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Even critical minerals can get complicated.
In northeastern Minnesota, a fight over the proposed NewRange Copper Nickel mine, better known as PolyMet, has dragged on for nearly two decades. Permits have been issued and revoked; state and federal agencies have been sued. The argument at the heart of the saga is familiar: Whether the pollution and disruption the mine will create are worth it for the jobs and minerals that it will produce.
The arguments are so familiar, in fact, that one wonders why we haven’t come up with a permitting and approval process that accounts for them. In total, the $1 billion NewRange project required more than 20 state and federal permits to move forward, all of which were secured by 2019. But since then, a number have been revoked or remanded back to the permit-issuing agencies. Just last year, for instance, the Army Corps of Engineers rescinded NewRange’s wetlands permit on the recommendation of the Environmental Protection Agency.
The messy history of this mine displays the difficult decisions the U.S. faces when it comes to securing the critical minerals that are key to a clean energy future — and the ways in which our current regulatory and permitting infrastructure is ill-equipped to resolve these tensions.
All sides in this debate recognize that minerals like nickel and copper are vital to the energy transition. Nickel is an integral component in most lithium-ion EV battery chemistries, and copper is used across a whole swath of technologies — electric vehicles, solar panels, and wind turbines, to name a few.
“We recognize that you're going to need copper, nickel, and other minerals in order to have a functioning society and to make the clean energy transition that we're all interested in,” Aaron Klemz, Chief Strategy Officer at the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, told me. But along with a number of other environmental groups and the Fond du Lac band of the Minnesota Chippewa tribe, which lives downstream of the proposed mine, MCEA opposes the project. “You can’t not mine. We understand that. But you have to take it on a case-by-case basis.”
On the one hand, the Duluth Complex, where the NewRange mine would be sited, contains one of the world’s largest untapped deposits of copper, nickel and other key metals. However, the critical minerals in this water-rich environment are bound to sulfide ores that can release toxic sulfuric acid when exposed to water and air. The proposed mine sits in a watershed that would eventually flow into Lake Superior, a critical source of drinking water for the Upper Midwest.
Many advocacy groups believe water pollution from the mine is inevitable, especially given NewRange’s plans for its waste basin. The current proposal involves covering the waste products, known as tailings, with water and containing the resulting slurry will with a dam. That’s considered much riskier than draining water from the tailings and “dry stacking” them in a pile. NewRange’s upstream dam construction method is also a concern, as the wet tailings can erode the dam’s walls more easily than with other designs. An upstream dam collapsed in Brazil in 2019, leading the country to ban this type of construction altogether.
And lastly, there’s the narrow question of the NewRange dam’s bentonite clay liner. Late last year, an administrative law judge recommended that state regulators refrain from reissuing NewRange’s permit to mine on the grounds that this liner was not a “practical and workable” method of containing the tailings.
Christie Kearney, director of sustainability, environmental and regulatory affairs for NewRange Copper Nickel, called these criticisms “tired and worn talking points” in a follow-up email to me, and said that the concerns simply don’t hold water “after the most comprehensive and lengthy environmental review and permitting process in Minnesota history.” The bentonite issue in particular, she told me, represents one of the main reasons permitting has been so challenging. “Instead of allowing agencies (who have the expertise) to make these decisions as established in Minnesota law, the regulatory decisions get challenged in court by mining opponents, leaving it to judges (who don’t have the technical expertise) to make these determinations,” she wrote.
The whole process could have gone more smoothly if all the stakeholders were involved from the beginning, she told me when we spoke. “In particular, we have a number of state permits that are overseen by the EPA, yet the EPA isn't involved until the very end, which has caused frustration both in our environmental review process as well as our permitting process.”
Klemz has another approach to ending the confusion. What is needed, he said, is a pathway to shut down projects once and for all if they’re deemed too environmentally hazardous. “There is no way to say no under the system we have now,” he told me. While courts can deny or revoke a permit, companies like NewRange can always go back to the drawing board and resubmit. “What we have instead is a system where the company has the incentive to keep on trying over and over and over again, despite whatever setback they encounter.”
While there’s no systematic way to block a mine, myriad avenues can lead to a “no.” Last year, the federal government placed a moratorium on mining on federal lands upstream of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Wilderness Area, effectively shutting down another proposed copper-nickel mine. And the EPA banned the disposal of mine waste near Alaska’s proposed Pebble mine, blocking that project as well.
