Yet as this Constitutionally-mandated date arrives, ARPN suggests our friends and followers observe a different date, established by a social study utterly lacking in legal authority: Today – January 19 – marks the day that, on average, people abandon their New Year’s resolutions. We hereby challenge friends of ARPN to buck the trend, and resolve anew to make 2021 a strong year for resource development.

And there is reason to hope. Begin with the observation that — all partisan politics aside — several of the executive steps taken during the Trump presidency were in fact a continuation of initial actions taken during the Obama Administration, under which the Department of Energy began formulating a Critical Minerals Strategy and the Critical Materials Institute, a leading authority on critical minerals R&D, was founded.

One of the most consequential steps taken by the outgoing Trump administration was probably E.O. 13953, which declared a critical minerals national emergency and instructs the Department of the Interior to explore the application of the Defense Production Act. That EO is one of a number of relevant executive actions taken during the past few years (for examples see our Year in Review posts here).

Rather than broadly rescinding executive actions (minus those that were codified into law in late December/early January) or initiating new rule-making processes to undo them, we will be watching to see whether the Biden Administration undertakes a merit-based review of individual actions, to ensure that our nation continues down the path towards a more comprehensive mineral resource policy begun under the Obama Administration and kicked into high gear over the past few years.

And on this day when so many statistically slide back to old ways best left in the past, ARPN hereby resolves to renew our resolution to add our efforts to those that will make 2021 a banner year for domestic resource development.

The post Don’t Abandon Those New Resolutions Just Yet: ARPN’s Look Ahead for Domestic Resource Development in 2021 appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

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 been a challenging year, and the holidays certainly look very different for many of us. One thing, however has not changed: The end of the year is the time to take stock and assess what has happened in the past twelve months, where we are, and where we are headed.

While two major issues — the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and the U.S. presidential elections — sucked up most of the oxygen in the public discourse and garnered most of the media’s attention, it has been an incredibly busy year on the mineral resource policy front. So, without further ado, we’re offering ARPN’s take on 2020 from a critical mineral resource perspective:

Where We Began — Incremental Progress in 2019 in the Wake of E.O. 13817

For the most part, the U.S. mineral resource policy realm had seen slow but steady incremental progress in 2019. Faced with mounting supply chain pressures and growing trade tensions with China, stakeholders had continued to push for comprehensive resource policy reforms in the wake of Presidential Executive Order 13817 of December 20, 2017, “A Federal Strategy to Ensure Secure and Reliable Supplies of Critical Minerals.”

Against the backdrop of a previously-signed memorandum of understanding (MOU) for critical materials between the United States and Canada to reduce U.S. reliance on Chinese rare earth supplies, and the FY2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which furthered a 2019 mandate for the U.S. military to not only buy non-Chinese rare earth permanent magnets but rather develop and implement a strategy to establish a “total domestic American rare earth supply chain” for all rare earth-enabled products utilized by the U.S. military, 2020 was shaping up to be a “pivotal year for rare earths.”

Meanwhile, with the battery arms race intensifying and Chinese-American trade tensions continuing to escalate, interest in a national policy conversation on critical minerals had increased. That notwithstanding, partisan pressures on Capitol Hill remained a key obstacle for reform because, as one observer noted as late as December 2019, the prevailing sentiment was that “neither [political] party’s base sees critical minerals as such a dire threat.”

The First Few Weeks of 2020 – Staying the Course towards an “All-of-the-Above”Approach on Critical Minerals

Efforts to strengthen mineral resource cooperation between the United States and our Canadian and Australian allies, which had hit a stride in 2019 with the signing of several cooperative agreements and the formation of the U.S.-Canada Critical Minerals Working Group, were off to a good start: On January 9th of this year, the U.S. and Canada announced the finalization of its Joint Action Plan on Critical Minerals Collaboration, and in February, U.S. and Australian officials met in Washington, D.C. to further flesh out a joint U.S.-Australia Action Plan on Critical Minerals.

On Capitol Hill, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Joe Manchin, (D-W.Virginia)., released the text of their energy innovation package in late February, which contained provisions to streamline the federal permitting system for mining projects, calling for research and development on recycling and developing alternatives to critical minerals, the development of analytical and forecasting tools to evaluate critical minerals markets, and the strengthening of the critical minerals workforce. With regards to rare earths, specifically, the package called for the enactment of a program to “develop advanced separation technologies for the extraction and recovery of rare earth elements (REEs) and minerals from coal and coal byproducts,” and respective reporting to Congress.”

