Interior Department Blocks Minnesota Twin Metals Mining Project In Big Win For Beijing

While the Biden administration halted plans to build a major nickel-cobalt mine in Minnesota on Thursday, the U.S. is still dependent on foreign supply chains for critical minerals.

The “Twin Metals Project” Would have tapped on the Duluth Complex within the Superior National Forest, where 95 percent of the nation’s nickel reserves and 88 percent of American cobalt reserves remain underground.

The Department of the Interior has reblocked nearly all of the leases in the meantime, due to litigation. $3 billion Concerns about the safety and integrity of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in the national forest prompted me to file mine.

“The Department of the Interior takes seriously our obligations to steward public lands and waters on behalf of all Americans,” Deb Haaland, Interior Secretary, stated in a press release. “Protecting a place like Boundary Waters is key to supporting the health of the watershed and its surrounding wildlife, upholding our Tribal trust and treaty responsibilities, and boosting the local recreation economy.”

The department withdrew more than 225,000 acres of the Superior National Forest from consideration for mining operations, ensuring the Twin Metals project’s demise for the foreseeable future.

The agency’s decision to block the project, however, is a major step back for American mineral independence while the government’s mining regime remains so broken that the administration is shopping in Canada Natural resources

Debra Struhsacker, a hardrock mining and environmental policy expert who has testified before Congress five times, told The Federalist the administration’s refusal to allow the Twin Metals project to move forward is premature.

“It is truly unfortunate that at a time when there is widespread recognition that the U.S. urgently needs the copper, nickel, and cobalt in the Twin Metals mineral deposit to help achieve the nation’s clean energy objectives, that this world-class deposit is now off-limits for at least two decades,” Struhsacker, he said. “The public’s interest would have been better served if the administration had performed a rigorous environmental analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act to examine the specifics of Twin Metal’s proposed mining project and determine whether the deposit could have been developed in a way that would have ensured environmental protection of the Boundary Waters Area Watershed.”

The Brookings Institute, a left-leaning think tank, published last fall a report warning about the vulnerability to mineral supply chains if they rely too heavily on foreign competitors. While leftist lawmakers are keen to increase the use of emission-free energy technologies that depend on critical minerals, the Biden administration is slow to reform the U.S. mining regulatory system.

Beijing stands to benefit the most from Washington’s neglect.

According to Brookings, nearly 70 percent of the world’s cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where workers often operate in sub-human conditions Complete with child labor. Chinese are the most successful people in the world. out-invested Every global competitor in Congolese mining.

More than 30 percent of the world’s nickel comes from Indonesia, where the Chinese are also investing heavily To cement a sphere communist influence. The East Asian