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“This is what you’d expect from China,” a veteran mining industry lobbyist told Heatmap.
President Donald Trump is chasing a new American mining boom. In the process, he’s making quick bets on projects that haven’t completed routine financial analyses or would be situated in environmentally sensitive areas with significant legal risk — and occasionally both at the same time.
In March, Trump issued an executive order that changed the landscape of American mining for the foreseeable future, commanding agencies to approve permits for individual mines as quickly as possible and requesting government funds go toward domestic mining. The Interior Department has also taken strides to hasten the environmental review process for mining on federal lands, asserting that it will complete comprehensive analyses in less than 30 days, a truncated time-table the likes of which mining industry lobbyists have long sought.
So far in his second term as president, Trump’s administration has claimed to have approved, expedited, or publicly endorsed at least 28 different mines and mineral exploration projects, according to a review of Bureau of Land Management notices and federal permitting databases, with more likely in the offing. Many of these projects may very well produce minerals required for key energy or defense purposes, and some of them are guaranteed to do so. But at least a few have not yet been proven to be economically viable in the way investors typically expect from mining companies.
Conservationists have decried these actions as an unnecessary risk to sensitive landscapes, which could be irrevocably changed without a guarantee of improved energy security. And even some in the mining industry are quietly noting these examples, saying they could represent a paradigm shift in how America treats the mining industry.
“This is what you’d expect from China,” a former veteran mining industry lobbyist told me, requesting anonymity to protect their current business from retribution. “The U.S. prides itself on mines that are good neighbors. The U.S. doesn’t have a perfect record, but those are things that it values.”
“I’m not saying the companies are going to do something wrong here,” the source continued, “but we don’t know that.”
The most headline-grabbing example of this rush to permit came last week, when the Interior Department said it would fast-track the permitting of a large uranium mine in Utah known as Velvet-Wood. The department said it would complete Velvet-Wood’s environmental review within two weeks — a process that has historically taken years.
On first blush, abbreviating the approval process for a mine that will produce energy fuel for nuclear power plants resembles the sort of permitting reform that climate hawks and centrist policy wonks have craved for years. Velvet-Wood’s developer, Anfield Energy, claims the site will also produce vanadium, a strategic mineral used in defense-grade steel.
A deeper examination, however, exposes signs of haste that go beyond all deliberate speed.
Ordinarily, mines take years to develop for reasons wholly unrelated to the federal permitting process. Usually a project requires years of exploration and study to verify that the area where digging will happen holds proven “resources” and then “reserves.” Think of resources vs. reserves as the difference between lukewarm and high levels of confidence that minerals are not only present but also economic to mine and process. It is unusual for any mine to be built without proven resources, let alone reserves, and feasibility studies are the way companies usually communicate that level of proof to investors. These studies have also been a primary mode of conveying a project’s value and design to the government.
Until our present policy moment, the permitting process was so lengthy that it made little sense to pursue it without first giving investors the certainty brought by a feasibility study. Anfield and other companies appear to have found a work-around to demonstrate that certainty, however, at least to the government: Asking to dig in places where mines used to be decades ago.
Anfield has not yet completed a feasibility study for Velvet-Wood, which would include the site of a former underground uranium mine. The most recent study of the project was a 2023 “preliminary economic assessment” that documented some of the old mining infrastructure and otherwise largely referenced historical data about mineralization. The company stated in the report that the study was “too speculative geologically to have economic considerations applied to them,” and that “there is no certainty that the preliminary economic assessment will be realized.”
In Anfield’s own press release announcing the Trump administration’s decision to quickly permit the project, the company states that it “has not done sufficient work to classify these historic estimates” for uranium and vanadium at the site. Anfield did not respond to requests for comment on why the company requested government permits before finishing a feasibility study.
Under the Velvet-Wood deposit’s previous owner, Russian mining company Uranium One, a draft feasibility study did find economically viable uranium. But that study is more than a decade old and was not made public, according to press materials at the time.