Coronavirus as Watershed Moment – Pandemic Exposes Vulnerabilities, Serves as Catalyst

Already, however, the global spread of the coronavirus began to overshadow all developments. In the weeks and months that followed, COVID-19 pandemic not only took over headlines all over the world, it also slowed down economic activity, drastically scaled back public life, turned parents into homeschool teachers, and sent financial markets into turmoil.

It also, perhaps more than any other event in recent memory, began to expose the depth of our supply chain challenges associated with an over-reliance on foreign, and especially Chinese, raw materials, the effects of which were being felt across broad segments of manufacturing.

While early on in the pandemic, the focus was on critical medicine —from basic drugs to treat COVID-19 to N95 surgical masks to guard against its spread —it quickly became apparent that, as ARPN’s Dan McGroarty observed in March of this year, “just as critical medicines from China are integrated across the U.S. health care spectrum, so too are critical minerals imbedded into all aspects of the U.S. supply chains for energy, high-tech manufacturing – and most worryingly, national defense.”

Tech War Exposed

While arguing that China had “no intention to fight either a Cold War or a hot one with any country,” Beijing has long engaged the U.S. in a “technology war,” of which most of the American public has been unaware. In essence, this tech war is a competition “to see which country will dominate the 21st Century Technology Age, in which our ‘Achilles heel’ is our over-reliance on foreign metals and minerals underpinning 21st Century technology.”

The coronavirus pandemic has placed a magnifying glass on the fact that the U.S. “lost a major battle in a war that it didn’t even realize it was fighting when China over the past decades established monopolies on several critical rare earth elements and a few other strategic minerals.”

According to National Defense Magazine editor-in-chief Stew Magnuson, the tech war has a number of battlefronts, ranging from the control over rare earths (or, more generally speaking, critical mineral resources) over aviation, space technology, biotech, quantum sciences, robotics, and military technology to artificial intelligence. Already down 0:1 over rare earths, he argues that the U.S. runs the risk of going 0:2 when factoring in the battle for 5G dominance, an area where, according to several recent think tank reports, the U.S. is allowing “China to eat its lunch.”

Global Energy Transition Continues to Fuel Demand for Critical Minerals

Covid-19 may have temporarily put public life and global markets on hold, but, the pandemic notwithstanding, the green energy transition marches on — and with that, our skyrocketing materials supply needs for the metals and minerals that underpin renewable technology.

In May of 2020, the World Bank released a landmark report, entitled “The Mineral Intensity of the Clean Energy Transition,” in the context of the global lender’s “Climate-Smart Mining” initiative. The global lender estimates that production of metals and minerals like graphite, lithium and cobalt will 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. Several other institutions, including the International Energy Agency echoed the sentiment of a mineral- intensive green energy future.

As such, reports that the pandemic was disrupting clean energy supply chains only added fuel to the fire, prompting Francis R. Fannon, Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Energy Resources at the U.S. Department of State, to observe that “the world must dramatically increase the extraction, refining and processing of critical energy minerals to meet the world’s ambitious clean technology demand.”

Unprecedented Attention for Supply Chains

The pandemic has drastically increased attention for supply chains. Dictionary publishers have just announced that their choices for “word of the year” in 2020 have fallen on “pandemic” and “quarantine,” but the frequency with which we have heard “supply chain” referenced in the public discourse would make the term a worthy runner-up.

And while, of course, as Dan McGroarty noted in an op-Ed for The Economic Standard earlier this year, “the first word in supply chain is ‘supply’” — underscoring the need to focus on where we source critical materials — COVID has also shed a light on the fact that supply chain vulnerabilities loom along virtually every point of the chain. The make-up of the supply chain for critical minerals may vary from material to material, but the key “link” (it’s a “chain” after all) between supply and manufacturing is refining — or, more bluntly, it’s the processing, stupid.

Unfortunately, but not unsurprisingly, this is another area where China has a leg up on us.

Over the course of the past few decades, by shutting down one smelter and refining facility after another the U.S. has effectively allowed the “hollowing out of its industrial base.”

