Urges White House to streamline permitting process for domestic mines that will supply the minerals and metals needed for energy transition.

Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy leveraged the national platform offered by S&P Global's CERAWeek 2024 energy conference in Houston to urge the Biden administration to streamline the permitting for mines that will deliver a domestic supply of the minerals and metals critical to America's economy, security, and clean energy ambitions.

Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy

"Our message to the Biden administration is, 'Do everything you can to do everything here in America. Get your permitting processes streamlined,'" Dunleavy told Reuters during the conference focused on exploring multidimensional energy transition strategies.

The Alaska governor's push for meaningful mine permitting reform echoes the sentiments of U.S. automakers, global commodities investment firms, and even high-level members of the Biden administration that have cited the often decade-long federal mine permitting process as the largest impediment to America's race to be the global leader in clean energy.

"If we are going to be successful in this competition and if we are going to take advantage of these opportunities, the jobs, we need to permit much, much quicker than we do right now," U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy Dave Turk said during an address during the Alaska Sustainable Energy conference held in Anchorage last May.

During that same conference hosted by Gov. Dunleavy, S&P Global Vice Chairman Daniel Yergin compared the long and arduous permitting process to the COVID lockdown.

"Our country is suffering from a permitting pandemic – it leads to paralysis, lack of economic resolve, and a great deal of pain," the highly respected authority on international energy and geoeconomics said during the 2023 Alaska Sustainable Energy conference.

Dunleavy says the White House's push for the transition to electric vehicles charged with renewable energy – both of which need much larger quantities of critical minerals than their fossil fuel-burning predecessors – while at the same time blocking the Pebble copper mine and Ambler Road projects in Alaska is "somewhat nonsensical."

"If we don't get our permitting processes together, if we don't start to use data and science again instead of emotion, this chaos is going to continue," he said.

Pebble battle goes to court

Last week, Dunleavy's administration sued the federal government over broken contracts relating to the Environmental Protection Agency's decision to restrict mining activities at the world-class Pebble copper project in Southwest Alaska.

The lawsuit seeks more than $700 billion to compensate for revenues that would be lost from the EPA ban that prevents the mining of 75 billion pounds of copper, 82 million ounces of gold, 370 million oz of silver, and 4.6 billion lb of rhenium that has been outlined so far on state land at Pebble.

Pebble Limited Partnership

Drilling has outlined 75 billion lb of copper, 82 million oz of gold, 370 million oz of silver, and 4.6 billion lb of rhenium at the Pebble project in Southwest Alaska.

According to R Street Institute, a Washington-based think tank, Pebble alone could supply 12% of the copper needed to meet the U.S.'s climate goals by 2040.

Dunleavy says EPA's decision to preemptively restrict mining at and around Pebble breaches contracts between the state and federal government and fails to recognize Alaska's role in sustainable resource development.

"The State of Alaska has the duty, under our constitution, to develop its resources to the maximum in order to provide for itself and its people, so it's important that any and all opportunities be explored in furtherance of this idea," the governor said. "Our opportunities to show the world a better way to develop our resources should not be unfairly pre-empted by the Biden administration under a solely political act."

Stalling a road to Alaska metals

The Biden administration also pulled previously issued permits to build a 211-mile road that would connect rich deposits of cobalt, copper, gold, silver, zinc, and other metals in Alaska's Ambler Mining District to markets demanding sustainable supplies of these mined materials.

Shane Lasley for Data Mine North

A high-grade sample with copper, cobalt, and germanium collected from the Bornite deposit at the western end of the proposed Ambler Road.

BLM and the National Park Service originally issued the federal authorization for the Ambler Road in 2020. In 2022, however, the federal land manager remanded the permits, citing a lack of adequate consultation with Alaska tribes and an evaluation of potential impacts on subsistence uses as its reasons.

A draft supplemental environmental impact statement that incorporates the cited missing data was released in October, and the final EIS and record of decision on the reevaluated Ambler Access Project is slated for later this year.

The road permitting delay has set back the envisioned timeline for permitting and developing mines in the Ambler District.

"I hope it's approved this year. But if it's a post-election decision and there's a new administration, I hope it's approved immediately," Dunleavy said during the CERAWeek conference.

Author Bio

Shane Lasley, Publisher

Over his more than 16 years of covering mining and mineral exploration, Shane has become renowned for his ability to report on the sector in a way that is technically sound enough to inform industry insiders while being easy to understand by a wider audience.

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