Mineral Independence (vs China’s Mineral Dominance and DragonBridge) by Dr. Ned Mamula @ TEAC12

Mineral Independence (vs China’s Mineral Dominance and DragonBridge) by Dr. Ned Mamula @ TEAC12

We talk about subjects no other conference talks about. Those of you who are moving to US NIC in Houston after this, I’m pretty sure you’re NOT going to hear about the critical materials aspect of advanced reactors, and all that. Kind of one of those things it’s like whistling past the graveyard. Ned, why don’t you come up and help the audience understand the somewhat not awesome, kind of dire situation we have, when it comes to how are we going to build these things when we really don’t have the material to do so? I am Ned Mamula I’m with I’m the chief geologist at Greentech Minerals Holding otherwise known as GreenMet we are a mining mineral Metallurgy advocacy firm and we’re in DC on K Street. I was formerly with USGS that’s where I got minerals background many years ago and up until a year or so ago when I joined greet I was actually running the DOE critical minerals program directing that critical minerals program small and such as it is but still they don’t have any geologist in the chain of command so I got a I got a great opportunity to to work with them on that but I had to move on and do other things today I want to talk to you and by the way I want to let you know that I know I’m the only thing between you and lunch so I’m going to be I’m going to be Johnny on the spot I’m going to be be getting my message out to you quickly and efficiently I hope. I want to talk to you about something that you feel strongly about and that is American mineral wealth and there’s two things today that I want to touch on first of all American mineral wealth and this goes for most most of the world too, but especially our country. We have two things. We have an embarrassment of riches at home domestic and for the sake of this talk I put on the second subtitle we have an embarrassment of import reliance from abroad. That’s the topic John Kutsch wanted me to touch on today. Why in lord’s name are we importing at wild wild rates, and it’s getting worse every year. I’m going to show you how we keep a handle on that but why do we have these imports who’s keeping tabs how are they keeping tabs and what have they found and that’s what I want to touch on today and by the way your your uh intro today on the spiritualness of thorium and you know cathedral of energy that goes for this too you look at a map of our country you look at a map of these deposit deposits and you can’t help but be struck by the fact that we have everything we’d ever need. As my great colleague Jim Kennedy said to me once and it was so elegant he said rare earths are not a resource issue. We have plenty of that we don’t know what to do with it. And I said, Jim, eureka it’s the same thing for the other critical minerals. We’re losing smelters we’re losing processing facilities we’re losing it so things are in the ground but we don’t know how to handle them. What has changed since 2017 till now and I’ve broken it up into two administrations this one here the Trump Administration from 2018 to 2021 we have had for the first time in US history a president of the United States define what a critical mineral is. I mean he didn’t do it he ordered it done so we have the definition of a critical mineral in executive order 13817 we have a secretarial order that goes along with that and also ordered the release of USGS professional paper 1802 guys if you don’t have this search usgs.gov PP 1802 you want to download that and you want it in the upper right hand or left hand or lower right corner of your laptop and you want it to sit there it is is one of the most unbelievable sources for critical minerals and nuclear that you’re going to have to refer to. Also we started to get the DOD involved in their industrial based supply reports and for the first time we had the the USGS compile a list of critical minerals and of course the executive order defined what that should be and the list came out because they met those criteria also the Department of Commerce, although it was one year late, put out the report on calls to action called for in the executive in the executive order. Then finally the president put out executive order 13953 declaring a state of emergency via a presidential determination about China and the control of rare earth elements. So you had these actions and then what you had in the under this administration you had some some similar good things happen there’s a lot of DOE funding for out of DOE Fe also e is the the other half of of doe in the LPO their Loan Program Office a lot of money going out there for Research into critical minerals I don’t necessarily agree with a lot of how it’s spent, but it’s going out out there. The Biden Administration did put out executive order 14017 simply titled US Supply Chain and that is a worthwhile read. Believe me, you didn’t hear the word Supply Chain up until three or four years ago, all of a sudden now it’s a big word. I won’t bore you can read the rest of those the the list of the critical minerals put out in 2018 was re-upped in 2021 2022 sorry and and some minerals were taken away foolishly. Uranium was taken off of the list of critical minerals, potash was taken off the list. Potash being the component of fertilizer I like to eat thank you very much I guess you guys do too okay I’m not