resource dependence

In a recent piece for The Hill, William Murray, federal energy policy manager, and Ned Mamula, associate fellow for the Washington, D.C.-based R Street Institute, lament that while policy makers and stakeholders are increasingly focusing on energy security issues, leaders are failing to pay “the same attention to a national security risk at least as large as oil import dependency was a decade ago – the domestic supply of critical and strategic minerals.”

Murray and Mamula argue that if China were to cut off exports of key minerals, the $2.8 trillion U.S. manufacturing economy along with “critical components of the U.S. military’s present and future arsenal” would be at risk of severe supply disruptions – a scenario that would not seem far-fetched for followers of ARPN, who are acutely aware of our nation’s largely home-grown mineral resource dependencies. 

Outlining some of the policies that have led to a scenario where the United States is effectively at the mercy of China when it comes to meeting our manufacturing base’s non-fuel mineral resource needs, Murray and Mamula point to solutions to our dilemma. Some of these solutions – which our very own Dan McGroarty outlined to U.S. Senators in recent congressional testimony – are readily available, and include permitting reform, and setting up cooperatives “similar to the co-ops currently used by the agriculture, ethanol, lumber and hardware industries,” among other things.

The authors’ bottom line hits home: 

“Decades of ill-advised resource policies have contributed to our current addiction to imported minerals. If the successful turnaround in U.S. energy security has taught us anything, it’s that dependence on imports can be solved with a combination of political will and private-sector initiative. It’s time to start digging, America.”

Click here to read the full piece. 

In a detailed letter to Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Dr. John G. “Jerry” McGinn, Katie Sweeney, General Counsel of the National Mining Association, urges the Department of Defense to “acknowledge the importance of domestic metals and minerals to meet our defense needs” as the agency moves forward to implement Executive Order 13806, “Assessing and Strengthening the Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency of the United States.” 

The Executive Order, which, as ARPN Principal Daniel McGroarty recently outlined in a commentary for Investor’s Business Daily, ties into the context of a growing threat level to U.S. national security as flash points involving Russia, China, Iran and North Korea continue to flare. It seeks to address the question of whether our defense forces are “prepared to deter war, defend U.S. interests and defeat adversaries if necessary,” and requires agency heads of various cabinet departments to report to the President policy recommendations for strengthening the U.S. defense industrial base by next April. 

As Ms. Sweeney aptly states in her letter, “[t]he focus on our nation’s manufacturing and defense industrial base and supply chain resiliency is more important than ever and long overdue.” 

While commending that the Executive Order acknowledges the “very real concern” of losing American manufacturing capabilities, she places a particular emphasis on the issue of the “further deterioration of domestic metal and mineral supply chains.”

Providing specific examples of the usage of a broad rage of metals in a variety of defense applications, Sweeney draws attention to the fact that the United States is “at a record high for dependence o foreign sources of minerals,” and that the U.S. “despite the strategic importance of minerals and metals to our national security,” ranks behind China, Russia, Chile and South Africa in mineral production. 

The underlying issues, according to Sweeney, will sound familiar to followers of ARPN:

“Many of the minerals and metals the DoD has deemed strategic and critical remain locked underground – inaccessible for military use – because of duplicative, inefficient permitting processes, limitations on lad access, and unnecessarily burdensome and harmful regulation so that stifle investment in new and existing mines in the United States and prevent the domestic mining industry from reaching its full potential.”

The whole letter, which also highlights the importance of the correlation between Gateway Metals and Co-Products which ARPN has consistently pointed to, and discusses remedies to our mineral resource woes is well worth a read. You can read it here. 

True defense readiness, which, as ARPN’s McGroarty has argued, “has long been a key bulwark of American strength,” starts at home — with the metals and minerals we are blessed to have beneath our own soil. 

 

While the geopolitics of fossil fuels are well established, we at ARPN have long lamented the lack of awareness regarding the geopolitical implications of non-fuel mineral resource supply and demand. For that reason, we were very pleased to see a recently released study co-authored by Meghan L. O’Sullivan of Harvard University’s Kennedy School, Indra Overland [...]

Against the backdrop of growing threats to U.S. security – recent flash points involve Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea – a new Presidential Executive Order “On Assessing and Strengthening the Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency of the United States,” zeroes in on defense readiness. The E.O. requires heads from various [...]

Meeting one of its “stretch goal[s] to demonstrate that rare-earth magnets could be produced from mine to manufacturer, here in the United States,” the Critical Materials Institute (CMI) a U.S. Department of Energy Innovation Hub, has announced that the has fabricated magnets made entirely of domestically sourced and refined REEs.  This success was achieved in [...]

At ARPN, we have long argued that our over-reliance on foreign minerals is problematic – particularly in light of the fact that the United States itself is home to vast mineral resources. Recognizing the importance of the issue, the United States Geological Survey (USGS), which has long been a formidable source of relevant data and [...]

While the world media mulls the impact of the U.S. airstrike on Syria in the wake of the sarin gas attack and marvel at the accuracy of the Tomahawk cruise missile, friends of ARPN are reminded that the rare earths critical to the Tomahawk’s terminal guidance system are sourced from China. An interesting sidebar to [...]

The following is a guest post by American Resources expert and J.A. Green & Company president and founder Jeffery A. Green The United States has placed itself in a very precarious situation with respect to its ability to produce and refine strategic and critical materials. Over the past few years we have willfully ceded our last remaining [...]

A recent piece for InvestorIntel zeroes in on a metal which, due to its growing use in battery technology, coupled with a challenging supply scenario is increasingly afforded “critical mineral” status – Cobalt. A co-product of Nickel and Copper, the metal’s recent history, as author Lara Smith argues, has been “chaotic.” ARPN agrees that about sums it up. Criticism regarding the [...]

For the last few months, politics has sucked up much of the oxygen in Washington, DC and around the country.  With the inauguration of the 45th President of the United States behind us, many of us are hopeful that the time has come to finally shift the focus away from politics toward policy. Against the backdrop [...]