Meanwhile, pursuing a strategic vision of controlling the entire supply chain, China has invested aggressively in metals and minerals processing, even — and especially — if the country does not develop the material domestically. For many metals and minerals, China has successfully ensured that “that all the trade flow arrows go into China before they make a product.”

As ARPN expert panel member and Benchmark Mineral Intelligence managing director Simon Moores has pointed out, “you don’t need the mass volume of raw materials mined in the U.S. — you can build other links in the supply chain to ensure those arrows point towards your country. To me, that’s the biggest challenge the U.S. has.”

Resource Policy in the Wake of COVID

The Great (Bipartisan) Reshoring

Grappling with these realities, which really are not new, but have been brought to the forefront in recent months, the “Great Reshoring” of critical materials supply chains has begun. After long period of inaction, the U.S. Government seems to be viewing strategic materials and critical minerals issues with a new seriousness — a seriousness that, while emphases will differ, stretches across party lines. During the often bitter and heated presidential campaign season of 2020, both U.S. President Donald Trump and his then-challenger and now-President-elect Joe Biden stressed the importance of “bring[ing] home our critical supply chains and permanently end[ing] our reliance on China,” (Donald Trump) and “bring[ing] Back Critical Supply Chains to America so we aren’t dependent on China or any other country for the production of critical goods in a crisis.” (Joe Biden).

The high stakes and particularly the national security implications of critical mineral resource policy have begun to resonate not just in Washington, DC., and the push for an “all-of-the-above” approach to critical minerals has received new impetus – resulting not only in multiple congressional hearings on the issue, but rather specific policy initiatives.

Specifically, we have seen progress in the following areas:

Legislation:
Aside from long-standing proponents of comprehensive mineral resource policy reform like Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Sen. Joe Manchin (D, W-Virginia) and Rep. Mark Amodei (R-Nevada), other lawmakers on Capitol Hill took on the issue:

• Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) “The Onshoring Rare Earths Act of 2020,” or ORE Act, seeks to reduce U.S. reliance on China for critical minerals. Defined as the 17 rare earths, plus four key minerals underpinning battery technology (lithium, cobalt, graphite and manganese), the ‘Cruz Criticals’ are key to establishing a domestic supply chain. The bill proposes a series of measures aimed at encouraging domestic mineral production, and strengthens existing federal statutes prohibiting rare earth magnet sourcing from China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. Recognizing that mineral production can take many forms, from traditional mining to recycling, reclamation from legacy mines, coal waste and even fracking water, it also sets up a federally-funded pilot program for traditional mining of critical minerals as well as what Cruz terms ‘secondary recovery projects.’ (…)
• House Reps. Lance Gooden (R-Texas) and Vincente Gonzalez (D-Texas) introduced the “Reclaiming American Rare Earths Act or RARE Act,” which is modeled after Sen. Cruz’s ORE Act.

• Reps. Paul A. Gosar (R-Arizona) and Michael Waltz (R-Florida) introduced the “American Critical Mineral Exploration and Innovation Act of 2020” intended to facilitate the availability, development and environmentally responsible production of domestic resources to meet national material or critical mineral needs.

• Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) offered two key amendments to the Fiscal Year 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) setting forth U.S. policies to achieve ambitious 10-year critical mineral goals and would requiring the Department of Defense (DOD) to produce a study on U.S. defense critical mineral needs.

• Sen. Mark Rubio (R-Florida) introduced the “RE-Coop 21st Century Manufacturing Act,” which would establish “a privately funded, operated, and managed Rare Earth Refinery Cooperative responsible for coordinating the establishment of a fully integrated domestic rare earth value chain to serve U.S. national security interests and restore American competitiveness of critical advanced manufacturing industries.”

Critical Materials Caucus:
In June of this year, U.S. Reps. Eric Swalwell (D- Calif.) and Guy Reschenthaler (R-Penn.) joined forces to launch a bipartisan caucus to “focus on ways to increase domestic production of specialized minerals used to make missiles, cell phones and other high-tech equipment.”

