CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — President Donald Trump is taking a step toward granting the U.S. mining industry’s biggest wishes by singling out one metal as a focus of his domestic minerals policy: copper.
From talk of acquiring Greenland and its vast mineral wealth to prodding Ukraine for minerals in exchange for help fending off Russia’s invasion, Trump has made the raw materials of modern life a pillar of his foreign policy.
United States President Donald Trump and his Ukraine counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy cancelled a mineral rights and security agreement at the White House on Friday after a news conference degenerated into a rare spectacle of raised voices and name-calling.
The deal would have been a showpiece for Trump’s transactional presidency and another sign of the resource nationalism that’s swept the globe in recent years as countries transition away from fossil fuels. The scrubbed signing comes as overt U.S. support for Nato declines and Trump pushes for a stronger European role in its own defence.
On Dec. 3, 2024, China’s Ministry of Commerce implemented export bans on key semiconductor materials, including gallium and germanium, to the US. While these minerals had already been subject to existing export restrictions introduced in July 2023, this is the first time China has specifically targeted the US.
To date, US legislation has focused on strengthening the downstream part of the semiconductor supply chain, leaving US technologies vulnerable to upstream supply chain disruption.US-China tensions centered on semiconductors and critical minerals are apt to continue rising as each government deploys the levers at its disposal, including restrictions on the upstream supply of materials key to the chip sector.
The cost of producing a penny has far exceeded the value of each coin for the past 19 years.
Most copper mined in the U.S. comes from Arizona. But President Donald Trump’s surprise announcement that he will halt production of pennies won’t make a dent in the state’s mining industry. The U.S. Mint produced 3.2 billion pennies last year. But since 1982, nearly all of the metal used has been zinc.
So the copper industry can shrug off Trump’s move, which economists have long called a no-brainer because each penny costs more to make than it’s worth – 3.69 cents as of last year – and most end up in jars, piggy banks, and sofa cushions.
The US should stop the closure of coal-fired power plants, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said, adding the fuel source would be essential to the nation’s power system for decades to come.
“We are on a path to continually shrink the electricity we generate from coal,” Wright said Tuesday on Bloomberg Television. “That has made electricity more expensive and our grid less stable.” Wright’s remarks come as demand for electricity is surging to feed power-thirsty data centers needed for artificial intelligence, new factories and the overall electrification of the economy.
Nations scramble for Arctic oil, gas and minerals amid rising global demand
“Go West, young man, go West… and grow up with the country” is a phrase attributed to Horace Greeley from the New York Daily Tribune back in 1865.In 2025, the phrase might be updated to “Go North, young man, go North” as optimism rises about the potential of oil and gas and critical minerals in the Arctic.
Optimism about the size of the prize of Arctic hydrocarbons rose in 2012 when the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) assessed that the Arctic holds an estimated 13 per cent (90 billion barrels) of the world’s undiscovered conventional oil resources and 30 per cent of its undiscovered conventional natural gas resources. The EIA has estimated that the Arctic may hold most of the world’s remaining untapped oil and gas reserves.
Can he do that? It’s not clear. But President Trump is right when he says that pennies “literally cost us more than 2 cents.”
Since taking office, President Trump has set his sights on big targets, like Greenland. But he has also taken aim at small ones, like paper straws. And pennies. On Sunday night, Mr. Trump said he had ordered the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, to stop producing new pennies, a move that he said would help reduce unnecessary government spending.
“Let’s rip the waste out of our great nations budget, even if it’s a penny at a time,” he said in a post on Truth Social, adding that pennies “literally cost us more than 2 cents.” It is unclear whether Mr. Trump has the power to do this. It is Congress, not the Treasury or the Federal Reserve, that authorizes the manufacture of the nation’s coins, according to the U.S. Mint.
Tungsten hasn’t been mined commercially in the U.S. since 2015, the nation counting China as its biggest source
The phone has been ringing off the hook for Lewis Black after China imposed export controls on tungsten, a niche metal mined by his firm that’s crucial to weapons manufacturing.
The chief executive officer of North America’s Almonty Industries Inc. said his customers are in a “state of disbelief” following Beijing’s move on Tuesday, one of a suite of measures announced as a riposte to tariffs placed on Chinese goods by the Trump administration.
