Over the objections of Republican lawmakers, the Department of the Interior has published a finalized critical mineral list that omits helium, uranium, potash, and other minerals that were on the original 2018 list, which was published in response to then-President Donald Trump’s 2017 executive order.
The department had solicited comments on its draft list, released in November 2021.
Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), ranking GOP member of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, voiced concerns over the finalized list, in light of U.S. reliance—or potential reliance—on Russia and its allies for uranium and helium.
“We have abundant supplies of uranium and helium. The president should make producing them in America a top priority.”
“At a time when inflation and geopolitical upheaval are putting global energy supplies in jeopardy, the fact that the Biden administration has excluded minerals like uranium from its critical minerals list is naive and shortsighted. Instead, this is another snub for Wyoming by the Biden administration,” Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) said in an emailed comment to The Epoch Times.
Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.
The senators questioned the methodology of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) for assessing the criticality of minerals, describing it as “mostly quantitative” with respect to helium, despite the 2020 Energy Act’s authorization of a more qualitative assessment alongside quantitative judgments.
“We believe even the most basic qualitative assessment of the foreign political risk, military conflict, violent unrest, and anticompetitive and protectionist behavior associated with helium would show that helium should remain on the list of critical minerals,” the letter reads.
Barrasso and Lee highlighted the dangers of growing Russian dominance, as well as reliance on another major helium-producing nation, Qatar.
Qatar was recently subject to a multiyear embargo from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates.
“Even absent any embargo, Qatar’s helium passes through the Straits of Hormuz, which has among the highest geopolitical tension in the world,” the letter reads.
The list’s exclusion of potash, a group of potassium-containing salts used almost entirely in fertilizer, comes at a time of rising global trade tensions over fertilizer nutrients, as well as dramatically rising fertilizer prices.
In late 2021, China restricted the export of potassium and urea, both used in fertilizers. Russia has followed suit, banning the export of ammonium nitrate in early February. The price of natural gas, also employed in fertilizer production, has likewise trended upward.
The USGS’s methodology noted that potash was among several minerals that barely fell short of its quantitative cutoff for supply risk.
“This highlights the fact that the metrics developed with this methodology are best viewed as a continuum of supply risk, rather than an as indication that supply risk does not exist for commodities below the quantitative cutoff,” the methodology states.