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United States Mining

Federal funding now available to 20 states & Navajo Nation for abandoned mine clean up – by Shondiin Silversmith (Tucson Sentinel- July 22, 2022)

https://www.tucsonsentinel.com/

More than 20 states and the Navajo Nation can now apply for $725 million in funding for abandoned mine lands projects to help communities that have suffered environmental hazards and pollution caused by coal mining.

“Through this program, we are investing in coal communities through job creation — including for current and former coal workers — and economic revitalization, all while addressing harmful environmental impacts from these legacy developments,” Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland said in a press release.

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USGS Scientists Help Address Conflict Mining (United States Geological Survey – June 27, 2022)

https://www.usgs.gov/news/

The USGS has collaborated with several international organizations working to track and monitor illegal mining and armed groups funded by natural resources around the world.

The concept of conflict diamonds or “blood diamonds” emerged in the late 1990s when it became evident that several violent civil wars in Africa were connected to mining and trading of rough diamonds. In 2006, the U.S. Geological Survey was asked by the U.S. Department of State to help address illegal diamond mining in Africa.

Since then, the USGS has collaborated with several international organizations working to track and monitor illegal mining and armed groups funded by natural resources around the world. USGS scientists help detect where illegal mining is likely taking place and develop realistic production numbers to determine a country’s true capacity for mining and exporting various resources.

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Rising EV demand puts America’s only nickel mine in the spotlight – by Garret Ellison (Michigan Live – July 16, 2022)

https://www.mlive.com/

ISHPEMING, MI — Right now, 3,200 feet below ground, explosives are blasting apart billion-year-old rock that, eventually, is going to wind up in an electric vehicle.

Broken into chunks, the rock, now called ore, takes a two-hour ride to the surface before getting trucked to a crushing mill, which separates the valuable minerals within through a flotation process that produces a clumpy gray filter cake. That concentrate is loaded onto trains and sent to Canada on its way to being smelted and refined into a sulphate used in lithium-ion batteries that power electric cars.

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Nuclear Power Gets New Push in U.S., Winning Converts – by Ivan Penn (New York Times – July 5, 2022)

https://www.nytimes.com/

With challenges in meeting clean energy goals and new electricity demands, politicians in both parties seek to prolong and even expand reactor use.

Driven by the difficulty of meeting clean energy goals and by surging electricity demands, a growing number of political leaders are taking a fresh look at nuclear power — both extending the life of existing reactors and building new ones.

Even past skeptics, largely Democrats, have come around to the idea — notably in California, where the state’s sole remaining nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon, is scheduled to close in 2025. The search for clean energy has given nuclear power a spark that has drawn bipartisan support that added billions in funding for existing and new projects.

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Robert Friedland’s Ivanhoe Electric raises $169-million in biggest U.S. IPO since May – by Niall McGee (Globe and Mail – June 28, 2022)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Robert Friedland’s latest mining venture stumbled on its first day of trading, after launching into the most hostile stock market environment since the start of the pandemic.

Vancouver-based Ivanhoe Electric Inc. priced its initial public offering at US$11.75 a share, and raised US$169.1-million. Just over a week ago, as the company made its final rounds to investors in order to lock in orders, it had targeted selling its shares as high as US$12.50 apiece.

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Column: U.S. forms ‘friendly’ coalition to secure critical minerals – by Andy Home (Reuters – June 30, 2022)

https://www.reuters.com/

LONDON, June 30 (Reuters) – A metallic NATO is starting to take shape, though no-one is calling it that just yet. The Minerals Security Partnership (MSP) is in theory open to all countries that are committed to “responsible critical mineral supply chains to support economic prosperity and climate objectives”.

But the coalition assembled by the United States is one of like-minded countries such as Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, France and Germany with an Asian axis in the form of Japan and South Korea.

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Blog: The US is using a mine in Greenland to counter China – by Mia Bennett (Eye On The Arctic – June 27, 2022)

https://www.rcinet.ca/

The U.S. has offered $657 million to develop the world’s northernmost mine in Greenland to counter China. Is it worth it?

In a remote fjord in northwest Greenland, an Australian company is scouting beneath a permafrost-laden beach for zinc. The price of the silvery element, which is used to galvanize other metals to prevent rusting, has doubled since March 2010 to nearly $2 a pound in March 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

As a result, remote deposits of the commodity are now even more lucrative than they were 15 years ago, when Ironbark Zinc was formed in Perth, one of the world’s most remote cities, to tap resources in an extreme frontier.