Gracelin Baskaran is the Director, Critical Minerals Security Program.
As the United States races to reduce its reliance on China for minerals vital for national, economic, and energy security, tariffs with Canada may drastically undermine these efforts. Canada is the biggest source of the United States mineral imports, providing key sources of uranium, aluminum, nickel, steel copper, and niobium. To put it into perspective, in 2023, Canada accounted for $47 billion of United States mineral imports.
China followed with $28.3 billion. The consequences of tariffs would be particularly profound for the defense industry, nuclear energy, and heavy manufacturing. A 25 percent tariff on Canadian mineral imports could cost U.S. off-takers an additional $11.75 billion—a figure that would increase as base metal and uranium prices recover.
The great battle for Greenland is probably all about resources to make apps like ChatGPT better.
Our new president’s obsession with buying Greenland has inspired jeers, laughs, and jokes about the cost of eggs, but more and more, the attempted procurement looks less like a joke and more like a big handout for the tech companies that backed him during the election. Multiple new reports show that some of Donald Trump’s most prominent financial benefactors have long been pursuing financial opportunities in the Arctic nation.
The Lever reports on the activities of KoBold Metals, a startup that is actively engaged in mining Greenland for raw materials that can be used to build AI products. KoBold, which is based in Berkeley, California, and uses AI to hunt for metals like cobalt, lithium, copper, and nickel, is basically the property of the tech industry’s most powerful executives.
Record prices for gold and silver helped to offset declines in U.S. production of critical minerals used in batteries, the 30th annual Mineral Commodity Summaries details
Reston, Va. — The overall value of U.S. mineral production edged up by \$1 billion in 2024 to $106 billion, according to the U.S. Geological Survey’s annual Mineral Commodity Summaries. Record prices for gold and silver buoyed the total, more than compensating for a 40 to 60 percent fall in the value of U.S. production of critical minerals used to make lithium-ion batteries.
Prices for the battery materials, principally cobalt, lithium and nickel, fell due to oversupply by dominant producers including China. The report also highlights the overall importance of nonfuel minerals to American industries including aerospace, electronics and construction. These industries represented $4.08 trillion in value in 2024, a 4% increase over 2023, and nearly one-seventh of the U.S. economy.
China has systematically extended its control over critical minerals essential for the global energy transition and net-zero emissions, using a network of at least 26 state-backed financial institutions over the past two decades, a new report shows.
The database, compiled by AidData at the College of William & Mary in the United States, reveals how Beijing has leveraged an intricate web of financial mechanisms to dominate the global supply chain for critical minerals. These minerals — including copper, cobalt, nickel, lithium and rare earth elements — are vital for emerging technologies such as electric vehicle batteries and solar panels.
Shipments of uranium ore from a revived mining operation just south of the Grand Canyon are expected to resume in February after the Navajo Nation reached a settlement with the mining company, clearing the way for trucks to transport the ore across the largest Native American reservation in the U.S.
The agreement announced Wednesday settles a dispute that erupted last summer when Energy Fuels Inc. began trucking ore from the Pinyon Plain Mine to a mill site in Utah. Navajo authorities attempted to put up roadblocks but the trucks already had left tribal roadways.
President Donald Trump’s threat to impose tariffs on US copper and aluminum imports will result in higher costs for local consumers because of a shortfall in domestic production, analysts and industry participants said on Tuesday.
In a speech on Monday, Trump said he would impose tariffs on aluminum and copper – metals needed to produce US military hardware – as well as steel, to entice producers to make them in the United States.
https://www.miningnewsnorth.com/
Reinstating Ambler Road permits was part of the “Unleashing Alaska” executive order signed by President Trump on first day back in office.
With the stroke of a pen on his first day back in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to reverse the previous administration’s decision to revoke permits required to build a road to the Ambler Mining District, along with a series of other Biden era initiatives that are significantly impacting resource development in Alaska.
The “Unleashing Alaska’s extraordinary resource potential” executive order signed by Trump shortly after being sworn into office reflects a list of sweeping changes requested by Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy.
