The Biden administration’s “rush-to-green energy policies” designed to create a “net-zero carbon power sector” by 2035 are causing economic upheaval and making the United States reliant on imported minerals and products, including from China, several witnesses warned during nearly 10 hours of hearings before House committees Feb. 7-9 in Washington.
While “promising utopia,” critics say the administration is steaming ahead in pushing electric vehicles (EVs), for instance, without a domestic supply chain to support it, inducing demand for imported lithium and EV batteries.
China controls more than 80 percent of the global markets for raw lithium and batteries, making the Chinese Communist Party among beneficiaries of Biden’s energy policies, witnesses and Republican panel members agreed.
Meanwhile, the demand for minerals key to emerging technologies is set to explode by 2040. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), demand for lithium will grow 40 times; for graphite, cobalt, nickel 20–25 times; for copper by 200 percent; with ‘‘rare earth elements’ to see three to seven times higher demand.
Many of these minerals—and much of the capacity to develop them—“are controlled by adversaries like China and Russia,” Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio) said. “We cannot stake our future on certain technologies that then rely on our adversaries for the minerals and mineral-processing needed to develop them.”
“These ‘rush-to-green energy policies’ are unsustainable and lead to greater reliance on countries like Russia, or in our case, China,” House Energy & Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) said. “This is not a future any of us want.”
“The U.S. must focus on supplying these materials at home, as well as restoring domestic smelting, refining, and processing capabilities,” National Mining Association (NMA) Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Katie Sweeney said. “Mineral security is energy security.”
GOP’s New Agenda
The NMA, which represents more than 275 mining and hard rock companies, is among organizations lobbying for adoption of the proposed ‘Securing America’s Critical Minerals Supply Act,’ which seeks to secure a domestic critical minerals’ “supply chain all the way back to the mine.”
The act is the flagship legislation among bills dealing with strategic minerals and mining introduced by Republicans since January. One prohibits importation of Russian uranium, others call for permitting reform and loosening regulations related to “critical” or “strategic” minerals in the Clean Air, Toxic Substances Control, and Solid Waste Disposal acts.
The critical minerals bills are part of a 17-bill package introduced by Republicans and discussed during hearings before the House Energy & Commerce Committee on Feb. 7, Natural Resource Committee on Feb. 8, and Natural Resources Committee’s Oversight & Investigations Subcommittee on Feb. 9.
Congressional reps won’t return to the capitol until Feb. 27 following consecutive “district work” weeks. The concerted GOP push to “unleash” the nation’s domestic energy production is not pausing during the break, but hitting the road with public hearings across the country, including the Natural Resources Committee’s Energy & Mineral Resources Subcommittee’s ‘Federal Energy Production Supports Local Communities’ hearing at the University of Texas campus Feb. 13 in Midland, Texas.
Rhetoric Vs. Reality
Sweeney said the United States has the resources and the industrial capacity to meet domestic needs as well as become an exporter of many critical minerals, but after a decade of dithering over how to develop that foundational supply chain, little has been done.
In fact, she said, “Despite the rhetoric around securing our mineral supply chains, we are at a crisis point. In 2022, the U.S. reached its highest recorded mineral import reliance” in its history.
Imports now constitute more than one-half of 51 “non-fuel mineral commodities” consumed in the United States, up from 47 commodities that met that metric in 2021, Sweeney said.
Mark Menezes, who served as U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Deputy Secretary in the Trump administration, testified that, “The U.S. relies on imports for 31 of the 35 critical minerals necessary for America’s defense and economy—14 of which we are totally dependent on imports.”
Therefore, Sweeney said, “As we enter the most mineral-intensive era in human history, [the U.S.] needs to focus on securing domestic supply chains all the way to the mines. Those who control these critical materials and possess the processing and manufacturing know-how will hold the balance of industrial power in the 21st century.”
Citing the surging demand for EV batteries reinforcing reliance on China and the United States’ “lack of domestic production,” she said American automakers are among domestic industries imperiled by the Biden administration’s energy policies.
“Automakers understand that truth, and worry that the coming battery mineral shortfall will decimate the EV revolution,” Sweeney said.
Imports Up, Industry Idles
The estimated value of U.S. metal mine production in 2022 was $34.7 billion, 6 percent lower than the revised value in 2021, Sweeney said. In 2022, the U.S. mining industry’s capacity utilization was 61 percent, leaving a lot of unused assets not producing, she added.
There is an estimated $6.2 trillion “worth of mineral resources here in the United States” that could meet these needs, including lithium and uranium, she said, noting with “further mapping all the time, there’s more likely to be found.”
But rather than encourage “a highly trained and highly compensated workforce” to tap into these resources under “world-class environmental and safety standards,” Sweeney said the Biden administration has hamstrung the nation’s mining industry with burdensome regulations and permitting complexities.
“Without permitting reform, the U.S. will be watching the global competition for energy dominance from the sidelines” she said, “and each new announcement of a blocked mine, such as Twin Metals Project in Minnesota, or [canceled] foreign sourcing agreements with countries” because of a host of issues, “locks in our position of competitive weakness.”
