Acknowledging their responsibility, the mining sector and associated industries have made significant capital investments and have been harnessing the materials science revolution to meet increased expectations of consumers, society and governments to sustainably and responsibly support the shift.

On a broader level, in a recent post, Seeking Alpha points to the European Copper Institute having found that the “copper industry reduced CO2 emissions by 60% from 1990 to 2020 by investing in efficiency and reducing energy consumption.”

The post adds: “(…) the green initiatives have just started: nowadays, mining of ‘green’ metals (which are metals produced with renewable energy sources and sustainable practices) is a new way to address emissions in the sector,” and points to low-carbon aluminum produced using mostly renewable energy sources, as well as low-carbon nickel.

Meanwhile, a significant disconnect persists in certain circles about both the importance of the mining industry in the green energy shift, and the strides companies have made to reduce their environmental impact. Overcoming that disconnect is the main reason ARPN continues to highlight specific sustainability initiatives in extractive and associated industries. These range from overhauling supply chain policies to ensure suppliers conform to certain environmental and social standards, to incorporating renewable power sources into their operations to offset some of the carbon costs of resource development. (Take a look at our latest roundup here.)

As Congress is weighing legislation that could bring significant changes for critical mineral resource policy, the time has come for another roundup:

• U.S. miner Alcoa has partnered with Alumtek Minerals, a Brisbane, Australia-based company that has developed a a process to extract critical minerals including gallium, vanadium, hafnium and rare earths from bauxite tailings. Having received a grant from the Australian government, the companies will collaborate with a Western Australian government research hub in the hopes to advance the processing technology from proof of concept to full production.
• As part of its full-value mining initiative, global miner Rio Tinto is also targeting waste tailings as a source for critical minerals and other useful consumer products. According to Bloomberg, the company is “currently figuring out ways to extract up to ten so-called critical minerals from copper waste at its mining facility in Utah,”  and in Australia, has partnered with the University of Queensland and Queensland Alumina to bioengineer bauxite residue known as ‘red mud’ into an eco-friendly plant-sustaining soil. Meanwhile, to reduce its carbon footprint, the company is looking to construct a brand new [additional] solar plant at is Weipa bauxite site, in Queensland, Australia. Contracting with energy supplier EDL, the company aims to triple North Queensland local solar power generation with the new plant.
• According to Engineering and Mining Journal, “Rolls-Royce and Flanders Electric have agreed to develop a retrofit solution for hybridizing mining-class haul trucks with mtu [motor-and-turbine union] engines, batteries and hybrid control systems, and Flanders drive train solutions.” A recently-signed Memorandum of understanding between the two companies enables them to “offer a scalable retrofit kit for hybridizing mining trucks in a wide range of mining applications.”
• In its efforts to operate more efficiently and sustainably, China-focused mine Silvercorp began constructing a one million tonne-per-year waste rock treatment plant which turns waste produced at its flagship Ying multi-mine project into aggregate. The company is further exploring the use of mine tailings in the manufacture of ceramic products.

These examples provide just a single snapshot into sustainability initiatives underway at this point in time, but of course more can, should, and is being done. Count on ARPN to continue to feature these initiatives going forward.

The post Green Energy Shift Requires a Revolution in Materials Science appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

The New Year is now a little over a week old and the inauguration of the 45^th President of the United States is just around the corner.  And while some are still dwelling on 2016 (we offered our post mortem at the end of the year), the time has come to look at what’s in store.

One of the key buzzwords, particularly if you’re looking for an issue that transcends party lines these days is “infrastructure” – an area where broad consensus on the need for significant overhaul exists.  What is often overlooked, however, is that our infrastructure today comprises of far more than just bridges, roads, and tunnels.  As our very own Daniel McGroarty outlines in a brand new piece for Investor’s Business Daily,

“[t]oday, our infrastructure extends to the national power grid — currently a patchwork of lines, nodes and often antique switching towers we rely on to move energy to where we need it — to the internet itself, which has a physicality we easily overlook in this Age of the Cloud and Wireless. These systems, marvels that they are, come closer to tin-can-and-string contraptions than the modern version we would build if we began the work today. 

