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The crumbling state of our nation’s infrastructure is neither a secret, nor is addressing it a small task, as today’s infrastructure stretches far beyond bridges, roads and ports. As ARPN’s Daniel McGroarty phrased it a few years back: “It’s not your Grandfather’s infrastructure anymore.”

U.S. President Joe Biden is right to call out and address this issue, writes the National Mining Association’s Rich Nolan in a recent piece for Inside Sources, but he cautions that the President’s American Jobs Plan runs the risk of falling far short “if we don’t recognize and elevate the importance of American-produced raw materials to make it a reality.”

Writes Nolan:

“Incomplete infrastructure plans that prioritize new bridges and roads, electric vehicle (EV) charging networks, or a new electricity grid, but relegate mineral and metal production to a second-tier are bound to collide with an alarming reality: failure to make mining policy infrastructure policy, energy policy, and jobs policy could very well derail these key initiatives, further weaken the nation’s economic and national security, and play right into China’s hands.”

The global transition to greener energy will require massive amounts of metals and minerals underpinning renewable energy technology, such as battery tech staples like lithium, graphite, cobalt, but also mainstay metals like copper, which is critical for both renewable energy applications as well as more traditional infrastructure projects.

According to Nolan, “The inescapable conclusion is that we need more domestic mines – with American workers producing American materials under world-leading environmental and safety standards – and we need them tomorrow.”

And as friends of ARPN know, in the U.S. mining world, tomorrow – with apologies to showtune enthusiasts of Annie! – is not just a day away, but in terms of the state and federal permitting process, an average of 7 to 10 years away.

Continues Nolan:

“From government to the automotive and tech industries, the troubling reality is we are financing enormous demand for material commodities — but not their supply. Should the president’s jobs plan become law without a decisive commitment to ramping up U.S. mineral production, some of its most ambitious initiatives will struggle to search for imported raw materials.”

Pointing to the alarming degree of our nation’s import reliance for many critical metals and minerals, Nolan states that while we should develop a comprehensive framework that encompasses closer cooperation with allies, and strategies like recycling to meet our mineral needs today and into the future, ultimately, “there is no getting to where we hope to go without more domestic mining.”

He concludes:

“Our challenge is not one of geology – the U.S. has vast domestic resources – but rather one of policy. America must build again. It must build and rebuild the bridges, roads, mass transit systems, and countless other pieces of critical infrastructure that cry out for attention. It must also build anew the industrial base and the high-paying community-supporting jobs to underpin this great effort – an effort that must be built from the mine up.”

In all, a timely reminder that infrastructure – and manufacturing in general – is materials-intensive. As we’ve said before at ARPN, Made in America starts with Mined in America.

Read Nolan’s full piece here.

Another round of COVID relief stimulus checks is hitting Americans’ bank account this week, and a vaccine schedule laid has been laid out.

Time for the Administration and Congress to move on to the next key priority of the Biden Administration’s “Build Back Better” agenda: an economic recovery package that will “make historic investments in infrastructure, along with manufacturing, research and development and clean energy.”

The BlueGreen Alliance, a national network of labor unions and and environmental organizations, is here for it:

“Strengthening and retooling our manufacturing sector to make today’s and tomorrow’s clean technologies and all products in cleaner ways, and modernizing our crumbling infrastructure to be safer and more energy efficient will protect our air and water, boost efforts to end economic and racial injustice, and create good union jobs across our nation,” Jason Walsh, executive director for the organization that is calling for at least $4 trillion in federal investment, said last month.

It may be popular in many circles, but it is going to be a massive undertaking — not just because it will require trillions of dollars in investment.

To use an infrastructure metaphor, we have already established that the road to a lower-carbon future is paved with critical metals and minerals — lots of them, as evidenced by last year’s World Bank report entitled “The Mineral Intensity of the Clean Energy Transition,” which estimated that production of metals and minerals underpinning the shift, such as the battery tech metals graphite, lithium and cobalt, would have to increase by nearly 500 percent by 2050 to meet global demand for renewable energy technology. To achieve the transition to a below 2°C pathway as outlined by the Paris Agreement, the deployment of wind, solar and geothermal power, as well as energy storage will require more than three billion tons of minerals and metals.

