Vincent Song

Physical Trader (Recycling) | prev @Stanford | The real shareholder value was the friends we made along the way 🥺

[Dan Nystedt @dnystedt]

War in Middle East impact on Taiwan Semiconductors

No shortages of Natural Gas or Helium for Now

Natural Gas:
Natural gas accounts for ~40% of Taiwan’s electricity, and a third comes from the Middle East. Taipower is already in talks with the USA, Australia, others for more natural gas.

Prices may eventually rise 4%-5% for chip makers.

Taipower has 2 price increase windows, April and October. It is unlikely prices will be increased in April, but may be in October. Taipower works for price stability.

Electricity is normally ~10% of the cost of fab operations, but goes up to teens% in summer months (May-October) because Taipower raises rates 30% due to higher usage.

Helium
For chip production

There are multiple suppliers of helium around the world, including the USA, a key supplier to Taiwan, but also Algeria, Canada, South Africa, others. There is no shortage in Taiwan and chip makers that source from Qatar have already started seeking alternative suppliers.

Most chip makers hold a 30-40 day inventory of gases/chemicals, but more of some (neon) due to geopolitics (Ukraine War) or scarcity.

Several gases are used in chip production, and account for 1%-5% of costs. Costs may increase for helium, but would unlikely affect overall gas costs much.

Last year, 75% of TSMC's revenue came from North America. If your company depends on TSMC or other Taiwan chip makers, it may be prudent to contact friends in high places to ensure stable natural gas supplies and helium for Taiwan. The USA is a major supplier of both gases. $TSM $NVDA $AAPL $AMZN $GOOGL $MSFT $META #semiconductors #semiconductor #helium

[Jack Farley @JackFarley96]

*Mining* silver? What? No mining. Why would you dig for silver? If you produce silver people will ask you how much and it will never be enough.

The second you mine your first ounce is the day you become a Utility. Why sell ounces to Chinese solar producers when you can sell warrants to Eric Sprott?

$11 AISC? Who gives a fuck.

It's not about how many ounces you can extract, it's about how many tons you can infer.

Cash flow is 2x dogs for like Wheaton Precious or Pan American Silver. It's about MAXIMIZING your NAV and raising capital based on rumors that the Alpayana Syndicate is considering a strategic stake.

Look at Hycroft. The company's got no production, Diane hasn't even built her billion dollar roaster yet her stock has 25xed!

The second the pumps finish and the silver comes out, the miner that was a 100x becomes a 1.5x loser. They have "labor" and "depreciation."

But not you. You're not weighed down by things like "remediation" or "Bolivian water regulations."

You're telling your investors you're using AI to interpret maps from the 1880s. You're sending crews to the Arctic to drill through three meters of ice in the dead of winter. You're looking at promising Deep Sea Massive Sulfide Deposits to extract silver from the tailings of Manganese Nodules.

[Paul Phillips @BlueFlameBlues]

Financial gas traders vs Physical gas traders (who have to make sure the gas is actually delivered)

[Eric Nuttall @ericnuttall]

So, who is going to be the first oilco. to take capital out of the Permian with WTI at $59 and redeploy it into ultra-heavy production in Venezuela with 50% royalty rates, 33% tax rates, massive security challenges, no rule of law, and decrepit infrastructure? Drill, baby drill!

[Brandon Beylo @marketplunger1]

My wife: "Don't get drunk and talk about metals and mining at Thanksgiving."

Me after one sip of water:

[Vincent Song @vincentjsong]

@healy_trader Given the tinge I’d say it’s sulfur?

[Vincent Song @vincentjsong]

@tfeldmann interesting that their partners Breakwall are ex riverstone guys. Perhaps borne out of a long term former partnership in the og sector.

[Yellow Lab Life Capital @YellowLabLife]

Any company talking about the COMEX copper price when the project in question doesn’t produce cathode in the USA is telling you something

[Vincent Song @vincentjsong]

@zachglabman Honestly would have been a solid return ~16%

[Daniel Rau @drauwsy]

No IAC deposits gets developed with the current cost structure of ion-exchange chromatography in the west.

Pregnant leaching solutions post-floatation are in teens g/L, enabling cost-effective SX circuits. However, with dilute PLS solutions, mixer-settler circuits blow-out from a dozen to a hundred. No bueno for capital intensity.

Dilute PLS solution born from direct leaching of IAC equaling < 3 g/L means chromatographic technology is the most attractive bulk impurity rejection process.

However, the west is falling behind. China leads the implementation of CIX & SMB systems into large volume mining applications.

Why?

10X the number of engineers, classically trained engineers fluent in software. The analogy is Foxconn tooling engineers for the iPhone.

Their operators and engineers and can handle complex PLC. While the west only utilizes these systems for binary component separations in pharma & food & bev.

On an anecdote - SunResin SMB rejected by the west b/c of process control complexity.

The War Below is also won by the masters of processing.

And Broadly, processing is getting more complex & higher capital intensity.

Refractory ores, polymetallic, lower head grades, higher strip ratios, ISR.

