ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Ken Hoffman called the lithium bottom before the market did. Ten months on, Chinese carbonate has gone from CNY 61,000 a tonne to CNY 148,000, copper has printed a record US$14,455, and the demand engine driving all of it — stationary storage — is one almost nobody had in their models three years ago.
What we covered:
- Why he called the lithium bottom early, and what was in the data everyone else skipped past
- Whether "chaos is the opportunity" still holds, or is now destroying more value than it creates
- Stationary storage overtaking EV batteries — does the crossover still happen this decade?
- China's two big policy moves on storage, and which one actually matters for lithium demand
- The Chinese "emergency order" for backup batteries — where that number comes from, and what's contracted
- Data-centre storage as a separate demand vector, or the industry double-counting the same megawatt-hours
- Where the next demand surprise comes from after storage
Lithium at CNY 148,000 — a pause in a bull market, or the front edge of the next supply response
- Bald Hill, Finniss and Jianxiawo restarting, and what's different from the 2023–25 glut
- Zimbabwe's export ban and whether the Indonesian nickel playbook transfers to lithium
- His own forecasting record, and the systematic bias in demand modelling
- Where new lithium supply gets built at US$18,000 a tonne without a government cheque
- Copper's record run, and the correction he called that never came
AI data centres versus Grasberg and El Teniente — narrative or genuine structural loss
- What a coherent US copper strategy would actually look like
- Rare earths and the US$110 NdPr price floor — who is absorbing the gap
- China's grip on refined NdPr and heavy rare earth separation, and what the West can realistically shift
- China's graphite and battery-equipment export controls, and what happens when the suspension expires in November
- Manganese, LMFP, and what has to happen for that thesis to pay (including his Firebird Metals advisory role)
- Why he's not a believer in sodium-ion, and what would change his mind
- The material with the strongest demand outlook and the thinnest pipeline
- Separating the West's mining problem from its refining problem
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