In order to become operational, Anfield expected to have to update the decades-old plan of operations for Velvet-Wood, according to the 2023 economic assessment, which also said BLM would need to take into account the impacts of restarting a formerly operational mine, as well as mining in areas that have not previously been mined before. That’s quite a lot of work to complete in only two weeks. While it’s possible that staff at Interior got a head start on their review when Anfield submitted its mine plan last year, they have not confirmed anything to that effect since the department’s announcement about permitting the project.
Aaron Mintzes, senior policy counsel for the mining reform advocacy group Earthworks, told me the practice of approving a mine before feasibility studies have been done carries the risk of painting a misleading portrait to investors about a project’s viability.
“Every mining company does this. All of them. If you’re a publicly traded mining company and you want investors to give your mine money, you must provide a feasibility study. That’s how you know they’re telling the truth,” Mintzes said of this approach. “Investors should be upset about this.”
In an email, BLM press secretary Brian Hires told me that “feasibility studies are not legally required by BLM for mining projects.”
“The BLM continues to ensure appropriate environmental oversight including coordination with other agencies, balancing mineral development rights and responsible public lands management,” Hires stated.
On Velvet-Wood, Hires said the agency acted under “recently established emergency procedures” created under the Trump administration to quickly approve new resource projects. “The expedited review is expected to significantly contribute to meeting urgent energy demands and addressing key threats to national energy security.”
Velvet-Wood is not the first mine Trump’s Interior Department has expedited so early in the approval process.
On April 8, the Trump administration gave Dateline Resources, an Australian company, a green light to build a large mine inside of the Mojave National Preserve. Like Velvet-Wood, the project, known as Colosseum, got this approval without a feasibility study. Colosseum would be a gold mine, according to Dateline’s website, which also states that the project is “prospective” for producing rare earth elements as a byproduct. The company cites previous radiomagnetic reviews by the U.S. Geological Survey and the project’s proximity of roughly 8 kilometers — or about 6 miles — from an operating rare earths mine, Mountain Pass. The company also cites decades-old information about the site from when it used to be an operating gold mine in the 1970s and 1980s.
Are there rare earths at the Colosseum dig site? There may be — but how much and how commercially useful they’d be are normally determined through a feasibility study process.
BLM approved Colosseum without any new environmental review, or at least nothing that was public at the time it made the decision known. Instead, it said in a five-sentence press statement that Dateline could rely entirely on a construction and operations plan from the previous mine, which shut down in the 1990s.
BLM’s press release also referred to Colosseum as a rare earths mine, with no mention of gold.
“For too long, the United States has depended on foreign adversaries like China for rare earth elements for technologies that are vital to our national security,” the release stated. “By recognizing the mine’s continued right to extract and explore rare earth elements, Interior continues to support industries that boost the nation’s economy and protect national security.”
Hires, the BLM press secretary, told me that the agency made this claim to highlight “the project’s potential to produce rare earth elements, which are required for economic and national security.”
On April 21, investors were informed that a “bankable feasibility study” was now “underway.” But that didn’t stop Trump from jumping far ahead of the usual process a few days later, publicly calling the project “America’s second rare earths mine” on Truth Social.
There’s a big reason this area stopped being mined, by the way: According to the National Park Conservation Association, the area is heavily restricted from mineral development under a law Congress passed in the early 1990s, the California Desert Protection Act.
There is a separate law that provides companies the ability to mine in national preserves and parks under very specific and limited conditions, and with the approval of the National Park Service, the association told me. Kelly Shapiro, an attorney representing Dateline, told E&E News in a story published last week that Interior told the company its mine plan of operations was “valid.” Shapiro also told the news outlet that “rare earths have been found at the Colosseum mine site.”
Dateline has now begun work at the mine site and conservation activists are sounding public alarms. The company did not respond to requests for comment.
Asked why BLM gave Colosseum the right to construct a new operating mine, Hires said the project site, which has not been active for decades, “is not a new mine.” He said the facility was granted the “right” to “continue mining operations” under the plan from when the site was active in the 1980s, which the agency said “includes exploration for rare earth minerals.”