It’s a delicate balancing act, because ultimately the administration does want to incentivize domestic critical minerals production. The Inflation Reduction Act provides generous tax credits for companies involved in minerals processing, cathode materials production, and battery manufacturing. Then there’s the $7,500 credit available to consumers that purchase a qualifying EV, which depends on the automaker sourcing minerals from either the U.S. or a country the U.S. has a free-trade agreement with.
Under the current interpretation of the IRA, it’s possible that none of this money would flow directly to NewRange, since mineral extraction isn’t eligible for a tax credit, and it’s yet unclear whether the company will process the metals to a high enough grade to be eligible for credits there, either. Automakers that source from NewRange could benefit, but the project doesn’t currently have offtake agreements with any electric vehicle or clean energy company. That’s something that critics of the mine point to when NewRange touts its clean energy credentials.
“It's much more likely that this will end up in a string of Christmas lights than it will end up in a wind turbine in the United States,” Klemz told me. Of course, more critical minerals in the market overall will lower prices, thereby benefiting clean energy projects. But NewRange is a less neat proposition than, say, the proposed Talon Metals nickel mine, which is sited about two hours southwest of NewRange. As MIT Technology Review reports, this mine could unlock billions in federal subsidies through its offtake agreement with Tesla.
That hasn’t inoculated Talon from fierce local opposition, either. “As disinterested as the public may be in a lot of things, they are really engaged in a new mining project in their backyard,” said Adrian Gardner, Principal Nickel Markets Analyst at the energy and research consultancy Wood Mackenzie, which has been tracking both the Talon and NewRange mine since they were first proposed.
The Biden administration is also engaged. Two years ago, the Department of the Interior convened an interagency working group to make domestic minerals production more sustainable and efficient, starting with the Mining Law of 1872 — still the law of the land when it comes to new mining projects. The group released a report last September recommending, among other things, that the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service provide standardized guidance to prospective developers and require meetings between all relevant agencies and potential developers before any applications are submitted. That means Congress will need to provide more resources to permitting agencies.
Those resources could come from a proposed royalty of between 4% and 8% on the net proceeds of minerals extracted from public lands, a fee that would also go to help communities most impacted by mining. The National Mining Association, of which NewRange is a member, has come out strongly against the report’s recommendations, highlighting the high royalties as a particular point of contention.
But many of the report’s proposals might have helped NewRange in its early days. “There were a lot of early missteps by the company,” Kearney admits. “The first draft [Environmental Impact Statement] that the company went through received a very poor reading from the EPA, and the company went back to its drawing board, changed out its leadership and its environmental leads.”
More stern rebukes, of course, would be the ideal for many advocacy groups. “I don't know how they could redesign it quite honestly, given what we know about the science, to comply with the law,” Klemz said.
Kearney is adamant, though, that even after five years of litigation, NewRange has no plans to give up the fight. “Not many companies can weather that,” Kearney said. Not many companies, however, are backed by mining giant Glencore. PolyMet, the project’s original developer, “really only survived because Glencore came in a few years back and invested over time until the point where they got 100% control,” Kearney told me.
Glencore, a $65 billion Swiss company, is pursuing the NewRange project in partnership with Teck Resources, which is worth $20 billion. The companies can afford to fight for a very long time, meaning nobody knows quite how or when this all ends.
“We do need this material. I get that,” Klemz told me. “So I don't really know if there's going to be some kind of neat future resolution to this.”
Kearney put it simply. “We don't have a timeline right now.”
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Generate Capital’s Jonah Goldman makes his case.
The Inflation Reduction Act sparked a predictable surge in clean energy-related investments from the law’s signing in 2022 through the 2024 election, before President Trump’s second term ushered in an era of cancellations, closures, and downsizing. Of the domestic projects announced since the IRA’s passage, a total of 35 have been nixed or scaled back so far this year — more than in all of 2023 and 2024 combined, according to estimates from the environmental advocacy organization E2. This accounts for over $22 billion in lost investment and 16,500 in lost jobs.
“There’s a drastic decrease in the amount of new [clean energy] investments,” E2’s Michael Timberlake told me. After the IRA’s passage, he explained, nearly every month saw over a billion dollars invested in new clean energy projects. But since December of last year, monthly investment has come in below a billion dollars more often than not.
Domestic electric vehicle and battery manufacturing projects have been hit the hardest, as these sectors are staring down a federal bureaucracy clearly hostile to their tech on the one hand and Chinese competitors that are already leagues ahead of them on the other. But there is a bright spot: E2’s data shows that the grim outlook for clean energy projects is largely confined to the manufacturing sector. Many large-scale energy generation projects might actually, maybe, be mostly okay.