Administration Efforts and New Critical Minerals Executive Order:

• Over the summer of 2020, the Department of Energy (DOE) overhauled its target critical minerals list to include several rare earths and materials considered building blocks of battery tech. DOE has asked for project proposals to develop, in cooperation with its technology hubs, next generation technologies to extract, separate and process ‘key critical materials’: five rare earths — neodymium, praesodymium, dysprosium, terbium, and samarium — as well as cobalt, lithium, manganese, and natural graphite.
• After an initial pause during the onset of the pandemic, efforts to foster cooperative agreements with friendly nations have been re-kindled. The State Department in June announced its hopes to expand the Energy Resource Governance Initiative (ERGI) – an initiative launched last year by the United States and joined by ten other countries, including Canada, Australia and Brazil – aimed at improving supply chain security for the metals and minerals underpinning green energy technology.
• In line with cooperative agreements entered into in 2019, Geoscience Australia, the Geological Survey of Canada, and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) are coordinating their critical mineral mapping and research efforts to create a shared foundation of mineral information to help ensure a safe and secure supply of the materials needed for each country’s economy and security.
• At the White House, three new Executive Orders take aim at strategic materials and critical mineral development:
• - One order, directing an executive branch review to reduce the regulatory burdens under NEPA — the longstanding National Environmental Policy Act — in order to speed infrastructure, energy and mining projects, has triggered threats of legal action that, if successful, could stop the regulatory review even before it begins.
• - While receiving far less media attention, the second Executive Order, delegating Defense Production Act (DPA) Title III emergency authorities to the U.S. Development Finance Corporation, including the authority to underwrite loans to support strategic material production.
• - The third and perhaps most important executive order of the three, E.O. 13953, declared a critical minerals national emergency and instructs the Department of the Interior to explore the application of the Defense Production Act — used earlier in the year to accelerate production of medical supplies in the context of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic — to promote domestic resource production and development.

China’s Response

After an initial hard lockdown, China quickly revved up its engine to move past the coronavirus pandemic. Observers worrying that China would look to exploit the global shutdowns in response to the first wave of COVID-19 were proven right. Beijing was already stretching its “tentacles” across the globe even as the country was shut down and has since looked to solidify its geopolitical position as its relations with the West deteriorated.

The battery arms race is a case in point. Here, Beijing has actively and aggressively built out its EV battery megafactories since the onset of the pandemic —only recently Benchmark Mineral Intelligence listed the following numbers for “planned EV battery plants in 2020”: EU – 2, USA – 3, and China: 38.

On the rare earths front, China’s legislature passed export control legislation to “take countermeasures against any country or region that abuses export-control measures and poses a threat to China’s national security interests,” and effectively allow the “government to ban exports of strategic materials and advanced technology to specific foreign companies” – raising the specter of yet another rare earths ban.

And while China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative in the context of which China has been investing hundreds of billions of dollars in Africa and beyond to gain access to mineral riches has suffered a setback, one must assume it will double down on the strategy particularly as relations with the West have been deteriorating.

Harnessing the Materials Science Revolution

If there is a silver lining to be found in the coronavirus pandemic, it’s that it has been unleashing the powers of innovation. The materials science revolution has not only not been slowed — it has delivered amazing promise.

Whether it’s the development of vaccines, rapid tests, new treatment methods or novel materials for personal protective equipment (PPE) at neck-breaking speeds – we’re seeing innovation unfold in front of our very eyes as materials science provides “platform technologies and tools for virus research.”

Courtesy of the materials science revolution, old school mainstay metal Copper recently has garnered a lot of attention due to its antimicrobial properties. We featured several new ideas on how to harness copper’s properties in the fight against coronavirus ranging from the development of copper-infused fabrics to copper-alloyed cell phone cases, and using copper-alloys in high-touch areas in transit, hospital settings and schools, as well as the development of copper-infused paints and coatings.

Critical minerals R&D certainly showed its promise in 2020, and we can expect the materials science revolution to continue to deliver more breakthroughs in the coming months and years.

A Look Beyond 2020

2020 has brought many changes, in our personal lives, in the way we travel or conduct business. It has also brought about political change — which will certainly impact policy making going forward.

We will explore our expectations in this regard and policy recommendations for 2021 in a more comprehensive manner in a forthcoming post.

For now, suffice it to say that regardless of who occupies the White House, the critical minerals challenge is here to stay.

While the Biden/Harris ticket proclaimed its intentions to bring home supply chains during the presidential campaign, priorities will undoubtedly shift come January 2021. Whereas the Trump administration, among other things, placed an emphasis on strengthening and increasing domestic mining, it is reasonable that expect the incoming Biden/Harris administration to greater emphasize leveraging partnerships with allied nations, as well as recycling, and reclamation of new minerals from old mine tailings.

