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Mining companies have asked for federal support — but this isn’t what most of them had in mind.
It took Donald Trump just over two months to potentially tank his own American mineral supply chain renaissance.
At the time Trump entered office, it looked like the stars could align for an American mining boom. Mining jobs had finally recovered to pre-COVID levels, thanks in part to demand for the metals required to engineer the transition away from fossil fuels (and, paradoxically, continued demand for coal). A lot of the gains in mining stocks were thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, which offered a huge tax break to mining and metal processing companies and mandated that the consumer EV credit apply only to cars with a certain percentage of domestically-sourced material.
Trump 2.0 was poised to capitalize on that progress and unleash permits for U.S. mines under pared-back environmental regulations. In March, he issued an executive order to boost production of minerals in the U.S. — a maneuver that, combined with trade actions targeting China specifically, could have been the final step to bring about a mining and mineral processing resurgence in the U.S. and wrest some global market control away from China and other countries under its sphere of influence. In 2024, more than half of the mineral commodities consumed by the U.S. were imported from foreign sources, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Trump’s new global tariffs, however, sent the broader stock market into freefall, mining stocks very much included. He exempted many metals from the tariffs in their rawest form, but that was all the relief miners got. There were few exceptions for refined metal products or the inputs used for mining and mineral exploration. At the same time, metals prices — including commodities integral to battery production such as copper and lithium — are falling, with producers warning that now may be the high point for prices this year.
Part of this pricing issue is because the market appears to expect lower demand for new products that require those metals, such as EVs. Another part, as U.S. officials have said previously, is that China has been flooding the globe with minerals sold at a loss to win market influence. For this reason, D.C. policy wonks had been lobbying for legislation to address this pricing issue.
Now Trump has piled onto the industry's problems. This period could be especially painful for American mining companies, as it is exceedingly possible that a combination of lower commodity prices and higher costs for machinery and parts shatters whatever tailwinds were buoying many U.S. mining and metals projects. We may not see projects canceled yet, but a sense of extreme anxiety is sweeping the minds of many in the mining sector.
“If you look at the carrot of the pro-domestic mining policy versus the stick of the recessionary impacts from the demand side and the availability of capital impact from the supply side, the carrot is a raindrop and the stick is an ocean,” Emily Hersh, a veteran of the mining industry, told me.
Al Gore III, head of the D.C.-based electric vehicle and battery mineral supply chain association ZETA, said he agreed with Hersh’s assessment: “She’s right. We’ve been waging war against a raindrop for the last year, and now we’re in the ocean.”
Hersh has worked on mining projects across the world and taught me almost everything I know about the mining business, a sector I covered for years as a beat reporter for S&P Global and E&E News. Over the weekend, she explained to me the basic math behind why these tariffs will be bad for U.S. mining: It’ll be more expensive to buy the things abroad that companies need to build a mine, she said, from the drill rigs used in exploration to the parts required for extraction and ore storage. We don’t make a lot of those devices in the U.S., and building factories to do so will now be more expensive, too, making it more difficult to scale up what would be required to avoid higher project costs. Whatever benefits there are from trade pressure to choose U.S. mines for sourcing is outweighed by, well, everything else.
It’s important to remember how integral longstanding U.S. trade partners are to the global mining industry. Canada is one of the world’s largest producers of hardrock minerals, and at least 40% of the world’s mining companies are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Japan — now hit with a 24% tariff — was positioned to be an ally in U.S. efforts to wean off China-linked minerals and signed a minerals trade agreement under Biden. Even the Democratic Republic of Congo, which produces most of the world’s cobalt for batteries, was hit with a 10% tariff, leading Trump officials to try and appease the Congolese government by offering billions of dollars in investment.
Mining capacity is not the only constraint. We don’t process the ore we mine here, either. Take copper, a crucial industrial metal that many companies mine in America but then ship to Mexico or Canada to be refined for use in everything from cars to transmission lines and consumer electronics. This is why news of the tariffs has already led to record shipments of processed copper products into the U.S. as companies try to get ahead of the tariffs.
The final, crucial pain point: Recessions, like low metals prices, are usually horrible for mining projects and the companies developing them.
The 2008 recession was infamous for being the moment when the U.S. lost to China on battery metals; mining companies already hurting under sagging metals prices chose to sell assets and stakes in developers in Africa and elsewhere to Chinese companies, paving the way for the global resource power imbalance Trump likes to bemoan. The 2020 Covid-19 market shock also did little to help mining projects — metals prices went up because mines had to shut down, but demand and investment also decreased. That moment translated into a short-term boon for metals trading, with excess material already floating about in commerce. But little more than that.
