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United States Mining

Potential rare-earths industry in the US must avoid China’s mistakes – by Carly O’Connell (Asia Times – July 8, 2017)

http://www.atimes.com/

As of 2016, the United States’ demand for rare-earth elements depended on imports, mostly from China. Rare earths are a class of critical minerals, 17 in number, that are used in many technologies such as smartphones, medical treatments, wind turbines and high-performance defense-industry equipment.

Recently, politicians from America’s coal country with the help of researchers, have moved to break that dependency. They hope to re-purpose old mines to produce rare earths, thus stimulating new economic growth in places like West Virginia. But we must learn from China’s example and avoid devastating environmental consequences, which are costing China billions of dollars to correct.

The US uses about 15,000 tonnes of rare-earth elements every year, more than 700 tonnes of which go to defense. West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin recently told the Washington Examiner that America’s reliance on foreign sources for such a vital material is “a national security concern that must be addressed.”

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Activists warn against more uranium mining in the Black Hills – by Kelsey Sinclair (Rapid City Journal – July 8, 2017)

http://rapidcityjournal.com/

Let’s clean up one mess before making another. That was the message from members of two local groups opposed to uranium mining on Saturday, when volunteers gathered at the Outdoor Campus West in Rapid City to set up public information and outreach booths to speak to visitors about the importance of clean water and the impact of uranium mining.

In the wake of Azarga Uranium proposing a uranium mine in South Dakota, the Black Hills Clean Water Alliance and Dakota Rural Action have opposed the idea, saying that uranium mining would bring only short-term economical benefits while harming tourism and land, water and cultural resources.

“The vast majority of the mines have not been cleaned up. They put radioactive materials into the rivers and into the soil sediment,” Lilias Jarding said. “The main thing we want is to clean up the old uranium mines and not start any new uranium mines in the Black Hills.”

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Coal no longer fuels America. But the legacy — and the myth — remain – by Karen Heller (Washington Post – July 9, 2017)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/

Boone County claims to be the birthplace of America’s coal industry, the rich and abundant black rock discovered in these verdant hills almost three centuries ago. Coal gives name to nearly everything in these parts — the Big and Little Coal rivers, the weekly Coal Valley News, the wondrous Bituminous Coal Heritage Foundation Museum and the West Virginia Coal Festival, celebrating, as we arrive in town, its 24th year.

The festival is more state fair than true celebration of coal. There’s a carnival, a talent competition, seven beauty queens (from Little Miss Coal Festival to Forever West Virginia Coal Queen).

Late in the afternoon of the second day, high on a hill graced with the statue of a miner, there’s a small memorial service for the West Virginia men who died on the job over the previous year. The most recent was 32-year-old Rodney Osbourne, pinned by mining equipment on June 14.

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A Digital Policy With Teeth – by Andy Mukherjee (Bloomberg News – July 7, 2017)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

Nationalism minus chauvinism. That’s how Indonesia wants to deal with FANG. Facebook, Apple, Netflix and Google — the four horsemen of the digital economy — will get to play freely in the archipelago’s 260-million-strong consumer market, according to Communications and Information Technology Minister Rudiantara.

The minister, who uses only one name, has no airy-fairy notions about national digital champions who’ll help keep Indonesian money at home.The nation’s pragmatic approach to its small but growing digital economy is in stark contrast to “a particularly durable brand of resource nationalism,” which, according to Eve Warburton, a research scholar at the Australian National University, “has become a permanent feature of Indonesia’s political economy.”

A tax on unprocessed copper, meant to prod U.S. companies Freeport-McMoRan Inc. and Newmont Mining Corp. to add more value to their exports from Indonesia, may have caused billions of dollars in revenue losses for the government since 2014. While the levy has now been scaled back, Freeport is still stuck in a messy quibble with Jakarta over its license to operate at Grasberg, the world’s second-largest copper mine.

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How an 1863 discovery put Arizona on the copper map – by Mark Nothaft (Arizona Republic – July 5, 2017)

http://www.azcentral.com/

It’s hard to imagine the scale of the Morenci Mine in the southeast portion of the state, but you can get really close to it. Literally.

Take a drive along U.S. Highway 191, and one of the world’s largest open-pit copper mines and leaching operations resembles the Grand Canyon in its multi-hued red rock expanses, layered and intricate and spell-binding. The road, which roughly follows the same path as the Coronado Expedition of 1540 from Mexico to the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola, winds through the middle of it.

You think you see Fray Marcos de Niza on horseback in the distance, and then, another detonation from the miners below shakes you back to reality. Boom! Monster bulldozers and dump trucks, four or five times the size of the ones we see in the city, scoop up loosened earth and haul it off for processing.