The concept of a circular economy — a system which thrives on sustainability and focuses mainly on refining design production and recycling to ensure that little to no waste results — is not new, but has gained traction in recent years, and — with technological advances and shifting resource supply scenarios — will likely continue to do so under President-elect Joe Biden.

What will not change, is the urgency with which we need to treat the United States’ critical minerals challenge, because, as the coronavirus pandemic has made crystal clear, neither China, nor the rest of the world will wait for us.

The post 2020 – A Watershed Year for Resource Policy appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

Already discovered in 1852, the celestial body is located in the Solar System’s main asteroid belt, roughly 370 million km from Earth. The object, which has been called 16 Psyche, is composed almost entirely of nickel and iron. A planned NASA mission to study the asteroid’s properties is set to launch in August of 2021, with a planned arrival at the celestial body in 2026. As Mining.com notes a little tongue-in-cheek, “[i]f the mission could kindly bring the asteroid back to Earth, every person on the planet — all 7.8 billion of us — would get roughly $1.2 billion, based on current metal prices.”

It’s a fascinating development, and harnessing the metal potential 16 Psyche would certainly take care of a looming nickel shortage some have been warning of — one of many mineral resource challenges we are facing and the extent of which has been brought to the forefront by the current coronavirus pandemic.

However, at least at this point in time, all talk about and funding/legislation for asteroid mining aside — space mining is little more than pie in the sky thinking.

Meanwhile, on Planet Earth, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring a critical minerals national emergency aimed at expanding terrestrial, i.e. U.S. domestic production of rare-earth and other critical minerals in an effort to reduce dependence on China. Among other things, the order directs the Department of the Interior to explore the application of the Defense Production Act — used earlier in the year to accelerate production of medical supplies in the context of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic — to promote domestic resource production and development.

In the context of the executive order, efforts to bring critical materials into the U.S. supply chain are currently underway. Here are a few examples, some of which draw on close cooperation with trusted allies Canada and Australia:

• Only days after the executive order, the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) announced the U.S. government’s taking of a $25 million equity stake in Dublin-based battery metals miner TechMet as part of the president’s push to reduce our nation’s over-reliance on supply chains dominated by China. The investment will help the company develop a nickel and cobalt mine in Brazil.
• Later in October, the United States Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) awarded American Manganese (AMY) a grant to perform work on the United States Government’s manganese ore stockpile located near Wenden, Arizona, with the goal of producing electrolytic manganese metal (EMM), a form currently on the U.S. National Defense Stockpile purchase list.

• In light of the closure of the last domestic titanium sponge plant in August, the U.S. is looking for a way to re-establish its titanium supply chain via Australian mining explorer Tao Commodities acquiring an option on a titanium and zircon project in Tennessee. The project site is only minutes away from one of the world’s largest titanium-consuming pigment plants. The owner of said facility, U.S.-based Chemours, has also opened a new facility in Georgia which will produce titanium dioxide (TiO2) pigment, as well as zircon.
• And moving from titanium to equally critical co-products, an example of reducing vulnerabilities at the processing level of the supply chain comes to us via our allies to the North, where global miner Rio Tinto has developed a way to extract scandium from waste tailings in the titanium dioxide production process in one of its production facilities in Quebec, Canada.

Perhaps unlike any other event in recent history, the coronavirus pandemic has put a magnifying glass over the United States’ supply chain vulnerabilities in the context of a globalized world.

The fate of the most recent executive order on critical minerals hangs in the balance in the wake of the Presidential election — an incoming Biden Administration may alter or rescind the executive order altogether, and we may see some policy shifts.

However, in the grand scheme of things, with the order being a direct response to our increasingly obvious over-reliance on foreign (and especially Chinese) critical minerals, and China’s penchant for playing politics when holding leverage over its adversaries, the push to reduce our mineral resource vulnerabilities will continue, irrespective of who will occupy the White House — and we at ARPN will be here to keep track.

The post With Asteroid Mining Likely Unattainable for the Time Being, U.S. Must Focus on Reducing Supply Chain Vulnerabilities – Here on Earth appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

The executive order is a direct response to an inconvenient truth the current pandemic has brought to the forefront — our over-reliance on foreign (and especially Chinese) critical minerals, and China’s penchant for playing politics when holding leverage over its adversaries, indications for which have been mounting over the last few months amidst growing trade tensions between the United States and China.

