Regulatory Reality Slows Biden’s Rush Toward an All-Electric Future on America’s Highways

Encouraged by the Biden administration and in the name of combating climate change, America is rushing headlong into electric vehicles. Soon it’s going to hit a wall.The problem isn’t demand. Ford had to stop taking reservations for its new F-150 Lightning within days of the all-electric pickup going on sale last year. Sales of electric cars in America, most of them Teslas, hit a record 200,000 in the first quarter of 2022.The snag is in the supply of raw materials that go into making the batteries that will power all these electric fleets. In the name of environmental regulation, America has all but forsaken its ability to mine and process the minerals — lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, and manganese, primarily — required to make batteries.Australia mines much of the world’s lithium, but two-thirds of it is processed in China and 80 percent of the world’s lithium-ion batteries are made there. Cobalt comes almost exclusively from the Democratic Republic of Congo — from mines owned primarily by Chinese companies — and two-thirds of the world’s supply is processed in China. Manganese and nickel? Also from China: 93 percent and 68 percent, respectively.“I am extremely concerned with China as the gatekeeper of the critical materials we need for everyday life, in addition to the minerals crucial to energy and defense applications,” Senator Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat, said during a recent congressional hearing on the matter.“It makes no sense to remain beholden to bad actors when we have abundant resources and manufacturing know-how here in the United States,” he added.The Biden administration announced last week that it would funnel more than $3 billion into projects aimed at building or retooling battery manufacturing and recycling facilities in America. The funds are from the trillion-dollar infrastructure bill signed last year by the president.The announcement came just weeks after Mr. Biden invoked the Cold War-era Defense Production Act — which gives the president the authority to control domestic industries in an emergency — to encourage domestic production of battery-making minerals.At the same time, however, the administration is unraveling Trump-era efforts to ease some of the regulatory burdens on domestic mining. In April, the Biden White House issued new guidelines requiring extensive environmental impact studies for mining projects under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970. In a letter to regulators about the changes to NEPA, as the 1970 law is commonly known, Katie Sweeney of the National Mining Association said the administration’s move “appears to be more of a kneejerk rush to reversal than a thoughtful assessment of the 2020 changes and whether any of them merit retention.”Ms. Sweeney and other mining industry officials have said the revised regulations amount to a return to the bad old days of hyper-regulation, when getting a new mine approved by state, local, and federal regulators could take between seven and 10 years — at a minimum.As recently as 1973, America was the world’s leading source of lithium. Now, however, the country is down to one operational mine in Nevada.A Canadian company, Lithium Americas, received approval from the Trump administration to tap into the nation’s largest known lithium reserve nearby in Thacker Pass. Permission was granted by the Bureau of Land Management in January 2021, the final Friday of the Trump administration.The project is fully permitted, but environmental groups are still fighting to kill it, and they are using NEPA as their bludgeon. The latest complaint from a group called the Western Watersheds Project says regulators must redo their earlier environmental assessments because they did not take into account 20 RV sites the company wants to put in the area to house some of the construction workers.“BLM must prepare a supplemental National Environmental Policy Act analysis to consider the effects of the main camp on the environment,” the group’s director of energy and mining campaigns, Kelly Fuller, wrote in a letter to the bureau.With some forecasts seeing demand for lithium increasing 40-fold by 2040 as the world moves toward a more electric future — and demand for other minerals needed for batteries increasing 20- to 25-fold — mining executives insist that the best thing the current administration could do is to ease up.“We can either have an efficient NEPA process akin to other world class mining country competitors like Canada and Australia, where mining projects are subject to similar environmental scrutiny, or face growing reliance on foreign sources of minerals,” the National Mining Association’s Ms. Sweeney wrote last month.“Clearly, these minerals will have to come from somewhere and NMA believes it should be the U.S. with its $6.2 trillion of minerals resources, its highly trained and highly compensated workforce, and world-class environmental and safety standards,” she added.

Regulatory Reality Slows Biden’s Rush Toward an All-Electric Future on America’s Highways

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