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United States Mining

Miners face ‘considerable challenges’ meeting demand from US climate law -study – by Ernest Scheyder (Reuters – August 15, 2023)

https://www.reuters.com/

Aug 15 (Reuters) – The mining industry faces “considerable challenges” meeting larger-than-expected demand for copper, nickel and other electric vehicle metals fueled by a U.S. climate law, S&P Global said in a report on Tuesday, ahead of the legislation’s one-year anniversary.

The landmark U.S. Inflation Reduction Act offers tax breaks for EVs, solar panels and other renewable energy products made from metals extracted in the United States or countries with U.S. free trade deals. Metals from “foreign entities of concern” including China, Russia, North Korea and Iran will be banned in 2025. That has sparked a race among manufacturers to lock down supply.

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Yellen warns of risks of over-concentration of clean energy supply chains – by Andrea Shalal (MSN.com/Reuters – August 14, 2023)

https://www.msn.com/

LAS VEGAS (Reuters) – The United States is working to build resilient, diversified clean energy supply chains to protect its economic security, while guarding against the risks posed by over-concentration in a handful of countries, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in remarks prepared for an event in Las Vegas on Monday.

Yellen will touch on the challenges of transitioning away from fossil fuels in a major speech she will deliver after touring a union facility where workers are learning skills to work on clean energy projects.

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Joe Biden’s Uranium Problem – by Darragh Roche (Newsweek Magazine – August 12, 2023)

https://www.newsweek.com/

President Joe Biden may soon be facing a political headache involving uranium and Russian President Vladimir Putin after his decision to protect land around the Grand Canyon from mining.

Biden declared almost one million acres of land around the Grand Canyon in Arizona a national monument, called the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni- Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument, on Tuesday in a move that has been criticized by mining firms and some conservatives.

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DEEP DIVE: Uranium Hunters in US West Face Partial Ban, Pollution Concerns – by Bobby Magill (Bloomberg – August 10, 2023)

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/

Five weeks before President Joe Biden announced a historic new ban on new uranium mining around the Grand Canyon, Sarana Riggs approached the barbed-wire fence surrounding an inactive mine in an Arizona national forest, a Geiger counter in her hand. The Geiger counter didn’t detect any dangerous radiation that day from the Pinyon Plain mine, about two miles from the spot where Biden would sign the monument proclamation. But Riggs wasn’t convinced.

The activist grew up on the Navajo Nation near Tuba City, Arizona, where a uranium mill operated until 1966. It took another 24 years to clean up the site, and yet uranium was still found later in groundwater beneath the town dump.

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Piedmont Lithium’s plans to supply Tesla face skeptical North Carolina officials (Mining.com/Reuters – August 8, 2023)

https://www.mining.com/

Piedmont Lithium on Tuesday drew skepticism and anger at a key meeting with local North Carolina officials about its plans for a lithium mine that would supply the electric vehicle battery metal to Tesla.

The open-pit mine, if approved, would be one of the few lithium-producing sites in the United States, but there has been little progress in gaining approvals for the project, which the company has been trying to get up and running for more than two years.

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Biden to Designate Monument Near Grand Canyon, Preventing Uranium Mining – by Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Lisa Friedman (New York Times – August 7, 2023)

https://www.nytimes.com/

Uranium extraction had already been restricted in the area, which Native tribes consider sacred, but the moratorium was set to expire in 2032. Mr. Biden’s designation will make it permanent.

President Biden will designate nearly a million acres of land near the Grand Canyon as a new national monument on Tuesday to protect the area from uranium mining, administration officials confirmed on Monday.

Mr. Biden’s visit to Arizona is part of a nationwide blitz by the White House to translate key policy victories to voters — including a law he signed last year to inject $370 billion in tax incentives into wind, solar and other renewable energy — as the 2024 campaign ramps up. Senior cabinet officials are also touring the country this week, highlighting his domestic agenda.

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A year after the IRA, industrial policy has gone global. Now what? – by David L. Goldwyn and Andrea Clabough (Atlantic Council – August 7,2023)

Atlantic Council – Shaping the global future together

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) may prove to be one of the most transformative pieces of economic legislation in US history. The vast waves of investment coming to US shores throughout the last year bear out this possibility. One recent analysis estimated that between August 2022 and January 2023, over 100,000 clean energy jobs were created in the United States as a result of almost $90 billion invested in dozens of clean energy projects.

The domestic impacts of the IRA are undeniable. It is less certain what it means for the global energy transition. One year later, much work remains ahead to maximize the potential of the IRA. While US policymakers should consider the IRA’s long-term future and extend many of its provisions past 2032, officials must prioritize opportunities to align with like-minded allies overseas.

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Quest for rare earth elements and critical minerals in Central Appalachia gets new boost – by Matt Busse (Cardinal News – August 7, 2023)

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A project that aims to identify Central Appalachian sources of rare earth elements and critical minerals has received $500,000 in federal funding to continue for another six months.

The 17 rare earth elements — so called not because they’re uncommon, per se, but because they typically occur in such low concentrations that easily extracted deposits are rare — include scandium, yttrium and a group of 15 elements collectively called the lanthanides. The 50 critical minerals identified as such by the U.S. Geological Survey are considered essential to the economy and have no viable substitutes; they include aluminum, cobalt, graphite, lithium, nickel and nearly all of the rare earth elements.