Before I came to Heatmap, I spent years writing about the mining industry. One of the stories I’m proudest of was an investigation into the amount of mining needed to build the vastly different energy and transportation systems we’ll need to fully decarbonize. So I can safely say this: We truly will need more minerals like lithium, copper, nickel, graphite and cobalt to decarbonize, and we might need to open more mines to get them, although recycling and technological innovation could easily reduce the tonnage required over time.
The Trump team has a different argument for mining this much. It says our country needs to wean off foreign sources of metals because relying on imports is a weakness in the eyes of hawkish security experts.
For the past decade, U.S. policymakers of both parties have rallied behind the basic notion that the country should stop relying as much on minerals from nations considered to be adversaries by the national defense apparatus, including China and Russia, as well as companies perceived to be substantially controlled by those nations. The idea first gained traction under Trump 1.0, leading to the creation of a list of so-called “critical minerals” that the military and domestically essential businesses rely on but are generally mined or refined in other countries.
Under Joe Biden, the “critical mineral” concept was magnified by multiple signature laws, including the 2021 infrastructure law and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which together established large grant and tax credit programs intended to stimulate a new American mining economy.
Trump has sped up the federal permitting process for some copper, nickel, and lithium mining and exploration projects. These commodities markets are ones in which China genuinely has an outsized influence, per national security experts, through market share and existing business relationships held by Chinese state-owned mining and refining companies.
Some of these U.S. mining projects likely would’ve been permitted no matter the outcome of last year’s election, either because their environmental impacts would be relatively limited or because they’d produce metals crucial for the energy transition that a Democrat-led government would have supported as a trade-off. Take South32’s Hermosa copper mine in Arizona, which the Biden administration fast-tracked and Trump 2.0 has signaled it will approve. A handful of these mines would supply a meaningful amount of defense minerals for which we currently rely on China, such as the Stibnite gold mine in Idaho, which would yield antimony for military-grade ammo as a byproduct.
Then there are special cases like the Resolution copper mine in Arizona, where the government’s hands are essentially tied under federal legal requirements to approve the conveyance of land to a mining company.
Other “transition metal” mining projects fast-tracked or endorsed by Trump 2.0, however, likely would not have been given priority — or even a second look — under a more neutral federal regulator. That’s because they are located in areas that officials under previous administrations fretted would produce outsized pollution risk and potentially run afoul of environmental laws.
Take for example the NewRange copper mine in Minnesota, which the company says would be the state’s only active copper mine if approved and constructed. NewRange is better known in the mining industry as PolyMet, which was its moniker for most of the nearly two decades it has been in the works. NewRange/PolyMet has struggled to get requisite permits, to the point of being referred to by its opponents as a “zombie” project, because it’s situated in an especially porous area of northern Minnesota covered in protected wetlands.
In 2022, the Environmental Protection Agency under Biden said the Army Corps of Engineers should rescind a water permit issued under Trump 1.0 because the project would violate the pollution standards of the Fond du Lac Tribe, which relies on the wet ecosystem to cultivate wild rice for subsistence and cultural practices.
At the beginning of May, the Trump administration added NewRange/PolyMet to a federal “transparency” dashboard that it says will soon have a timetable for approving the project under the same authority it fast-tracked Resolution. Representative Pete Stauber of Minnesota, whose congressional district includes the mining project, reacted in a statement that said the designation shows Trump “understands the vital importance of this project,” and that he looks forward to “seeing NewRange meet and exceed every permitting standard in a timely manner.”
This is an example of mine that, if approved hastily, would probably create new litigation just as fast.
At the risk of repeating myself, it’s not the only example of such a case, and there are more examples where the Trump administration has opened the door to new, legally risky directions on a mine.
Most notable in that pile is the Pebble mine in Alaska, which Trump halted during his first term but may be given what appears to be a last shot at survival under his new government. Decades of battle between a would-be gold mine and the denizens of Bristol Bay have dominated conversations around American mining. Opponents across the political spectrum have tried to stop the project because they fear construction would pollute the bay and its world-class fishing grounds.
The first Trump administration actually opposed Pebble after a private lobbying campaign by Donald Trump, Jr. and other conservative conservation advocates. Under Biden, the EPA issued a rare veto of the project area under a provision of the Clean Water Act. This was a step beyond simply rejecting the permit as it would, in the view of advocates, be a permanent restriction against development.
