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GoGreenNation news

US Agency Review Says Nevada Lithium Mine Can Co-Exist With Endangered Flower

News Feed
Thursday, September 19, 2024

RENO, Nev. (AP) — U.S. land managers said Thursday they've completed a final environmental review of a proposed Nevada lithium mine that would supply minerals critical to electric vehicles and a clean energy future while still protecting an endangered wildflower.“This environmental analysis is the product of the hard work of experts from multiple agencies to ensure that we protect species as we provide critical minerals to the nation,” Bureau of Land Management Director Tracy Stone-Manning said in a statement Thursday.The agency's final environmental impact statement is subject to a 30-day comment period. It's likely to face legal challenges from environmentalists who fear the mine will cause the desert flower Tiehm's buckwheat to go extinct at the only place it exists in the world near the California line halfway between Reno and Las Vegas.The Australian mining company pushing the project said completion of the review is a “significant milestone” in a six-year-long effort to build the Rhyolite Ridge mine. It anticipates production to begin as early as 2028 of the element key to manufacturing batteries for electric vehicles.“Today's issuance not only advances the Rhyolite Ridge project but brings the United States closer to a more secure and sustainable source of domestic critical minerals,” said Bernard Rowe, managing director of Ioneer Ltd.Opponents of the project say it’s the latest example of President Joe Biden's administration running roughshod over U.S. protections for native wildlife, rare species and sacred tribal lands in the name of slowing climate change by reducing reliance on fossil fuels and cutting greenhouse gas emissions.The Fish and Wildlife Service added the 6-inch-tall (15-centimeter-tall) wildflower with yellow and cream-colored blooms to the list of U.S. endangered species on Dec. 14, 2022, citing mining as the biggest threat to its survival.The bureau said Thursday the mine could potentially produce enough lithium to supply nearly 370,000 electric vehicles a year. By 2030, worldwide demand for lithium is projected to have grown six times compared to 2020. “The Rhyolite Ridge project represents what we can do when we work together — with industry, states, tribes and stakeholders — to ensure the swift consideration and adaptation of projects to fulfill our energy needs while respecting cultural and ecologically sensitive areas,” said Laura Daniel-Davis, acting deputy secretary of the bureau's parent Interior Department.The bureau said in announcing its completion of the review that details of the final EIS would be published Friday in the Federal Register.The Center for Biological Diversity has been fighting the mine since its inception and has vowed to do whatever it takes to block it.Patrick Donnelly, the center's Great Basin director, criticized the agency for publicly announcing its completion of the review Thursday without including accompanying details of the EIS.“It’s disappointing that the BLM continues to subvert public engagement on this mine by issuing a press release full of platitudes about saving Tiehm’s buckwheat while failing to back up any of its assertions by producing the final environmental analysis,” Donnelly said Thursday.“We know this much: if the final mine plan looks remotely like the draft we saw earlier this year, it will result in the extinction of Tiehm’s buckwheat. We’ve been fighting to save this endangered little wildflower for over five years, and we’re not backing down," he said.The bureau said Ioneer had adjusted its latest blueprint to reduce destruction of critical habitat for the plant, which grows in eight sub-populations that combined cover approximately 10 acres (4 hectares) — an area equal to the size of about eight football fields.“We are eager to get to work in contributing to the domestic supply of critical materials essential for the transition to a clean energy future,” Ioneer Executive Chairman James Calaway said Thursday.Nevada is home to the only existing lithium mine in the U.S. and another is currently under construction near the Oregon line 220 miles (354 kilometers) north of Reno. That Lithium Americas mine at Thacker Pass survived numerous legal challenges from environmentalists and Native American tribes who said it would destroy lands they considered sacred where their ancestors were massacred by U.S. troops in 1865.Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - July 2024

Federal land managers have completed a final environmental review of a proposed Nevada lithium mine they say would help supply minerals critical to electric vehicles and a clean energy future while still protecting an endangered wildflower

RENO, Nev. (AP) — U.S. land managers said Thursday they've completed a final environmental review of a proposed Nevada lithium mine that would supply minerals critical to electric vehicles and a clean energy future while still protecting an endangered wildflower.

