Rare earth

A new and unprecedented partnership between a federal agency and a multi-national mining company plans to arrange flights next year over southwest Montana’s Boulder Batholith to search from the sky for mineral resources considered vital to national security. They range, A to Z, from aluminum to zirconium and include rare earth metals. Supply-chain snarls have made finding domestic sources for these minerals even more pressing, officials say. And rare earth metals promise to play a key role as the nation moves away from fossil fuels. The partnership, part of the USGS’s Earth MRI initiative, was announced in late October.

The year 2021 will likely be one of the worst for glaciers in southern British Columbia, Alberta, Washington and Montana. To avoid further widespread loss of glaciers in the Earth’s mountainous regions, policy-makers need the courage to commit to meaningful reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.

More than $8.3 billion in water projects alone earmarked for Western states will help pay for programs such as renting water from farmers to send down the Colorado River in extremely dry years, replanting and managing high country forests devastated by wildfires and recycling more water in cities, said Alexander Funk, director of water resources for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. “It’s a really solid step to addressing some of the water resource challenges that we’re seeing in Colorado and other Western states,” Funk said. 

The biggest coal-fired power plant in the country gets all of its coal from Wyoming. A second of its four units is now slated for retirement, halving total capacity before the end of the decade. Three Wyoming mines—Buckskin, Caballo and Eagle Butte—supply most of the millions of short tons of coal burned annually by Georgia’s 3,520-megawatt Robert W. Scherer Power Plant. Last year, roughly 10% of the mines’ combined coal production went to Scherer, according to the EIA.