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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 But since then, a number have been revoked or remanded back to the permit-issuing agencies. Just last year, for instance, the Army Corps of Engineers rescinded NewRange’s wetlands permit on the recommendation of the Environmental Protection Agency.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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U.S. EV sales have been way up — just not for the domestic champion, which sank to its worst-ever market share in August.
Americans are rushing to buy electric vehicles ahead of the expiration of the $7,500 consumer tax credit at the end of this month.
And fewer of those cars are Teslas.
Preliminary data from Cox Automotive for August, first shared with Reuters, shows that the month was the best for EVs in U.S. history, with just over 146,000 units sold, comprising almost 10% of total car sales that month. At the same time, Tesla’s share of the EV market hit its lowest recorded level, down to a (still sizable) 38%.
Cox’s data puts Tesla sales at 55,000 for the month, which is up a little more than 3% from July but down over 6% from a year prior, while the company’s total market share fell from just over 40% in July and 45% in the first half of the year. In 2020, by contrast, Tesla’s share of U.S. EV sales was about 80%. Overall, Cox estimated that Tesla sales in the U.S. are down about 9% so far this year.
“The U.S. EV market is in a far more dynamic place than a few years ago,” Corey Cantor, the research director at the Zero Emissions Transportation Association, told me in an email. “Most automakers now offer electric vehicle models in multiple segments. There are multiple electric vehicles available below the average price point of a new car at $48,000.”
Entering this new phase means that the EV market is getting less Tesla-centric, almost by definition. Morgan Stanley reported that electric vehicle sales were up 23% in August from a year ago, while overall car sales were up 7.5% — although even amidst this industry-wide growth, Tesla sales fell more than 3% year over year, while electric vehicle sales were up 42%.
Much of that EV market growth comes down to timing. “Early indications are that EV sales are in fact surging over the past two months, following the changes that will phase the credit out at the end of this month. We’ve seen record sales for EV models last month, such as the Honda Prologue,” Cantor said. This likely means some portion of these sales are being “pulled forward” from buyers trying to beat the deadline and these sales numbers will not persist through the rest of the year.
As Tesla’s stranglehold over the U.S. EV market may be weakening, so too is its hold on the international market. Thanks to CEO Elon Musk’s association with right wing politics in the U.S. and abroad, and to fierce competition from Chinese EV leader BYD, Tesla’s sales have fallen dramatically in Europe. Globally, BYD overtook Tesla in sales last year.
None of that seems to matter much to Tesla’s leadership, or to its shareholders. On Friday, the company’s board of directors put forward a new compensation plan for Musk that would boost his ownership of the company to around 25% and put him in line for a $1 trillion payday if he meets growth and performance targets over the next decade.
A Delaware court last year threw out an earlier Musk pay package, arguing that Musk was too close to the board of directors for them to objectively determine his pay in the interest of all the company’s shareholders. (He subsequently relocated Tesla’s official headquarters to Austin, Texas, explicitly to avoid Delaware jurisdiction.) Musk has said that he wants to own about 25% of the company, a significant upgrade from the roughly 15% he owns currently.
Tesla’s board said in a recent regulatory disclosure that Musk had “reiterated that, if he were to remain at Tesla, it was a critical consideration that he have at least a 25% voting interest in Tesla,” and that “Mr. Musk also raised the possibility that he may pursue other interests that may afford him greater influence if he did not receive such assurances.”
The board’s disclosure also confirmed that Musk sees the future of Tesla as going far beyond selling cars to people. The filing said that “through its discussions with Mr. Musk,” the special committee in charge of coming up with his compensation had “identified four core product lines that would drive Tesla’s future transformation”: Tesla’s vehicle fleet, automation (i.e. Full Self-Driving) software, its robotaxi product, and humanoid robots. Tesla’s robotaxi service is available on a select basis in Austin, with no date yet indicated for a wider rollout, while its humanoid robots — which Musk has said will one day make up 80% of the company’s value — are due to reach “scale production” next year, Musk said on a recent earnings call.
Tesla stock actually rose on the news of the proposed compensation package, likely because Tesla shareholders viewed it as a way to retain Musk and keep his attention on the company.
Longtime Tesla bull Adam Jonas, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, said in note to investors that the compensation deal now means that Musk “has an incentive to focus on Tesla more than ever.” Jonas also, like many Tesla bulls, sees its business of selling cars to people as just a small portion of its overall value — in his case, $76 a share, compared to his $410 a share price target or the roughly $346 a share price the stock was trading at on Monday afternoon.
Still, the company today is largely a pretty normal car company, at least according to its income statement. In the second quarter of its current fiscal year, some $16.6 billion of Tesla’s $22.5 billion in revenue came from cars, with $2.8 billion coming from its energy business and $3 billion coming from “services and other revenues.”