In February, the Trump 2.0 Justice Department requested a stay on the federal lawsuit filed against the veto by Pebble’s developer, Northern Dynasty Minerals, alongside top political leaders in the state of Alaska, who have argued that the agency overstepped its authority. On Wednesday, Justice Department attorneys filed a status report asking that the stay be extended for at least another month because while officials had been briefed on the subject, they “require additional time to determine how they wish to proceed.”
This indicates the government is still not ready to state its position, and leaves open a door for the Justice Department to flip sides. Northern Dynasty Minerals hopes a flip will happen. “This is an important position in any negotiation between a project proponent and a regulator, and for a process that could, hopefully, remove the veto and re-start the permitting process,” the company’s CEO Ron Thiessen said in a public statement made after the stay extension request.
It may be that even Pebble Mine is a bridge too far for Trump 2.0. But after all these other projects have gotten the skids greased, we must all wait with bated breath for the next shoe — er, pebble — to drop.
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A review of Heatmap Pro data reveals a troubling new trend in data center development.
Data centers are being built in places that restrict renewable energy. There are significant implications for our future energy grid – but it’s unclear if this behavior will lead to tech companies eschewing renewables or finding novel ways to still meet their clean energy commitments.
In the previous edition of The Fight, I began chronicling the data center boom and a nascent backlash to it by talking about Google and what would’ve been its second data center in southern Indianapolis, if the city had not rejected it last Monday. As I learned about Google’s practices in Indiana, I focused on the company’s first project – a $2 billion facility in Fort Wayne, because it is being built in a county where officials have instituted a cumbersome restrictive ordinance on large-scale solar energy. The county commission recently voted to make the ordinance more restrictive, unanimously agreeing to institute a 1,000-foot setback to take effect in early November, pending final approval from the county’s planning commission.
As it turns out, the Fort Wayne data center is not an exception: Approximately 44% of all data centers proposed in Indiana are in counties that have restricted or banned new renewable energy projects. This is according to a review of Heatmap Pro data in which we cross-referenced the county bans and ordinances we track against a list of proposed data centers prepared by an Indiana energy advocacy group, Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana.
This doesn’t necessarily mean the power going to these data centers is consistently fossil. Data centers can take years to construct and often rely on power fed to them from a distributed regional energy grid. But this does mean it would be exceptionally costly for any of these projects to build renewable generation on site, as a rising number of projects choose to do – not to mention that on a macro level, data centers may increasingly run up against the same cultural dynamics that are leading to solar and wind project denials. (See: this local news article about the Fort Wayne data center campus).
Chrissy Moy, a Google spokesperson, told me the Fort Wayne facility will get its power off of the PJM grid, and sent me links to solar projects and hydroelectric facilities in other states on the PJM it has power purchase agreements with. I’d note the company claims it “already matches” all of its global annual electricity demand with “renewable energy purchases.” What this means is that if Google can’t generate renewable energy for a data center directly, it will try to procure renewable energy at the same time from the same grid, even if it can’t literally use that clean power at that data center. And if that's not possible, it will search farther afield or at different times. (Google is one of the more aggressive big tech companies in this regard, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo details.) Google has also boasted that it will provide an undisclosed amount of excess clean electricity through rights transfers to Indiana Michigan Power when the tech company’s load is low and demand on the broader grid is peaking, as part of Google’s broader commitment to grid flexibility.
I reached out to Tom Wilson, an energy systems technical executive at the Electric Power Research Institute, an industry-focused organization that studies modern power and works with tech companies on flexible data center energy use, including Google. Wilson told me that in Indiana, many of the siting decisions for data centers were made before counties enacted moratoria against renewable energy and that tech companies may not always be knowingly siting projects in places where significant solar or wind generation would be impractical or even impossible. (We would just note that Fort Wayne, Indiana, has an opposition risk score of 84 in Heatmap Pro, meaning it would have been a very risky place to build a renewable energy project even without that restrictive ordinance.) It also indicates some areas may be laying down renewables restrictions after seeing data center development, which is in line with a potential land use techlash.
