Recently, there has been a lot of news about “rare earths” and “critical minerals.” Critical minerals are the blanket term for a large group of elements ranging from nickel, silica and lithium to rare earths, the largest category of essential minerals.
President Trump has referred to the importance of rare earths and has said the U.S. should consider acquiring Greenland or making a deal with Ukraine to access critical minerals.
Why does the president care? Why should you care? Here are a couple of good reasons:
• Our military structure depends on them as they are in fighter jet engines. If you have a smartphone, you are holding rare earth and critical minerals in your hand. They are essential for semiconductors (which are in almost everything these days) and permanent metal magnets in nearly everything, including cellphones). They are crucial for the artificial intelligence revolution. The list goes on, but essentially, all the technology we rely on comes from and contains one or more critical minerals.
• The U.S. has only one mine producing rare earths. China controls the global market and has demonstrated its willingness to control processed materials to manipulate prices and, in some cases, withhold materials from the U.S. and other consumers. This can have serious consequences for our national security and way of life.
Do we need Greenland or Ukraine to secure our minerals future? No.
The U.S. has vast mineral resources that, for various reasons, we have chosen not to develop. That needs to change. There is no more secure supply chain than mined and manufactured in America, and we can do that.
For instance, one company is working to develop a project in Wyoming that has been proven to contain more than 2.6 billion tons of rare earth elements. With support and assistance from the state, this project has significant assets on Wyoming land, which accelerates permitting. It could become a producing mine within the next four to five years, a remarkably short time in the U.S., where new mines typically take 18 to 20 years to move from project to production.
This means American jobs in an operation conforming to the world’s highest safety and environmental standards. It means using our natural resource wealth to ensure we can control the inputs to fighter aircraft, computers, phones and everything else we need for national security and economic development.
There is urgency in seizing this opportunity to control our national destiny rather than leaving it in the hands of the Chinese.
The moment is now. We need to act.
Editor’s note: Melissa “Mel” Sanderson is a geo-strategic adviser on the board of American Rare Earths and co-chairs of the Critical Minerals Institute. She wrote this for InsideSources.com. Please send your comments to AzOpinions@iniusa.org. We are committed to publishing a wide variety of reader opinions, as long as they meet our Civility Guidelines.
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