Threats against our infrastructure are as diverse as they are real, and dealing with them will require a comprehensive approach.  Securing access to Copper, Graphite, Cobalt, Manganese, and Rhenium may not be the first things that come to mind when we think critical infrastructure protection – but they, and many other tech metals and minerals, have to be on our shopping list if we’re serious about a 21^st Century infrastructure that is competitive and can withstand threats from the outside and within.

As followers of ARPN are aware, we are subject to a significant degree of import-dependence for the above referenced materials, as well as for many others.  With there being more to infrastructure than “cement trucks and Jersey Barriers”, it’s time for an approach conducive to unleashing our arguably vast domestic mineral potential.

Explains McGroarty:

“It means getting over the pernicious mindset that 2017 America lives in a postindustrial age, a time when Americans are all ‘symbolic analysts,’ tapping away at keyboards, creating wealth from ones-and-zeros, live-blogging streaming video and the like, no longer dependent of transforming real raw materials into things. That messy business has been off-shored to other places, happy to sell us what we need.” 

This leaves us at the mercy of the rest of the world — and needlessly so. Concludes McGroarty:

“Word is that the new infrastructure bill will exceed $1 trillion. Shoring up our infrastructure — broadly understood — is essential, and not just for jobs and GDP, but for the stuff modern dreams are made of — everything from the gadgets we use to occupy our time to the high-performance materials that power the weapons platforms that keep us safe.

If we approach the Great Infrastructure Debate in this spirit, we could do even more than rebuild our roads, bridges and tunnels. We could build the foundation for a new American Century.”

The post McGroarty on Critical Minerals: “It’s Not Your Grandfather’s Infrastructure” appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

Noting a common thread between new pushes for EPA to use its pre-emptive veto to stop potential mines in Minnesota, Oregon and Wisconsin, Dan writes:

“What these projects have in common is that none has put forward an actual mine plan. This action would trigger a thorough mine review, as required under the National Environmental Policy Act. For more than 40 years NEPA has defined the process by which a mine plan is evaluated. Under the law, every one of the concerns raised by opponents to the Wisconsin, Minnesota and Oregon mines would be aired publicly, examined by scientists and a range of technical experts, before approval is granted or denied. Now, using Pebble Mine as precedent, anti-mining activists are urging the EPA to ignore NEPA and bar mining projects with no review necessary.”

As Dan wrote in a previous Wall Street Journal piece:

“If the EPA reinterprets existing law—Section 404 of the Clean Water Act—and grants itself unilateral authority to stop the permitting process before it begins, Pebble Mine won’t be the only project in its cross hairs, and copper won’t be the only metal.”

Add potential projects in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Oregon to what may well be a growing list.

Read the full piece HERE.

The post ARPN’s Daniel McGroarty in the Wall Street Journal appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

How the EPA Sticks Miners With a Motherlode of Regulation
The years-long wait for mining permits in the U.S. is the worst in the world.

On Dec. 13, the proposed Rosemont Copper project in southwestern Arizona—which would produce about one-tenth of all the copper in the U.S. every year—got the green light from the U.S. Forest Service to begin operations.

It was a long time coming—more than seven years after the company presented its mine plan and began the National Environmental Policy Act review process. Then again, since the average time to get a mine permitted in the U.S. is a worst-in-the-world seven-to-10 years, Rosemont’s long wait isn’t the exception. It’s the rule.

The Forest Service’s approval should be great news for our high-tech economy, powered by copper in, for instance, electric vehicles, smart homes and smartphones (about 10% of an average phone’s weight is copper). But that decision is overshadowed by the last remaining—and most formidable—governmental hurdle, the Environmental Protection Agency, the guardian of Section 404 of the Clean Water Act. Having run the gauntlet of state and local permitting requirements, Rosemont now faces two potentially fatal challenges from the EPA in the final stages of review: either death by a thousand pesky comments or an outright veto.

