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Wallace, Idaho - Mineweb's
inestimable Dorothy Kosich reported Thursday that Colorado Republican Mike
Coffman has reintroduced the Rare Earths Supply-Chain Technology and Resources
Transformation Act of 2011 (RESTART Act) this week in
the Congress.
According to friend Kosich: "Coffman's comprehensive
legislation will put in place mechanisms to help U.S. manufacturers meet
their needs for rare earth metals and ensures U.S. national security needs
are met in the near term."
Continues Kosich:
"The legislation directs federal agencies to expedite their
permitting processes in order to increase the exploration and development of
domestic rare earth elements, without waiting environmental laws, and
establishes a multi-agency task force to carry out this process.
"The bill would also build a Defense Logistics Agency (DLA)
rare earth inventory-where the DLA would enter into long-term supply
contracts and make the supplies available for purchase to federal government
contracts-to generate a domestic market and facilitate the domestic sourcing
of rare earth alloys and magnets.
"Federal-government backed loans would be made available to
start production should lending from capital markets not be made available
under the terms of the legislation.
"The measure would also require the various U.S. Cabinet
Secretaries to appoint executive agents for rare earths."
It's about bloody time. But we're not sure the average
congressional nit-wit grasps that we are utterly at the mercy of China,
Russia and unfriendly countries in Africa for some two dozen rare earth and
critical metals, or why he or she should care. Well, cell phones, flat-screen
TVs, computers, jet engines, automobiles and a plethora of manufacturing
process all run on these metals and they do not run without them.
Federal policy has been a study of enlightenment on the issue of
critical metals. A decade ago the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency buried
20,000 tons of indium-rich flue dust collected by the Bunker Hill smelter in
nearby Kellogg right next to a river and inside an aquifer. The stash was in
hot demand: Teck Cominco in Canada wanted it; so did the Chinese government,
and so did Sunshine Mining Co. and Wyoming-based Williams Metals Industries,
which went so far as to purchase an Australian-developed process to separate
pure indium and pure lead out of the stuff, with an arsenic-based wood
preservative left over.
If you've got an LCD-screen watch or TV set, you're gazing at
indium. There was enough indium in the Bunker Hill smelter dust to provide a
year's supply of indium for the entire planet. But in its infinite wisdom,
instead of selling it to willing buyers, the EPA mixed into this pile a heap
of mercury and creosote and buried it in a substandard disposal area it would
have sued a private company for constructing - again in an aquifer next to
one of the headwaters of the Columbia River.
So here is where we find ourselves: Wholly dependent on foreign
and frequently unfriendly sources of materials basic to our society. The
irony is, rare-earths aren't particularly rare. It's just that they're
scattered around in the earth's crust in relatively uneconomic,
unconcentrated levels. They are plentiful here in the United Snakes of
America. It's just that between the EPA and the Green Movement, you can't
mine them or recover them. So we go overseas for them, just like we do for
oil. We've got gazillions of tons and barrels of oil, but the same EPA and
Green Movement won't let us develop the reserves in the U.S.
China has an abundance of rare earths because it has an
abundance of smelters, which collect the same sort of flue dust that Bunker
Hill collected. Asia accounted for just 2 percent of the smelting capacity on
this planet two decades ago. It now smelts more than half the world's supply
of precious and base metals, and the detritus recovered from its bag-houses
fuels the rare-earth supply.
Meanwhile, the blast furnaces at Bunker Hill will never be
re-lit; there is no Bunker Hill smelter anymore, and it used to account for
about 25 percent of this nation's needs for lead and zinc, and 10 percent of
its silver. HudBay is shuttering its smelting and refining operations in Flin
Flon in Manitoba and White Pine, Michigan. Asarco permanently closed its El
Paso smelter in 2009, which had sat idle for a decade before that. AS&R's
Tacoma copper smelter is in ruins. Nobody ships to East Helena anymore. We're
basically left, on this continent, with the Horn smelter in Quebec, now owned
by the Swiss, Teck's smelter in Trail, B.C., and St. Joe's remaining smelter
in Missouri, now North America's largest lead refiner.
Without smelters we don't get rare earths. We also don't get
common base metals like lead, zinc and copper. Without them we also don't get
silver. It is important to understand that the this decade's run-up in silver,
gold, copper and other metal prices has as much to do with who is producing
the stuff as who is not.
It seems all the United Snakes of America produces any more is
paper money, which in itself may become a critical material as the Green
Movement shuts down the timber industry.
It will be 40 years ago this coming August that the United
Snakes officially declared bankruptcy, as artfully detailed by Chris
Weber this week, who wonders if we even own any gold anymore. It's when the
U.S. reneged on its promise to redeem U.S. Dollars in gold, much to the
chagrin of our old allies in Europe, who had trusted us. It was when U.S.
Treasury Secretary John Connally famously (or apocryphally?) said to France,
"The dollar is our currency, but it's your problem."
No wonder Charles De Gaulle kicked NATO out of France the next
day. Despite its famous tolerance of all that is weird, the Republic of
France does not suffer tramps and fools lightly. Nor need it. We stiffed
them, plain and simple, and now we are staring down a very dirty barrel.
But we digress. Back to Rep. Mike Coffman's proposed
legislation. What metal is NOT critical, or rare, to an
industrialized nation that consumes them all? That is at the mercy of
governments, sheikdoms and principalities hostile to it? That is at the mercy
of nations it has smart-assedly stiffed? Remember that nasty Oil Embargo in
the mid-1970s, when OPEC was formed? Know why that happened? It was because
the Arabs re-priced oil to sync with the re-pricing of gold the U.S. had
instigated. The Arabs just wanted measure-for-measure, which we are pretty
sure is a Christian command.
We had better adopt Congressman Coffman's proposal in short
order, but expand it to include every other metal, mineral and fossil fuel we
possess but lack the will to produce. Include silver, copper, zinc, lead, and
"dirty" gold. Every time we fire a cruise missile at Libya, we burn up 15 kilograms of silver in its wiring.
But we don't make silver here anymore.
Wars start on Sunday mornings. It takes a decade to build a
silver mine. Rep.
Coffman, are you listening?
David Bond
Editor : The Silver Valley Mining
Journal
www.silverminers.com
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