happy about that uh renum I don’t know why. Strontium. And here’s a real disappointing fact, helium, we need helium. The government’s out of the helium business now I don’t know if that’s a good thing, maybe it is, but helium’s off the list ranium is off the list. Ranium is off the list potash is off uranium is off I don’t agree with these. That’s just Ned. Zinc went on nickel went on copper went on, oh nope, copper didn’t go on. There was for the first time I can remember I think USGS succumb to, shall we say, a little bit of politics copper should be on there lo and behold DOE has a list of critical minerals and copper is on there, hmm, okay anyway we’ll see what the next update copper should be on there that is such a no-brainer I can’t believe it. There has been uh a big push in this administration for mining reform. It’s really not reformed, they want to get rid of the claim business, they want to end hard rock mining as we know it. This is probably not a good idea. This is where most of your critical minerals come from versus leasing. You have Leasing and you have Hard Rock claims and then you have Saleables. 3 classes of minerals. I don’t have time to get into it today. What I want to tell you though is we’ve gone into an era here in the last 2 years of negative mining, where we’re actually have more mines closed. How can I say this there’s a negative number of mines being opened if that makes sense in other words we’re not opening mines we’re losing mines every year. The permits are being revoked they’re being closed they’re not having their environmental things reviewed. Environmental lawfare is just destroying our mining sector this is a problem so okay… how to keep track? Do what I told you go to usgs.gov Mineral Commodity Summary 2024 you might say wait a minute we’re in 2024 they’re always a year ahead with the title this is all 2023 stats. I love USGS I started my career here, and I spent a good chunk of my early years here, it is a venerable venerable historic unbelievable organization to work for. With the twin cousin or sister or brother, whatever, the Bureau of Mines was shut down the USGS took on a lot of the responsibility and the data gathering and the repository. I saw these cardboard boxes coming in by the thousands into the basement of headquarters in Ron Virginia. They do an admirable job but they do not do what the Bureau of Mines did and that was the deep second, and third, order analysis of mineral forecasting. Geopolitical forecasting. Mining technology research. All of the great things that the bureau of Mines did and it is gone. And you know, who complains the loudest about the Bureau of Mines not being here? Foreign scientists and engineers because the Bureau of Mines would produce reports from other countries better than those countries could produce for themselves. It wasn’t a national hit, it was a global hit. And it was a cheap hit because they wanted to reduce the number of federal agencies, and they picked the wrong damn one. The massive budget of the Bureau of Mines when it was closed are you ready for the massive number? 120 million. They fired 1,200 people half of whom were world class mining engineers, scientists, geologists, hard rockers. As great as the data Gathering capability of USGS is, and this is one of the three, I’m going to show you the 3 most popular figures in every year’s Mineral Commodity Summary. This is sometimes referred to as the tornado chart, and okay, no one can argue with USGS data. It’s the gold standard. My problem is, it’s hard to work with. You can rip this sheet out of the book and walk away and you would have enough food for thought for a long, long time. But it should be easier to get to, and easier to talk to a policy maker about. Policy maker? Well not only them. Anybody. You could leave this on your nightstand and it might put you to sleep if you if you’re kind of an insomniac. The other popular diagram in the mineral commodity summary is the global you’ve all seen this it maybe you have maybe you haven’t this is usually figure three every year. It’s the same except for the number of countries we’re importing from. And they’re in colors there’s the code I won’t bore you you can look it up and you’ll have these slides right John? All the a relatively new diagram in the mineral commodity summary shows you what the USGS considers primary mining. That bullseye in the middle are your primary minerals mined in this country, metals. And then as you move out of this out of the bullseye you’re seeing co-products and byproducts and the concentric circles are 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% of the value of the principle product. So this little diagram here is worth a lot. You could tear that out of the book and you could sit and write a thesis or 3 just on that. The other go-to has to be publication of the USGS Critical Minerals List. And, as I said a minute ago, I don’t agree with some of their decisions. But they have a mathematical way to arrive at what should and shouldn’t be on the list, and I respect that. But it comes out and it’s very well done. So these two are how they’re reported and who does it and how they do it and and I feel comfortable with this. But more needs to be done. Again, this is not workable for most, but on here let me tell you what you’re looking at: 58 Commodities on the vertical axis. The blue bars are kind of a distraction okay you don’t need them you can convert