News coming out of China this weekend point to China’s readiness to escalate tensions with the United States and its allies and underscore the need for action.

According to Nikkei Asia, the Chinese legislature on Saturday passed export control legislation China to “take countermeasures against any country or region that abuses export-control measures and poses a threat to China’s national security interests,” and effectively allows the “government to ban exports of strategic materials and advanced technology to specific foreign companies.”

Listing some of the ramifications of the new law, which is set to go into effect on December 1, 2020, Nikkei Asia writes that “[c]oncerns have been raised that rare-earth metals, for which China’s market share exceeds 60%, may be included in the restricted items. Such a ban would have broad implications worldwide.”

Aside from also affecting companies that import export-controlled items from China, and not only end users, the law can also “be enforced over acts committed outside Chinese borders,” and employees of foreign companies without offices in China could be arrested upon entering the country.

The move comes on the heels of ministerial meetings of the Australia-India-Japan-United States Quadrilateral or Quad in Tokyo earlier this month — which had prompted the Chinese Communist Party to dub the Quad an “anti-China coalition” and an “exclusive clique.”

During the Quad meetings, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had called for the four-nation grouping to “collaborate” on countering China, stating that “[a]s partners in this Quad, it is more critical now than ever that we collaborate to protect our people and partners from the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) exploitation, corruption, and coercion.”

With tensions escalating, it is encouraging to see that stakeholders have begun to realize the urgency of the situation and there are indications that the new executive order is (finally) setting off a flurry of activity in the U.S. critical minerals space — along all links of the supply chain. As ARPN’s Daniel McGroarty has stated:

“[W]e’ve spent enough time admiring this problem. The question now will be whether this EO triggers an immediate and active response on the part of the U.S. Government – one that will encourage American ingenuity, innovation and investment to bring new sources of supply into production.”

The post China’s New Export Control Legislation Raises Specter of REE Ban appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

Aside from calling on the Department of the Interior to invoke the Defense Production Act to expand and strengthen our domestic mining and processing capacity, the order directs agencies to “prioritize the expansion and protection of the domestic supply chain for minerals and the establishment of secure critical minerals supply chains,” and to direct agency resources accordingly, to ensure that these “do not depend on resources or processing from foreign adversaries.”

In its effort to secure U.S. supply chains, the U.S. will, among other things, leverage “cooperation and coordination with partners and allies, including the private sector” — an area into which the Trump administration has made forays in recent months with the signing of various cooperative agreements on critical minerals with Australia and Canada.

The recently agreed-upon three-year labor deal between Unifor, the labor union that represents Canadian autoworkers, and Ford Motor Company of Canada Ltd, must be viewed in this context.

Under the agreement, Ford will spend nearly $2 billion on its Canadian plants, including $1.8 billion toward the production of five electric vehicle models in its Oakville, Ontario plant, with production starting in 2025. The governments of Ontario and Canada, respectively, are contributing $295 million for a total spend of $590 million, towards retooling the Oakville EV plant.

According to news reports, the upgrade of the plant will elevate Oakville into Ford Motor Company’s No 1. electric vehicle factory in North America.

During the contract negotiations leading up to the agreement, in what constitutes a clear acknowledgment of the strategic importance of controlling the entire supply chain, Ontario’s premier Doug Ford made clear that the province was willing to invest to not only assemble EVs, but to also have battery manufacturing done in Ontario.

The Canadian federal government’s investment into EV technology ties into its post-pandemic recovery plan. As Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains wrote earlier this fall in Policy Options magazine:

“With Canada’s natural resources and skilled workforce providing a competitive advantage, we absolutely must support the development of the next generation of battery supply chains, right here in Canada. The ability of Canadian industry to pivot quickly has been on display since the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a matter of months, Canadian manufacturers were able to retool their existing production lines and set up new manufacturing facilities to produce much-needed PPE and other critical supplies. There is no reason we cannot see the same kind of rapid retooling of existing facilities – and eventually the construction of new ones – to take on the manufacture of battery materials. Doing so would provide positive results across various sectors, including mining and critical minerals, automotive and bus manufacturers, research and development — all of which drive economic growth.”