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The race is on to make EV batteries truly sustainable – by Mike Finelli (Fortune Magazine – June 23, 2022)

https://fortune.com/

The electric vehicle battery supply chain that has been built over the last 20 years will not be the same one that carries us through the next 20 years. With demand for EVs growing rapidly, fundamental changes are needed to address the ethical and sustainable challenges in creating EV batteries.

As a growing number of Americans trade in their gas guzzlers for environmentally friendly EVs, auto manufacturers and those who create EV batteries should prepare to go under the American consumer’s microscope on issues like semiconductor supply chains, carbon footprints in manufacturing, and circularity.

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More uranium mining near the Grand Canyon? Might as well just poison our water now – by Carletta Tilousi (AZ Central.com – June 21, 2022)

https://www.azcentral.com/

Tribal leader Carletta Tilousi is a citizen of the Havasupai Tribe and sits on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council.

The Pinyon Plain uranium mine sits fewer than 10 miles from Grand Canyon National Park on the ancestral homelands of my people, the Havasupai, the “people of the blue-green water.” As the guardians of the Grand Canyon, we are fighting to protect our sacred lands and waters against harm that federal and state agencies continue to permit.

The Biden administration has promised to prioritize environmental justice and listen to Indigenous voices. Yet it is considering moving forward with a uranium reserve program that would use taxpayer dollars to buy uranium from operations like the Pinyon Plain Mine.

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Nuclear industry hopes to expand output with new reactors – by Jennifer McDermott (Associated Press/ABC News – June 21, 2022)

https://abcnews.go.com/

The trade association for U.S. nuclear plant operators says it hopes to nearly double their output over the next three decades

The U.S. nuclear industry is generating less electricity as reactors retire, but now plant operators are hoping to nearly double their output over the next three decades, according to the industry’s trade association.

The massive scaling-up envisioned by the utilities hangs on the functionality of a new type of nuclear reactor that’s far smaller than traditional reactors. About two dozen U.S. companies are developing advanced reactors, with some that could come online by the end of the decade if the technology succeeds and federal regulators approve.

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Piedmont Lithium looks abroad amid North Carolina uncertainty – by Ernest Scheyder (Reuters – June 22, 2022)

https://www.reuters.com/

June 22 (Reuters) – Piedmont Lithium Inc’s (PLL.O) first steps toward securing lithium supplies will be in Quebec or Ghana, not the United States, as an intensifying North Carolina regulatory review delays the miner’s goal of anchoring America’s electric vehicle battery renaissance.

The delay has forced Piedmont to expand its strategy beyond its proposed North Carolina mine – a project it has touted as the best way to help secure American energy independence, but one that now faces a regulatory quagmire – and fund mines abroad.

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Yellen Urges Less Dependence on Other Nations for Key Supplies – by Christopher Condon and Danielle Bochove (Yahoo Finance/Bloomberg – June 20, 2022)

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/

(Bloomberg) — Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the US should work on shifting its dependence away from some rival nations for supplies of critical inputs as global supply-chain logjams have hurt the domestic economy.

“We saw during the pandemic that our supply chains were very brittle and really lacking in resilience,” she said Monday.

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U.S. wants Canada to join investigation of cross-border pollution from B.C. coal mines – by Bob Weber (CBC News British Columbia/Canadian Press – June 15, 2022)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/

The United States government, including President Joe Biden’s White House, has joined calls for Canada to participate in a probe of cross-border pollution coming from coal mines in southern British Columbia.

In a statement released last week, the U.S. State Department said Biden supports a joint investigation of selenium coming from Teck Resources’ Elk Valley coal mines, which flows into rivers and lakes south of the border.

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US increases production to catch China in global battery race – by SHARON UDASIN, ZACK BUDRYK AND CAITLIN MCLEAN (The Hill – June 9, 2022)

https://thehill.com/

As battery-powered electric vehicles become a mainstay on the nation’s highways — and a key piece of President Biden’s environmental policy — the U.S. is facing a formidable challenge in its efforts to compete in the global battery race.

“The problem is, we’re just pretty far behind here,” Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, told The Hill.“We should have been planning for this a decade ago,” he added. “But I think we can get things moving, now that there’s bipartisan support for it.”

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You may be stuck paying high gas prices for years as a global metals shortage sabotages the electric car revolution – by Tristan Bove (Fortune Magazine – June 10, 2022)

https://fortune.com/

Metals are quickly becoming the new oil as fossil fuels are phased out and replaced with clean energy and electric cars. The green energy transition relies on mining to produce enough lithium, cobalt, and nickel for the expected boom in solar panels, wind turbines, and electric car batteries over the next decade.

The only problem is that most of those metals are already in short supply. Paltry investments by governments in mining, the complexity of recycling rare metals, and geopolitical trade squabbles are already hampering metal production.

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