Sweeney cited several examples of federal land-use and environmental regulations nixing mining projects, including recently “locking up more than 225,000 acres in federal Forest Service lands from mining for two decades,” and terminating 60-year-old federal leases in areas with “the nation’s largest reserves of nickel, cobalt, copper, platinum, and palladium.”
These decisions “could only be described at best as short-sighted and at worst self-sabotage” if domestic energy security is the objective, she said.
“This must stop,” Johnson agreed, accusing the Biden administration of “promising utopia while prohibiting our own mineral production, like canceling leases for nickel mines in Minnesota, lithium mines in Nevada, and rescinding a land swap necessary for a copper mine in Arizona.”
Permitting, Regulatory Reform
Menezes said among initiatives in the proposed ‘Securing America’s Critical Minerals Supply Act’ is amending the DOE’s organizational structure to “designate an agency with clear authority to address … securing the supply of critical energy resources necessary to develop energy technologies and the operation of energy systems.”
“This bill is a needed clarification of DOE’s responsibility and leadership throughout the interagency process,” he said, noting another proposed measure would authorize the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator to waive requirements, sanctions, fees, “with respect to processing or refining of critical energy resources at a critical energy resource facility, and for other purposes.”
Congress and federal agencies must also focus on the industrial capacity to process minerals and metals, a domestic industry that has been regulated into paralysis, he said.
“While plenty of attention is on the supply chains of critical minerals, we mustn’t forget that, as a nation, we should continue to ensure the operation of our critical energy facilities producing our critical energy resources during emergencies and threats to our energy security,” Menezes said. “Congress has recognized the importance and efficiency of executive agency action necessary to ensure the speedy recovery from natural disasters.”
Other bills address administrative bottlenecks in several key environmental laws, including the 1972 Clean Air Act, that Sweeney and others said would allow the nation’s mining industry to produce the materials necessary for robust and independent energy generation.
“Permitting delays have been, and continue to be, one of the most significant risks to meeting domestic mineral production goals,” she said. “As the permitting process for important projects across the U.S. drags on, geopolitical rivals are taking advantage of our bureaucratic inertia.”
Time to Get Digging
Sweeney said opening or expanding a mine in the United States typically involves multiple agencies and “tens or even hundreds of permitting processes at the local, state and federal levels” over an average of seven-to-10 years.
The process comes with “little transparency into status, delays arising from duplication among federal and state agencies, an absence of firm timelines for completing environmental assessments, and failures in coordination of responsibilities between various agencies,” she said, noting it takes less than three years to process similar permits under similar environmental rules in Australia and Canada.
“The NMA believes that valid concerns about environmental protection should be fully considered and addressed but permitting processes should not serve as an excuse to trap mining projects in a limbo of duplicative, unpredictable, endless, and costly review without a decision point,” Sweeney said.
She agreed with Menezes in noting the bills don’t just seek to unchain the nation’s mining industry but seek to “improve supply chain security” by allowing for “more smelting, processing, and refining capabilities in the United States necessary to claw back these essential processes from geopolitical adversaries like China, which controls more than 80 percent of global rare earth element production, nearly 90 percent of global mineral processing capabilities as well as the market prices for rare earth elements at each step of the process.”
Demand for lithium and cobalt “will skyrocket 30–40 percent” in less than two decades, Johnson said. “This is hard to comprehend. The bottom line is, we need a lot more mining and a lot more mines. We can do that with the right permitting in place.”
“We need the right policies in place to unblock that potential,” Sweeney said. “We’re not asking for shortcuts, we’re asking for a more transparent, predictable process. We have to bring battery production here. To do that, we have to solve these things and we don’t have much time.”
‘Fast-Tracking’ Criticism
Committee Democrats and several witnesses claimed the bills propose ways to skirt regulations with solutions that don’t address shortfalls in critical minerals but merely reinstall gas and oil as the dominant source of energy generation.
“Several of the bills would create new loopholes in important environmental laws,” Rep. Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.) said, noting the 17-bill slate is to be “fast-tracked … with little concerns for Americans’ air, water, and safety.”
“Few bills of the 17 we have here today actually establish a definition of ‘critical energy sources,’” Earthjustice Legislative Director for Healthy Communities Raul Garcia said. “What they actually say is, ‘Let’s leave that definition up to the Secretary of Energy.’ That’s a Trojan horse. That means everything can suddenly become a critical energy source” depending on the whim of a bureaucrat.
Garcia cited a proposed amendment to the Toxic Substances Control Act “that would have us consider the economic impacts, the economic costs, when determining if a substance is toxic or not.”
That makes so little sense, he said, it’s bound to be lethal.
“That would mean, if we put poison in three cups of water, we are going to drink them all and figure out what the economic costs would are going to be to us” of drinking three cups of water with poison in them,’ he said.
“So,” he concluded, “another question I have to the proponents of the bill is, ‘What is the cost of a human life? What is the cost that poison is going to inflict on a human being?’ We haven’t talked about [risks] here yet, so that is what I think we need to focus on in this committee because these bills fail—flat-out fail—to do that.”