In the bureaucratic equivalent of sticky riot foam—a substance meant to slow and stop people on the street—every few months, a couple of dozen pages furl out from the EPA to Rosemont’s managers. Past communications have included the suggestion that the project might jeopardize the leopard frog, or the Gila topminnow, or the water umbrel. One official worry was that the project might impede the opportunity for people to canoe in a desert region where summer temperatures reach 118 degrees.

The EPA churns out concerns about potential impacts on 18 miles of streams and threats to the “water quality” of the Davidson Canyon Wash, a single gulch—filled intermittently by rain—in a state with 39,039 rivers and streams. The agency also lets Rosemont know it will be looking at the impacts of mining on air quality—but only after a preliminary process to determine which air-quality standard should apply. Each governmental query receives a Rosemont reply in the never-ending race toward a moving finish line.

Even this snail’s pace doesn’t satisfy antimining advocates. Many environmentalists and anticapitalists (and many critics are both) would like to see the EPA simply short-circuit the review process and veto the mine proposal. After all, the agency has used Section 404(c) of the Clean Water Act to shut down a mine—famously, the Spruce Mine in West Virginia—even after it had received its operating permit.

For the most vocal environmental groups, the EPA is perfectly suited as judge and jury. Jennifer Krill, the director of Earthworks, confirmed in congressional testimony earlier this year that her group has never supported or endorsed a single U.S. mine. The threat of an EPA Clean Water Act veto of various projects hangs over more than $220 billion in economic development, ranging from mines to agriculture and infrastructure projects.

Sadly for communities around the proposed mine—about 30 miles southwest of Tucson in an area where unemployment is still stubbornly close to 10%—every day of delay means a longer wait for much-needed jobs, which would funnel much-needed revenue into local tax coffers. Mothers and fathers struggling to support their families may feel endangered, but unlike the leopard frog, they’re not on a government list.

The nation, meanwhile, is losing the output of a mine with a projected yearly output of more than 100,000 metric tons. That’s Arizona copper the U.S. wouldn’t need to import from abroad, feeding a negative balance of trade, and providing political and economic leverage to nations that supply the metal we fail to mine ourselves.

If we mine fewer metals, won’t manufacturing jobs leave the U.S. and go where the metals are? If we don’t mine in the U.S.—with arguably the world’s most stringent oversight, environmental and safety standards—won’t Americans end up importing products made with metals mined in other places under less-stringent standards (if any), leading to far more damage to the environment and the health of the miners? All of these questions are critical to determining whether a mine serves the public good. Surely they must matter to the nation as much as a topminnow does to the EPA.

Finally, did Congress pass the National Environmental Policy Act to put in place a means of balancing the benefits of resource extraction with competing public goods? Or did it set up an endless bureaucratic gauntlet designed to delay, derail or economically exhaust mine developers?

Seven and a half years on, Rosemont Copper is still waiting for an answer.

The post Op-ed: How the EPA Sticks Miners With a Motherlode of Regulation appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

The following op-ed by American Resources Principal Dan McGroarty was published in the Wall Street Journal on July 5, 2013. The original text can be found here.

A Potential Copper Bonanza Runs Afoul of the EPA

The metal is essential for wind turbines, but a proposed mine in Alaska has set off Keystone-like alarms.

By Daniel McGroarty

Activists are pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to take a drastic regulatory step that could have significant repercussions for the U.S. economy. I’m not referring to the Keystone XL pipeline or taxing carbon emissions. At issue is the Pebble Mine—a natural-resource project in Alaska that could yield more copper than has ever been found in one place anywhere in the world.

