Biden wants $2 trillion of clean energy. Where will all that metal come from?

The US, the world, and the mining for clean energy tech

Oct 29, 2020

Minnesota, Arizona, and Nevada are swing states in the US election. They also happen to be places where hard-rock mining is particularly popular — and where major mines have received a boost from the Trump administration but hurdles from the Biden camp.

In Nevada, lithium projects promise to spur rural economic development, but environmentalists are concerned that one threatens a rare plant.
In Arizona, the same company that destroyed sacred sites in Australia plans to mine copper on sacred Apache lands.
And in Minnesota this month, Trump unveiled to a crowd of supporters an executive order to promote mining. Two copper and nickel projects had been the campaign’s focus, because Obama blocked them on environmental grounds, and Trump revived them for the ~2000 jobs they would bring.

Biden hasn’t publicized his stances on specific projects, but last week, he told mining executives that they were part of his climate plan. Mining for copper, lithium, rare earths, nickel, and many others needs to take place in the US, he said, according to sources who spoke to Reuters last week.

On the face of it, that puts the Biden campaign on similar grounding as his opponent. His clean energy plan demands a lot from the metals industry, but mining still remains a rather large gap in his campaign; he hasn’t said much at all on it. He’s likely trying to avoid controversy as much as possible, and mining hasn’t been a big-ticket item for the voters he’s aiming for. But that policy gap could also be a roundabout way to stay open to an alternative.

Analysts on both sides have had difficulty surmising what each administration could mean for mining — and, really, whether there would be a difference between the candidates.

Both Trump and Biden have supported bipartisan efforts to build a domestic minerals supply chain. Trump’s support comes in the form of anti-China policies that seek to strengthen US autonomy in energy and military equipment. Biden, through his clean energy plan, has hinted that he would bolster domestic supply chains, especially for rare earths.

For Aaron Mintzes, senior policy counsel for DC-based NGO Earthworks, the candidates’ policies are like night and day. Trump has taken a sledgehammer to environmental regulations, many of which were meant to mitigate the impacts of mining. But that doesn’t mean, he says, that a new administration will see more or less mining.

“It would just mean that we would have more protections in place and more thorough review of the environmental impacts and more weight given to the interests of tribes and the American people in general,” he said. More than slashing environmental regulations or loosening enforcement, the market determines how and where mines will develop, and the US has long been favorable to mining companies.

Then how can policy affect mining? Mintzes says work backward, from consumers to producers, not the other way around. That’s the alternative that fits in the Biden campaign’s reluctance to take a stance on mining: a circular economy.

The Green Rocks Map

“The place where government policy could be most effective would be to incentivize recycle, reuse and substitution,” he says. (Earthworks doesn’t work with campaigns.)

Once laptops, phones, batteries, turbines, solar panels and the like are used up, they can be recycled — at least in theory. You’re reading this newsletter on a device with processed metals, and that device will eventually live out its final days.

However, many companies don’t create products that are designed to be recycled. Apple, for example, requires that their products be “shredded” instead of dissembled to salvage working components. EV battery manufacturers haven’t figured out how to ensure their products can return to use. Many say this is the critical leg to a sustainable economy, and policies can encourage manufacturers to design products that don’t end up in waste dumps.

Ian Morse @ianjmorse

How's this for a green rocks edition on the election

Eye on Industry

A Canadian mining company, Nevsun, settled a lawsuit alleging torture and slavery for an undisclosed amount of money. The case was first filed by three Eritrean refugees in 2014.
More than 100,000 children and women of child-bearing age have likely suffered from lead poisoning as a result of pollution from a lead mine in Zambia owned by mining company Anglo American, according to a lawsuit filed against the company.
Protesters gathered in Papua New Guinea last week to oppose plans to dump mine waste in the ocean. The proposed project, Wafi Golpu, is owned by Australia’s Newcrest.
A prominent consultancy said the metals industry needs to raise $1 trillion in order to meet forecasted demand for renewable energy technologies.
150 people staged a sit-in at Vale’s office in Brumadinho, Brazil demanding emergency aid payments from the tailings dam disaster there almost two years ago. Prosecutors accused the company and another, BHP, of colluding with a lawyer to reduce payments for another dam disaster in 2015.
The local community around a copper mine in Peru has several times blockaded roads to the mine in protests over compensation and pollution. The most recent one, a week long, ended last week.
The Philippine government is trying to sell mines to fill the deficit left by the Covid-19 pandemic. However, lawsuits are preventing the sale, so a legal task force is being set up to solve the disputes.
In the wake of a widely criticized deregulation law in Indonesia, a report has linked the law’s backers to mining firms that stand to benefit.
New coral species were discovered in the deep ocean where miners are also looking to extract metals.
Now the the Bolivian election is over, is a deal with a German firm back on the table?