this to a table, but it’s really bland to look at. On the right are the countries where these commodities are sourced from and on each line they’re listed in the order of of what do you. In other words the country furthest to the left is the most and then in order of diminishing import numbers you get down halfway and you say well look we’re importing peat from Albania. No we don’t care about. What we care about is the critical minerals thorium uranium critical minerals and to get that information out of here this one like I did seven years ago with this is the 2016 version. You have to dig and tear the data apart. The data is all there you have to dig it out. And this one here you can see that this blood sweat there’s some coffee stains on there. There’s a lot of magic marker juice on that page. But from this I’ve come up with a plan. I just take and whack the 50% mark. If we’re importing it below 50 I just take that off for the time being and I say here you have 50% imports and up… okay 48 commodities greater than 50% is still unworkable. So what I’ve done here, I’ve said okay, we’re getting rid of the onesies and twozies the Albania the Serbia the Peru the these are the countries the heavy-hitting countries on the right hand side. In red, China. And blue, Russia and their Soviet ilk. Then the other black letters just say others if we’re importing something from Canada I’m not going to worry about it right now okay. Then I left the commodities there it’s not up to me to change that it would be but I did put an arrow pointing at rare earth elements they’re still grouped for the sake of this but in reality the rare earths are broken out. I’ll show you that in a minute. But this is not enough. The USGS has the list of critical minerals there it is there on the left and they have this tornado chart on the right you need to put them together and start color coding these things and producing reports saying look for magnesium these countries we’re importing this percent and so forth and so on. And make it more workable and it would be for policy makers a bigger help. Here are just the minerals being imported to the United States at 100%. The first 15 there’s 30. Now first 15 are alphabetical because they can be. they’re all at 100% right and the the second 15 you see there along the blue line are all the rare earth metals. So there’s 29 or 30 at 100%. And this is probably the most pain chart I’m going to show you. Look in the right, now look at the countries where they’re coming from. We are really in a headlock. The Chinese have us in a headlock over these. And by the way, I want to point out Jim helped me with this. Look if you look in the rare earths listed, you’ve got neodymium, praseodymium. Those are required absolutely for magnet making for your standard magnets. But it is theum the holmium, the dysprosium, the turbium, that is necessary for the high operating temperature magnets that are really important. So I’ve color coded those orange and red respectively. Scandium and yttrium are yellow. Some people don’t real don’t acknowledge that they are rare earths, but there they are. Those are the numbers and that’s what they look like. Now it’s time in a few minutes left to step back and let me show you how I took the analysis of this. Number one, we’re importing from no less than 57 countries 58 commodities, plus the 15 rare earths. If they’re counted separately gives you 73 commodities more than 25%. Let’s jump down. 48 commodities or 62 at 50%. And the 30 I just showed you at 100%. You can see how bad they get. Bad meaning, how serious it is. As you get up there into the really critical and the rare earth metals. Here’s how you can evaluate those 3 things. 70% of the imports to this country of our critical minerals and a few others. 70% of the 100% of consumables, 70% of that is coming from adversaries. Is that a problem? Yes. I already told you what the was added and removed from the critical minerals list I’ll skip that. I’ll just say that mineral imports now are out of control and that we could be, I think we are, headed to a black swan event. Everybody know what that is? A black swan event is rare, usually hopefully they don’t become unrare, often times it could be war and it would be now who would who would be in there how about how about Russia all right? Ukraine China Israel Iran not that we were at war with Israel or any of these but I’m just saying these represent flash points over resource wars that are actually ongoing right now. So think of that black swans are usually a surprise kind of like the Arab Oil Embargo. That was a surprise and a disappointment in the way we handled our oil. There was no shortage of oil. It was the way we handled it, and the escalation of trade restrictions. Is that happening now? Yes, very much so. Let me show you, bear with me with these headlines, I just threw this together for the sake of this PowerPoint. But look, the second half of last year was horrible. China trade restricted the United States from gallium on August 1. Those are some of the just the pedestrian links to the media. There’s others, better but I just have these here. The same day they restricted geranium. A couple of months later they trade restricted… Well there the uh we were told by the administration not to worry about rare earth elements that Vital Metals up in Canada was going to supply everything we needed. Good. And then on October 6 they went bankrupt. Then next a week later the Vietnamese police arrested Luu Tuan in jail. All his lab equipment I guess is confiscated? All of the samples he was working with all of his colleagues are probably in prison with him. The Chinese do not want rare earth production done outside of China. These guys play rough. Lynas on again off again on again with Malaysia. That’s on hold I think. It might be up and running now, but we don’t know. China, later that month, restricted graphite. Are you kidding me? Now you have the 3 G’s. Gallium, Geranium and Graphite. 