“This environmental analysis is the product of the hard work of experts from multiple agencies to ensure that we protect species as we provide critical minerals to the nation,” Bureau of Land Management Director Tracy Stone-Manning said in a statement Thursday.

The agency's final environmental impact statement is subject to a 30-day comment period. It's likely to face legal challenges from environmentalists who fear the mine will cause the desert flower Tiehm's buckwheat to go extinct at the only place it exists in the world near the California line halfway between Reno and Las Vegas.

The Australian mining company pushing the project said completion of the review is a “significant milestone” in a six-year-long effort to build the Rhyolite Ridge mine. It anticipates production to begin as early as 2028 of the element key to manufacturing batteries for electric vehicles.

“Today's issuance not only advances the Rhyolite Ridge project but brings the United States closer to a more secure and sustainable source of domestic critical minerals,” said Bernard Rowe, managing director of Ioneer Ltd.

Opponents of the project say it’s the latest example of President Joe Biden's administration running roughshod over U.S. protections for native wildlife, rare species and sacred tribal lands in the name of slowing climate change by reducing reliance on fossil fuels and cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

The Fish and Wildlife Service added the 6-inch-tall (15-centimeter-tall) wildflower with yellow and cream-colored blooms to the list of U.S. endangered species on Dec. 14, 2022, citing mining as the biggest threat to its survival.

The bureau said Thursday the mine could potentially produce enough lithium to supply nearly 370,000 electric vehicles a year. By 2030, worldwide demand for lithium is projected to have grown six times compared to 2020.

“The Rhyolite Ridge project represents what we can do when we work together — with industry, states, tribes and stakeholders — to ensure the swift consideration and adaptation of projects to fulfill our energy needs while respecting cultural and ecologically sensitive areas,” said Laura Daniel-Davis, acting deputy secretary of the bureau's parent Interior Department.

The bureau said in announcing its completion of the review that details of the final EIS would be published Friday in the Federal Register.

The Center for Biological Diversity has been fighting the mine since its inception and has vowed to do whatever it takes to block it.

Patrick Donnelly, the center's Great Basin director, criticized the agency for publicly announcing its completion of the review Thursday without including accompanying details of the EIS.

“It’s disappointing that the BLM continues to subvert public engagement on this mine by issuing a press release full of platitudes about saving Tiehm’s buckwheat while failing to back up any of its assertions by producing the final environmental analysis,” Donnelly said Thursday.

“We know this much: if the final mine plan looks remotely like the draft we saw earlier this year, it will result in the extinction of Tiehm’s buckwheat. We’ve been fighting to save this endangered little wildflower for over five years, and we’re not backing down," he said.

The bureau said Ioneer had adjusted its latest blueprint to reduce destruction of critical habitat for the plant, which grows in eight sub-populations that combined cover approximately 10 acres (4 hectares) — an area equal to the size of about eight football fields.

“We are eager to get to work in contributing to the domestic supply of critical materials essential for the transition to a clean energy future,” Ioneer Executive Chairman James Calaway said Thursday.

Nevada is home to the only existing lithium mine in the U.S. and another is currently under construction near the Oregon line 220 miles (354 kilometers) north of Reno. That Lithium Americas mine at Thacker Pass survived numerous legal challenges from environmentalists and Native American tribes who said it would destroy lands they considered sacred where their ancestors were massacred by U.S. troops in 1865.

Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Photos You Should See - July 2024

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Technique makes complex 3D printed parts more reliable

New research enables computer designs to incorporate the limitations of 3D printers, to better control materials’ performance in aerospace, medical, and other applications.

