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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 But since then, a number have been revoked or remanded back to the permit-issuing agencies. Just last year, for instance, the Army Corps of Engineers rescinded NewRange’s wetlands permit on the recommendation of the Environmental Protection Agency.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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Any household savings will barely make a dent in the added costs from Trump’s many tariffs.
Donald Trump’s tariffs — the “fentanyl” levies on Canada, China, and Mexico, the “reciprocal” tariffs on nearly every country (and some uninhabited islands), and the global 10% tariff — will almost certainly cause consumer goods on average to get more expensive. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that in combination, the tariffs Trump has announced so far in his second term will cause prices to rise 2.3%, reducing purchasing power by $3,800 per year per household.
But there’s one very important consumer good that seems due to decline in price.
Trump administration officials — including the president himself — have touted cheaper oil to suggest that the economic response to the tariffs hasn’t been all bad. On Sunday, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent told NBC, “Oil prices went down almost 15% in two days, which impacts working Americans much more than the stock market does.”
Trump picked up this line on Truth Social Monday morning. “Oil prices are down, interest rates are down (the slow moving Fed should cut rates!), food prices are down, there is NO INFLATION,” he wrote. He then spent the day posting quotes from Fox Business commentators echoing that idea, first Maria Bartiromo (“Rates are plummeting, oil prices are plummeting, deregulation is happening. President Trump is not going to bend”) then Charles Payne (“What we’re not talking about is, oil was $76, now it’s $65. Gasoline prices are going to plummet”).
But according to Neil Dutta, head of economic research at Renaissance Macro Research, pointing to falling oil prices as a stimulus is just another example of the “4D chess” theory, under which some market participants attribute motives to Trump’s trade policy beyond his stated goal of reducing trade deficits to as near zero (or surplus!) as possible.
Instead, oil markets are primarily “responding to the recession risk that comes from the tariff and the trade war,” Dutta told me. “That is the main story.” In short, oil markets see less global trade and less global production, and therefore falling demand for oil. The effect on household consumption, he said, was a “second order effect.”
It is true that falling oil prices will help “stabilize consumption,” Dutta told me (although they could also devastate America’s own oil industry). “It helps. It’ll provide some lift to real income growth for consumers, because they’re not spending as much on gasoline.” But “to fully offset the trade war effects, you basically need to get oil down to zero.”
That’s confirmed by some simple and extremely back of the envelope math. In 2023, households on average consumed about 700 gallons of gasoline per year, based on Energy Information Administration calculations that the average gasoline price in 2023 was $3.52, while the Bureau of Labor Statistics put average household gasoline expenditures at about $2,450.
Let’s generously assume that due to the tariffs and Trump’s regulatory and diplomatic efforts, gas prices drop from the $3.26 they were at on Monday, according to AAA, to $2.60, the average price in 2019. (GasBuddy petroleum analyst Patrick De Haanwrote Monday that the tariffs combined with OPEC+ production hikes could lead gas prices “to fall below $3 per gallon.”)
Let’s also assume that this drop in gas prices does not cause people to drive more or buy less fuel-efficient vehicles. In that case, those same 700 gallons cost the average American $1,820, which would generate annual savings of $630 on average per household. If we went to the lowest price since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, about $3 per gallon, total consumption of 700 gallons would cost a household about $2,100, saving $350 per household per year.
That being said, $1,820 is a pretty low level for annual gasoline consumption. In 2021, as the economy was recovering from the Covid recession and before gas prices popped, annual gasoline expenditures only got as low as $1,948; in 2020 — when oil prices dropped to literally negative dollars per barrel and gas prices got down to $1.85 a gallon — annual expenditures were just over $1,500.
In any case, if you remember the opening paragraphs of this story, even the most generous estimated savings would go nowhere near surmounting the overall rise in prices forecast by the Yale Budget Lab. $630 is less than $3,800! (JPMorgan has forecast a more mild increase in prices of 1% to 1.5%, but agrees that prices will likely rise and purchasing power will decline.)
But maybe look at it this way: You might be able to drive a little more than you expected to, even as your costs elsewhere are going up. Just please be careful! You don’t want to get into a bad accident and have to replace your car: New car prices are expected to rise by several thousand dollars due to Trump’s tariffs.
With cars about to get more expensive, it might be time to start tinkering.
More than a decade ago, when I was a young editor at Popular Mechanics, we got a Nissan Leaf. It was a big deal. The magazine had always kept long-term test cars to give readers a full report of how they drove over weeks and months. A true test of the first true production electric vehicle from a major car company felt like a watershed moment: The future was finally beginning. They even installed a destination charger in the basement of the Hearst Corporation’s Manhattan skyscraper.