3 of the most critical minerals, and one thing they have in common those 3 and 3 or 4 others are the main critical minerals that we need for the electrical grid, and China knows it. So next time you hear about blackout or brownout I want you to be thinking maybe it’s not the power generation, maybe it’s that we don’t have the material we need. Then toward the end of the year China banished uh well they shut down Rare Earth Processing Technology. Done, okay? So that was the way 2023 closed. There’s a word for what’s going on here in the US and our so-called critical mineral policy right now. The word is not a black swan event… it’s just a good old fashioned butt kicking is what’s happening to us. And it’s happening because why we don’t have a critical mineral policy. We don’t have a mining policy. We have a patchwork quilt. Our little friend there in the lower right hand corner couldn’t be happier. You see them there smiling away? It’s perfect for them. They’ve got all the cards. How to analyze? Let’s get down on a third order… SEC first order… USGS second order… I showed you the numbers. Third order ok? This is the so-what of the so-what. Can the US adapt to a critical mineral trade restriction? No. Embargo? Uh uh. Wait! We can use our stockpile! We don’t have a stockpile. It was all sold off after the cold war. Dang it. Stable supply chains? Whose? Where are they? Imports from allies! That’s right, that’s what we’re going to do, we’re going to borrow from Canada and Australia! We’ll be fine. But no, they have problems too. They have problems like we do. Here’s the thing: there’s a there’s a there’s a buzzword out now called Friend Shoring. Friend Shoring: you give me what I need, the critical minerals okay and we’re going to be friends and we’re going to share. Folks, our country has to mine things in order to be able to Friend-Shore them. These guys want Friend Shore this way, and nothing the other way. It doesn’t work. We look like a joke on the world stage. We’re not mining when we have an embarrassment of riches. This is not good. There’s no real national policy. There’s no freaking Bureau of Mines. Nobody at the federal level representing the mining industry. Not good. We are the only G20 country or the only industrial country in the world without a bureau of mines. I had my assistant research every country going down I think 100 out of the 200 countries all of them have some kind of Bureau of Mines, or Bureau of Minerals, or Bureau of Commodities, something. We have butkus. And then EO 13817, that was a good start, but we need to start mining now. There’s a negative attitude on mining. You can see for yourself, reforming our mining means really eliminating it. The brass ring is to get rid of mining and lock down all federal lands. Meanwhile, full blast on the other side of the earth. China’s going wild mining minerals, metallurgy, rare earth institutes, full bore all day long. There’s my little friend again. He’s happy. They have a burgeoning middle class. They need minerals and metals now, so I expect their exports to start to be reduced anyway. But more than that, these guys have in their culture metals and minerals. They have for thousands of years. Look on the right hand side, metal is part of their Chi. How you going to fight that? How you going to compete with that? Plus these guys are state owned enterprises. We’re capitalists. They can take a loss all day long. This is where I grew up in Pittsburgh PA. That’s my hometown, there’s where I grew up, there’s a city skyline in the back. That’s where I worked for a couple years. That is gone. They cut that up and barged it down the Mississippi and they barged it to China and they made scrap out of it. Are you kidding me? So you know how we can’t we don’t make stuff? They’re making stuff, and they’re just eating our lunch. I can prove it right now. Look from 2000 to 2015 those are the number of mine startups, critical hard rock mineral mine startups, not coal or uranium. These are critical hard rock minerals in this country, Australia and Canada. Look at the green bars. Look how sad. Look how sad, between 0 and 5. You know it went up a little bit down a little bit and under President Trump it went up pretty good and now it’s down to zero. Remember I said a couple minutes ago now it’s below zero? Because permits and revocations of active mines are being taken away. So we’re in first time in American history we’re negative mining. And you have to be careful how you explain that to policy makers some of them don’t get it. I won’t go through this in much detail, but it takes about 10 plus years to develop a mine. Hey we have a problem with workforce too. I heard somebody say, here we have a nuclear workforce issue? Same thing in mining. Kids need to know that they can come into mining, and make a fortune out of school, and not worry about it. Here’s a global trend, look at the US, all