'Minerals that are unavailable when we need them, should be considered critical.' -NATIONAL MINING ASSOCIATION
The following was adapted by the author, Utah Mining Association President Brian Somers, from testimony he gave to the Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources of the U.S. House of Representatives in September.
It is important to recognize that mining is something most people never experience firsthand, yet they benefit from the products made possible by mining every single day. From smartphones, medical devices and consumer electronics to new energy technologies and national defense systems, our modern economy and quality of life are supported by mined minerals.
The Utah Mining Association (UMA) was founded in 1915 and represents Utah’s hard-rock, coal and industrial mineral mine operators and related support industries. UMA’s mission is to advocate on behalf of Utah’s mining industry, its workers and the communities they support. Mining is a critical industry in Utah, contributing $7.7 billion to the state’s GDP, supporting nearly 57,000 direct and indirect jobs and powering Utah’s broader economy by producing the coal which provides 62 percent of Utah’s low-priced electricity. Mining jobs in Utah are family- and community-sustaining jobs with mining salaries averaging 46 percent more than the average Utah wage.
Since Utah’s first commercial mining district was established in 1863 — 33 years before Utah became a state — Utah’s mining industry has labored diligently to develop Utah’s vast mineral wealth and provide the mined commodities markets demand.
Today, we are witnessing a welcome and long overdue public focus on supply chains and mineral production. This is partly due to the supply chain disruptions which everyone experienced during the COVID pandemic. It is partly due to current geopolitical events which are affecting mineral production and availability, including interference by bad actors like China who seek to distort and control commodity markets. And it is due, I believe, by an increased public awareness of misguided regulatory burdens, policy decisions and investment signals by the federal government which hamper domestic mineral production.
Much of the current public focus and discourse around mineral supply is centered around what are being called “critical minerals.” Responding to an executive order from President Donald Trump, the Department of Interior published a list of critical minerals in 2018, which was updated in 2022. We also have competing mineral lists from other parts of the federal government, including a list of critical “materials” from the Department of Energy and the National Defense Stockpile of minerals maintained by the Defense Logistics Agency.
In many ways, the current focus on critical minerals is history repeating itself. A recent report titled “Critical Minerals of Utah” released by the Utah Geological Survey states, “The concept of critical minerals is not new, and in the United States various lists of commodities and definitions of what qualifies as critical have been developed since the early 1900s.”
It seems that over the past 100 years, we haven’t learned the lesson that making lists of critical minerals — however methodologically sound they might be — is not as useful as letting the diverse demands of free markets, environmental responsibility, operational efficiency, technological innovation, economic security and national security determine which minerals are “critical” at any given time.
More simply, perhaps we could adopt the definition of criticality put forth by the National Mining Association (NMA), which is that,
“minerals that are unavailable when we need them, should be considered critical.”
Utah provides an example of how, as NMA presciently observed in a comment letter on the first Department of Interior critical minerals list in 2018, “World events can redefine criticality in an amazingly short period of time.” A 2020 report from the Utah Geological Survey stated that Utah hosts 28 of the 35 minerals on the original critical minerals list and had active production of eight of them. When the Department of Interior released the revised critical minerals list in 2022, four of the eight critical minerals Utah was producing were removed from the list: uranium, potash, helium and rhenium.
Just two days before the revised critical minerals list was published in the Federal Register, Russia invaded Ukraine. In the aftermath of the invasion, global prices for uranium spiked and remain at near-record highs as alternatives to uranium supplied by Russia and Russian-aligned countries are explored, especially in light of the greatly diminished capacity of the U.S.’s once-thriving uranium mining, milling and enrichment industries.
Prices for potash also spiked after the invasion and have remained high given that Russia and Belarus account for 41 percent of global trade in potash, with resulting negative effects on food supply and prices. Ongoing shortages and high prices for helium also continue, putting further strains on the global semiconductor shortage which began during the COVID pandemic as semiconductor manufacturing constitutes the second-largest use of helium worldwide.
Almost in real-time, world events were highlighting the criticality of uranium, potash and helium as the federal government was downgrading their “official” critical status. It should be noted that Utah is home to the nation’s last functioning conventional uranium mill and is the only state in the union which produces the higher-value sulphate of potash or SOP, which made the exclusion of uranium and potash from the revised critical minerals list especially puzzling to Utahns.
There are many other concerns and inconsistencies related to federal government’s designation of critical minerals and its management of the nation’s mineral estate which also need to be part of the public conversation.
These include the competing federal mineral and material criticality assessments; the accelerated withdrawal of public lands from mineral production during the Biden administration; implications of the fact that many minerals designated as critical are co-located and produced with other minerals which may not share a criticality designation; the severe diminishment of domestic mineral processing, smelting, refining and other beneficiation capacity over the last few decades; and the federal government’s byzantine and burdensome permitting processes which are far outside the norm of other allied countries with similar environmental and labor standards and which discourage capital investment.
I believe the public can coalesce around the idea that any minerals that are unavailable when we need them should be considered critical. There are far too many minerals which are unnecessarily unavailable or constrained because we have neglected our nation’s vast mineral resources, our highly trained mining workforce and our unrivaled capacity for innovation.