You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
Are these minerals even economically viable?
President Donald Trump is going to be talking rocks with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy during their Friday meeting in Washington, D.C., where they will sign a “very big agreement,” Trump said Wednesday.
As the Trump administration has ramped up talks to end the war in Ukraine, shift America’s strategic priorities away from Europe, and build a new relationship with Russia, it has also become intensely interested in Ukraine’s supposed mineral wealth, with Ukrainian and American negotiators working on a deal to create an investment fund for the country’s reconstruction that would be partially funded by developing the country’s mineral resources.
But exactly what minerals are in Ukraine and if they’re economically viable to extract is a matter of contention.
So-called critical minerals and rare earths have a way of finding themselves in geopolitical hotspots. This is because they’re not particularly rare, but the immense capital required to cost effectively find them, mine them, and process them is.
“A lot of countries have natural resources. We don’t mine everything that exists underground. We look for projects that are economically competitive,” Gracelin Baskaran, director of the critical minerals security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me.
Baskaran pointed out, it was precisely Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine that kicked the United States’ interest in building up supplies of critical minerals and rare earths outside of China — which dominates the industry — into overdrive.
“It was a fortuitous moment in that way for Ukraine’s resources, because they weren’t necessarily being mined before,” she said.
And Ukraine has done its best to promote and take advantage of its mineral resources, even if there’s some ambiguity about what exactly they are, and if they can be profitably extracted at scale.
While often conflated, critical minerals and rare earths are distinct. The so-called “rare earths” are 17 similar elements, which the U.S. Geological Survey explicitly says are “relatively abundant,” like scandium and yttrium. Critical minerals are a more amorphous group, with the USGS listing out 50 (including the rare earths) as well as commonly known minerals like titanium, nickel, lithium, tin, and graphite, with uses in batteries, alloys, semiconductors, and other high value energy, defense, and technology applications.
When countries are desperate for outside assistance or their patrons are desperate to see some return on their “investments” in military and foreign aid, as Bloomberg’s Javier Blas has pointed out, the minerals tend to show up — just look at the “$1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits” the United States identified in Afghanistan in 2010. Ten years later when the USGS looked at Afghanistan’s mineral industries, the rare earths remained untapped and instead the country was largely exporting talc and crushed marble to its neighbors.
Ukrainians have been eager to show there are economically viable and valuable minerals in the country, including a claim by one Ukrainian official in early 2022 that “about 5% of all the world’s ‘critical raw materials’ are located in Ukraine,” while a pair of Ukrainian researchers claimed there was 500,000 tons of unmined lithium oxide resources. More recently the country has claimed to have rare earths, and that President Trump has taken a special interest in.
Many industry experts doubt there’s any significant reserves of rare earths in the country, with the exception of scandium, which is used in aluminum alloys and fuel cells. Ukraine does have a significant mining industry and has produced substantial amounts of iron ore and manganese, along with reserves of graphite, titanium, cobalt, and uranium, many of which are those so-called “critical minerals” with uses for energy and defense.
“There do not appear to be hardly any economically viable rare earths in the country – that was largely a misuse of a term someone heard,” Morgan Bazillian, director of the Payne Institute and a public policy professor at the Colorado School of Mines, told me in an email.
Blas has documented a game of telephone whereby rare earths and critical minerals are conflated to make it seem like the former exists in abundance underneath Ukraine. Despite the doubts, President Trump said on Wednesday during his cabinet meeting “we’ll be really partnering with Ukraine, [in] terms of rare earth. We very much need rare earth. They have great rare earth.”
While there’s disagreement about exactly what Ukraine has to offer in terms of minerals, the interest in building up supplies of minerals is part and parcel of what is now a bipartisan priority to build up supplies and the ability to process and refine minerals used for a variety of defense, industrial, and energy applications.
To the extent the United States is able to jumpstart any new mineral operations in postwar Ukraine, it would require first repairing the country’s greatly damaged infrastructure, which has been wrecked by the very conflict that has spiked interest in the country’s mineral sector.