“You have an administration here who is trying to torpedo international financial order with a misguided idea that some phoenix is going to magically rise from the ashes,” Hersh said. “That’s not how markets work, and that’s not what history has demonstrated happens in any scenario that parallels what the Trump administration is doing now.”
Ben Steinberg, a D.C. lobbyist who helps run an ad hoc advocacy group of mining and battery material companies, put it to me more succinctly: “These projects take a long time to develop. Capital can be somewhat patient, but we know it is generally impatient. The uncertainty is incredibly destabilizing,” said Steinberg, whose coalition of companies includes ones with mining projects that have offtake agreements with Tesla and other EV manufacturers. “The tariffs aren’t what I think about when I think about more mining in the U.S. I’m thinking of permitting.”
Gore, who also represents Tesla through his trade association, told me the tariffs will mean “everything is going to move a bit slower,” including the “momentum towards onshoring a lot of the supply chain.”
“I think that in general, capitalism works when you are using signals very judiciously — using carrots far more than you use sticks,” he told me.
The National Mining Association is also carefully signaling concern about the tariffs. NMA represents more than just the interests of battery metals — it also includes coal companies and gold miners that are rare beneficiaries of the market’s tailspin. But in a statement provided exclusively to Heatmap, NMA spokesperson Conor Bernstein offered a cautious note about interpreting these restrictionist trade actions as potentially good for mining.
“Targeted tariffs can be a part of an effective policy response,” Bernstein said. “At the same time, this is an incredibly complex time for any company to be operating, and we are working closely with our members to gather information on actual and potential impacts, are engaged with the administration to provide that information, and are committed to working with the administration to rebuild American supply chain security from the mine up.”
Ian Lange, an academic at the Colorado School of Mines, offered a blunt assessment of the tariffs: They’re an opportunity for a small group of domestic producers who have successfully argued to “reshape the supply chain away from their competitors.”
For years, individual mining companies have been seeking tariffs and trade protections on specific minerals they claim are unfairly subsidized and cheaply distributed by China and other nations. These efforts, which rose to prominence in Trump 1.0 Washington over uranium and fertilizers, have become more popular and bipartisan in D.C. as part of a tit-for-tat with China over minerals used in batteries, including graphite.
If there’s any silver lining in this moment, Lange said, it is the fact that this “bunch of people who’ve been complaining get their shot.”
“You wanted this!” Lange exclaimed. “So you better take advantage of it.”
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Solar and wind projects will take the most heat, but the document leaves open the possibility for damage to spread far and wide.
It’s still too soon to know just how damaging the Interior Department’s political review process for renewables permits will be. But my reporting shows there’s no scenario where the blast radius doesn’t hit dozens of projects at least — and it could take down countless more.
Last week, Interior released a memo that I was first to report would stymie permits for renewable energy projects on and off of federal lands by grinding to a halt everything from all rights-of-way decisions to wildlife permits and tribal consultations. At minimum, those actions will need to be vetted on a project-by-project basis by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and the office of the Interior deputy secretary — a new, still largely undefined process that could tie up final agency actions in red tape and delay.
For the past week, I’ve been chatting with renewables industry representatives and their supporters to get their initial reactions on what this latest blow from the Trump administration will do to their business. The people I spoke with who were involved in development and investment were fearful of being quoted, but the prevailing sense was of near-total uncertainty, including as to how other agencies may respond to such an action from a vital organ of the federal government’s environmental review process.
The order left open the possibility it could also be applied to any number of projects “related to” solar and wind — a potential trip-wire for plans sited entirely on private lands but requiring transmission across Bureau of Land Management property to connect to the grid. Heatmap Pro data shows 96 renewable energy projects that are less than 7 miles away from federal lands, making them more likely to need federal approval for transmission or road needs, and another 47 projects that are a similar distance away from critical wildlife habitat. In case you don’t want to do the math, that’s almost 150 projects that may hypothetically wind up caught in this permitting pause, on top of however many solar and wind projects that are already in its trap.
At least 35 solar projects and three wind projects — Salmon Falls Wind in Idaho and the Jackalope and Maestro projects in Wyoming — are under federal review, according to Interior’s public data. Advocates for renewable energy say these are the projects that will be the most crucial test cases to watch.
“Unfortunately they’ll be the guinea pigs,” said Mariel Lutz, a conservation policy analyst for the Center for American Progress, who today released a report outlining the scale of job losses that could occur in the wind sector under Trump. “The best way to figure out what this means is to have people and projects try or not try various things and see what happens.”
The data available is largely confined to projects under National Environmental Policy Act review, however. In my conversations with petrified developers this past week, it’s abundantly clear no one really knows just how far-reaching these delays may become. Only time will tell.
