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[The_Gman]

Wyoming wins again (and Montana)!

The New Era of Mining
A deep dive into the efforts bringing mining into the 21st century.
Anna-Sofia Lesiv
April 25, 2024

The problem isn’t that the US doesn’t have enough resources domestically. By all accounts, the United States is swimming in valuable minerals. The issue, apart from regulation and the low cost of foreign competition to American mining efforts, is that we don’t have a good idea of where these minerals are.

To that end, in 2023, the USGS invested millions of dollars to help conduct airborne magnetic and radiometric surveying efforts across New Mexico, Alabama, Montana, and Utah to identify areas that might harbor valuable ore deposits. Recent years have already uncovered veritable motherlodes of critical minerals across America.

In early 2024, a deposit at Halleck Creek in Wyoming was found to contain 2.34 billion metric tons of rare-earth elements, in what is now considered the richest deposit of such elements in the world. In the year prior, Montana was found to contain significant deposits of rare earth minerals too. Meanwhile, in 2023 it was revealed that the Nevada-Oregon border is in fact, home to some 20 to 40 million tons of lithium, the largest known deposit of lithium on Earth.

These discoveries are immensely hopeful, but it’s only here that the real work begins. The International Energy Agency estimates that it takes over 16 years on average for a mine to go from discovery to production, as acquiring permits, designing and building the mine itself, and in some cases the processing facilities are all intermediate steps that take years to complete. Beyond this lies the tricky question of profitability.

On the one hand, it is a positive to have affordable critical minerals as inputs into broader electrification efforts. On the other, persistently low prices make domestic development of these minerals entirely uneconomical. In fact, many American mines that have adequate permits to begin production, like a newly proposed cobalt mine in Lemhi County, Idaho, have stalled simply because global cobalt prices have plummeted. Analysts believe the price action might be a deliberate move on the part of China, which dominates global cobalt production in the Democratic Republic of Congo and has ramped up supply in recent years – a move some think is intended to run competitors out of business. The situation is certainly a Catch-22, but if there’s one way out of this dilemma, it’s through innovation.

https://www.contrary.com/foundations-and-frontiers/mining