Democrats Begin to Regret Relying on China for Trade in Green Energy Components
There seems to be new found respect for mining among liberal policy wonks.
About a week ago, I reported that China was beginning to limit its graphite exports, a key component of Electric Vehicle (EV) batteries.
It turns out Democrats are beginning to sense that the green energy dominoes are beginning to collapse and are desperate to begin resolving some of the “unintended consequences” of their policies.
Now Reuters is reporting two Democratic U.S. senators are urging the Energy Department to take steps to boost U.S. battery manufacturing and next-generation battery research, citing China’s dominance and export controls.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Mark Warner and Energy Committee Chair Joe Manchin cited experts saying that the United States is “ten to twenty years behind Asia in commercialization of battery technology,” and noted that China accounts for more than 75% of battery cell production.
“The U.S. must become a leader in manufacturing batteries and battery components, while securing our supply chains for the materials that make up those components,” the senators wrote in a previously unreported letter seen by Reuters, citing China’s decision last month to restrict exports of graphite, critical to manufacturing battery anodes.
China dominates the global EV battery supply chain including production of graphite – the single largest component.
The letter noted in 2022 the United States produced less than 10% of lithium-ion batteries in 2022 and said demand is expected to grow over seven times by 2035.
The letter wants a committee briefing by Dec. 1 “on ongoing research and development of next-generation battery technologies.”
James Morton Turner is a professor of environmental studies at Wellesley College and the author, most recently, of “Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future.” Therefore, you might suspect Turner would be a big supporter of the Green New Deal Biden foisted on the American public via the “Inflation Reduction Act.”
In a recent opinion piece in The New York Times, the Wellesley College professor sounds like he has some supply chain regrets…which stem from insufficient domestic production.
What the Inflation Reduction Act hasn’t done, however, is spur similar investments in mining and minerals processing. Although it includes a 10 percent tax credit for critical minerals production (a category that includes graphite), about 2 percent of the newly announced investments are going toward mining and materials processing facilities. So as the United States expands investments in clean energy manufacturing, its dependency on global supply chains, dominated by China, will only grow.
Building more diverse and resilient supply chains for critical minerals requires action at home and abroad. First, the United States needs to reduce the hurdles to investing in domestic mines and mineral processing facilities. While a new battery or E.V. factory can be brought online in a few years, identifying, permitting and commissioning mines and refineries often stretches out over a decade or more. Reforming permitting processes to ensure better engagement with local communities and expedited environmental reviews is urgently needed. Such reforms could help advance projects like Graphite One, a mine planned for Alaska’s Seward Peninsula.
Of course, it doesn’t help when Biden’s diversity hire for the Bureau of Land Management proposes 50-year mining bans.
The proposed mineral withdrawal would prevent new claims and developments in the area to safeguard Tribal lands, boost local recreation opportunities and support wildlife habitat connectivity.
In a statement on Monday, the Department of Interior explained that Pueblos of San Felipe and Santa Ana had long sought protections for the Placitas area, which they consider ancestral and sacred lands. The site, located near the Albuquerque metro area, also provides close-to-home outdoor recreation opportunities and is popular for hiking, camping, sightseeing and hunting. The proposal would help protect, preserve and promote the scenic integrity, cultural importance, recreational values, and wildlife habitat connectivity within the Placitas area.
“Today we’re responding to calls from Tribes, elected leaders, and community members who want to see these public lands protected,” said Secretary Deb Haaland.
There is some hope that domestic mining may become more popular among Democrats….as they have identified a way for the government to get its share of the profits.
The Biden administration is recommending changes to a 151-year-old law that governs mining for copper, gold and other hardrock minerals on U.S.-owned lands, including making companies for the first time pay royalties on what they extract.
A plan led by the Interior Department also calls for the creation of a mine leasing system and coordination of permitting efforts among a range of federal agencies. This comes as The White House has been pushing to boost domestic mining for minerals needed for electric vehicles, solar panels and other clean energy.
Under terms of an 1872 law, the U.S. does not collect royalties on minerals extracted from federal lands, a fact Democratic lawmakers and environmental groups have long lamented. The White House plan would impose a variable 4% to 8% net royalty on hardrock minerals produced on federal lands. The proposal needs approval by Congress — unlikely when the House is controlled by Republicans who have long opposed such fees.
