Paul Driessen
Oil and natural gas aren’t just fuels. They supply
building blocks for pharmaceuticals; plastics in vehicle bodies, athletic
helmets, and numerous other products; and complex composites in solar
panels and wind turbine blades and nacelles. The USA was importing 65% of its
petroleum in 2005, creating serious national security concerns. But fracking
helped cut imports to 40% and the US now exports oil and gas.
Today’s vital raw materials foundation also includes
exotic minerals like gallium, germanium, rare earth elements and platinum group
metals. For the USA, they are “critical” because they are required in thousands
of applications; they become “strategic” when we don’t produce them in the
United States.
They are essential for computers, medical imaging and
diagnostic devices, night vision goggles, GPS and communication systems,
television display panels, smart phones, jet engines, light-emitting diodes,
refinery catalysts and catalytic converters, wind turbines, solar panels,
long-life batteries and countless other applications. In 1954, the USA imported
100% of just eight vital minerals; in 1984, only eleven.
Today, in this technology-dominated world, the United
States imports up to 100% of 35 far more critical materials. Twenty of them
come 100% from China, others from Russia, and others indirectly from places
where child labor, worker safety, human rights and environmental standards are
nonexistent.
The situation is untenable and unsustainable. Literally
every sector of the US economy, the nation’s defense, its energy and employment
base, its living standards – all are dependent on sources, supply chains and
transportation routes that are vulnerable to disruption under multiple
scenarios.
Recognizing this, President Trump recently issued an executive order stating that federal policies would henceforth
focus on reducing these vulnerabilities, in part by requiring that government
agencies coordinate in publishing an updated
analysis of critical nonfuel minerals; ensuring that the private
sector have electronic access to up-to-date information on potential US and
other alternative sources; and finding safe and environmentally sound ways to
find, mine, reprocess and recycle critical minerals – emphasizing sources that
are less likely to come from unfriendly nations, less likely to face
disruption.
The order also requires that agencies prepare a detailed
report on long-term strategies for reducing US reliance on critical minerals,
assessing recycling and reprocessing progress, creating accessible maps of
potentially mineralized areas, supporting private sector mineral exploration,
and streamlining regulatory and permitting processes for finding, producing and
processing domestic sources of these minerals.
Incredibly, the last report on critical minerals and
availability issues was written in 1973, the year the first mobile telephone
call was made. That inexcusable 45 years of neglect by multiple administrations
and congresses dates back to the era of “revolutionary” Selectric typewriters and includes the appearance of desktop
computers in 1975 and the first PC in 1981. (That PC had a whopping 16 KB of
memory!)
As former geologist, Navy SEAL and military commander –
and now Secretary of the Interior – Ryan Zinke has observed, allowing our
nation to become so heavily “reliant on foreign nations, including our
competitors and adversaries,” for so many strategic minerals “is deeply
troubling.”
It’s actually far worse than “troubling” or “neglectful.”
It involved a concerted, irresponsible, ill-considered effort to place hundreds
of millions of acres in wilderness, wilderness study and other highly
restrictive land use categories – often with the very deliberate intention of
making their mineral prospects off limits, before anyone could assess the
areas’ critical, strategic and other mineral potential.
The 1964
Wilderness Act had contemplated the preservation of a few million or
tens of millions of acres of wild and primitive areas and natural habitats. To
ensure informed land use decisions and access to vital mineral resources,
Congress included “special provisions” that allowed prospecting and other
activities in potential and designated wilderness areas – and required surveys
by the US Geological Survey “on a planned, recurring basis,” to gather information
about mineral or other resources – if such activities are carried out “in a
manner compatible with the preservation of the wilderness environment.”
In 1978, while hiking with him, I asked then Assistant
Secretary of Agriculture Rupert Cutler how he could defend ignoring this clear
statutory language and prohibiting all prospecting, surveys and other
assessment work in wilderness and study areas. “I don’t think Congress should
have enacted those provisions,” he replied, “so I’m not going to follow them.”
As of 1994, when geologist Courtland Lee and I prepared a detailed
analysis, areas equal to Arizona, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico,
Utah and Wyoming combined (427 million acres) were off limits to mineral
exploration and development. The situation is far worse today – and because of
processes unleashed by plate tectonic, volcanic and other geologic forces,
these mountain, desert and other lands contain some of the most highly
mineralized rock formations in North America, or even the entire world.
The deck was stacked: for wilderness, and against
minerals and national security. This must not continue.
These areas must be surveyed and explored by government
agencies and private sector companies. The needs of current and future
generations are at stake. Failure to conduct systematic evaluations violates
the most fundamental principles of national defense, national security and
responsible government.
The Departments of Agriculture and the Interior should
follow the special provisions of the Wilderness Act; abolish, modify or grant
exceptions to existing motorized access restrictions; and ensure that areas are
evaluated using airborne magnetic and other analytical equipment, assay gear
carried in backpacks, truck-mounted and helicopter-borne drilling and coring
rigs, and other sophisticated modern technologies.
This approach also complies with environmental and
sustainability principles. It ensures that we can get vital strategic minerals
from world class deposits on small tracts of land, instead of having to mine
and process vast quantities of low quality ores. That protects most of our
wild, scenic and wildlife areas – and modern techniques can then restore affected
areas to natural conditions and high quality habitats.
Even ardent environmentalists should support this,
because the renewable energy, high-tech future they want and promise depends on
these minerals. For example, generating all US electricity (3.5 billion
megawatt hours per year) from wind would require some 14 million 1.8 MW turbines, requiring some 8 billion tons of steel alloys and
concrete, 2 million tons of neodymium, other rare earths, and vast amounts of
cobalt, molybdenum and other minerals. Substituting photovoltaic solar panels for turbines would require arsenic,
boron, cadmium, gallium, indium, molybdenum, selenium, silver, tellurium and
titanium.
Backing up that electricity for seven windless or sunless
days would require 700 million 100kw Tesla battery packs – and thus millions of tons of lithium,
cobalt, manganese, nickel and cadmium.
Every generation of renewable energy, computer,
communication and other high-tech equipment requires new materials in new
quantities – and thus renewed exploration, mining and processing.