Declining market share in its biggest product line isn’t completely meaningless, even if many Tesla shareholders see a glorious future for the company beyond the automobile trade.
Looking ahead, Cantor said to expect the EV market to get even more diverse.
“Moving forward, we will continue to see automakers innovate in the EV space. Timelines may change and models will vary by automaker, but high-profile launches expected over the next year include the Rivian R2, a new version of the Chevrolet Bolt EV, as well as more affordable models by Lucid and Kia,” Cantor said in his email.
“While the 30D [consumer electric vehicle tax] credit’s phase out will have a real impact on sales the next quarter or two here in the U.S.,” he added, “the long-term trend of excitement and innovation continues to be in the launch of new electric vehicles.”
On PJM pressure, Orsted’s approval, and a carbon storage well milestone
Current conditions: Hurricane Kiko, now a Category 3 storm, is expected to bring heavy rainfall to Hawaii this week as wind speeds roar up to 125 miles per hour • Dry air in the Caribbean is stymying any tropical storm from gaining wind intensity • Tropical Storm Tapah strengthened to a typhoon over China on Monday morning.
U.S. immigration authorities arrested hundreds of South Korean workers at a Hyundai battery plant in Georgia, in a move already prompting geopolitical blowback that could threaten efforts to reestablish manufacturing in the United States. After U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers conducted their biggest workplace raid since President Donald Trump took office again on Thursday, the South Korean government chartered planes to ferry detained workers back home. At an emergency meeting in Seoul, South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun said his government was “deeply concerned,” and that he would consider flying to the U.S. to meet with the Trump administration. Most of the 475 people arrested at the electric vehicle battery plant — a joint venture between automaker Hyundai and the battery company LG Energy Solution – were South Korean nationals. Videos of the arrests showed the workers’ wrists and ankles wrapped in chains as they were led away.
“You are already poorer because of this idiocy, you just don’t know it yet,” Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer wrote in a post on X, in response to a video of ICE agents chaining workers at the wrists and ankles. “This will crush American manufacturing know-how.”
Under a solar panel in Pennsylvania. Drew Hallowell/Getty Images for NASCAR
Political pressure is mounting on the nation’s largest grid operator to make hooking up new power sources easier amid surging demand. In remarks made as part of a public process for overhauling the grid’s rules, the governors of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and Illinois called on the PJM Interconnection to streamline the process to connect new resources to the grid, citing ERCOT, the independent power system in Texas, as an example of a successful model. “We must open all feasible pathways to bring additional electrons to our grid,” the governors said in a public comment highlighted on X by energy researcher Tyler Norris.
The push comes as PJM is fending off criticism from big tech companies and data centers over a proposal that would allow the grid to encourage big power users to pare back consumption when demand is particularly high. The backlash isn’t surprising to Abraham Silverman, a former lawyer for the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities and an assistant research scholar at Johns Hopkins. As he explained to Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin: “The existing rules are financially very favorable to the data centers.” The focus on adding new generation rather than curtailing new load is consistent with that more traditional approach.
Trump once called the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act former President Joe Biden signed in 2021, better known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, “a loser for the U.S.A.” that “patriots will never forget.” Now he’s taking credit for the projects it’s funding. In recent months, signs have gone up around the U.S. bearing the president’s name on bridge projects in Connecticut and Maryland, rail-yard improvements in Seattle, Boston, and Philadelphia, and the replacement tunnel on an Amtrak route between Baltimore and Washington, according to The New York Times. “PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP” a sign by the road in southern Connecticut reads. “REBUILDING AMERICA’S INFRASTRUCTURE.”
Republicans had previously balked at similar signs bearing Biden’s name. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote, “Senator Ted Cruz of Texas lodged a grievance with the Office of Special Counsel alleging Biden had violated the Hatch Act by using taxpayer dollars to pay for ‘nothing more than campaign yard signs.’” Republican Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa (who recently announced her intention not to seek reelection after becoming a target of Trump supporters) gave the signs one of her monthly “squeal awards” last year, demanding to know how much they cost.
Orsted’s shareholders on Friday backed the company’s plans to shore up its finances by raising $9.4 billion on the stock market to fend off attacks from the Trump administration. The approval came even as the world’s largest offshore wind developer cut its profit guidance for the year as lower-than-expected wind speeds dinged the company’s planned power output for the year. At an investor meeting in Copenhagen that the Financial Times described as “extraordinary,” at least 98.5% of shareholders voted in favor of authorizing the issuance of new shares.
The Sweetwater Carbon Storage Hub completed drilling for the nation’s deepest carbon storage well in Wyoming. The project, a collaboration between the University of Wyoming’s School of Energy Resources and the company Frontier Infrastructure holdings, reached a vertical depth of 18,437 feet. Preliminary data from the well “is highly encouraging,” according to the nonprofit newsroom Oil City News. “This deeper well gives us a more complete picture of the subsurface, reinforcing our commitment to building scalable, practical carbon solutions for Wyoming’s key industries,” said Robby Rockey, president and co-CEO of Frontier.