Wilson told me that two thirds of data centers rely on power from the existing energy grid whereas surveys indicate about a third choose to have at least some electricity generation on site. In at least the latter case, land use constraints and permitting problems really can be a hurdle for building renewable energy close to where data is processed. This is a problem exacerbated when centers are developed near population centers, which Wilson said is frequently the case because companies want to reduce “latency” for customers. In other words, they want to “reduce the time it takes to get answers to people” via artificial intelligence or other data products.
“The primary challenges are the size of the data center and the amount of space it takes to build renewables,” he said. “They are moving from 20 megawatt or 40 megawatt data centers to 100, 200, 300 megawatt data centers. It’s really hard to locate that much renewable [energy] right near a population center. So that requires transmission, and unfortunately right now in the U.S. and in many other countries, transmission takes a significant amount of time to build.”
The majority of data centers are served by regional power grids, Wilson told me. Companies like Google, Meta, and others continue to invest in renewable energy procurement while building facilities in areas that have restricted new solar or wind power infrastructure. In some cases, companies may feel they’re forced to seek these places out because the land is just plain cheap and has existing fiber optic cable networks.
At the same time, there are large data centers getting energy generated on site, and how they each approach their energy sources varies. It’s also not always consistent.
For instance, Meta’s new Prometheus supercluster complex in New Albany, Ohio — potentially the world’s first 1 gigawatt data center — will reportedly have a significant amount of new gas power generation constructed at the facility, even though the company also struck a deal with Invenergy over the summer to procure at least 400 megawatts of solar from two projects in Ohio that already have their permits. One is in Clinton County and was fully permitted but resulted in a years-long fight before the Ohio Power Siting Board and included conservative media backlash. The other is in Franklin County and got its permits in 2021, before a recent wave of opposition against solar projects. Prometheus itself will be sited on the Licking County side of New Albany, where solar has been extremely difficult to build, even though most of this Columbus suburb is in solar-supporting Franklin.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s xAI data center notoriously relies on a polluting gas plant in Memphis, Tennessee. The surrounding Shelby County had a solar moratorium until mere months ago that residents want to bring back. An affiliate company of xAI used for the project’s real estate is subleasing land near the data center for a solar farm, but it is unclear right now if it’ll power the data center.
In the end, it really does seem like data centers are being sited in places with renewable energy restrictions. What the data center developers plan to do about it — if anything — is still an open question.
Current conditions: After walloping Bermuda with winds of up to 100 miles per hour, Hurricane Imelda is veering northeast away from the United States • While downgraded from a hurricane, Humberto is set to soak Ireland and the United Kingdom as Storm Amy in the coming days and bring winds of up to 90 miles per hour • Typhoon Matmo is strengthening as it hits the Philippines and barrels toward China.
The Department of Energy is canceling two regional hydrogen hubs in California and the Pacific Northwest as part of a broader rescinding of 321 grants worth $7.5 billion for projects nationwide. Going after the hydrogen hubs, which the oil and gas industry lobbied to keep open after President Donald Trump came back to office, “leaves the agency’s intentions for the remaining five hubs scattered throughout the Midwest, Midatlantic, Appalachia, the Great Plains, and Texas unclear,” Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote yesterday.
The list of canceled projects that Emily got her hands on “does seem to confirm that blue state grants were the hardest hit,” she wrote. But, she found, “many would actually have benefitted Republican strongholds,” including a $20 million grant for a manufacturing plant in Texas that was slated to create 200 jobs.
Tesla’s global deliveries rose 7% in the third quarter, hitting a new record as Americans rushed to buy electric vehicles before the federal tax credit expired on September 30. The automaker delivered 497,099 vehicles in the three months leading up to that date, up from 462,890 in the same period last year, according to the Financial Times. That was well above analyst forecasts of 444,000.
That may do little to turn around the headwinds blasting the EV giant. While the company benefited from buyers scrambling to tap the federal EV tax credit, Tesla sank to its lowest-ever share of the electric vehicle market in August as drivers flocked to offerings from other automakers. It’s not just a problem in the U.S. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote last month, “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.”
