‘This is a really good objective, and it’s long overdue,’ Mark Mills, said executive director of the National Center for Energy Analytics.
The Trump administration’s push for greater energy production in the United States will go beyond drilling for oil and gas to include the expansion of mining and refining for what have been deemed critical minerals.
While speaking before a joint session of Congress on March 4, President Donald Trump said that he would “take historic action to dramatically expand production of critical minerals and rare earths here in the USA,” pledging a new initiative “later this week,” which is still being anticipated.
This follows several executive orders issued by Trump since the beginning of his administration, which called for more domestic production of critical minerals.
The first two orders, “Unleashing American Energy” and “Declaring a National Energy Emergency,” were issued on Jan. 20. In them, Trump criticized “our nation’s diminished capacity to insulate itself from hostile foreign actors” in the production of essential resources.
A subsequent order in February sought to boost American production of copper. In this order, the president said that “the United States faces significant vulnerabilities in the copper supply chain, with increasing reliance on foreign sources for mined, smelted, and refined copper.”
These orders seek to increase domestic production by expediting the permitting process, providing federal grants and tax incentives, and implementing tariffs on imports.
“This is a really good objective, and it’s long overdue,” Mark Mills, executive director of the National Center for Energy Analytics, told The Epoch Times. “Any increase will reduce our import dependence.”
A 2023 report by the National Mining Association, an industry advocacy group, found that the United States was “100 percent net import reliant” for 12 of the 50 minerals considered in 2022 to be critical, and “an additional 31 critical mineral commodities (including 14 lanthanides, which are listed under rare earths) had a net import reliance greater than 50 percent.”
In anticipation of Trump’s latest executive order, NioCorp, a Colorado-based mining company, announced that it was ready to start construction of its Elk Creek Critical Minerals Project in Nebraska, where it will mine niobium, scandium, titanium, and rare earths essential to U.S. defense.
“America is ready to mine, baby, mine in order to reduce our dangerous dependence on China and the other nations of the BRICS cabal,” Mark Smith, CEO of NioCorp Developments, said in a statement, referring to the intergovernmental association of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, among other countries that joined later.
Among the requests NioCorp made of the Trump administration are low-interest loans for permitted projects, funding from the Defense Department, streamlining the permitting process, and setting “reasonable limits on litigation timelines.”
The mining firm stated that it takes an average of 29 years to get a mine up and running in the United States, and “only Zambia is worse.”