Out: Diversity and cultural respect.
In: 4 to 8 percent return!
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Comments
Liberal Playbook: Never t hink past the knee-jerk.
Virtue Signaling Trump’s reality every time until the real world smacks them in the face
Don’t worry – Electric vehicles won’t be going anywhere anyway, and Americans won’t be able to travel beyond bicycle range. Back to the age of peasants and lords.
50 year ban on mining nut sounds a lot like the Hawaiian official in charge of stream water distribution on Maui refusing to let anyone pump out water to save Lahaina. …Oh….and he was proud of his action afterwards and was lauded by the left…no sacrifice by others is enough for the liberal ego even if people must die to affirm the beliefs of liberal cultists.
As Lord Farquaad says: “Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make.”
Pretty soon we are going to either need to go to war with China over these resources or bow to them. America will decide but unfortunately the appetite for war even in necessity is so low that many would rather deny that the necessity exists.
Or we start mining these resources ourselves, and stop pushing garbage EVs.
China and Russia control way too much of the resource footprint to make that viable.
That said, I agree with you on the EVs.
We essentially own an entire continent. I think we can probably produce whatever we need
Provided the government gets the hell out of the way, which they never will.
Due to environmental regulations we don’t mine these resources because it is too costly. They do exist in abundance in the US.
The power to regulate is the power to destroy, just as much as the power to tax is. Raising the cost bar artificially is the way industries are killed.
If you didn’t notice Brandon signaled surrender to the Chinese over some of the largest rare earth mineral deposits in the world with his pull out from Afghanistan.
There are lots of places with these minerals–they’re not actually “rare”, just expensive to process (and they appear in fairly low concentrations, so there’s a lot of “processing waste” to deal with).
It’s not regret. Its’ timing and money. This was supposed to happen AFTER the gasoline engine went extinct and, in the meantime, Wall Street was supposed to score a windfall in green energy.
The playbook has always been talk up electric cars, produce electric cars, subsidize electric cars, get rid of the gas engine leaving only electric cars, then get rid of the electric car as too environmentally unfriendly. Yes, you may say, but how will people freely move about? (Precisely).
Their goal is 15-minute “smart cities” (aka “camps where people concentrate”….)
Who could not want Smart Cities? Dumb people obviously.
So many people now have ADHD so we do need help concentrating.
/sarc
Ii was at the lab this am and in the Drs parking spots there were 3 top shelf teslas and one 4 door Porsche
Green energy components from China? Hey that’s a good idea. Let’s use them to produce millions of batteries that weigh 1,000 pounds each.
We can recycle them, right?
Right. However, it’s very complicated and not cost effective, therefore startup companies will need government funding like wind farms. In a few years we’ll probably find the battery recyling plants have gone the same way as off shore windmills.
Oh well, they can always go to the landfill. Maybe California will be chosen for the disposal site when Gavin Newsome becomes president.
Remember all those meme photos about a charging station with a diesel generator next to it for power? Stellantis makes it a permanent feature of one of their Ram trucks:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/stellantis-ram-ramcharger-generator-in-trip-electic-vehielce-battery-depletion/
>> Stellantis’ Ram brand may have an answer for that, especially for people who need a truck to haul or tow things. It’s called the Ramcharger, a pickup that can travel 145 miles on electricity, with a 3.6-liter V6 gas-powered engine linked to a generator that can recharge the battery while the truck is moving. <<
Hahahaha. Actually, that is a good idea with a nearly 700 mile range. If it’s not more expensive and does not decrease payload/towing capacity it could be a winner. It does show that those electric pick ups are a total loser for anything other than grocery runs
So they’re inventing a Prius truck?
Hopefully, the likely imminent crash in EV demand will sour the market for batteries and the rare earth minerals needed to produce them.
EV’s are a total con; expensive, poor value and underperforming toys for narcissistic, virtue-signaling Dhimmi-crats and Leftists.
My greatest fear is to get stuck somewhere with a dead battery so I pull a trailer behind my truck with my generator and a 50 gallon tank of gas in order to keep my EV battery fully charged.
So far the only problem I have encountered is I have to stop every so often to fill my gas tank.