“Their infrastructure is decimated. Rebuilding it will be the priority, getting industry moving again will take time – including from basic services like electricity,” Bazillian told me.
And after that, much basic work needs to be done before any mining can happen, like an updated geological survey of the country, which hasn’t been done since the country was part of the Soviet Union. And all that’s before starting the process for opening a mine, something that on average takes 18 years to do.
“You need to have a geological mapping. You need to identify investors who want to go in. You need to build infrastructure,” Baskaran said.
“Ukraine has undeveloped or untapped potential that could be utilized. And the question is whether that untapped potential is economically viable, and we don’t know yet.”
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
A war of attrition is now turning in opponents’ favor.
A solar developer’s defeat in Massachusetts last week reveals just how much stronger project opponents are on the battlefield after the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Last week, solar developer PureSky pulled five projects under development around the western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury. PureSky’s facilities had been in the works for years and would together represent what the developer has claimed would be one of the state’s largest solar projects thus far. In a statement, the company laid blame on “broader policy and regulatory headwinds,” including the state’s existing renewables incentives not keeping pace with rising costs and “federal policy updates,” which PureSky said were “making it harder to finance projects like those proposed near Shutesbury.”
But tucked in its press release was an admission from the company’s vice president of development Derek Moretz: this was also about the town, which had enacted a bylaw significantly restricting solar development that the company was until recently fighting vigorously in court.
“There are very few areas in the Commonwealth that are feasible to reach its clean energy goals,” Moretz stated. “We respect the Town’s conservation go als, but it is clear that systemic reforms are needed for Massachusetts to source its own energy.”
This stems from a story that probably sounds familiar: after proposing the projects, PureSky began reckoning with a burgeoning opposition campaign centered around nature conservation. Led by a fresh opposition group, Smart Solar Shutesbury, activists successfully pushed the town to drastically curtail development in 2023, pointing to the amount of forest acreage that would potentially be cleared in order to construct the projects. The town had previously not permitted facilities larger than 15 acres, but the fresh change went further, essentially banning battery storage and solar projects in most areas.
When this first happened, the state Attorney General’s office actually had PureSky’s back, challenging the legality of the bylaw that would block construction. And PureSky filed a lawsuit that was, until recently, ongoing with no signs of stopping. But last week, shortly after the Treasury Department unveiled its rules for implementing Trump’s new tax and spending law, which basically repealed the Inflation Reduction Act, PureSky settled with the town and dropped the lawsuit – and the projects went away along with the court fight.
What does this tell us? Well, things out in the country must be getting quite bleak for solar developers in areas with strident and locked-in opposition that could be costly to fight. Where before project developers might have been able to stomach the struggle, money talks – and the dollars are starting to tell executives to lay down their arms.
The picture gets worse on the macro level: On Monday, the Solar Energy Industries Association released a report declaring that federal policy changes brought about by phasing out federal tax incentives would put the U.S. at risk of losing upwards of 55 gigawatts of solar project development by 2030, representing a loss of more than 20 percent of the project pipeline.
But the trade group said most of that total – 44 gigawatts – was linked specifically to the Trump administration’s decision to halt federal permitting for renewable energy facilities, a decision that may impact generation out west but has little-to-know bearing on most large solar projects because those are almost always on private land.
Heatmap Pro can tell us how much is at stake here. To give you a sense of perspective, across the U.S., over 81 gigawatts worth of renewable energy projects are being contested right now, with non-Western states – the Northeast, South and Midwest – making up almost 60% of that potential capacity.
If historical trends hold, you’d expect a staggering 49% of those projects to be canceled. That would be on top of the totals SEIA suggests could be at risk from new Trump permitting policies.
I suspect the rate of cancellations in the face of project opposition will increase. And if this policy landscape is helping activists kill projects in blue states in desperate need of power, like Massachusetts, then the future may be more difficult to swallow than we can imagine at the moment.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewables.