People are increasingly turning to software to design complex material structures like airplane wings and medical implants. But as design models become more capable, our fabrication techniques haven’t kept up. Even 3D printers struggle to reliably produce the precise designs created by algorithms. The problem has led to a disconnect between the ways a material is expected to perform and how it actually works.Now, MIT researchers have created a way for models to account for 3D printing’s limitations during the design process. In experiments, they showed their approach could be used to make materials that perform much more closely to the way they’re intended to.“If you don’t account for these limitations, printers can either over- or under-deposit material by quite a lot, so your part becomes heavier or lighter than intended. It can also over- or underestimate the material performance significantly,” says Gilbert W. Winslow Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Josephine Carstensen. “With our technique, you know what you’re getting in terms of performance because the numerical model and experimental results align very well.”The approach is described in the journal Materials and Design, in an open-access paper co-authored by Carstensen and PhD student Hajin Kim-Tackowiak.Matching theory with realityOver the last decade, new design and fabrication technologies have transformed the way things are made, especially in industries like aerospace, automotive, and biomedical engineering, where materials must reach precise weight-to-strength ratios and other performance thresholds. In particular, 3D printing allows materials to be made with more complex internal structures.“3D printing processes generally give us more flexibility because we don’t have to come up with forms or molds for things that would be made through more traditional means like injection molding,” Kim-Tackowiak explains.As 3D printing has made production more precise, so have methods for designing complex material structures. One of the most advanced computational design techniques is known as topology optimization. Topology optimization has been used to generate new and often surprising material structures that can outperform conventional designs, in some cases approaching the theoretical limits of certain performance thresholds. It is currently being used to design materials with optimized stiffness and strength, maximized energy absorption, fluid permeability, and more.But topology optimization often creates designs at extremely fine scales that 3D printers have struggled to reliably reproduce. The problem is the size of the print head that extrudes the material. If the design specifies a layer to be 0.5 millimeters thick, for instance, and the print head is only capable of extruding 1-millimeter-thick layers, the final design will be warped and imprecise.Another problem has to do with the way 3D printers create parts, with a print head extruding a thin bead of material as it glides across the printing area, gradually building parts layer by layer. That can cause weak bonding between layers, making the part more prone to separation or failure.The researchers sought to address the disconnect between expected and actual properties of materials that arise from those limitations.“We thought, ‘We know these limitations in the beginning, and the field has gotten better at quantifying these limitations, so we might as well design from the get-go with that in mind,” Kim-Tackowiak says.In previous work, Carstensen developed an algorithm that embedded information about the print nozzle size into design algorithms for beam structures. For this paper, the researchers built off that approach to incorporate the direction of the print head and the corresponding impact of weak bonding between layers. They also made it work with more complex, porous structures that can have extremely elastic properties.The approach allows users to add variables to the design algorithms that account for the center of the bead being extruded from a print head and the exact location of the weaker bonding region between layers. The approach also automatically dictates the path the print head should take during production.The researchers used their technique to create a series of repeating 2D designs with various sizes of hollow pores, or densities. They compared those creations to materials made using traditional topology optimization designs of the same densities.In tests, the traditionally designed materials deviated from their intended mechanical performance more than materials designed using the researchers’ new technique at material densities under 70 percent. The researchers also found that conventional designs consistently over-deposited material during fabrication. Overall, the researchers’ approach led to parts with more reliable performance at most densities.“One of the challenges of topology optimization has been that you need a lot of expertise to get good results, so that once you take the designs off the computer, the materials behave the way you thought they would,” Carstensen says. “We’re trying to make it easy to get these high-fidelity products.”Scaling a new design approachThe researchers believe this is the first time a design technique has accounted for both the print head size and weak bonding between layers.“When you design something, you should use as much context as possible,” Kim-Tackowiak says. “It was rewarding to see that putting more context into the design process makes your final materials more accurate. It means there are fewer surprises. Especially when we’re putting so much more computational resources into these designs, it’s nice to see we can correlate what comes out of the computer with what comes out of the production process.”In future work, the researchers hope to improve their method for higher material densities and for different kinds of materials like cement and ceramics. Still, they said their approach offered an improvement over existing techniques, which often require experienced 3D printing specialists to help account for the limitations of the machines and materials.“It was cool to see that just by putting in the size of your deposition and the bonding property values, you get designs that would have required the consultation of somebody who’s worked in the space for years,” Kim-Tackowiak says.The researchers say the work paves the way to design with more materials.“We’d like to see this enable the use of materials that people have disregarded because printing with them has led to issues,” Kim-Tackowiak says. “Now we can leverage those properties or work with those quirks as opposed to just not using all the material options we have at our disposal.”

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Energy Department plans to claw back $13B in green funds

The Energy Department is planning to claw back $13 billion in unspent climate funds, it announced Wednesday. In a press release, the department said that it plans to "return more than $13 billion in unobligated funds initially appropriated to advance the previous Administration’s wasteful Green New Scam agenda." The press release did not specify exactly where the...