Now that the new U.S. Executive Order has declared a critical minerals “national emergency,” we will see whether Canada’s actions in the EV sector find an echo on the U.S. side of the border — and one that draws on the collective strengths of two of the world’s most technologically advanced democracies.

The post Has Canada Just Jump-Started its Electric Vehicle Sector? – A Look at the Recent Ford Canada Labor Deal Through the Prism of an Integrated North American Value Chain appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

On his way to a campaign rally in Minnesota, the president on Wednesday signed an Executive Order declaring a national emergency on critical minerals, determining that

“our Nation’s undue reliance on critical minerals, in processed or unprocessed form, from foreign adversaries constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.”

Among other provisions, the executive order calls for the Department of the Interior to invoke the Defense Production Act to expand and strengthen domestic mining and processing capacity in an effort to “guard against the possibility of supply chain disruptions and future attempts by our adversaries or strategic competitors to harm our economy and military readiness.”

Agencies are directed to “prioritize the expansion and protection of the domestic supply chain for minerals and the establishment of secure critical minerals supply chains,” and to direct agency resources accordingly, to ensure that these “do not depend on resources or processing from foreign adversaries.”

ARPN Principal Daniel McGroarty, who has long advocated the application of an “all-of-the-above” approach we’ve come to know from the energy policy discourse – in the context of working toward resource independence – called the executive order welcome, if also long overdue.

He said:

“Last July [2019], we saw the President use the Defense Production Act to designate the rare earths as essential to the national economy and national security. In this new Executive Order [EO], the extension of the U.S. Government’s ‘national emergency’ authority across not only the rare earths but the full range of critical minerals is a dramatic step, and clear recognition of the breadth and depth of the dangerous dependencies we focus on at ARPN.

As I’ve said before, we’ve spent enough time admiring this problem. The question now will be whether this EO triggers an immediate and active response on the part of the U.S. Government – one that will encourage American ingenuity, innovation and investment to bring new sources of supply into production.”

To read the full text of the order, click here.

The White House will be holding a stakeholder call later this afternoon to provide more information, so expect more coverage on our blog over the next few days.

The post New Critical Minerals Executive Order Declares National Emergency, Invokes Defense Production Act appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

“The current coronavirus pandemic has exposed significant supply chain challenges associated with our over-reliance on foreign (and especially Chinese) raw materials,” — writes ARPN’s Sandra Wirtz in a new piece for The Economic Standard:  

“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 U.S. supply chains. And, in spite of the fact that the United States is rich in mineral resources, we have maneuvered ourselves into a situation where we often find ourselves at the mercy of China.”

Outlining the genesis and extent of our over-reliance on largely Chinese-sourced mineral resources, Wirtz argues that while the main focus has been on rare earths, our supply chain vulnerabilities stretch far beyond, as evidenced most recently by the findings of the new World Bank report on “The Mineral Intensity of the Clean Energy Transition.”

With COVID as the catalyst, that message is resonating with U.S. policymakers, in the Cabinet Departments and at the White House. Wirtz outlines several current policy initiatives aimed at alleviating our supply chain vulnerabilities:

• U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s Onshoring Rare Earths Act of 2020, or ORE Act, which defines ‘critical minerals’ as the 17 Rare earths plus four key minerals underpinning battery tech;  
• the expansion of the Department of Energy’s “target list” for project proposals to develop next gen extraction, separation and processing technologies for five rare earths plus cobalt, lithium, manganese and natural graphite; and

• two new Executive Orders which would promote domestic mineral resource development. 

She closes:

“All of which is to say that, after long period of inaction, the U.S. Government seems to be viewing strategic materials and critical minerals issues with a new seriousness.  That’s a welcome development.  COVID, with its sudden disruption of supply chains, should be the last warning the U.S. needs to bolster our mineral resource security going forward.”

Read the full piece here.

The post ARPN’s Wirtz: “COVID Should Be the Last Warning the U.S. Needs to Bolster Mineral Resource Security” appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

The hearing comes against the backdrop of increased domestic and international activity in the field of mineral resource policy amidst growing concern on Capitol Hill over how to secure mineral supply chains for domestic industries.  

The specter of using Rare Earths as an economic weapon – as threatened by China earlier this year – revealed that “the current trade war between the U.S. and China is in fact one front in a larger tech war: a competition to see which country will dominate the 21st Century Technology Age.”

