valuable materials in these waste streams. But again, it's all about the volumes and being able to economically process of smaller volumes. And that's exactly where Nth Cycle’s technology can fit in is we can profitably, you know, process those lower volumes of materials that are still very meaningful for the overall supply chain, but for these big refineries doesn't simply make sense for them to reprocess it. So that we can help them capture 100% of that value in the end.

And then similarly, there's, as I mentioned before, at the very beginning of this episode, right, there's these smaller, you know, short-life mines that are in the States or other parts, you know, sort of in the Western world that really struggle from an environmental permitting perspective or again, just can't justify, you know, building an entire refinery next to it, in the traditional sense.

And so those are the types of mining applications that we want to go after—of can we help this asset actually come online and start to produce these materials? Because again, they're very meaningful volumes. They're just not large enough to justify traditional technology, which are massive, massive refineries. And so, those are the types of applications.

Because we don't expect to go in, and we don't want to go in and try to replace, you know, a flow sheet of some of the largest mines in the world, right. They can operate, you know, pretty much in any environment—of course, except in times of low, low metals prices like we are now.

But those that the other applications I mentioned are really where we think we can add the most value with the Oyster.

JOE RENSHAW

How close are you to getting into that market or kind of, you know, what's in the way, what's the path, you know, how do you move from recycling into that world?

MEGAN O’CONNOR

Yeah, so that's an area of development for us. And so we're hoping to have a pilot in the next, you know, three to four years for the mining space. As you can imagine, the volumes are just much larger than what you're seeing in the recycling space. And so we wanted to go into recycling and capture as much of that market as we possibly can as we're developing the technology for the mining space.

And it's simply slightly updating the form factor to be able to actually stack them vertically so that our footprint is smaller while we can have more capacity for the mining space, if that makes sense.

JOE RENSHAW

Okay, so we're looking at a tower of Oysters—is that what we're talking about?

MEGAN O’CONNOR

A tower of oysters: that's right!

JOE RENSHAW

Great! Well, I've just got one more question, which is around, about 18 months ago, you raised $44 million in series B funding. And, I guess I'm just curious what you're hoping to achieve basically in the next two, three, four years that—aside from the mining proof of concept.

MEGAN O’CONNOR

Yeah, absolutely. So, yes, with that funding, we’re able to build out our first commercial facility in Ohio that I mentioned. And we will be going out to fundraise for the next, you know, five to six projects. And so the goal is to have six projects on site with our partners in the recycling space, to continue to scale, you know, our production volumes, both here in North America and in Europe, right.

There's a massive, massive need for refining capacity. There's been a lot of, I would say, recycling capacity—where we think of recycling as the collection and the shredding of some of these materials, like lithium ion batteries that have come online in the past, you know, two to four years. But there's no refining capacity to match that.

And so even if we're sort of, quote/unquote, “recycling” and shredding these materials here, currently they're still being shipped overseas to be chemically refined and anything usable again.

And so we feel that there's a massive opportunity for us to be able to move quickly and to install these systems, to be able to help build up that refining capacity over the next two years.

And one of the things I didn’t mention earlier—one of the massive challenges we're trying to solve is how fast that we can get these refineries online. Because typically it takes, you know, upwards of five years, even close to ten in some cases to build out, you know, one traditional refinery. We need critical minerals yesterday, not ten years from now.

And so, you know, we wanted to figure out a way to rapidly deploy these, which is, again, why we're trying—we're focused on at least six over the next two years and hopefully more after that. But those are sort of our main goals to help scale our refining capacity domestically as quickly as we can.

JOE RENSHAW

Megan, thank you very much for your time. I've really enjoyed the conversation. I thought it was absolutely fascinating. Thank you very much for joining us on Our Industrial Life.

MEGAN O’CONNOR

Yeah, thank you so much, Joe.