The Energy Department is planning to claw back $13 billion in unspent climate funds, it announced Wednesday.  In a press release, the department said that it plans to "return more than $13 billion in unobligated funds initially appropriated to advance the previous Administration’s wasteful Green New Scam agenda." The press release did not specify exactly where the money would have otherwise gone or what it will be used for now, if anything. Spokespeople for the Energy Department did not immediately respond to The Hill's request for additional information. Asked about the money during the New York Times's Climate Forward event on Wednesday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the funds "hadn't been assigned to projects yet" but that they were aimed at subsidizing more wind and solar energy, as well as electric vehicles.  The Trump administration has repeatedly sought to curtail spending on renewable energy — and set up barriers that hamper its deployment — while trying to expedite fossil fuels and nuclear power.  The Energy Department has made several attempts to cut climate spending, including previous funding recissions.  The Environmental Protection Agency has separately sought to rescind billions of its own climate spending that was issued under the Biden administration. 

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States get a blueprint to speed up heat-pump adoption

States are ramping up efforts to get residents to switch from fossil-fuel-fired heating systems to all-electric heat pumps. Now, they’ve got a big new tool kit to pull from. Last week, the interagency nonprofit Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management, or NESCAUM, released an 80-page action plan laying…

Heat pumps are slowly catching on. In the U.S., the units outsold gas furnaces by their biggest-ever margin last year, but their share of the market is still modest. Citing data from the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute, a trade association, Levin said that in 2021, heat pumps accounted for about 25% of the combined shipments of gas furnaces, heat pumps, and air conditioners, the three largest reported HVAC categories. In 2024, they’d risen to about 32%. “No matter how you look at it, there are still a lot of gas furnaces being sold, there are still a lot of one-way central air-conditioners being sold — all of which could really become heat pumps,” Levin said. Produced in consultation with state agencies, environmental justice organizations, and technical and policy experts, the NESCAUM report lays out a diverse set of more than 50 strategies — both carrots and sticks — covering equity and workforce investments, obligations to reduce carbon, building standards, and utility regulation. A wide range of decision-makers, often in collaboration, can pull these levers — from utility regulators to governor’s offices, state legislatures, and energy, environment, labor, and economic development agencies. Here are six recommendations from the report that stand out. Make heat pumps more accessible to lower-income and renter households. A number of barriers need to be overcome to make heat pumps available to these groups, who often struggle to afford the appliances or lack the autonomy to install them. For example, contractors can’t put heat pumps in homes with hazards like mold, lead, asbestos, and rotten beams, but the process to address these problems can itself cost tens of thousands of dollars. Philadelphia’s Built to Last program coordinates aid to carry out these necessary pre-electrification repairs. On the other side of the country, California is launching a program this fall to install heat pumps in qualifying low- and moderate-income homes — for free. Notably, owners of low-income multifamily buildings can also use the program to upgrade their tenants’ heating systems, but they must agree to keep rent from increasing more than 3% per year for up to 10 years after the project.Set an all-electric standard for new buildings. States have the ability to establish the minimum health, safety, and energy standards that developers must adhere to. New York recently became the first state to require that most new buildings be electric only, making heat pumps the default heating appliances. The rules withstood a legal challenge in July and take effect on Dec. 31.Use building performance standards to encourage heat pumps in existing structures. Such standards require building owners to meet specific annual limits on energy use or carbon emissions and bring them down over time, or face penalties. Several states and cities have already developed these rules. Maryland, for one, stipulates that owners of most edifices 35,000 square feet or greater must report their CO2 emissions starting this year, hit standards by 2030, and fully ditch fossil-fueled appliances by 2040.Leverage emissions rules that improve air quality and protect public health. For example, in 2023, the San Francisco Bay Area air district, home to more than 7 million people, set landmark rules requiring that new residential water and space heaters don’t spew health-harming nitrogen oxides, starting in 2027 and 2029, respectively. Heat pumps fit the bill. Switching to the tech nationwide could avert more than 2,600 premature deaths annually, according to electrification advocacy nonprofit Rewiring America.Push utilities to deliver clean heat.States can require utilities to slash emissions and electrify buildings. For example, in 2021, Colorado adopted a first-in-the-nation clean-heat law doing just that. Lawmakers also mandated that utilities file their implementation plans for approval. In 2024, regulators greenlit a $440 million proposal from Xcel Energy, the state’s largest utility, which included electrifying 200,000 homes with heat pumps by 2030. 