In addition to an estimated 80 billion pounds of copper, the Pebble Mine also holds strategic metals like molybdenum and rhenium, which are essential to countless American manufacturing, high-tech and national-security applications. Yet even before a plan to mine the deposit has been introduced by the Pebble Partnership, the group poised to bring the mine into production, the EPA appears all too willing to bend to the pressure of environmental activists. The EPA has conducted a hypothetical environmental assessment of the region that positions the agency to pre-emptively veto the Pebble project before the partnership even applies for a single permit.

Apparently some left-wing environmental groups, like the Natural Resources Defense Council, Earthworks and Trout Unlimited are so worried that the project might make it through the permitting process that they’re trying to stop it before it starts. As the NRDC put it in August 2012: “EPA’s study (and intervention) is critically important. If left to its own devices, the state of Alaska has never said no to a large mine.”

Thankfully, some liberals are voicing their opposition to a new EPA pre-emptive veto power. The Center for American Progress, for example, has come out in favor of letting the permitting review take place, even though the group has criticized the Pebble Mine project.

This is the first instance of a fissure in the unofficial anti-mining alliance that wants to see the EPA acquire vast new powers. With luck, more groups will emulate the Center for American Progress’s principled position.

The irony here is that renewable-energy industries that environmentalists champion, like solar and wind, rely heavily on copper. More than three tons of it are needed for a single industrial wind turbine. CIGS photovoltaic panels hold out the promise of efficiently capturing the sun’s rays, with an energy conversion rate topping 20%. The “C” in CIGS stands for copper, and the “S” for selenium, 95% of which is derived as a copper byproduct.

Electric cables, of course, carry the energy generated by these renewable sources to the national grid. The cables are usually made of copper, using the metal’s superior conductivity.

Yet to hear anti-mining activists tell it, the project at Pebble Mine offers none of these benefits. Just last week, when speaking to the trade publication Energy & Environment News on the subject, NRDC official Joel Reynolds said flatly: “We view this as one of the worst projects anywhere in the world today.”

Let’s take environmentalists’ advice and “think global” for a moment about that statement. How would a mining project at Pebble stack up against some other places where global markets currently source copper?

Will Pebble employ child-slaves as young as 8 to do the mining? Copper mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo do—and that copper is sold into the global market.

Will Pebble send its miners to work without respiratory equipment, wearing boots with holes that let acid rot miners’ feet? Chinese-run mines in Zambia do. Where are the environmentalist protests at the Zambian or Chinese embassies?

Will Pebble’s leadership be able to order local officials jailed for opposing its project? That’s what happened last month in Iran—a mining nation set on doubling its copper production by 2015—where an entire town council was jailed for opposing a marble and stone mine.

It’s easy for someone like the NRDC’s Mr. Reynolds to protest an American mine from the organization’s $5 million waterfront headquarters (the Robert Redford Building) in Santa Monica, Calif. In the U.S., protesting is a career choice, and movement leaders are feted with awards and grants. Opposing a project the size of Pebble makes a great fundraising tool. It’s far more challenging to life and limb to take on African warlords, Chinese officials or Iranian mullahs.

Environmental activists often preach that the planet is interconnected. Well, that’s certainly true of the global marketplace: Every pound of copper left in the ground in Alaska or the Lower 48 is effectively a price support for producers in the places like Zambia and Angola.

If the EPA reinterprets existing law—Section 404 of the Clean Water Act—and grants itself unilateral authority to stop the permitting process before it begins, Pebble Mine won’t be the only project in its cross hairs, and copper won’t be the only metal. A 2011 study by the Brattle Group, an economic consulting firm, shows that U.S. economic development projects worth more than $200 billion would be exposed if the EPA asserts this new power.

President Obama recently said that we must weigh the opportunity cost of not building the Keystone XL pipeline. The same logic applies to the project at Pebble Mine—and the federal permitting process is the only place to do that.