That’s what Jonah Goldman of the infrastructure investment firm Generate Capital is banking on. As electricity demand rises for the first time in over a decade, the need to deploy cost-competitive grid energy is only increasing. Thus, Goldman sees plenty of reason to continue investing in a renewables buildout — solar especially, which can often be deployed more quickly, flexibly, and economically than any other form of generation, politics aside.
“What is not a question really anymore is whether these projects are going to get built,” Goldman told me. “There’s just not another option. Even if you think of doubling our investment in gas generation, you still don’t get to this incredible increase in power demand that we need in order to reach the projections that we’re getting.”
Taking a closer look at the post-IRA projects that have been either canceled or scaled back shows that solar is indeed the most resilient investment of the bunch. Since the IRA’s passage, about 12% of announced solar projects have been canceled or downsized, compared to 25% of wind projects, 19% of EV projects, and 34% of EV battery projects. Only three of the 35 projects hit this year were related to solar, and only one of those was for solar generation.
Despite the overall dour domestic investment outlook, Timberlake thus agrees with Goldman that solar in particular isn’t grinding to a halt anytime soon. The market signal for clean energy, Timberlake said, is “indisputable.” The buildout might happen more slowly than it otherwise would have, as the administration continues to unspool regulatory red tape for these projects, but it’ll happen.
And, of course, it will get more expensive. Because while Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill maintains investment and production tax credits for most clean energy technologies through 2033, it cuts credits for solar and wind projects that either start construction after July 2026, or, if they haven’t started by then, are placed in service after 2027.
While Goldman hates what that will do to electricity prices, he doesn’t seem too worried about it hurting Generate’s ability to invest. For the moment, he told me, this timeline leaves the firm with a strong pipeline of opportunities not only in solar, but also in other categories like battery energy storage, geothermal, and sustainable fuels that have largely retained their IRA incentives. “You’re still talking about hundreds of billions of dollars of available investments that don’t wear that risk at all,” he said.
In fact, there are also already so many renewables projects under construction or set to begin soon that “we’ve got more investable opportunities than we have capital to invest,” Goldman explained. Rather than a lull, the tax credit cutoff date is now creating an incentive for investors to throw their support behind projects that appear poised to meet the deadlines.
That won’t last forever. After the credits phase out, investment could certainly dip, Goldman said, “until either those incentives are restored — which they still could be — or the market figures out how to effectively price those projects without that incentive.” Because tax-credit eligible projects that began construction prior to July 2026 will still be coming online for the next few years, Goldman predicts the lull could start around 2029.
He’s not convinced the incentives are gone for good, though. Solar and wind tax credits have suffered through many periods of uncertainty during their decades-long history, always ultimately enduring. And while the industry shouldn’t bank on a mid-term congressional shakeup laying the groundwork for a credit extension, it’s always a possibility — especially given looming electricity price hikes. That could rile up voters enough to begin chipping away at the partisan divides that have formed around clean energy, fossil fuels, and how the heck to power all of these AI data centers.
“We’re no longer talking about a political issue, despite the fact that they made this a political issue.” Goldman told me. “What we need is more electrons on the grid for as affordable a price as possible. And some of those will be generated from gas, and some of those will be generated from renewables.”
The U.S. is also not the only place for infrastructure investors to make money. While domestic clean energy investment may be down, the first half of 2025 saw global private infrastructure funding increase significantly compared with the prior two years. Data center and renewables-focused funds drove the trend, making up 45% and 36% of total investment raised, respectively. The “power and transmission” sector — which includes fossil fuel-fired generation — comprised a mere 12%.
But given that climate funds from all corners of the globe do primarily invest in the U.S., this certainly points to a sustained interest in building domestic clean energy infrastructure. Or, as Goldman put it, “the fundamentals of the market are complicated but only pointing in one direction — a deep thirst for quick, buildable power. And there’s only certain technologies that can fill that deep thirst.”
On Interior’s birdwatching, China’s lithium slowdown, and recycling aluminum
Current conditions: Hurricane Erin is gathering strength as it makes its way toward Puerto Rico later this week • Flash flooding and severe storms threaten the Great Plains and Midwest • In France, 12 administrative regions are on red alert for heat as temperatures surge past 95 degrees Fahrenheit.