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California’s Far North Deplores ‘Tyranny’ of the Urban Majority – by Thomas Fuller (New York Times – July 2, 2017)

https://www.nytimes.com/

REDDING, Calif. — The deer heads mounted on the walls of Eric Johnson’s church office are testament to his passion for hunting, a lifestyle enjoyed by many in the northernmost reaches of California but one that Mr. Johnson says surprises people he meets on his travels around America and abroad.

“When people see you’re from California, they instantly think of ‘Baywatch,’” said Mr. Johnson, the associate pastor of Bethel Redding, a megachurch in this small city a three-and-a-half-hour drive north of San Francisco. “It’s very different here from the rest of California.”

Mr. Johnson lives in what might be described as California’s Great Red North, a bloc of 13 counties that voted for President Trump in November and that make up more than a fifth of the state’s land mass but only 3 percent of its population.

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Trump Is Wrong About Aluminum Imports – by Shelley Goldberg (Bloomberg News – June 27, 2017)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

Plan for restrictions is based on a nonexistent national security threat.

President Donald Trump is using national security to kowtow to an industry in a conundrum. In April, the administration opened an investigation into the impact of imported steel and aluminum that is expected to result in tariffs or quotas on imports of these important metals.

The probe fits with Trump’s core trade pledge to shake up the old order while trumpeting “America First.” But proving metal imports pose a national security threat will be a considerable challenge.

Although much of the focus has been on steel, the ramifications for aluminum are also significant and could have broad repercussions for many other industries and for the U.S. economy as a whole. The amount of aluminum consumed by the U.S. military is insignificant in the scope of the total. Most of the metal imported by the U.S. comes from nations such as China and Canada, and typically serves civilian uses for automobiles, packing, roofing, road signs and consumer durables, none of which implicate national security.

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Rosemont Mine one step closer to reality with Forest Service approval – by Logan Burtch-Buus (Inside Tucson Business – June 28, 2017)

http://www.insidetucsonbusiness.com/

The proposed Rosemont Mine in the Santa Rita Mountains has moved closer to approval with the U.S. Forest Service signing off on a key step in the process. The Forest Service released its Record of Decision, lending approval to the project after more than a decade of research and public feedback.

But Hudbay Minerals, the Canadian company that hopes to open the mine, still needs approval of a permit related to its impact on the region’s watershed from the Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA has been critical of the proposed plan.

The site, 30 miles southeast of Tucson, spans more than 5,400 acres of private, state and federal land in the Santa Rita Mountains southeast of Tucson.

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Why coal mining is resurgent in the U.S., China and India (CBS News – June 26, 2017)

http://www.cbsnews.com/

Associated Press: BEIJING — The U.S., China and India are going back to the coal mines. These three countries, the world’s biggest coal users, have boosted coal mining in 2017, in an abrupt departure from last year’s record global decline for the heavily polluting fuel and a setback to efforts to rein in climate change emissions.

Mining data reviewed by The Associated Press show that production through May is up by at least 121 million tons, or 6 percent, for the three countries compared to the same period last year. The change is most dramatic in the U.S., where coal mining rose 19 percent in the first five months of the year, according to U.S. Department of Energy data.

Coal’s fortunes had appeared to hit a new low less than two weeks ago, when British energy company BP reported that tonnage mined worldwide fell 6.5 percent in 2016, the largest drop on record. China and the U.S. accounted for almost all the decline, while India showed a slight increase.

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The Future of Coal Country – by Eliza Griswold (The New Yorker Magazine – July 3, 2017)

http://www.newyorker.com/

A local environmental activist fights to prepare her community for life beyond mining.

One Sunday morning, just after deer-hunting season ended, Veronica Coptis, a community organizer in rural Greene County, Pennsylvania, climbed onto her father’s four-wheeler. She set off for a ridge a quarter of a mile from her parents’ small farmhouse, where she was brought up with her brother and two sisters. “Those are coyote tracks,” she called over the engine noise, pointing down at a set of fresh paw prints.

At the crest of the ridge, she stopped along a dirt track and scanned in both directions for security guards. Around her stretched a three-mile wasteland of valleys. Once an untouched landscape of white oak and shagbark hickory, it now belonged to Consol Energy and served as the refuse area for the Bailey Mine Complex, the largest underground coal mine in the United States.

Five hundred feet below the ridgeline lay a slate-colored expanse of sludge: sixty acres of coal waste, which filled the valley floor to a depth of more than a hundred feet. Coptis stared; it was twice as deep as it had been when she’d visited a year before. “How can it be that after two hundred years no one has come up with a better way of getting rid of coal waste?” she asked.

