I’ve spent the last hour staring at a hand-drawn flow sheet ...

The graphite is worn down to the wood and my hands are stained grey, but the math on this recovery circuit still isn't quite singing. We talk a lot about the lithium and cobalt buried in the ground, but we don't talk nearly enough about the shrinking pool of folks who actually know how to cook those metals out of the host rock. I look at this folded paper and realize that metallurgy is becoming a lost art in the States, traded for software suites that can't tell a leach tank from a laundry tub. It doesn't matter how many world-class deposits we permit if we don't have a fresh generation of boots-on-the-ground engineers who understand the chemistry of a rock. We are mining the future, sure, but we are running dangerously low on the human capital required to refine it.