The first derivative of project capital intensity will only widen between western & Chinese operators.

Someone should try to fix this.

[jpa @josephpalbanese]

new project: cleo (kindle + llm) 📚

cleo is an ios app that pairs whatever book you're reading on kindle with an llm (o3) — ask questions, get recaps/summaries, or listen/discuss (think audiobooks but interactive). the llm has context on exactly where you are + the book contents.

best part? no complex setup needed. just link your kindle account and that's it. it just works.

reply / rt for testflight invite 👇

[Vincent Song @vincentjsong]

@yashdulla @ycombinator CRM

[Vincent Song @vincentjsong]

Negotiations extended far into the night…

[Alan Cole @AlanMCole]

The excuse that the penguin island policy is about averting tariff avoidance from rerouted goods fails on roughly three levels:

1. There is no port through which goods could be rerouted.

[Neil Ringdahl @NeilRingdahl]

Things you can pick up from operational photos in Corporate Presentations:
In the pic the shovel tracks are at a 45° to the truck & the truck is reversed at 30° angle to the muck face (bottom of pic). This makes digging efficiency a lower & each swing of the boom (to load the truck) is ~120°, resulting in a much lower loading cycle. Ideally, you want the tracks (and truck) 90° to the muck face, with space for then next truck to reverse in on the opposite side of the shovel. This is a basic pit management issue and getting it right could improve production 15-25% right away.

Pit Conditions
On the bright side, the pit floor in the background looks good, & its very pleasing to see a tyre dozer lurking there. Also you can see the last loaded truck driving out with apparently no other trucks waiting, so at least they do not have trucks queuing to be loaded. Muck pile height looks to be about 12m so the bench height is probably 10m (Truck is 7m high & excavator is 9m high) - perfect for these machines.
The mine -I think- is Newmont's Yannacocha seeing the name on the excavator. 😁

Equipment selection.
The ideal, best productivity shovel-truck "match" is 3-4 (shovel) passes to fill any truck. This ensures fastest loading & minimum truck waiting time. Getting this right has a HUGE impact on financials.
Smaller operations with "little" excavators can get away with 5-8 passes, but that is because they move relatively fast loading small trucks, but with big kit like this, swing times are much slower. This is another discussion we can have, as having a small sized fleet (if there is room for it) can actually be as productive - its just a lot more to manage. Anyway you have 3 variables to play with when it comes to equipment selection: Shovel bucket fill factor, Shovel bucket capacity & truck capacity.

A bucket fill factor is how much of the stated bucket can be filled in one scoop of any muck pile. Hardness of the material, fragmentation size, muck pile height (vis a vis bench height), shovel breakout force & bucket design all affect fill factor. A rule of thumb is 90% for hard rock mining, but in certain materials it can theoretically be over 100% such as in an oil sands or sand mining environment where it can heap on the bucket. Here it might be a little above 90% given the material looks rather soft.

Bucket capacity (in cubic meters) x broken density x fill factor = Actual Shovel capacity, lets say its 36 tonnes for the shovel in this pic which looks to be a Hitachi EX 5600 with std. bucket size of 29m3.

So ideally you would want to have a truck capacity of 140-187t (3 to 4 x 47t). So probably a CAT 789 or Hitachi EH3500 which has nominal capacity of 190t would work well with this machine. You'll never get it exactly right but. You might consider a 140t truck (Cat 785 size) with a full 3-pass load each time, so a shorter truck loading cycle and better truck productivity, but possibly also overloading the trucks a tad.

In this photo it looks to be ~4 pass to load the truck; Hard to say if the bucket was properly filled or not, but the material seems very soft so is probably full.
Anyway, a truck 20% smaller than this might be worth considering if that were the case.

[Charles Yang @charlesxjyang]

new substack post with some reflections on how to think about everything happening in energy (and data centers)

[Ananya Chadha @AnanyaChadha]

It's official — we are excited to launch https://t.co/nPODnS9U8W in the world.

GENERATE A 1-MINUTE MOVIE FROM A MINOR PROMPT.

Our AI agent assembles the entire video for you, in your video timeline, and you can manually make changes, if you’d like.

It's incredible to see our first users have made videos with their friends as main characters, product ads, faith stories, music videos, fanfictions, book trailers, and more. 🧵

Try it today @quanderAI.

If you’ve made it here, we have free credits for you 👇

[Vincent Song @vincentjsong]

@Moh1tAgarwal @hardmaru Would love to read can you link?

[Vincent Song @vincentjsong]

@AlexLaplaza_ @ADoricko Is this in Turkey?

[Charles Yang @charlesxjyang]

For anyone working on this, the dept of energy has a live request for information on this exact topic from yours truly

We’re looking for insights on market conditions and feedback on ways the US govt can tackle these problems

Tell all your critical mineral friends to respond!

[Ashwin Ramaswami @AshwinRamaswami]

Today, I officially launched my General Election campaign as the Democratic nominee for GA State Senate District 48.

I'm an election security expert running in my hometown against a fake elector who was indicted with Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election results.