That Leaf was a bit of a lump, aesthetically and mechanically. It looked like a potato, got about 100 miles of range, and delivered only 110 horsepower or so via its electric motors. This made the O.G. Leaf a scapegoat for Top Gear-style car enthusiasts eager to slander EVs as low-testosterone automobiles of the meek, forced upon an unwilling population of drivers. Once the rise of Tesla in the 2010s had smashed that paradigm and led lots of people to see electric vehicles as sexy and powerful, the original Leaf faded from the public imagination, a relic of the earliest days of the new EV revolution.
Yet lots of those cars are still around. I see a few prowling my workplace parking garage or roaming the streets of Los Angeles. With the faded performance of their old batteries, these long-running EVs aren’t good for much but short-distance city driving. Ignore the outdated battery pack for a second, though, and what surrounds that unit is a perfectly serviceable EV.
That’s exactly what a new brand of EV restorers see. Last week, car site The Autopiancovered DIYers who are scooping up cheap old Leafs, some costing as little as $3,000, and swapping in affordable Chinese-made 62 kilowatt-hour battery units in place of the original 24 kilowatt-hour units to instantly boost the car’s range to about 250 miles. One restorer bought a new battery on the Chinese site Alibaba for $6,000 ($4,500, plus $1,500 to ship that beast across the sea).
The possibility of the (relatively) simple battery swap is a longtime EV owner’s daydream. In the earlier days of the electrification race, many manufacturers and drivers saw simple and quick battery exchange as the solution for EV road-tripping. Instead of waiting half an hour for a battery to recharge, you’d swap your depleted unit for a fully charged one and be on your way. Even Tesla tested this approach last decade before settling for good on the Supercharger network of fast-charging stations.
There are still companies experimenting with battery swaps, but this technology lost. Other EV startups and legacy car companies that followed Nissan and Tesla into making production EVs embraced the rechargeable lithium-ion battery that is meant to be refilled at a fast-charging station and is not designed to be easily removed from the vehicle. Buy an electric vehicle and you’re buying a big battery with a long warranty but no clear plan for replacement. The companies imagine their EVs as something like a smartphone: It’s far from impossible to replace the battery and give the car a new life, but most people won’t bother and will simply move on to a new car when they can’t take the limitations of their old one anymore.
I think about this impasse a lot. My 2019 Tesla Model 3 began its life with a nominal 240 miles of range. Now that the vehicle has nearly six years and 70,000 miles on it, its maximum range is down to just 200, while its functional range at highway speed is much less than that. I don’t want to sink money into another vehicle, which means living with an EV’s range that diminishes as the years go by.
But what if, one day, I replaced its battery? Even if it costs thousands of dollars to achieve, a big range boost via a new battery would make an older EV feel new again, and at a cost that’s still far less than financing a whole new car. The thought is even more compelling in the age of Trump-imposed tariffs that will raise already-expensive new vehicles to a place that’s simply out of reach for many people (though new battery units will be heavily tariffed, too).
This is no simple weekend task. Car enthusiasts have been swapping parts and modifying gas-burning vehicles since the dawn of the automotive age, but modern EVs aren’t exactly made with the garage mechanic in mind. Because so few EVs are on the road, there is a dearth of qualified mechanics and not a huge population of people with the savvy to conduct major surgery on an electric car without electrocuting themselves. A battery-replacing owner would need to acquire not only the correct pack but also potentially adapters and other equipment necessary to make the new battery play nice with the older car. Some Nissan Leaf modifiers are finding their replacement packs aren’t exactly the same size, shape or weight, The Autopian says, meaning they need things like spacers to make the battery sit in just the right place.
A new battery isn’t a fix-all either. The motors and other electrical components wear down and will need to be replaced eventually, too. A man in Norway who drove his Tesla more than a million miles has replaced at least four battery packs and 14 motors, turning his EV into a sort of car of Theseus.
Crucially, though, EVs are much simpler, mechanically, than combustion-powered cars, what with the latter’s belts and spark plugs and thousands of moving parts. The car that surrounds a depleted battery pack might be in perfectly good shape to keep on running for thousands of miles to come if the owner were to install a new unit, one that could potentially give the EV more driving range than it had when it was new.
The battery swap is still the domain of serious top-tier DIYers, and not for the mildly interested or faint of heart. But it is a sign of things to come. A market for very affordable used Teslas is booming as owners ditch their cars at any cost to distance themselves from Elon Musk. Old Leafs, Chevy Bolts and other EVs from the 2010s can be had for cheap. The generation of early vehicles that came with an unacceptably low 100 to 150 miles of range would look a lot more enticing if you imagine today’s battery packs swapped into them. The possibility of a like-new old EV will look more and more promising, especially as millions of Americans realize they can no longer afford a new car.