A similar scenario unfolds for overhauling America’s infrastructure, which, undeniably, is crumbling. In 2017, the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Infrastructure Report Card assigned a D+ to America’s roads, bridges, dams and other infrastructure. With an update of the quadrennial report due this year, and infrastructure reform having fizzled after a first push during the Trump Administration, there is no reason to expect a better grade this time around.

The sheer need for mainstay materials like steel and copper for construction and wiring or zinc for galvanization already make clear that we’re looking at another mineral intensive component of the Biden Agenda. But it’s not just old school transportation infrastructure that is in dire need of an overhaul.

ARPN’s Daniel McGroarty made it clear in a piece for Investors Business Daily in the early days of the Trump Administration:

“This isn’t your grandfather’s infrastructure. Bridges, tunnels and roads are just part of the story. Today, 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.”

With that, comes another layer of material inputs — lots of copper for wiring, but also battery tech metals like lithium, graphite, nickel and vanadium for energy storage, to name but a few.

Meanwhile, the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has highlighted our nation’s over-reliance on critical metals and minerals underpinning the above-referenced goals of a lower-carbon future coupled with a comprehensive infrastructure overhaul.

How do we reconcile massive material inputs and sustainably “Building Back Better”? The challenge is big, and will likely require an “all-of-the-above” approach — but thankfully, as we previously pointed out, is “increasingly ‘recognizing [its] responsibility and trying to meet the increased expectations of consumers, society and governments” to contribute towards the push towards a greener energy future.’ In its growing efforts to do so, it is harnessing “advances in materials science and technology to meet the challenge of restoring a balance between mining and environmental protection.”

As Washington D.C. delves into part two of President Biden’s “Build Back Better,” agenda, we will continue to highlight initiatives by mining companies to “close the loop,” ranging 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 — as we have done in the past (take a look here and here).

Stay tuned for the next roundup.

Innovation. Disruption. That’s what Elon Musk and Tesla have become synonymous for — and for good reason. A recent claim made that Tesla would be able to reach production of 20 million vehicles per year before 2030, however, may be more of a stretch goal than a realistic number, as staff at Mining.com has recently [...]

Merely days after assuming office U.S. President Joe Biden has already signed a series of executive orders on climate change and related policy areas, marking an expected shift in priorities from the preceding Administration. But even before, and irrespective of where you come down on the political spectrum, there was no denying that we find [...]

ARPN’s Year in Review — a Cursory Review of the United States’ Critical Mineral Resource Challenge in 2020 It feels like just a few weeks ago many of us quipped that April 2020 seemed like the longest month in history, yet here we are: It’s mid-December, and we have almost made it through 2020. It’s [...]

Beijing’s threat to withhold potentially life-saving medical supplies and medications in the middle of a global pandemic, during which China has “taken control of [respective] supply chains around the world as part of its quest for global domination,” were a wake up call, write U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Gov. Mike Dunleavy (R-AK) in [...]

Against the backdrop of a new presidential executive order declaring a critical minerals “national emergency” for the United States, Benchmark Mineral Intelligence will host its “Washington DC Summit 2020 – Online” on Tuesday, October 20th, at 1p.m. EST. This year’s virtual summit will bring together U.S. Government representatives and industry stakeholders to discuss materials challenges [...]

The current coronavirus pandemic has shed a light on an inconvenient truth. We have become over-reliant on foreign (and especially Chinese) raw materials. As we previously outlined, “PPE has become the poster child, but whether it’s smart phone technology, solar panels, electric vehicles, or fighter jets — critical minerals are integrated into all aspects of [...]

“[G]aining full access to America’s domestic resources will be essential to our ability to grow, defend ourselves, and dominate in the energy world of tomorrow,” writes Forbes contributer Jude Clemente in a new piece for the publication, adding that “[w]e must finally get serious about America’s need for a mining revolution to give the wind, [...]

The current coronavirus pandemic may have thrown a wrench into the gears of many industries, but — against the backdrop of skyrocketing materials supply needs in the context of the green energy transition — Europe continues to forge ahead with the buildout of its large-scale battery gigafactory capacity.  According to London-based Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, whose [...]