1. Wells County, Indiana – One of the nation’s most at-risk solar projects may now be prompting a full on moratorium.
2. Clark County, Ohio – Another Ohio county has significantly restricted renewable energy development, this time with big political implications.
3. Daviess County, Kentucky – NextEra’s having some problems getting past this county’s setbacks.
4. Columbia County, Georgia – Sometimes the wealthy will just say no to a solar farm.
5. Ottawa County, Michigan – A proposed battery storage facility in the Mitten State looks like it is about to test the state’s new permitting primacy law.
A conversation with Jeff Seidman, a professor at Vassar College.
This week’s conversation is with Jeff Seidman, a professor at Vassar College and an avid Heatmap News reader. Last week Seidman claimed a personal victory: he successfully led an effort to overturn a moratorium on battery storage development in the town of Poughkeepsie in Hudson Valley, New York. After reading a thread about the effort he posted to BlueSky, I reached out to chat about what my readers might learn from his endeavors – and how they could replicate them, should they want to.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
So how did you decide to fight against a battery storage ban? What was your process here?
First of all, I’m not a professional in this area, but I’ve been learning about climate stuff for a long time. I date my education back to when Vox started and I read my first David Roberts column there. But I just happened to hear from someone I know that in the town of Poughkeepsie where I live that a developer made a proposal and local residents who live nearby were up in arms about it. And I heard the town was about to impose a moratorium – this was back in March 2024.
I actually personally know some of the town board members, and we have a Democratic majority who absolutely care about climate change but didn’t particularly know that battery power was important to the energy transition and decarbonizing the grid. So I organized five or six people to go to the town board meeting, wrote a letter, and in that initial board meeting we characterized the reason we were there as being about climate.
There were a lot more people on the other side. They were very angry. So we said do a short moratorium because every day we’re delaying this, peaker plants nearby are spewing SOx and NOx into the air. The status quo has a cost.
But then the other side, they were clearly triggered by the climate stuff and said renewables make the grid more expensive. We’d clearly pressed a button in the culture wars. And then we realized the mistake, because we lost that one.
When you were approaching getting this overturned, what considerations did you make?
After that initial meeting and seeing how those mentions of climate or even renewables had triggered a portion of the board, and the audience, I really course-corrected. I realized we had to make this all about local benefits. So that’s what I tried to do going forward.
Even for people who were climate concerned, it was really clear that what they perceived as a present risk in their neighborhood was way more salient than an abstract thing like contributing to the fight against climate change globally. So even for people potentially on your side, you have to make it about local benefits.
The other thing we did was we called a two-hour forum for the county supervisors and mayor’s association because we realized talking to them in a polarized environment was not a way to have a conversation. I spoke and so did Paul Rogers, a former New York Fire Department lieutenant who is now in fire safety consulting – he sounds like a firefighter and can speak with a credibility that I could never match in front of, for example, local fire chiefs. Winning them over was important. And we took more than an hour of questions.
Stage one was to convince them of why batteries were important. Stage two was to show that a large number of constituents were angry about the moratorium, but that Republicans were putting on a unified front against this – an issue to win votes. So there was a period where Democrats on the Poughkeepsie board were convinced but it was politically difficult for them.
But stage three became helping them do the right thing, even with the risk of there being a political cost.
What would you say to those in other parts of the country who want to do what you did?
If possible, get a zoning law in place before there is any developer with a specific proposal because all of the opposition to this project came from people directly next to the proposed project. Get in there before there’s a specific project site.
Even if you’re in a very blue city, don’t make it primarily about climate. Abstract climate loses to non-abstract perceived risk every time. Make it about local benefits.
To the extent you can, read and educate yourself about what good batteries provide to the grid. There’s a lot of local economic benefits there.
I am trying to put together some of the resources I used into a packet, a tool kit, so that people elsewhere can learn from it and draw from those resources.
Also, the more you know, the better. All those years of reading David Roberts and Heatmap gave me enough knowledge to actually answer questions here. It works especially when you have board members who may be sympathetic but need to be reassured.