Ford announced plans on Monday to deliver a $30,000 mid-size all-electric truck in 2027, in a potential shakeup of an EV market that’s been plagued by high costs. But the truck — which is rumored to revive the retro name Ford Ranchero — wasn’t really the main news. The pickup is part of Ford’s plan to “reimagine the entire way it builds EVs to cut costs, turn around its struggling EV division, and truly compete with the likes of Tesla,” Heatmap contributor Andrew Moseman wrote, which the company has dubbed its second “Model T moment.”
The strategy embraces a more minimalist, software-driven method of car design that EV-only companies such as Tesla and Rivian employ, allowing them to make mechanically simpler vehicles with fewer buttons and parts and more functions run by software through touchscreens. The push could “change everything” and “disrupt the U.S. auto industry,” wrote Inside EVs.
The Department of the Interior’s Fish and Wildlife Service is sending letters to wind developers across the U.S. asking for volumes of records about eagle deaths, indicating an imminent crackdown on wind farms under the auspices of bird protection laws, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reported. The letters demand developers submit a laundry list of documents to the Service within 30 days, including “information collected on each dead or injured eagle discovered.”
The Trump administration has ramped up its assault on the wind industry in recent weeks, de-designating millions of acres of ocean for offshore wind development and yanking federal approvals for the Lava Ridge wind project in Idaho. Here’s Jael with more on the escalation.
An explosion at a U.S. Steel plant outside Pittsburgh killed at least two workers and injured nearly a dozen more. The first worker confirmed to have died was Timothy Quinn, 39, a father of three and caretaker to his mother, his sister, Trisha Quinn told CNN. She said officials did not alert her to her brother’s death until 4 p.m., hours after the explosion occurred. “My dad worked at the steel mill for 42 years,” she said. “He would be disgusted at the situation right now.” U.S. Steel executives said they do not yet know what caused the blast. The name of the second worker to have died was not yet confirmed.
The Clairton Coke Works facility, which has operated for more than 120 years, is a key node in the American steel supply chain, providing iron for the blast furnaces in Braddock, Pennsylvania, and Gary, Indiana. It was slated for potential investments under Nippon Steel’s $15 billion acquisition of the American giant. The extent of the damage is unclear, but the reconstruction of the plant could pose a test of whether Nippon will invest in newer, cleaner technologies or rebuild the existing coal-fired equipment.
Chinese battery giant Contemporary Amperex Technology, or CATL, said Monday it would halt production at a major lithium mine, sparking a surge in lithium futures and miners’ share prices, Reuters reported. The move is seen as part of Beijing’s broader attempt to rein in China’s overcapacity in the battery market, which created a global glut. Stock in lithium companies outside China surged on the news, as did spot prices. The license on the mine, located in the southeast province of Jiangxi, expired on August 9. The site previously supplied up to 6% of the world’s lithium.
“I am bullish on the move. It is proof positive that Chinese producers can only operate at a loss for so long before shutting in production. When they do, the floor under prices starts to take shape,” Ashley Zumwalt-Forbes, the Department of Energy’s former deputy director for batteries and critical minerals, wrote on LinkedIn. “This move will not fix the sector’s structural challenges overnight, but it is a meaningful signal that the worst of the oversupply pressure may be behind us.”
President Donald Trump’s 50% tariffs on imported aluminum could spur a recycling boom, industry experts told The Wall Street Journal’s Ryan Dezember. Primary aluminum production dwindled over the last 25 years. Two of the first new smelters planned in the U.S. in decades are facing increased competition for electricity from data centers. Production is likely still a few years away. By contrast, aluminum-recycling plants can be built faster and cheaper — roughly two years and $150 million — and consume 5% of the energy needed for primary production since they rely on chemical reactions to break down wasted metal. “Recycling is the answer,” said Duncan Pitchford, the executive in charge of recycling giant Norsk Hydro’s upstream business in the U.S. “The metal is already here.”
Scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Princeton University re-engineered the metabolism of the yeast Issatchenkia orientalis to supercharge its fermentation of plant glucose into succinic acid, an important industrial chemical used in food additives and agricultural and pharmaceutical products. The natural fermentation process, relying on yeasts and renewable plant material, is far less carbon intensive than the conventional production using petrochemicals. “These advances bring us closer to greener manufacturing processes that benefit both the environment and the economy,” Vinh Tran, study’s primary author, said in a press release.
The assembly line is the company’s signature innovation. Now it’s trying to one-up itself with the Universal EV Production System.
In 2027, Ford says, it will deliver a $30,000 mid-size all-electric truck. That alone would be a breakthrough in a segment where EVs have struggled against high costs and lagging interest from buyers.
