by Nick Pope
China plans to curtail exports of a key mineral needed for weapons production, while a U.S. company that could reduce U.S. reliance on foreign suppliers struggles with red tape, energy experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Chinese government announced On August 15, it was announced that there would be restrictions on the export of antimony, a key mineral that is a key raw material for weapons production worldwide and is imperative for the production of equipment such as ammunition, night-vision goggles and bullets that are critical to national security, According to to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Perpetua Resources, a U.S. mining company, has been slogging through red tape for years to develop a mine in Valley County, Idaho, that could reduce its reliance on Chinese antimony supplies, but a tardy permitting process has gotten in the way, energy experts told DCNF.
Securing all the necessary approvals and permits to develop a mine like the one Perpetua Resources is trying to operate can take years. One of the key permitting regulations in place is Act on National Environmental Protection Policy (NEPA), which also applies to federal land management activities and the construction of certain public infrastructure projects, such as highways.
“After six years planning and early involvement, we started [NEPA] permitting process in 2016. We currently have eight years “to NEPA,” a Perpetua Resources spokesman told DCNF. The company hopes to extract antimony from the largest known deposit in the U.S., and Perpetua Resources development could also produce millions of ounces of gold.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate and Environment, said the Perpetua Resources mine poses real environmental concerns that need to be addressed, but that U.S. production is almost certainly cleaner than production in China. In addition, dependence on China for raw materials needed to make key defense equipment poses a clear national security risk, Furchtgott-Roth said.
“The United States has the highest environmental standards in the world for its mines, and for some other things as well,” Furchtgott-Roth told DCNF. “That’s a huge national security risk. Given what we saw when Russia cut off natural gas supplies to Europe, we know that countries can cut off important supplies to other countries.”
“If the administration wants to pursue policies that promote electric vehicles, green energy and other mineral-intensive technologies, it should work to improve the permitting process across the board, rather than selectively implementing reforms for some preferred types of development and not others,” Furchtgott-Roth added.
Steve Coonen, a former Department of Defense (DOD) official who focused on technology exports to China, agreed that reliance on China for raw materials to produce critical technologies poses clear national security risks.
“The United States has all the rare earths it needs, not dissimilar to its energy needs,” Coonen told DCNF. “Yet Democrats have handcuffed American industry by banning the extraction of these materials on misguided and misinformed environmental grounds, which poses a serious risk to the national security and long-term economic health of the United States.”
China accounts for just under 50 percent of global antimony production and is also the source of 63 percent of current U.S. antimony imports, according to CSIS. Meanwhile, the U.S. did not mine any “marketable” antimony in 2023, According to to CNBC.
China’s recently announced antimony export restrictions will go into effect on September 15, according to CNBC. To many in the industry, China’s decision to restrict antimony exports would have been a surprise just a few months ago, so the country’s decision to take action seems “quite confrontational in that regard,” said Lewis Black, CEO of Canadian miner Almonty Industries.
In addition to antimony, China also showed its strength, restrictive exports of other key minerals in which it dominates the world, such as germanium and gallium, from 2023.
“The United States has some of the highest permitting standards in the world, and that’s something to be proud of. But NEPA has been criticized for its inefficiencies, and much of that criticism is justified,” a Perpetua Resources spokesperson told DCNF. “When we’re talking about the minerals we need for America’s national and economic security — not to mention our clean energy future — we need an efficient regulatory process that continues to provide robust protections for communities and the environment.”
The company expects the process — from initial identification of the deposit to the start of mineral extraction from the mine — to take 18 years, a Perpetua Resources spokesperson told DCNF. However, the spokesperson added that NEPA was beneficial for transparency with the public and allowed stakeholder communities to provide feedback on the project.
Still, Perpetua Resources “absolutely supports a common-sense, bipartisan approach to authorizing reforms” because “good projects should not languish in bureaucracy.”
Restrictions on antimony may be even more urgent given existing concerns on the strength of the US defense industrial base in the face of wars in Middle East AND Europeand rising tensions with China over Taiwan. Many experts To have he warned that the United States is allowing itself to become overly dependent on hostile supplies of mineral resources from China at a time when these resources play a much larger role in the American economy, thanks to partly to the Biden administration’s sweeping green energy program.
“In the mid-20th century, domestic mining accounted for 90 percent of U.S. antimony consumption. Today, the U.S. no longer mines antimony; instead, it relies on China, its primary geopolitical rival, for more than 60 percent of its antimony imports,” Quill Robinson, associate researcher in the Energy Security and Climate Change Program at CSIS, told DCNF. “Effectively reducing China risk requires reducing dependencies across the value chain.”
Independent West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin and Republican Wyoming Senator John Barrasso have joined forces to to introduce a permitting reform bill in July aimed at simplifying the regulatory hurdles that vast infrastructure and development projects must overcome and speeding up timelines without completely stripping regulators of the ability to ensure that environmental issues and considerations are taken into account. That bill has not yet been brought to a vote in the Senate.
“There are legitimate environmental challenges that need to be mitigated for projects like this,” Arnab Datta, director of infrastructure policy at the Institute for Progress, told DCNF. But government agencies are more motivated to avoid third-party legal challenges to their reviews than to thoroughly review more solemn environmental issues, which means regulators tend to waste a lot of time on these minor issues and end up extending permitting timelines, Datta explained.
“Uncertainty around permits and lawsuits compound the challenge of achieving production in an often volatile and uncertain market environment for these goods,” continued Datta, who also works for Employ America as managing director of policy implementation. “These companies need a process with certainty and reasonable timelines, as well as support that helps mitigate the volatility resulting from China’s actions in the market.”
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Nick Pope is a reporter at the Daily Caller News Foundation.
