Input Stories

It will soon be easier for mining companies to recover critical minerals from waste, thanks to a new Interior Department directive (Reuters, subscription).

What’s going on: Interior Secretary Doug Burgum recently ordered his “department to update guidance on making mine waste recovery projects eligible for federal funding and speed up reviews of plans to recover uranium and other minerals from abandoned mines.”

• Under the order the U.S. Geological Survey will also map and inventory federal mine waste sites.
• Burgum’s directive is the latest move in the administration’s efforts to bolster domestic mining of critical minerals. The global critical minerals industry has long been dominated by China.

What it could mean: Interior “expects the move to attract private investment, support environmental reclamation and boost energy sources.”

• Research has identified sources of zinc, germanium and tellurium, as well as rare earth elements, in closed and operating mines.

Worthless no more: American mining company Freeport-McMoRan “expects to produce 800 million pounds (362,900 metric tons) of copper annually as soon as 2027 by leaching the metal from piles of waste at its mines previously thought to be worthless.”

• Oklahoma lead and zinc mines abandoned in the 1970s “left behind waste rich in zinc and germanium, minerals the U.S. imports, the department said.”
• In Bingham Canyon in Utah, tellurium, critical to defense tech, “can be extracted from tailings created during copper mining.”