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Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch. Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the British Conservatives, has vowed to repeal the United Kingdom’s landmark climate law if her party, colloquially known as the Tories, wins the next election. Eliminating the Climate Change Act, passed almost unanimously under a Tory government in 2008, would dismantle controls on greenhouse gas emissions and remove what The Guardian described as “the cornerstone of green and energy policy for successive governments” for the past 17 years.
The move rankled past Tory leaders. Former Prime Minister Theresa May condemned the campaign pledge as a “catastrophic mistake.” Calling it a “retrograde” step, she said that “while consensus is being tested, the science remains the same.” Alok Sharma, the former Tory minister who led the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in 2021, told The Guardian in a separate article that a repeal risked “many tens of billions of pounds of private sector investment and accompanying jobs.”
Sea ice in Antarctica reached its third-smallest winter peak extent since satellite records began 47 years ago, according to a new analysis by Carbon Brief. Provisional data from the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center showed Antarctic sea ice reaching a winter maximum of just under 6.9 million square miles as of September 17. That’s nearly 350,000 square miles below the average between 1981 and 2010, the historical baseline against which recent changes in sea ice extent are compared. The “lengthening trend of lower Antarctic sea ice poses real concerns regarding stability and melting of the ice sheet,” one expert told the publication.
The finding comes as a “groundbreaking” study the European Geosciences Union published Thursday in the journal Earth System Dynamics found that Antarctic sea ice has emerged as a key predictor of accelerated ocean warming. Using Earth system models and satellite images from 1980 to 2020, the researchers found higher sea ice extent enhances cloud cover, which has a cooling effect overall by reducing incoming solar radiation. As a result, ongoing sea ice loss is linked to larger reductions in clouds, stronger surface warming, and even more ocean heat uptake, accelerating the cycle.
Duke Energy plans to meet surging demand for electricity by increasing its natural gas and battery capacity, keeping coal plants open for up to four years longer than previously estimated, and evaluating new sites for nuclear reactors. The 100-page biennial proposal published this week dials back plans for more renewables such as wind and solar. It also pushed back the earliest start date for a new reactor to 2037, declined to commit to either small modular reactors or large traditional units, and said the utility still needs extra protections against cost overruns before embarking on construction.
In the meantime, the added years of coal burning “will result in millions of tons in additional greenhouse gases over the next decade when combined with other proposed changes to the utility’s fuel mix,” Inside Climate News reported. In a statement to Axios, North Carolina Governor Josh Stein, a Democrat, called on the state’s utilities commission to “require significant changes” and condemned Duke for “retreating from the state’s clean energy future.”
New research by a team of scientists from the U.K. and New Zealand has found that new analytical methods could bolster conservation breeding programs by offering a better understanding of why eggs don’t hatch. The researchers used fluorescent dyes to discover that nearly 66% of 174 unhatched eggs examined in the study had been fertilized, whereas previous methods suggested that only 5.2% had been fertilized. “There are many different factors that contribute to breeding success,” Gary Ward, a co-author from the London-based ZSL Institute of Zoology, said in a statement, “and the more understanding we can have into why an egg might not hatch, the more we can refine our care for these birds and the better chance of recovery we can give them.”
And more on the week’s most important fights around renewable energy projects.
1. Ocean County, New Jersey – A Trump administration official said in a legal filing that the government is preparing to conduct a rulemaking that could restrict future offshore wind development and codify a view that could tie the hands of future presidential administrations.
2. Prince William County, Virginia – The large liberal city of Manassas rejected a battery project over fire fears, indicating that post-Moss Landing, anxieties continue to pervade in communities across the country.
3. Oklahoma County, Oklahoma – The Sooner state legislature on Monday held a joint committee meeting on solar and wind setbacks featuring prominent anti-wind advocates.
4. Tippacanoe County, Indiana – The developers of a large-scale solar project are suing the county over being rejected.
5. Dane County, Wisconsin – The Wisconsin Public Service Commission approved Invenergy’s Badger Hollow wind project – the state’s first new fully-permitted wind energy project in more than a decade.