Business leaders wary of critical mineral subsidies

(The Center Square) — As federal money and private investment pour into critical minerals, Pennsylvania’s potential is great.

The grants that buoy more research to figure out the size of the market in the commonwealth, however, mean some projects are wary of embracing government handouts.

For one leader, efforts that don’t diversify draw suspicion as he doesn’t see a strong future in critical minerals without other energy-focused endeavors.

“One thing we’re trying to avoid is any type of federal subsidies in our project other than the Department of Energy,” said Bill Smith, CEO of Firepoint Energy. The Wyoming-based startup opened a Pennsylvania office in Jefferson County where it plans to make synthetic jet fuel and recover rare earth minerals.

Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia could hold more than $40 billion of the minerals in coal ash sites alone. Elements like lithium, scandium, and others are crucial for the defense and tech industries, but China dominates sourcing and processing. Though technical problems remain, Pennsylvania has drawn attention as a potential domestic source to reshore supply chains.

But Smith warns that neither success nor government assistance is guaranteed.

“It has to be a business business,” he said. “If we can’t make it run as a business, then administration changes or whatever — those subsidies tend to disappear at times.”

Federal subsidies, Smith argued, are in line with defense priorities, making them less liable to disappear unexpectedly. That gives him “some security that this isn’t gonna go away with a change of administration.”

The subsidy opposition isn’t ideological. Instead, it’s risk averse. Getting burned before has taught him a lesson.

“I worked a subsidy program during the Obama administration to make a product to replace coal with a waste product — and we did it, we proved it at a waste coal plant in West Virginia,” Smith said. “We lined up $9 million of subsidies on the books, went to cash them in, and the subsidy disappeared. That's why we’re leery about taking that approach, which a lot of people are taking.”

With Firepoint, Smith wants to make a profit by taking waste coal piles (what’s left over from mining coal) and produce synthesis gas, used as jet fuel.

“The site in Jefferson County has the best percentages of rare earth minerals, aluminum, and lithium of the multiple sites we’ve tested since arriving in Pennsylvania,” Smith explained in a July press release . “On top of the more than $3 billion worth of rare earth minerals and other metals at this location, we expect to produce 15.4 million gallons of clean jet fuel per year from the very same waste coal. We fully expect to produce revenues of at least $101 million in metals and minerals each year."

“It has to be a business, in and of and by itself,” Smith said. “If you just had a rare earth processing company, I don’t think they’d be profitable. We’re talking about ions of an element. But since we’re doing jet fuel, we can pull out alumina, rare earths, hydrogen, and make us money.”

That approach takes the burden off taxpayers, but it also offers the potential for cleaning up the environmental damage left behind by coal mines. Some reclaimed coal waste sites, Smith argued, still produce acid mine drainage.

“Burying them in dirt doesn’t stop anything,” he said. “Acid mine drainage — rainwater filtered through waste coal piles — picks up alumina, sulfur, cobalt, lithium, etc. It’s supposed to be treated once it comes out of the waste coal piles with ponds, but I’ve yet to find a site that’s actually doing that because it’s so expensive.”

A longer-term solution is to eliminate the coal pile.

“If we get rid of these waste coal piles, we stop the acid mine drainage, and the water clears up,” Smith said.

So far, building the project comes at the right time in his eyes, economically and with interest from state officials.

“The reception across the state has been ‘please do this, we want to help you,’” Smith said.