The following op-ed by American Resources Principal Dan McGroarty was published in the Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2013. The original text can be found here.

America’s Growing Minerals Deficit

The U.S. is now tied for last, with Papua New Guinea, in the time it
takes to get a permit for a new mine.

By Daniel McGroarty

After every election, there’s a mad scramble in Washington over the
must-make-it-happen agenda for the newly inaugurated president and
Congress. There are welcome signs from the White House’s own Material
Genome Initiative that securing America’s access to critical metals
and minerals will be high on the list.

A good thing, too. Jobs and capital increasingly flow to countries
that command the resources to power modern manufacturing, and American
manufacturing is more dependent on metals and minerals access than
ever before. Yet there is no country on the planet where it takes
longer to get a permit for domestic mining. Among other consequences
of this red tape, there are now 19 strategic metals and minerals for
which the U.S. is currently 100% import-dependent—and for 11 of them a
single country, China, is among the top three providers.

Even so, the president’s interest in the subject is a double-edged
sword: Will U.S. policies be guided by sound science? Or will they be
unduly influenced by environmental politics—despite the fact that many
minerals we need are essential components for the production of green
energy?

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy underlined the
importance of this access in a Jan. 14 statement. “A century ago,
plentiful elements like iron, lead, and copper fueled our Nation’s
transition to an industrial economy. But today, many of the materials
that characterize the industrial cutting-edge—such as rare earths,
indium, and lithium—are not as naturally abundant or easy to access as
their predecessors.”

The implication that we’ve entered a brave new world where arcane
“technology metals” replace their industrial precursors is a bit
misleading, though. The situation is actually more acute. The
country’s metals dependency is even more pronounced than the White
House indicates—and some of those metals and minerals, important in
many processes, are not just “cutting-edge” ones like rare earths and
indium.

General Electric, for instance, is now using 72 of the first 82
elements on the periodic table in its product-manufacturing mix. Not
just iron, lead and copper, either. GE also needs zinc, aluminum, tin
and nickel—elements that the American Resources Policy Network argues
are best understood as “gateway metals,” resources whose byproducts
include scores of critical metals recovered during mining.

Consider copper, which serves as a gateway to 21 elements on the
periodic table, collectively supporting transportation, manufacturing,
modern medicine and the major alternative-energy sources to power the
clean technology of the future. Copper can also be processed to
produce selenium and tellurium (used in solar power), molybdenum (used
in steel super-alloys), and rhenium (used in jet engines, lead-free
gasoline and treatments for liver and bone cancers). Finally, copper
is sometimes found with rare-earth elements which are used in
alternative-energy production, for wind turbines, electric-vehicle
batteries and compact-fluorescent light bulbs.

The country’s advanced weapons systems are equally—and
increasingly—metals-intensive. Measured in metric tons, copper is the
second-most-used metal in defense applications. In April 2009, the
Department of Defense reported that a shortage of copper had caused a
“significant weapon system production delay for DOD.”

The White House’s Material Genome Initiative says its goal is to
“support U.S. institutions in the effort to discover, manufacture, and
deploy advanced materials twice as fast, at a fraction of the cost.”
The need for speed is accurate, but it’s going to prove difficult for
American innovators to be twice as fast when America’s mine permitting
process is easily twice as slow as in other mining nations.

The U.S. has domestic resources for 18 of those 19 metals and minerals
we now exclusively import from abroad. But a maze of government
regulations has made mining them here too difficult. That’s the
consistent finding of the annual Behre Dolbear Country Rankings for
Mining Investment, known in the mining world as the “Where-Not-to-Mine
Report.” The U.S. is currently tied for last place (with Papua New
Guinea) in the time it takes to permit a new mine—seven to 10 years on
average.

In a world where the technology industry regards a year as an
eternity, waiting a decade for new supplies of critical technology
metals will severely hamper America’s ability to innovate. Without
significant reform of the country’s mining-permit process, the U.S.
may be starved of the resources to build everything from smartphones
to weapons systems, impairing both the economy and national security.

Reform could begin with streamlining the permitting process to get rid
of redundancies at the local, state and federal levels, so the process
can run concurrently. Among other benefits, this would mean that
environmental challenges and litigation—bitter ironies given the fact
that the mined metals and minerals are needed for many forms of green
energy—do not set the permit process back repeatedly.

All that will depend on whether the White House initiative is the
first step toward a strategic-resource policy that asserts the
importance of domestic metals and minerals exploration. Or will the
initiative bring only a federally funded study group writing what
might prove to be the definitive white paper on the industrial decline
of the U.S.?

Mr. McGroarty is president of American Resources Policy Network, a
nonpartisan education and public-policy research organization based in
Washington, D.C.