The Policy, People, and Place Impacts of Mining for the Clean Energy Transition in the US

Abstract

To meet the growing demands of the energy transition, we need to rapidly deploy mines to supply the minerals for clean energy technologies. This presents a set of challenges, or tensions, at the energy transition level, policy level, and mine level. This thesis seeks to answer two questions: What are the tensions for mining in the US? How do we decide where to permit these mines given the realities of environmental and community impacts? To address the tensions at the energy transition level, I establish copper, cobalt, nickel, and lithium, or energy transition minerals, as the focus of this thesis. Then, to address policy tensions, I conducted a geospatial analysis and found that 38% of the US’ energy transition mineral resources are on or near difficult to permit lands, with 92.7% of those resources being copper. To understand how these tensions play out in practice, I created three case studies through a series of interviews and pulling public comments. The first case study is of the East Boulder and Stillwater Mines. In this case, stakeholders came together to form a Good Neighbor Agreement, or a legally binding contract between the mine owner and grassroots community organizations. The agreement is an adaptable framework for mine decision making, which shows how stakeholders can work creatively within the tensions of mining for the energy transition. The second case, the Twin Metals Minnesota Case Study, shows how political tensions can introduce risk and uncertainty in the mine permitting process and prevent a mine from moving forward. The third is an Indigenous lands case study centered around the Thacker Pass lithium mine, which illustrates how a tensions framing is critical when the tradeoff framing has historically risked Indigenous sovereignty over their lands. The identified tensions flow into the policy recommendations, which are to: 1. Replicate solutions that maximize gains to stakeholders, 2. Rely on currently underutilized policy options to increase transparency and consolidate review in the permitting process, and 3. Look downstream in the energy transition to learn from newer industries. Taken all together, this thesis tells a story of what types of mines need to be deployed in the US to meet the needs of the clean energy transition, whether and where mines can be deployed under current policy constraints in the US, and how mines are deployed in practice.