The way I think of it is you progressively go from the raw materials to something processed. You then turn this into a battery pack. The battery pack goes into a vehicle. Ultimately, you make a lot of money on the vehicle. There's value that accrues throughout the chain.
The question that the United States and Canada face is where you enter into the chain so that you can create value on your own. If China controls the first four parts of the chain and just sells you a battery and you just put it in a car, a lot of the value that is in that battery accrues to China.
What I meant is that if you look at the numbers in my testimony, you'll see that BloombergNEF, which is one of the well-known energy consultants, shows the value that the lithium may start at and that $11 billion of mined lithium ultimately ends up in a $7-trillion auto industry. The lithium itself has value, but the question is, who can access that lithium and turn it into a useful product? That's where the competitive edge comes from.
If this were an open market and you could get lithium wherever you wanted, no one would care. However, it's not an open market; it's a new market and it's a growing market, so accessing that mineral is very important in ways that it's not for other commodities that are in ample supply and that you could go and get from the open market.