Still, as I reported in this newsletter last week, the new research from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and Imperial College London found “a prudent global limit” of around 1.46 trillion tons of CO2 that can be safely stored in geologic formations. That’s “almost 10 times smaller than estimates proposed by industry that have not considered risks to people and the environment.”
A long-term study spanning more than 50 years found that beavers that have returned to the Evo region in southern Finland increased habitat biodiversity as a result of how they engineer the ecosystem with dams. “While the positive effects of the changes brought about by beavers in the boreal region are significant, their long-term effects on biodiversity dynamics remain partly unknown. This is why long time series are needed to understand the far-reaching ecological effects of these changes,” Petri Nummi, a senior lecturer at the University of Helsinki and an author of the paper, said in a press release.
Using more electricity when it’s cheap can pay dividends later.
One of the best arguments for electric vehicles is the promise of lower costs for the owner. Yes, EVs cost more upfront than comparable gas-powered cars, but electric cars are cheaper to fuel and should require less routine maintenance, too. (Say goodbye to the 3,000-mile oil change.)
What about the societal scale, though? As the number of EVs on the road continues to rise, more analysts are putting forth the argument that EV ownership could lead to lower energy bills for everyone, even the people who don’t buy them.
The idea may be counterintuitive, given the prevailing narrative about voracious appetite for electricity. EVs do require a lot of energy. Electricity demand for EVs in the U.S. jumped 50% from 2023 to 2024 alone as more Americans bought electric, and the research group Ev.energy says demand could triple by 2030. Studies suggest that replacing every internal combustion vehicle in the country with an EV would eat up as much as 29% of American electricity.
Meanwhile, the grid is struggling to keep up — it is, after all, much more difficult to add more megawatts to the capacity of our power system than it is to put a few more EVs on the road. The obvious inference would then seem to be that a battery-powered car fleet could cause an energy crunch and spike in prices.
A new report from Ev.energy, however, argues that if we got smarter about how and when we charge our cars, their presence could actually cut costs for the average American by 10%. The gains could be even better if EVs reach their true potential as a way to give the grid a unique kind of flexibility and resilience.
Compare an electric car to a data center, the other application painted as a ticking time bomb for electricity prices. Worries about the energy-gobbling habits of AI-powering servers are well-founded, given their 24/7 appetite. An EV, however, needs to charge only once in a while. In fact, most people don’t need to charge every day, given the range of modern EVs and the driving habits of the typical American.
As we've covered before, it’s when you charge that matters. Optimizing EV charging can be a helpful way to ease pressure on the power grid and align EV charging with the availability of clean energy.
Here in California, which has far and away the most EVs in America, TV commercials remind us to use less energy between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m., when the state is dealing with rising residential energy use just as solar power is tapering off for the day. It would cause a grid crisis if every EV owner charged as soon as they got home from work. Having EV owners charge their cars overnight, a period of low demand, helps ease the pressure. So does charging during midday, when California sometimes has more solar energy than it knows what to do with.
When EVs charge in this mindful manner, using energy during times of day when it’s cheap for utilities to provide it, data suggests they can effectively push down electricity prices for everyone. Says one recent report from Synapse Energy: “In California, EVs have increased utility revenues more than they have increased utility costs, leading to downward pressure on electric rates for EV-owners and non-EV owners alike.” As the NRDC points out, California has revenue decoupling in place for its utilities, so “any additional revenue in excess of what was anticipated is returned to all utility customers — not just EV drivers — in the form of lower rates.”
Those rosy figures depend upon drivers following this model and charging during off-peak hours, of course. But with time-of-use rates giving them the financial motivation to charge overnight rather than in the early evening, it’s not an outrageous presumption.
And there’s something else that differentiates EVs from other applications that consume lots of electricity: Thanks to their ability to store a large number of kilowatt-hours over a lengthy period of time, electric vehicles can give back. EVs can be a cornerstone of the virtual power plant model because the cars — those equipped with bidirectional charging capabilities, at least — could feed the energy in their batteries back onto the grid to prevent blackouts, for example. In Australia, the Electric Vehicle Council recently crunched the numbers to argue in favor of incentivizing residents to install vehicle-to-grid infrastructure. Their math indicates Australia would reap more than the government invests because these connected EV would cut everyone’s electricity price.
It’s getting more expensive for the individual to own an EV — the federal tax credit for buying one disappears at month’s end, and punitive yearly fees for EV ownership are coming. Yet it seems that driving electric might be doing your neighbors a favor, and not just by clearing the air.