the numbers below are in brackets meaning negative except molybdenum. Look at China. Look at Zambia, with their copper, it’s unbelievable. Congress regulatory help? Nah. They propose these same bills year after year, they go nowhere. The mineral wealth, our mineral wealth, really is ours not Washington’s. So right now Washington has a strangle hold and what we need to do is have an American mining template look much like American oil and gas and energy did we came out of that, and now we are energy independent, energy dominant even. We need to get toward mineral independence or we are in trouble. This is ridiculous. I don’t care what political parties in there, they should be uh thinking about this. Is the this is the bipartisan issue of the century. Our resources, right? I wrote a book on this topic. There it is. I was going to discuss it more, but I’m afraid John will criticize my cover art. What we need to do is recalibrate the federal role of Bureau of Mines. Upgrade the university geology and mining programs. Protect our environment with, hey listen it’s not disinformation I just say it’s an out and out lie that we can’t have a clean environment and mining at the same time. That’s not opinion, it’s a lie. We can have both. This the United States so you need to ask your Congressman, Senators. You need to get involved and talk to them say look we need this. Here’s my new book undermining power. We need to throw off some of the disinformation about mining minerals and what the hell is going on. Just so you know, in closing, the Chinese have a program called DragonBridge. Anybody ever hear of operation Dragon Bridge? Real quickly, they’re paying indigenous tribes in Canada. I was up there. I know that’s true. They’re paying Indian tribes. They’re paying them to lawyer up and foment trouble for mining. They’re also paying E-NGOs… Environmental Non-Government Orgnaizations to file lawfare. We’re strangling ourselves. The Chinese know. They’re using our laws rules and regulations against us like you can’t believe. These guys are masters, and in a way, in a grudging way, I admire what they’ve done here. And in their country they are the masters [of rare earths] and we are not, but at one time we were the masters of rare earths. Thorium. Uranium. Nuclear. Critical Minerals. Many of which are needed for the uranium and thorium industries. We are brothers. We need to unite and we need to get these policy makers smart, and tell them look, we can do this and still have a good environment. We don’t need to be victims of disinformation, and that’s what’s happening, and the Chinese know how to play that card very well. So I’ll end it here John thank you again. That name yeah I’m from Canada and uh I am hearing about what you’re talking about is there anything more specific you can say about uh other countries influencing Canada in regards to mining? Operation Dragonridge is the name of the operation being run against the great mining economies in the world by the Chinese. Canada, Australia, US sort-of, Sweden big-one. Where they can get in and foment unrest and disinformation about mining.And it’s successful. Canada’s starting to fall victim to that. The indigenous people are not happy and you know you’re government’s going to have to figure out how to handle that. Is your book a recommendation for Canadians as well? Like when you say that last book, is that for Canadians as well? Listen, I would say whatever I say about our country I wouldn’t be hypocrit I’d say yes to Canada our great friend listen in my book Groundbreaking: America’s Quest for mineral Independence. I spent a whole chapter saying how we should do what the Canadians and the Australians do and that is they love their mineral wealth. This is the only country in the world that I know of that actually shuns their mineral wealth like they’re embarrassed of and we would never use our wealth for geopolitical influence. What happened to the political lobby in Washington for the mining industry? There used to be something called the National Mining Association. I mean I I see your organization based on K Street are there any others what what what happened to this this feature of the mining industry? National Mining Association, NMA, National Mining Association based on Constitution Avenue and DC most of their clients are coal? This is not coal. This is hard rock. AEME, American Exploration and Mining Association. Those are the hard rockers. They’re out in Spokane. That distance saps a little bit of their political strength. They’re working hard, but this is a deeply ingrained thing and I don’t know how we’re going to get rid of it except through education. Ned’s the best.

Dr. Ned Mamula, Chief Geologist, Greentech Minerals Holdings (GreenMet).
Formerly with U.S. Geological Survey and DOE Critical Minerals Program.

Author of:
Groundbreaking! America’s Quest for Mineral Independence.

30:53 Dragon Bridge DragonBridge

There is no real U.S. critical mineral policy.

Can U.S. adapt to CM trade restriction, embargo? Probably not! Need serious mining, processing, and metallurgy— plus trained workforce.

Stockpiles are very low, insufficient supplies.

Stable supply chains —Whose? Where?

Imports from allies? No…they have similar needs…

Can they count on US to mine for export? No.

Yet “friendshoring” is a hopeful new buzzword.

No real national policy for exploration or mining.

No U.S. Bureau of Mines.

EO 13817 a welcome start.