In the case of Tesla, it has been making some attempts to build its own vertical supply chain of the battery metals and such needed to meet its goals. Within the United States, Tesla just announced a deal with Minnesota-based Talon Metals (which is partnered with global giant Rio Tinto) to buy nickel from Talon’s Tamarack Project once it’s (hopefully) developed.
This follows a very high-profile announcement in fall 2020 of a deal between Tesla and North Carolina-based Piedmont Lithium, which is nearing the development of a substantial lithium project in the Carolina Tin–Spodumene Belt: a legacy area that few realize was the cradle of modern-day lithium production and global processing technology.
Tesla and Piedmont already have had to push the deal’s “start date” back, as Piedmont is slogging its way through the permitting process. As for Talon’s Tamarack, here, too, it will be several years before Tesla sees its first shipment of nickel concentrate for the manufacture of batteries.
Contrary to both its prior claims and its continuing disingenuous propaganda, the Biden administration and its allies have made this whole situation much worse, even just in the past week. While claiming to have a goal of having half of the new vehicles produced in the United States by 2030 be electric vehicles, President Joe Biden and others seem to be doing everything they can get away with to guarantee that we won’t have the various metals necessary to produce either the vehicles or their batteries—at least in this country.
Although he looked some of these very people in the eye while campaigning in Minnesota, praised them for their industry, and lauded an area with the largest resources of battery metals in the United States, Biden has allowed his administration to pull the plug on the Twin Metals Project in northeast Minnesota’s storied “Iron Range” area. Vast amounts of nickel, copper, cobalt, and platinum group metals, chiefly, now won’t be available to feed a vertical supply chain in the United States.
Its neighbor to the southwest, PolyMet Mining, reportedly has the single-largest development stage resource of metals in the United States, including (anticipated production in the first phase based on existing resources) about 1.2 billion pounds of copper, 170 million pounds of nickel, 6.2 million pounds of cobalt, and 1.56 million ounces of gold, platinum, and palladium.
PolyMet, for the more than 20 years that I’ve known about and followed the company, is still beset by efforts to keep these needed metals in the ground, some of which were renewed under Biden.
Elsewhere, Biden’s Interior Secretary Deb Haaland has maneuvered her far-left allies into position for a challenge to the Energy Fuels-owned White Mesa Mill in Utah, the only mill in the United States that can process both conventional uranium ore and rare earth-containing materials.
As I wrote in my recent “Green Manual” for both concerned citizens and investors, it’s inevitable that lawsuits to come will attempt to hinder work there—a prospect since made even more likely by the Environmental Protection Agency turning newly hostile there as well.
Incredibly, this comes as the Biden administration claims to want to (1) bolster the near-dormant U.S. uranium industry for both strategic and green energy reasons and (2) lift the United States from almost complete dependence on China for refined rare earth elements.
On the latter, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) is co-sponsoring a bipartisan measure to address at least part of the issue: the military’s dependence for strategic uses on some rare earth products from China.
“We’ve got to stop relying on Chinese rare earths in our defense industry,“ Kelly said. ”It’s a national security risk to us. If China decided to cut us off on those rare earth minerals right now, this would have a serious impact on our national defense. So this requires that DOD [Department of Defense] and the Department of Interior work together to build a stockpile of rare earth minerals.”
But by and large, the Department of the Interior is going in the opposite direction. And the erstwhile “leader” of all these folks—Biden—is AWOL.