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Deep Inside Mountains, Work Is Getting Much More Dangerous – by Drew A. Harris (New York Times – August 2, 2023)

https://www.nytimes.com/

Drew Harris is the medical director of Stone Mountain Health Services black lung program and an associate professor of pulmonary and critical-care medicine at the University of Virginia.

As a high school baseball star, Denver Hoskins led Kentucky in home runs and was invited to try out for the Cincinnati Reds. But when his father got sick (and later died) from black lung, a disease caused by inhaling mineral dust, the younger Mr. Hoskins gave up his Division I college scholarship offer to support his family.

Following in his father’s footsteps, he went to work as a coal miner. By the age of 44, Mr. Hoskins was diagnosed with his own case of the most severe form of black lung. He now breathes from an oxygen tank at night and watches his son’s batting practice from the sidelines.

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Focusing on abandoned uranium mines across Navajo, EPA opens Flagstaff office – by Adrian Skabelund (Arizona Daily Sun – July 29, 2023)

https://azdailysun.com/

Tuesday saw the opening of a new U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Office in Flagstaff that will be largely focused on investigating and cleaning up hundreds of abandoned uranium mines across the Navajo Nation.

The office comes as the agency, in cooperation with local partners, works toward a goal of remediating 110 high-priority mines by 2030. As it opens, the office, which is located on the U.S. Geological Survey campus near Buffalo Park, will have a staff of at least 14 employees. That number could increase, according to office manager Jacob Phipps.

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Quebec copper mine builder is on the fast track in northern Michigan – by Ian Ross (Northern Ontario Business – July 27, 2023)

https://www.northernontariobusiness.com/

Highland Copper inks a mine development partnership deal with Kinterra Copper USA

A Quebec-based junior miner with a copper deposit in northern Michigan has brought aboard a deep-pocketed partner to advance it to production.

Longueuil-headquartered Highland Copper has entered into a joint venture with Kinterra Copper USA to bring cash and technical expertise to turn its White Pine North project into a mine. Kinterra made a cash payment of $30 million to take a 66 per cent ownership stake in the project. White Pine North is one of two copper projects owned by Highland. Copperwood is the other, located 60 kilometres (37 miles) to the southwest.

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‘King Coal’ First Look: Visually Stunning Documentary Captures Mythic Power Of Appalachian Coal Country – by Matthew Carey (Deadline.com – July 21, 2023)

 

https://deadline.com/

EXCLUSIVE: Only about 40,000 people work in coal mining in the U.S., a modest number compared to other lines of work – 1.7 million people, for instance, are employed in the auto industry.

And yet coal and coal mining occupy an almost mythic place in the American imagination that belies the labor force statistics. In the documentary King Coal, Oscar-nominated filmmaker and Appalachia native Elaine McMillion Sheldon examines a part of the country deeply embedded, one might say, in the charred rock. As America increasingly turns away from coal as an energy source and towards renewables, the future of coal country remains uncertain.

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Nuclear Energy’s Moment Has Come – by Charles Oppenheimer (Time Magazine – May 11, 2023)

https://time.com/

Oppenheimer is an entrepreneur and investor, representing the family of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

For all the recent talk about clean energy and a shift away from coal, there’s a major problem in our goal to transition to a net zero-carbon economy. Despite all the growth and advances in renewable energy, globally we consume more fossil fuels than ever, and our rate of CO2 production is in fact increasing, not heading to zero.

But there’s a bipartisan, environmentally friendly solution still sitting on the table, still waiting for its moment — if only we can overcome our predetermined bias. As J. Robert Oppenheimer’s grandson, I believe that my grandfather would support the expansion of nuclear energy as an environmentally friendly solution to address both the world’s energy problems and, perhaps counterintuitively, as a catalyst for peace and unity.

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Gem Hunters Found the Lithium America Needs. Maine Won’t Let Them Dig It Up – by Alana Semuels and Kate Cough (Time Magazine/Maine Monitor – July 17, 2023)

https://time.com/

The world’s richest known lithium deposit lies deep in the woods of western Maine, in a yawning, sparkling mouth of white and brown rocks that looks like a landslide carved into the side of Plumbago Mountain. Mary Freeman and her husband Gary found the deposit five years ago while hunting for tourmaline, a striking, multi-colored gemstone found in the region.

The Freemans make their living selling lab supplies through the Florida-based company they founded 40 years ago, Awareness Technology. But their true love is digging for gemstones, which has brought them for years to Mary’s home state of Maine, the site of some of the best tourmaline hunting in the world.

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This time it’s different? The rush to mine Indigenous lands – by Mark Trahant (Alaska Beacon – July 13, 2023)

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The Aspen Institute: The mining industry has a long history of failing to respect community interests, breaking agreements, destroying sacred sites, and forcing displacements; Indigenous communities have been ‘disproportionately impacted’

WASHINGTON – This won’t be an easy conversation: Can tribal nations love mining? Or at least accept mining as a necessary step in the creation of a clean economy? And can governments and international mining companies figure out how to respect and work fairly with Indigenous communities?

The conversation is weighted by history. The mining industry, and governments, have to sell the idea that, this time it’s different. This time the industry will respect cultural and religious sites. This time the industry will clean up its own mess. This time it will reward tribal communities as owners instead of serving up resources as colonies. Why would anyone believe that? Why should a tribe expect this time to be different?

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