Manchin says “major strides” made in critical mineral permitting after debt limit deal

Senator Joe Manchin said that “major strides” had been made in terms of improving permitting for critical mineral projects, following the debt ceiling deal agreed in Congress this month.

The West Virginia Democrat told the Benchmark Gigafactories USA conference that the “environmental community has to come to grips with reality. We have to do the mining. We have to do the processing. We can do it. We have to embrace it.”

The remarks come following the inclusion of permitting reforms in the debt ceiling agreement passed by Congress last month, including putting a time limit on environmental reviews of major infrastructure projects.

The agreement sets a two year time limit on Environmental Impact Statements for projects. It also streamlines permitting for energy storage projects.

The bill also approved permits for the Mountain Valley gas pipeline in Manchin’s home state.

Permitting reform is a key part of boosting US critical mining and processing this decade. The US is forecast to account for just 3.4% of lithium chemicals production globally in 2030 and less than 0.5% in each of refined cobalt, nickel sulphate, and flake graphite production, according to Benchmark.

Automakers call for permitting reform

Automakers including General Motors and Volkswagen told the Benchmark conference that permitting reform was needed to increase the domestic mining and processing of those minerals.

“Obviously Congress made a first attempt, which I think is a very important attempt, but permitting reform has to continue. And we have to continue to press that advantage,” Craig Glidden, executive vice president at GM, said.

Donald Davidson, senior manager for public policy and strategy at Volkswagen America, said that permitting reform could work “hand in glove” with the critical mineral mining incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, which have no end date.

Last month South32’s Hermosa manganese project was included in the government’s “FAST-41” permitting process, which puts the project on a public dashboard to help increase the transparency of the process.

Pat Risner, president of the Hermosa project, told the Benchmark conference that the Fast-41 process was a “rigorous process” where the company had to demonstrate the importance to the nation of the project.

But he called it an “important tool” for speeding up the process.

Permitting reform bill

Alex Jacquez, special assistant to the President for Economic Development and Industrial Strategy, told the Benchmark conference that the government needed to make permitting “more efficient.”

“We need to make it more efficient how we permit in the United States,” he said. “I think some of that is on government processes, but certainly some of that is on resources … It’s about working with the private sector, working with states and localities … We need more. We need to go further.”

The US Department of the Interior is focused on updating mining regulations and laws, including driving efficiencies in the permitting system, he said.

One of the main causes of delays is litigation, Jacquez said. There was a lot of work being done in terms of equity sharing with communities and getting them involved early on in a project, he said.

There were a “number of proposals” that the administration would like to see in a permitting reform bill and it would publish a report this month, Jacquez added.

Reform is needed to “ensure that we are upholding our bedrock environmental standards but also moving the project forward in a timely and consistent manner,” he said.

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