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After years of failed attempts, California lawmakers have cleared the way to create an electricity-trading market that would stretch across the U.S. West. Advocates say that could cut the region’s power costs by billions of dollars and support the growth of renewable energy. But opponents say it may make the state’s climate and clean-energy policies vulnerable to the Trump administration. Those are the fault lines over AB 825, also known as the ​“Pathways Initiative” bill, which was signed into law by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sept. 19 as part of a major climate-and-energy legislative package. The law will grant the California Independent System Operator (CAISO), which runs the transmission grid and energy markets in most of the state, the authority to collaborate with other states and utilities across the West to create a shared day-ahead energy-trading regime. Passage of this bill won’t create that market overnight — that will take years of negotiations. CAISO’s board wouldn’t even be allowed to vote on creating the market until 2028. But for advocates who’ve been working for more than a decade on plans for a West-wide regional energy market, it’s a momentous advance. ​“We’ve shot the starting gun,” said Brian Turner, a director at clean-energy trade group Advanced Energy United, which was outspoken in support of the legislation. Today, utilities across the Western U.S. trade energy via bilateral arrangements — a clunky and inefficient way to take advantage of cheaper or cleaner power available across an interconnected transmission grid. An integrated day-ahead trading regime could drive major savings for all participants — nearly $1.2 billion per year, according to a 2022 study commissioned by CAISO. That integrated market could create opportunities for solar power from California and the Southwest and wind power from the Rocky Mountains and Pacific Northwest to be shared more efficiently, driving down energy costs and increasing reliability during extreme weather. Lower-cost power more readily deliverable to where it’s needed could also reduce consumers’ monthly utility bills — a welcome prospect at a time of soaring electricity rates. The regional energy market plan is backed by a coalition that includes clean-energy trade groups such as Advanced Energy United and the American Clean Power Association; environmental groups including the Sierra Club, Union of Concerned Scientists, and the Natural Resources Defense Council; business groups including the California Chamber of Commerce and the Clean Energy Buyers Association; and the state’s major utilities. It also has the backing of U.S. senators representing California, Oregon, and Washington, all states with strong clean-energy goals. Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris, a Democrat who authored AB 825, said in a statement following its passage that it ​“will protect California’s energy independence while opening the door to new opportunities to build and share renewable power across the West.” But consumer advocates, including The Utility Reform Network, Consumer Watchdog, and Public Citizen, say the bill as passed fails to protect that energy independence. The Center for Biological Diversity and the Environmental Working Group share their concerns. They fear a new trading market will allow fossil fuel–friendly states like Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming to push costly, dirty coal power into California — and give an opening to the Trump administration to use the federal government’s power over regional energy markets to undermine the state’s clean-energy agenda. What a Western energy market could achieve The arguments for a day-ahead energy-trading market can be boiled down to a simple concept, Turner said — bigger is better. Being able to obtain power from across the region could reduce the amount of generation capacity that individual utilities have to build. And tapping into energy supplies spanning from the Pacific Ocean to the Rocky Mountains would allow states undergoing heat waves and winter storms to draw on power from parts of the region that aren’t under the same grid stress, improving resiliency against extreme weather. A Western trading market could also serve as a starting point for even more integrated activity between the dozens of utilities in the region that now plan and build power plants and transmission grids in an uncoordinated way. A 2022 study commissioned by Advanced Energy United found that a regional energy organization could yield $2 billion in annual energy savings, enable up to 4.4 gigawatts of additional clean power, and create hundreds of thousands of permanent jobs. For advocates of a Western market, the chief challenge has been to design a structure that doesn’t give up California’s control over its own energy and climate policies, but allows other states and their utilities a share of decision-making authority over how the market works. Taking a lead on that design work has been the West-Wide Governance Pathways Initiative, a group of utilities, state regulators, and environmental and consumer advocates.

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