Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
The biggest problem we face with mining in the United States is we’re not doing enough of it. And that’s because of the continuing absence of a long-term mining policy that recognizes the importance of a secure domestic supply of minerals and metals for our nation’s economic and environmental well-being.
What’s eye-popping about newly published data on minerals and metals is the growing global demand for so-called battery metals -- lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, and copper -- and the prices those critically important materials are getting. The price of lithium, for example, jumped nearly 500% last year. The market for battery metals keeps getting stronger, but there’s a catch. China has a grip on the world supply.
China is using mineral supply chains to dominate the industries that depend on them, such as battery, solar panel, and wind turbine manufacturing. China’s dominance of these supply chains is also creating a glaring geopolitical vulnerability for the United States. Chinese mining companies have the full backing of their government, receiving subsidies to buy mineral and metal resources around the world. This has put competing U.S. companies at a huge disadvantage, reducing the viability of the U.S. industrial base and creating a dangerous foreign dependence that can undermine U.S. commercial and national security interests.
Such reliance on China, if allowed to continue, will have far-reaching consequences for U.S. factory workers, the environment, and businesses.
The International Energy Agency foresees the clean-energy transition potentially increasing the global demand for minerals and metals 6-fold by 2040. For key battery metals, like lithium, their demand could explode 40-fold in 20 years. Experts warn that within the next 10 years supply chains won’t be able to keep up with demand for minerals and metals, causing a shortage of batteries that would seriously hamper EV production and torpedo efforts to mitigate carbon emissions. At this rate, by 2030 automakers will be unable to fill up to 35 million EV orders.
In U.S. energy policy circles, there is a growing sense that the climate challenge -- and the China problem -- has fundamentally changed the calculus for minerals and metals production. The Biden Administration has earmarked $3 billion for Department of Energy loans to spur increased domestic mining. That’s a good start but there needs to be much more if our country hopes to counter China and meet soaring demand for minerals and metals.
Just counting on the private sector won’t work. We need smart policy that incentivizes bringing supply chains home and building them at the speed and scale needed to make mineral production an enabler of clean energy deployment, not an impediment.
Government loan guarantees and other forms of financial support for the opening of new mines would help ensure that capital flows to mining. Bringing efficiencies to a duplicative and cumbersome mine permitting process and ensuring U.S. mining companies have access to our vast, minerals-rich federal lands must also complement financial support. As it now is, before a company can open a new mine located on public land, it must obtain approval from as many as 40 federal, state, and local agencies, with overlapping regulations.
It now takes on average 17 years to get from initial planning for a new mine to actual production. Addressing these unnecessary permitting hurdles is critical to moving the entire mining process forward.
The enormity of the climate problem is obvious. If we want to avoid a severe climate crisis in coming years, then fundamental decisions need to be made now about improving U.S. production of key minerals and metals so that the switch to EVs and renewable energy sources becomes a reality. Otherwise, the economic, geopolitical and environmental costs will be extraordinarily high.
Jim Constantopoulos is a geology professor at Eastern New Mexico University. Contact him at:
