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Power Democrats Government United States

US President Invokes Emergency Authority Prioritizing Pursuit of EV Battery Minerals (cnbc.com) 199

U.S. president Joe Biden "will invoke the Defense Production Act to encourage domestic production of minerals required to make batteries for electric vehicles and long-term energy storage," reports CNBC.

"It will also help the U.S. minimize dependence on foreign supply chains." The president's order could help companies receive government funding for feasibility studies on projects that extract materials, including lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite and manganese, for EV production.

The Defense Production Act, established by President Harry Truman during the Cold War, allows the president to use emergency authority to prioritize the development of specific materials for national production.... The administration also said it's reviewing further uses of the law to "secure safer, cleaner, and more resilient energy for America."

The transportation sector is one of the largest contributors to U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, representing about one-third of emissions every year. The transition away from gas vehicles to EVs is considered critical to combating human-caused climate change....

The administration in February unveiled a plan to allocate $5 billion to states to fund EV chargers over five years as part of the bipartisan infrastructure package.

The White House said in a statement the move would reduce America's reliance on China and other countries "for the minerals and materials that will power our clean energy future."
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US President Invokes Emergency Authority Prioritizing Pursuit of EV Battery Minerals

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  • by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Saturday April 02, 2022 @12:53PM (#62411114)

    After decades of mining being super un-popular, looks like mining is cool again.

    Maybe even cool enough that mining permits will no longer be slow-walked as they have over the past few decades...

    The thing is, it takes a long, long time to ramp up mines and it will not be enough really to meet battery metals needs for some time to come. Not even close to meeting needs for expressed desires to have all cars be electric in a short timeframe.

    Tesla was super wise to lock in all the contracts they did early on for various minerals, other companies are going to struggle.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Are there any big American battery tech companies? I know Tesla makes Panasonic cells in its factory, I mean a company that has its own technology.

      I heard that GM is developing battery tech. Is it their own and are the producing it at scale?

      • Are there any big American battery tech companies? I know Tesla makes Panasonic cells in its factory, I mean a company that has its own technology.

        Actually, now Tesla makes it's own batteries. Tesla had bought a battery company [electrek.co] invested in it's own R&D and now owns the patent on tabless batteries [medium.com] as well as other improvements. [electrek.co]

        So now Panasonic will be manufacturing Tesla batteries [electrek.co] in it's own factories.

      • Tesla has its own technology for the new 4680 cells, currently being produced in their Kato Rd facility and in a few months in Austin.

        Beyond that, no domestic companies are at industrial production levels with their own technology. Quantum Scape and a few others claim to be about 2 years out from industrial production, but I am guessing that it will be more like 5 years.

      • Are there any big American battery tech companies?

        I'm not sure, I've been more focused on the raw material angle, so rare earth miners and the like (like Energy Fuels [energyfuels.com], disclaimer I am a shareholder but I think the company is awesome and they had a push to produce rare earth materials before it was popular).

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Mspangler ( 770054 )

      We'll see if he is willing to tell the environmentalists to go away.

      I was a victim of Clinton, Gore, and Babbitt's war on mining. I had to change industries when the mineral extraction jobs went away. Several universities closed down their mining and extractive metallurgy programs. And just a couple years ago Washington's two senators were very proud a a bill that banned not just mining, but even prospecting for mineral deposits in a large part of the Cascades because the Seattle Elite might want to take a

      • Not to mention that a half-ton battery requires the refining of 250 tons of ore.

        Per car. All diesel.

      • by HiThere ( 15173 )

        I certainly hope he's not. But there needs to be some way to handle that kind of situation. Ideally it would involve creating a "new safe space" for the endangered species, and then making sure that it could survive there.

        That said, mining is not "cool". It's necessary, which is a very different thing.

      • Maybe some people value pristine wilderness over mineral rights?

        • Maybe some people value pristine wilderness over mineral rights?

          Then they are welcome to live there, as Nature intended. Not drive a Tesla to a coffee place, and write anti-corporate shitposts on their newest Macbook.

    • A lot of US mines were idled, but they are still there, so getting them started up will take a lot less time than building an entirely new mine. It is unfortunate that politicians have only recently discovered the necessity of not relying on other nations for mineral production. Hopefully this new-found awareness will extend to manufacturing as well.

  • by RightwingNutjob ( 1302813 ) on Saturday April 02, 2022 @12:59PM (#62411122)

    and rule by decree.

    While I am all in favor of federal policies that streamline and encourage the development of domestic mineral extraction and heavy industry, I am not in at all in favor of using emergency powers to accomplish a goal that rightly needs to be done with legislation.

    Covid vaccines one could reasonably argue justified use of DPA because it was an actual emegency in the sense that it was killing people.

    Climate change...not so much. To the extent it actually threatens any American lives in an unambiguously attributable fashion (hint: not really), it is both slow-moving rather than an emergent situation, and its acute effects can be mitigated by other means that don't involve presidential decrees (more accurate flood maps that don't undervalue risk of insuring coastal properties, tax incentives for resilient roads and power lines, etc).

    Loosening the definition of "emegency" to mean "$political_agenda is stalled because I'm a bad negotiator/communicator/lobbyist" is not at all a good way to govern.

    • by waspleg ( 316038 )

      Trump did declare an emergency for CV19 ... in March 2020 [archives.gov] before he was downplaying shit and saying it would go away on its own. [factcheck.org]

      there are a lot of executive orders from all sides. [federalregister.gov]

      But, only one has done shit like this. [apnews.com]

      WASHINGTON (AP) â" The day he declared the COVID-19 pandemic a national emergency, President Donald Trump made a cryptic offhand remark.

      âoeI have the right to do a lot of things that people donâ(TM)t even know about,â he said at the White House.

      Trump wasnâ(TM)t just crowing. Dozens of statutory authorities become available to any president when national emergencies are declared. They are rarely used, but Trump last month stunned legal experts and others when he claimed â" mistakenly â" that he has âoetotalâ authority over governors in easing COVID-19 guidelines.

      That prompted 10 senators to look into how sweeping Trump believes his emergency powers are.

      They have asked to see this administrationâ(TM)s Presidential Emergency Action Documents, or PEADs. The little-known, classified documents are essentially planning papers.

      The documents donâ(TM)t give a president authority beyond whatâ(TM)s in the Constitution. But they outline what powers a president believes that the Constitution gives him to deal with national emergencies. The senators think the documents would provide them a window into how this White House interprets presidential emergency powers.

      âoeWhen somebodyâ(TM)s the president of the United States, the authority is total,â Trump said, causing a backlash from some governors and legal experts. Trump later tweeted that while some people say itâ(TM)s the governors, not the presidentâ(TM)s decision, âoeLet it be fully understood that this is incorrect.â

      Trump later backtracked on his claim of âoetotalâ authority and agreed that states have the upper hand in deciding when to end their lockdowns. But it was just the latest from a president who has been stretching existing statutory authorities âoeto, if not beyond, their breaking point,â said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Gravis Zero ( 934156 )

      Climate change...not so much.

      Climate change is an emergency unlike any we have faced before. It might as well be a giant meteor and you are saying no effort should be taken to push it off course because it hasn't killed anyone. As more time passes, it becomes more and more difficult to push that giant meteor off course.

      Now, we've pasted the point where we can stop the giant meteor from hitting the planet but are still trying to avoid a direct strike. Despite all this, you idiots are still saying, "it's no big deal" as if billions of

  • by Anonymous Coward

    So first we'll need to strip mine to acquire the insane volume of material we'll need to produce the batteries in the first place. Then we'll need new electric generation solutions which don't use carbon. And still, everyone hates nuclear.

    Ya. This is gonna go great. But hey! We're "saving the planet!".

    • Nuclear. Yep, nuclear. People will accept it when the other option is to freeze in the dark.

      And electric trains ... you can power an EV from an overhead wire for basically an unlimited distance without batteries. Then use cars and trucks with much smaller batteries for the last 50-100 miles.

      The Russians and Ukrainians fundamentally have the right model -- build dense cities and towns, leave rural areas rural, use electrified rail for longer distances between them.

      • And electric trains ... you can power an EV from an overhead wire for basically an unlimited distance without batteries.

        Uh huh. Someone get this poster a detailed map of the US. Showing the impracticality of his "wire".

        • by HiThere ( 15173 )

          It's not really that impractical, but it would be very expensive and require lots of on-going maintenance. It might also need to be DC rather than AC, unless you're going to hang it high enough to minimize interaction with the ground.

          OTOH, if the goal is to charge batteries, you could do that with solar plants in the middle of various deserts. (If you insist that it work at night, look into thermal storage. I think there's one in the Mojave that would be a good model with a bit of fine tuning.)

          • 25kV AC electrification is pretty much normal worldwide (even in the Northeastern US). The usual location for overhead wires (1-2 m above the top of the train) is also high enough to prevent interaction with the ground.
            • by HiThere ( 15173 )

              The problem, though, isn't the Northeastern US, but rather the stretch between the Mississippi and the Sierra Nevadas. That's a long enough distance that losses become more important. Of course an alternative is to put generators at various points. My geography isn't good enough to pick points in there beyond Kansas City. Or you could go the Southern route, where there are several cities. I'm not sure about the Northern route. It used to work, but I'm not sure that the population hasn't decreased. I

  • by MrL0G1C ( 867445 ) on Saturday April 02, 2022 @01:02PM (#62411130) Journal

    I guess they didn't hear that you can get all you need from geothermal... https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org] (I'm still skeptical about this)

    • Wow. I saw that article earlier but didn't look at the numbers. They say a single geothermal plant could produce almost enough lithium to meet current US lithium demand. If that turns out true, then it's amazing.

      • by drhamad ( 868567 )
        It's not so much true-vs-false as the technology doesn't exist. They're in a testing phase and with a long way to go before it scales. It might someday be a savior - or it might not. But it's not anything in the short term.
  • The Biden Administration makes a lot of good decisions. But, of course, President Biden is often sloppy when he initially talks about those decisions.
    • Also they tend to be sloppy about actually implementing those decision.

      I do admire the current president in his steadfastness in keeping us from war.

      • I do admire the current president in his steadfastness in keeping us from war.

        Just like his predecessor (you know, the administration that actually negotiated the Afghan Withdrawl that Biden was - according to his own statements - legally and morally obligated to do)...

        • Yes, his reticence to start war is something I appreciated about Trump, as well. All things considered, he wasn't the worst president of the century.

  • So our green energy future is going to be secured by subsidizing mining companies trying to extract cobalt and nickel and whatnot?
    • by HiThere ( 15173 )

      Sorry, but that was already happening. What this does is incentivize the moving of the process into the US. This will be more expensive, but will probably actually be a lot more environmentally friendly.

      OTOH, environmentally friendly is not the same as "low carbon". They're related, but sure not identical. If mining wastes aren't properly handled they can be immensely environmentally destructive at a local level. (Even if they are properly handled they aren't exactly benign. So far. What we really ne

  • Apparently (Score:2, Insightful)

    by kenh ( 9056 )

    Apparently sinking poll numbers and rising gas prices constitute a "National Emergency"... Good to know.

  • by JackAxe ( 689361 ) on Saturday April 02, 2022 @04:28PM (#62411614)
    Biden's administration canceled its lease right when they got into office.

    https://www.kvrr.com/2022/01/2... [kvrr.com]
  • So of course, all this emergency mining will be net zero carbon and done without fossil fuels right?

    • You should be able to build thousands or millions of EVs from running a few hundred ICE vehiclea at a mine.

      Besides, it is a chicken and egg problem. You will need to transport the materials to make EVs to transport the materials in a non-ICE way.

  • "It will also help the U.S. minimize dependence on foreign supply chains."

    If only there had been some sort of US president and accompanying political movement that was interested in minimizing dependence on foreign supply chains.

    These days we're more into killing domestic production of things and then begging dictators to sell us more.

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