On the shifting energy mix, tariff impacts, and carbon capture
Current conditions: Europe just experienced its warmest March since record-keeping began 47 years ago • It’s 105 degrees Fahrenheit in India’s capital Delhi where heat warnings are in effect • The risk of severe flooding remains high across much of the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys.
The severe weather outbreak that has brought tornadoes, extreme rainfall, hail, and flash flooding to states across the central U.S. over the past week has already caused between $80 billion and $90 billion in damages and economic losses, according to a preliminary estimate from AccuWeather. The true toll is likely to be costlier because some areas have yet to report their damages, and the flooding is ongoing. “A rare atmospheric river continually resupplying a firehose of deep tropical moisture into the central U.S., combined with a series of storms traversing the same area in rapid succession, created a ‘perfect storm’ for catastrophic flooding and devastating tornadoes,” said AccuWeather’s chief meteorologist Jonathan Porter. The estimate takes into account damages to buildings and infrastructure, as well as secondary effects like supply chain and shipping disruptions, extended power outages, and travel delays. So far 23 people are known to have died in the storms. “This is the third preliminary estimate for total damage and economic loss that AccuWeather experts have issued so far this year,” the outlet noted in a release, “outpacing the frequency of major, costly weather disasters since AccuWeather began issuing estimates in 2017.”
AccuWeather
Low-emission energy sources accounted for 41% of global electricity generation in 2024, up from 39.4% in 2023, according to energy think tank Ember’s annual Global Electricity Review. That includes renewables as well as nuclear. If nuclear is left out of the equation, renewables alone made up 32% of power generation last year. Overall, renewables added a record 858 terawatt hours, nearly 50% more than the previous record set in 2022. Hydro was the largest source of low-carbon power, followed by nuclear. But wind and solar combined overtook hydro last year, while nuclear’s share of the energy mix reached a 45-year low. More solar capacity was installed in 2024 than in any other single year.
Ember
The report notes that demand for electricity rose thanks to heat waves and air conditioning use. This resulted in a slight, 1.4% annual increase in fossil-fuel power generation and pushed power-sector emissions to a new all-time high of 14.5 billion metric tons. “Clean electricity generation met 96% of the demand growth not caused by hotter temperatures,” the report said.
President Trump’s new tariffs will have a “limited” effect on the amount of solar components the U.S. imports from Asia because the U.S. already imposes tariffs on these products, according to a report from research firm BMI. That said, the U.S. still relies heavily on imported solar cells, and the new fees are likely to raise costs for domestic manufacturers and developers, which will ultimately be passed on to buyers and could slow solar growth. “Since the U.S.’s manufacturing capacity is insufficient to meet demand for solar, wind, and grid components, we do expect that costs will increase for developers due to the tariffs which will now be imposed upon these components,” BMI wrote.
In other tariff news, the British government is adjusting its 2030 target of ending the sale of new internal combustion engine cars to ease some of the pain from President Trump’s new 25% auto tariffs. Under the U.K.’s new EV mandate, carmakers will be able to sell new hybrids through 2035 (whereas the previous version of the rules banned them by 2030), and gas and diesel vans can also be sold through 2035. The changes also carve out exemptions for luxury supercar brands like McLaren and Aston Martin, which will be allowed to keep selling new ICE vehicles beyond 2030 because, the government says, they produce so few. The goal is to “help ease the transition and give industry more time to prepare.” British Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander insisted the changes have been “carefully calibrated” and their impact on carbon emissions is “negligible.” As The New York Timesnoted, the U.S. is the largest single-country export market for British cars.
The Environmental Protection Agency has approved Occidental Petroleum’s application to capture and sequester carbon dioxide at its direct air capture facility in Texas, and issued permits that will allow the company to drill and inject the gas more than one mile underground. The Stratos DAC plant is being developed by Occidental subsidiary 1PointFive. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham has reported, Stratos is designed to remove up to 500,000 metric tons of CO2 annually and set to come online later this year. Its success (or failure) could shape the future of DAC investment at a time when the Trump administration is hollowing out the Department of Energy’s nascent Carbon Dioxide Removal team and casting doubt over the future of the DOE’s $3.5 billion Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs program. While Stratos is not a part of the hubs program, it will use the same technology as Occidental’s South Texas DAC hub.
The Bezos Earth Fund and the Global Methane Hub are launching a $27 million effort to fund research into selectively breeding cattle that emit less methane.