But the company’s big announcement on Monday isn’t (just) about the truck. The promised pickup is part of Ford’s big plan that it has pegged as a “Model T moment” for electric vehicles. The Detroit giant says it is about to reimagine the entire way it builds EVs to cut costs, turn around its struggling EV division, and truly compete with the likes of Tesla.
What lies beneath the new affordable truck — which will revive the retro name Ford Ranchero, if rumors are true — is a new setup called the Ford Universal EV Platform. When car companies talk about a platform, they mean the automotive guts that can be shared between various models, a strategy that cuts costs compared to building everything from scratch for each vehicle. Tesla’s Model 3 and Model Y ride on the same platform, the latter being essentially a taller version of the former. Ford’s rival, General Motors, created the Ultium platform that has allowed it to build better and more affordable EVs like the Chevy Equinox and the upcoming revival of the Bolt. In Ford’s case, it says a truck, a van, a three-row SUV, and a small crossover can share the modular platform.
At the heart of the company’s plan, however, is a new manufacturing approach. The innovation of the original Model T was about the factory, after all — using the assembly line to cut production costs and lower the price of the car. For this “Model T moment,” the company has proposed a sea change in the way it builds EVs called the Ford Universal EV Production System. It will demonstrate the strategy with a $2 billion upgrade to the Ford factory in Louisville, Kentucky, that will build the new pickup.
In brief, Ford has embraced the more minimalist, software-driven version of car design embraced by EV-only companies like Tesla and Rivian. The vehicles themselves are mechanically simpler, with fewer buttons and parts, and more functions are controlled by software through touchscreen interfaces. Building cars this way cuts costs because you need far fewer bits, bobs, fasteners, and workstations in the factory. It also reduces the amount of wiring in the vehicle — by more than a kilometer of the stuff compared to the Mustang Mach-E, Ford’s current most popular EV, the company said.
Ford is in dire need of an electric turnaround. The company got into the EV race earlier than legacy car companies like Toyota and Subaru, which settled on more of a wait-and-see approach. Its Mustang Mach-E crossover has been one of the more successful non-Tesla EVs of the early 2020s; the F-150 Lightning proved that the full-size pickup truck that dominates American car sales could go electric, too.
But both vehicles were expensive to make, and the Lightning struggled to make a dent in the truck market, in part because the huge battery needed to power such a big vehicle gave it a bloated price. When Tesla started a price war in the EV market a few years ago, Ford began hemorrhaging billions from its electric division, struggling to adapt to the new world even as carmakers like GM and Hyundai/Kia found their footing.
The big Detroit brand has been looking for an answer ever since, and Monday’s announcement is the most promising proposal it has put forward. Part of the production scheme is for Ford to build its own line of next-gen lithium-ion phosphate, or LFP batteries in Michigan, using technology licensed from the Chinese giant CATL. Another step is to employ the “assembly tree,” which splits the traditional assembly line into three parallel operations, which Ford says reduces the number of required workstations and cuts assembly time by 15%.
Affordability has always been a bugaboo for the American EV industry, a worry exacerbated by the upcoming demise of the $7,500 tax credit. And while Ford’s manufacturing overhaul will go a long way toward building a light-duty pickup EV that sells for $30,000, so too will a fundamental change in thinking about batteries, weight, and range. The F-150 Lightning isn’t the only pickup with a big battery and an even bigger price. That truck’s power pack comes in at 98 kilowatt-hours; large EV pickups like the Rivian R1T and Chevy Silverado EV have 150 or even 200 kilowatt-hour batteries, necessary to store enough power to give these heavy beasts a decent driving range.
InsideEVs reports, however, that the affordable Ford truck may have a battery capacity of just over 50 kilowatt-hours, which would dramatically reduce its cost to make. The trade-off, then, is range. The Slate small pickup truck that made waves this year for its promised price in the $20,000s would have just 150 miles of range in its cheapest form. Ford hasn’t released any specs for its small EV truck, but even using state-of-the-art LFP chemistry, such a small battery surely won’t deliver many more miles per charge.
Whatever the final product looks like, the new Ford truck and the infrastructure behind it are another reminder that, no matter the headwinds caused by the Trump administration, EVs are the future. Ford had been humming along through its EV struggles because its gas-burning cars remained so popular in America, and so profitable. But those profits collapsed in the first half of 2025, according to The New York Times. Meanwhile, Ford and every other carmaker are struggling to catch up to the Chinese companies selling a plethora of cheap EVs all over the world. Their very future depends on innovating ways to build EVs for less.