Mr. McGroarty is president of American Resources Policy Network, a public policy research group in Washington, D.C., that is supported by organizations and companies in mining and related industries.

The post Op-ed: A Potential Copper Bonanza Runs Afoul of the EPA appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

In a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal, a reader from Arizona responds to American Resources Principal Daniel McGroarty’s op-ed “America’s Growing Minerals Deficit.”

Citing Canada-based Augusta Resources’ Rosemont copper mine project in southern Arizona as an example, the reader alleges McGroarty “overlooks one very important consideration. There isn’t any assurance that the U.S.-mined minerals will be used to meet manufacturing needs in the U.S.” He sees the main conundrum in that “the copper to be mined on U.S. soil by a foreign-owned company is expected to be sent to China for smelting, then made available on the world open market.”

In today’s globalized world, the majority of mining companies are based in other nations. The fact of the matter is that the United States benefits greatly from foreign direct investment to extract our resources. In recent years, foreign direct investment, the attraction of which is a key priority of the Obama Administration, has supported more than 2 million domestic manufacturing jobs, with workers “at majority-owned U.S. affiliates of foreign companies receiv[ing] 30% higher pay than non-FDI supported jobs.”

As for the mining sector specifically, the National Mining Association estimates that “U.S. mining in 2010 directly and indirectly generated more than 1.98 million U.S. jobs, $119 billion in U.S. labor income, [and] $225 billion in contribution to U.S. gross domestic product.”

There are a number of other reasons why harnessing our domestic resource potential is critical. While the “not in my backyard” crowd is quick to point to potential environmental damage associated with domestic mining, they fail to acknowledge that in order to meet domestic manufacturing needs, we otherwise have to rely on foreign imports with all strings attached – and that all too often means less stringent environmental standards or human rights abuses in supplier nations.

Moreover, the geopolitical nature of resource policy cannot be dismissed. China’s blatant willingness to use its near-total supply monopoly for Rare Earths as a retaliatory “weapon” illustrates the pitfalls of allowing a foreign nation to effectively control the entire supply chain.

The WSJ reader’s question of whether or not we can “keep U.S.-mined minerals for exclusive use in this nation” is besides the point – in a globalized world that cannot be, and is not the goal. But taking ourselves out of the equation and preemptively surrendering in the global race for resources by failing to develop what we’re blessed to have beneath our own soil should not be an option.

Regardless of where resources are being sent for smelting – the bottom line is this, as Daniel McGroarty has pointed out before:”If we stagger forward with our current system, let’s be honest and open-eyed about the outcome: We will perpetuate foreign dependencies that will impair our ability to bring the manufacturing supply-chain home to American cities and towns, forfeiting jobs and GDP and adding to our outbound balance of trade transfers. We will hand to nations who do not always wish us well leverage over our economy and – in the case of the many metals required for our advanced weapons systems – our national security. And we will surrender a large portion of the innovation-driven advances in high-tech and green-tech to nations that can offer access to metals and minerals the U.S. in many instances possesses but makes it impossible to mine.”

Is that really the future we want?

The post “Can we keep U.S.-mined minerals for exclusive use in this nation?” – A question that misses the mark appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

Citing General Electric as an example of a manufacturer that uses 72 of the first 82 elements on the Periodic Table in its product manufacturing mix, McGroarty underscores the urgency of the United States’ overreliance on foreign mineral imports.

In his piece, McGroarty also points to an area where the White House’s stated goal to “support U.S. institutions in the effort to discover, manufacture, and deploy advanced materials twice as fast, at a fraction of the cost,” through its Material Genome Initiative is at odds with actual government policy:

“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.”

It remains to be seen whether actual reforms will result from the White House policy initiatives, or whether Washington, DC will return to business as usual. Says McGroarty:

“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.?”

The post American Resources Principal discusses mineral resource supply issues in context of White House initiatives in Wall Street Journal appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

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.

The post Op-ed: America’s Growing Minerals Deficit appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.