A modest royalty isn’t a huge barrier but the ever increasing regulatory burden and purposeful delaying tactics for gaining approval and permitting to get things done definitely is.
This entire ‘green’ energy saga reads like Atlas Shrugged. The neo Marxist bureaucracy and luddite eco activists seem to believe that no matter how unprofitable they make an industry with absurd requirements and hoops to jump through that the ‘capitalists’ will still find a way to produce the needed goods.
I have been screaming from the rooftops that solar and wind cannot power an industrialized economy. I have made several posts here that say the same.
I do not believe that fossil fuels are warming the planet.
However, if you want to discontinue the use of fossil fuels, you need to build nuclear power plants. A nuclear power plant takes ten years to construct. If the government wants to eliminate fossil fuels, they need to allow GE and other power plant producers to ramp up and build a few thousand plants all over the country.
After those plants come on line and the grid is updated to transfer the power to homes and commercial manufacturers, then you can talk about shutting down fossil fuel power generating plants (which I am not in favor of).
EVs will never work except for commuters who can make a round trip to their workplace on one charge, and for fleet vehicles like postal delivery and such that can finish their route on one charge.
The notion that fully laden 18-wheelers can be converted to electric power is absurd.
The power engineers all know this, but the politicians do not care.
The green revolution is a grift, flat and simple.
Erronius
There are some companies working on new nuclear technologies that could be very useful. At least three are supposedly installing/testing microreactors at Idaho National Labs, I believe. We’ll see whether the government is serious about climate change, etc. by what happens with those sorts of initiatives; if the companies whose technologies work get licenses and protection from frivolous suits and other maneuvers, the government is serious…
Has anyone stopped to figure out that with all of the money that Biden has taken from our enemies, he can’t do anything to stop their aggression? They have so much dirt on him that he would be impeached immediately if it was revealed. obama gave money to Iran because he is a closet Muslim and he is pulling the strings of Biden the puppet to do all he can to hurt Israel and help Iran. We all know that any sort of pause will only help Hamas and hurt Israel. But that is what Biden is demanding. China has us right where she wants us and is going to put the squeeze on us when the time is right. She must be panicking now that the EV craze is dying. That battery component supply leverage is dying as well.
“There seems to be new found respect for mining among liberal policy wonks.”
Shades of how Massachusetts suddenly began creating “exceptions” to their livehold trap ban when beavers began doing their best to submerge Newton and Wellesley.
Trappers explained, “You made mere possession of the traps a felony, so no one here can help you, even if we wanted. How long can you tread water?”
The progressive fascists AKA Dems don’t care about the environment. Global warming is just a means to destroy the private sector so the citizens are dependent on government for everything and a way for government to gain control of every aspect of our economy and thereby make the establishment of the progressive fascist utopia just one small step away.
Marxocrats once again prove attempting to micromanage every aspect of american economy amd society is impossible. At this point, they can’t even manage their own agenda as it is starting to compete against itself.
I could support companies paying royalties on this basis:
– mining can create environmental damage and it’s perfectly fair for the government to set up a scheme to assure funds are available to clean up the site if the company fails or otherwise proves unwilling/unable to do it
– the extracting company pays royalties into a fund that would be used for cleanup (so the rate of royalty would be proportional to the likely amount required to clean the place up once mining was done), which requires estimates of how long the site will operate, how much material will come out, what price the material can be sold for, what extraction costs are likely to be, and how much cleanup (i.e., cost for cleanup) is needed.
– If the extracting company is able to clean up the place properly and still leave money in the fund, they get the remaining funds back, tax-free (since, after all, we the people would just be returning what is theirs).
– the government should be able to use a (very small) portion of the royalty fund to compensate (at least in part) for its “overhead” in overseeing the fund and necessary safety and environmental compliance
– in exchange for the presence of government safety and environmental oversight, the government indemnifies the extracting company against frivolous lawsuits by advocacy groups, as long as the company remains in compliance with the relevant regulations. And a lawsuit that fails on that basis (i.e., the government would have to publish a formal finding of wrongdoing and refusal to correct the problem before such a suit could be considered by the court) results in the advocacy group compensating the company and government for legal fees (attorney’s time, discovery-related expenses, et al.).