Henry Lee and Xin Sun write in The Hill about the need for new critical metal mines.
- To power a clean and secure energy future, the United States and its allies will need to increase critical metal mining.
- Environmental reviews and inefficient permitting have made domestic mining and mineral processing uneconomical and difficult to accomplish.
- Ensuring that mining does not leave a lasting footprint will also be crucial, but can be accomplished with private sector innovation.
“[T]he primary hurdle to meeting the demand for batteries will not be raw material availability but whether governments and industries can manage the environmental impacts of mining on a time schedule that will be compressed into 25-40 years. Doing so will require substantial investment in prevention of toxic waste leakages from mining, improved options to protect the local ecology, and development of better land reclamation techniques.”
Read the full article here.
The views and opinions expressed are those of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of C3.