And while Washington, DC remains locked in partisan fighting, there is a growing realization across party lines – as evidenced in a recent U.S. Senate hearing -  that a more “holistic approach” to critical mineral resource policy is warranted and that “when it comes to critical minerals extracting, processing, recycling… now is our call to action.”

Writes Dylan Brown for E&E Daily (subscription required):

“They are split on solutions, but many Republicans and Democrats share national security concerns about growing reliance on foreign countries, in particular China, for a slew of minerals used in military and renewable energy technology.”

Earlier this summer, the White House released its long-awaited federal strategy subsequent to the December 2017 executive order. Like long-standing legislation put forth by Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chairwoman Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), S. 1317, and Rep. Mark Amodei (R-Nev.), H.R. 2531, the strategy aims to reform the regulatory framework for mine permitting. 

The post Tomorrow, Tuesday, Dec. 10 – U.S. House Committee to Hold Hearing on “Research and Innovation to Address the Critical Materials Challenge” appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

In a post for Scientific American, Bazilian retraces trends and events in the critical minerals sphere and points to the shortcomings of methodologies applied to date to measure criticality of metals and minerals. Writes Bazilian:

“But how do we measure security or criticality in a meaningful way? The methodology used in the U.S. list essentially boils down to if it is deemed “essential” and if it is estimated to have a supply chain risk. Neither of those hurdles is precise, so proxies are used. That is typical in security assessments of all kinds.”

Comparing various approaches used around the world and drawing from examples from the energy sector, he concludes:

“The future will likely bring more globally interdependent markets and systems. As a result, it is useful to further encourage new quantitative and qualitative approaches to the issues of security and criticality—in both minerals and energy. Additionally, some of the tools developed during the early oil shocks, such as the development of the International Energy Agency, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and sending the Navy’s Fifth Fleet to protect key supply choke points (such as the Strait of Hormuz), are now being considered to protect access to critical materials.

Finally, policy must take into consideration issues across the supply chain from raw materials through final manufacturing in an interconnected world. A narrow focus on domestic ‘dominance’ will not be sufficient, nor useful in addressing mineral criticality. The lessons from the energy sector are attractive as an analogy—a thoughtful application in a very different sector is required.”

One should note that the piece was written before the release of the Commerce Department’s Critical Minerals Strategy in early June, which itself has made recommendations on how to improve assessments, such as to make supply chain networks more robust “so that domestically produced critical minerals can support our Nation’s economic security and national defense.”

For example, the strategy calls for an “an interagency methodology to periodically assess market trends and competitiveness of the U.S. critical mineral industry and its downstream supply chains in order to recommend policies and strategies such as government investment in R&D, capacity expansion, stockpiling, and trade actions.”

That not withstanding, Bazilian’s points of how to measure criticality – and particularly his emphasis on factoring in the degrees of interconnectivity in today’s globalized world remain valid – and provide some important food for thought as the debate over critical mineral resource security continues to heat up. 

The post Measuring Criticality in Today’s Interconnected World appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

The report, which, according to the agency’s official announcement, “contains a government-wide action plan, including recommendations to advance research and development efforts, increase domestic activity across the supply chain, streamline permitting, and grow the American critical minerals workforce,” comes at a critical juncture in time. 

Only hours before the Commerce Department report release, China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) had announced it is studying proposals to impose export controls on rare earth elements to “protect and better use such ‘strategic resource.’” 

The recent escalation of U.S.-Chinese trade tensions, along with growing concerns over mineral resource supply chains for the EV and energy storage sectors are shining a light on the United States’ over-reliance on foreign sources for our critical mineral needs – which Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Ak) has called our nation’s “Achilles heel.”

Important first steps towards a comprehensive mineral resource strategy, which our country has been lacking, were made with Executive Order 13817, A Federal Strategy to Ensure Secure and Reliable Supplies of Critical Minerals, in December of 2017, and the release of a list of 35 metals and minerals deemed critical from an economic and national security perspective, but most subsequent legislative efforts to reduce our foreign mineral dependencies faltered in 2018. 

Says Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross on the release of the new report:

“These critical minerals are often overlooked but modern life without them would be impossible. Through the recommendations detailed in this report, the Federal government will take unprecedented action to ensure that the United States will not be cut off from these vital materials.”

Here’s hoping the report does not fall on deaf ears and helps generate new momentum to secure our nation’s critical mineral needs. 

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