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Grand Canyon is our home. Uranium mining has no place here – by Carletta Tilousi (The Guardian – June 26, 2017)

https://www.theguardian.com/

Carletta Tilousi is a member of the Havasupai tribal council.

The Havasupai – “people of the blue-green waters” – live in Supai Village, located at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Today our lives and water are being threatened by international uranium mining companies because the US government and its 1872 mining law permit uranium mining on federal lands that surround the Grand Canyon.

In 1986, the Kaibab national forest authorized a Canadian-based uranium company to open Canyon mine, a uranium mine near the south rim of Grand Canyon national park. The Havasupai tribe challenged the decision but lost in the ninth circuit court of appeals. Miners were just starting to drill Canyon mine’s shaft in 1991 when falling uranium prices caused the company to shut it down for more than two decades.

Havasupai ancestors share stories of the sacredness of the Grand Canyon and all the mountains that surround it. They have instructed us to protect the waters and the mountains from any environmental contamination. That’s why we stand firm against any uranium mining in the Grand Canyon region.

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Aluminum industry scrambles to align Trump’s trade guns – by Andy Home (Reuters U.S. – Jun 22, 2017)

https://www.reuters.com/

LONDON -Aluminum industry executives will line up on Thursday to have their say on whether foreign imports into the United States pose a threat to the country’s security. The Section 232 investigation was announced by the Department of Congress on April 27 and follows hot on the heels of a similar probe into U.S. steel imports, the results of which are pending.

Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, to give its full title, was last used in 2001 against imports of iron ore with a “no action necessary” outcome.

This time around, everyone’s expecting a different result. The Trump administration has pledged to stem the rising metallic import tide and reverse the ebbing of the country’s primary aluminum production capacity.

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Rio Tinto, Canada aluminum’s good guys in Commerce Department probe – by Suzanne O’Halloran (June 21, 2017)

http://www.foxbusiness.com/

The world’s biggest aluminum players want to set the record straight: they say they shouldn’t be lumped in with China, Russia and other alleged “bad actors” whose imports may be a threat to the security of the United States.

Among those Rio Tinto (RIO), the largest producer of aluminum in North America, via its operations in Quebec and British Columbia. “Rio Tinto’s operations, such as those in Utah, California and Arizona are strong contributors to the United States economy and employment” Rio Tinto CEO Alf Barrios said in prepared remarks viewed by FOX Business, to be delivered Thursday during a scheduled hearing.

Barrios also defended the miner’s long history as a U.S. defense ally dating back to World War II. “Our smelters have a long history of supplying U.S. manufacturers – particularly U.S. defense-related manufacturing” he notes.

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HBO, John Oliver Sued by Energy Company Over Segment on Coal Mining – by Eriq Gardner (Hollywood Reporter – June 22, 2017)

 

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/

The defamation lawsuit discusses how Oliver created a “villainous” portrait of Murray, 77, who “needs a lung transplant” and who “does not expect to live to see the end of this case.”

HBO has been hauled into court over a June 18 broadcast of Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, which covered President Donald Trump’s generous treatment of the coal industry. The plaintiff in the defamation case is conservative coal baron Robert Murray, Murray Energy and other associated coal companies.

In a complaint filed in West Virginia Circuit Court, first obtained by The Daily Beast, Murray alleges his reputation was harmed when Oliver stated that there was no evidence an earthquake caused a deadly 2007 mine collapse and implied that Murray had lied about it. The lawsuit also cites alleged implications that Murray Energy sacrifices safety and the health of its employees for profits and takes issue with the refusal of Last Week Tonight to regard information supplied or pointed out by Murray. Then, there’s the humor.

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Western tensions stoked as mining interests seek to lift ban on claims – by Daniel Rothberg (Las Vegas Sun – June 19, 2017)

https://lasvegassun.com/

In 2012, then-President Barack Obama issued a 20-year ban on mining claims near the Grand Canyon. The move halted future uranium extraction projects in the region, a win for environmentalists and local tribes that had fought against the industry for years.

But some elected officials in Arizona and Utah disputed their claims of contamination risk, arguing that the ban would unnecessarily sacrifice jobs for overblown environmental concerns. With President Donald Trump swinging the pendulum toward economic development, opponents of the ban are asking the administration to lift it.

Their request and Trump’s reconsideration of nuclear policy in the West have stoked debate over how environmental concerns should be weighed against economic potential. That tension underlies discussions about everything from increasing nuclear testing to storing nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain, only 90 miles from Las Vegas. And it highlights the inescapable nature of the West’s nuclear legacy.

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