If the US government wants to meet its electrification ambitions and secure a regional supply of critical minerals, it should support all permits needed for domestic mining and processing operations rather than erect roadblocks to developers, Republican US representatives said Jan. 12.
“You can’t have your cake and eat it too. It makes no sense that you want a policy for your country to want be all electric or have alternative source of energy, and you’ve got these critical minerals that we need to make that happen, and yet you stop domestic mining,” said Peter Stauber of Minnesota during a press conference led by Republican members of the US House Committee on Natural Resources and the Congressional Western Caucus.
Stauber pointed to recent policies advanced during the Biden administration that he argued are putting the future of mining developments in jeopardy, including the Twin Metals polymetallic mining project in Minnesota.
Twin Metals, a subsidiary of the miner Antofagasta, plans to mine copper, nickel, cobalt, and platinum group metals at the mine that carries its name. Its two leases on the project are now in litigation.
An environmental study from October 2021, by the departments of Interior and Agriculture, put a moratorium on issuing new mining leases on US federal land surrounding the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota, which in turn curtailed development of the Twin Metals mine.
Permitting and Processing Challenges
Rep. Bruce Westerman of Arizona, the ranking member of the Natural Resources Committee, said the permitting of mineral processing will be just as significant as it was for mining.
“We think of the mining, getting the ore out of the ground, but the other part to that, which could be such a job creator here in the US, is the further processing of those ores, and right now we can’t do that,” he said. “So much of that has to be sent off to other locations, and we need to be working on this to enable the permitting to build these further processing facilities here in the United States.”
For example, he said, Westerman noted a project developer extracting lithium brine in Arizona must send its concentrate abroad for additional processing.
“The process to allow new facilities in the US is so burdensome that you ship the ore and you ship the raw materials to other locations, and that’s something we need to address, especially if you’re going to produce all of these electrical components that are dependent upon these minerals and elements,” he added. “We ought to be refining it here in the United States.”
