The finalized list was released on May 18 pursuant to Executive Order 13817 of December 20, 2017, “A Federal Strategy to Ensure Secure and Reliable Supplies of Critical Minerals.”

ARPN’s Dan McGroarty had submitted public comments during the official commenting period for the draft list.

His statement on the final list can be read here.

You can follow the hearing live on the committee’s website, where witness testimony will also be made available at the start of the hearing. Archived video will be posted shortly after the hearing concludes.

The post Full Senate Committee to Examine DOI Critical Minerals List and U.S. Mineral Resource Dependence 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.

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Like some of the other critical metals and minerals we have covered on our blog – Antimony and Cobalt come to mind – Tungsten lacks the “sex appeal that made investors fall for the rare earth story.”  Says Seddon:

“One of the big differences between tungsten and REEs is their applications. Tungsten is a very industrial metal. It’s mainly used as a carbide or “hard metal” in drilling and cutting tools used in heavy industry. Tungsten is not sexy in that sense. It’s a very solid industrial market. This contrasts with REEs, which are used in a lot of newer, high-tech applications that are much easier for the investment community to make into an exciting story.”

While Tungsten may be used in industrial applications that don’t get people as excited as, say, green technologies, there are no viable substitutes at this point.

Meanwhile, there is a strong geopolitical aspect factoring into the Tungsten narrative:  As is the case with Rare Earths, most of the world’s Tungsten comes from China, which accounts for roughly 80 percent of global Tungsten output, a fact that invites similar challenges as the ones manufacturers relying on REES have seen in the past.

Further complicating the supply picture for domestic manufacturers is the fact that Tungsten from the Eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and surrounding regions, another main source of supply, has been labeled a conflict mineral and subjected to a series of (confusing) reporting requirements under the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law and respective rules handed down by the SEC in 2012.

A partial solution to at least some of the challenges may lie in the domestic development of our Tungsten supplies, which would allow for reducing our overreliance on foreign minerals and allow for “conflict-free” sourcing.  In any case, however, the Tungsten narrative once more shows that critical resource policy cannot occur in a vacuum, as the strategic implications of our supply issues stretch far beyond the now often-discussed Rare Earths story.

The post Why Tungsten should be on your critical minerals watch list appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

So I’ll step back here to the Internet for a bit of prequel and sequel to the piece WSJ was gracious enough to run.

For me, the catalyst for the piece was my immediate reaction to the White House’s laudable goal to double the speed of U.S. manufacturing. Knowing that U.S. mine permitting is easily twice as slow – and more than that in many cases – as in other mining nations, I pictured the prospect of a manufacturing push derailed by the basic inability to source the metals and minerals necessary to make it work. Adjust for Moore’s Law (as amended by David House), with computing capacity doubling every 18 months, and the 7 to 10 years it takes to bring the average U.S. mine through the permitting process is roughly 4 to 6 high-tech “lifetimes.”

Put another way, how can a typical U.S. technogeek design system 1.0 when the metals and minerals needed to fabricate it won’t come out of an American mine til he’s on version 4-, 5-, or 6.0?

The real-world answer is: he won’t. Or at least not for production here in the U.S. He’ll source his material – maybe even site his fab plant – in a country where mining happens faster.

Judging by the pick-up, posts and reprintings, people understood the problem.

The question is, what will we do about it?

Because if we do no more than commiserate about our balky resource development system, we’ll miss the main point. What we need now is to generate momentum for reform – a shift in public policy that parallels the dynamism of the private sector which is ready to advance resource development. If we let it.

I didn’t have the space in the WSJ to point out that Australia permits mines in 18 to 24 months, while Canada does it in about one-third to half the time it takes in the U.S.. Neither country ranks as an environmental scofflaw. Indeed, Sweden — where extractive industries account for roughly 1/5th of its annual exports — is at once ranked as one of the world’s 5 most “sustainable countries,” at the very moment it ranks second in a study of countries that place the least obstacles in the path of mine development.

You’d think that means we’re ready for a sober, science-based round of permitting reform.

And you’d be wrong.

Propose even a modest change to the U.S.’s never-ending permitting story, and a certain sort of anti-mining activist will howl about industry rubber-stamps and environmental short-cuts — as if this bureaucratically barnacled maze we have now is the Platonic ideal for mine permitting. Underneath that position is a decidedly non-scientific belief that when it comes to reviewing a mine, long is good, longer is better, and right time to permit a mine of any kind is… never.

That doesn’t bode well for the U.S. in a world where capital flows freely to projects with the lowest risk and greatest certainty in terms of public policy. Mines delayed here will simply be built elsewhere. Metals that remain in the ground here will simply provide “price support” for metals mined elsewhere, and sold to us at a profit – or perhaps, in times of crisis, denied to us, if that happens to advantage the supplier country.

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.

If we’re serious about reviving American manufacturing, if we’re serious about restoring American jobs, if we’re serious about making sure the high-tech and green-tech dreams of the future are Made In America, if we’re serious about safeguarding our national security – we need a new resource development strategy. And we need it now.

The post A plea for mineral permitting reform 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.?”

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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.

The Juneau Empire’s Russell Stigall has summarized their conversation in an article highlighting McGroarty’s emphasis on Alaska being the “single most important state when measured across the full range of hard rock metals,” and the state’s vast mineral potential. McGroarty also explained what constitutes a critical and strategic mineral – a definitional void that has proven problematic in the case of the U.S. government, where a cacophony of definitional approaches has gotten in the way of policy makers formulating a critical and strategic mineral strategy:

“A strategic mineral is used in advanced weapon system that does not have a second best metal to do the job — such as certain metals used in the making of smart bombs, McGroarty said.

Minerals are considered critical if there is a near-term, present or projected shortfall in the metal, McGroarty said. This can come from the geographic location of the mineral deposit or the fluctuations of the economy, he said. But minerals can become critical also if the U.S. is not comfortable sourcing, say, gold, tin or tungsten in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“If we shut those off successfully from our U.S. manufactures and users we may have created a critical metal out of tungsten,” McGroarty said.”

Unlike many in U.S. government, Alaska’s Parnell Administration understands the stakes, and has taken the lead in formulating a critical minerals strategy at the state level. Hopefully, last week’s conference has served to raise awareness of our critical mineral needs and domestic resource potential nationally – our strategic, national security and economic future depends on it.

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