We’re looking at battles brewing in New York and Ohio, plus there’s a bit of good news in Virginia.
1. Idaho — The LS Power Lava Ridge wind farm is now facing a fresh assault, this time from Congress — and the Trump team now seems to want a nuclear plant there instead.
2. Suffolk County, New York — A massive fish market co-op in the Bronx is now joining the lawsuit to stop Equinor’s offshore Empire Wind project, providing anti-wind activists a powerful new ally in the public square.
3. Madison County, New York — Elsewhere in New York, a solar project upstate seems to be galvanizing opposition to the state’s permitting primacy law.
4. Fairfield County, Ohio — A trench war is now breaking out over National Grid Renewables’ Carnation Solar project, as opponents win a crucial victory at the county level.
5. El Paso County, Colorado — I don’t write about Colorado often, but this situation is an interesting one.
6. St. Joseph County, Indiana — Something interesting is playing out in this county that demonstrates how it can be quite complicated to navigate municipal and county-level permitting.
7. Albemarle County, Virginia — It’s rare I get to tell a positive story about Virginia, but today we have one: It is now easier to build a solar farm in the county home to Charlottesville, one of my personal favorite small cities in our country.
Getting local with Matthew Eisenson of Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.
This week’s conversation is with Matthew Eisenson at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. Eisenson is a legal expert and pioneer in the field of renewable energy community engagement whose work on litigating in support of solar and wind actually contributed to my interest in diving headlong into this subject after we both were panelists at the Society of Environmental Journalists’ annual conference last year. His team at the Sabin Center recently released a report outlining updates to their national project tracker, which looks at various facility-level conflicts at the local level.
On the eve of that report’s release earlier this month, Eisenson talked to me about what he believes are the best practices that could get more renewable projects over the finish line in municipal permitting fights. Oh — and we talked about Ohio.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
So first of all, walk me through your report. How has the community conflict over renewable energy changed in the U.S. over the past year?
A few things I would highlight. In Ohio, we now have 26 out of 88 counties that have established restricted areas where wind or solar are prohibited. These restrictions are explicitly enabled by the state law, SB 52. I’d also highlight that while the majority of litigation in our database is state-level litigation and contested case administrative proceedings, there are certain types of projects — particularly offshore wind — that have an extremely high prevalence of federal litigation. A majority of federally permitted offshore wind projects have been subject to federal lawsuits. The plaintiffs in these lawsuits have never succeeded on the merits, but they keep filing them and they drive up costs.
In general, as a topline takeaway, [our] report shows more and more of the same.
You personally do quite a bit of legal work on solar and wind permitting battles in the state of Ohio, where as you noted counties are curtailing deployment left and right. What’s your bird’s eye view of the situation in the state right now?
So Ohio has for years had a state-level siting process. The Ohio Power Siting Board reviews all applications for large-scale energy generation facilities, 50 megawatts or larger. The Siting Board has a set of criteria they are required to apply when they are reviewing an application, but basically only one of them seems to matter in deciding whether a project is approved or denied: whether the project serves the public’s convenience and necessity.
We’re seeing that in the majority of proceedings for approvals of large-scale wind and solar projects, there will be groups that intervene in opposition to the project, and often these groups will argue that there is so much local opposition that the project cannot possibly serve the public interest.
The Power Siting Board has been rejecting that argument in important cases recently. The board is still putting substantial weight on whether local governments are supportive or not supportive of a project, but are not rejecting projects just because of a demonstration of local opposition.
Say you’re a developer and you start facing opposition. What is the right legal avenue? How should they do the calculus, so to speak, on how to navigate legal options?
There’s numerous things developers can do. They can work with the local government and community-based groups to work with the local government to craft host community agreements, community benefit agreements — voluntary but binding contracts with the local community where a developer provides benefits; in exchange, community-based groups would agree to support the project, or at least not to oppose it. These can be very helpful and particularly meaningful in places where a local government itself is not in charge of permitting decisions themselves. So in a state like Ohio, if a developer negotiates host benefit agreements with local township governments and then those governments don’t turn around to intervene against a project, those would be extremely helpful.
It’s also important for developers to do community outreach and build a base of local supporters, and get those supporters to turn out at public meetings. Historically opponents of projects are more motivated to show up at a local meeting than supporters, but it’s really not a good look for a project when you have 500 turn out against it and 10 turn out to support.
For years the opponents were very proactive. There would be a proposal for a project in one county in Kansas and a group of opponents in the neighboring county would propose a restrictive ordinance to block future projects — supporters weren’t thinking proactively in the long-term. I think a concentrated effort will produce meaningful results. But they’re behind.