In the midst of a partisan permitting reform fight in Washington D.C, a new mining project in Arizona has made history.

The South32 Hermosa project in southern Arizona has become the first critical mineral mine to receive FAST-41 designation. Put simply, this means that the normally arduous permitting process will be expedited for this particular project. FAST-41 was passed in 2015 “to improve the timeliness, predictability, and transparency of the Federal environmental review and authorization process for covered infrastructure projects,” according to the EPA. Since then, it has primarily been used for energy production projects like natural gas pipelines and other infrastructure, not for critical mineral mining.

For those of us who want to build cleaner, faster and compete with China, it’s about time that FAST-41 was applied to domestic mining.

South32 Hermosa, funded by an Australian company, would mine both manganese – which is used in electric vehicle batteries – as well as zinc. It’s important to note that manganese has not been mined in significant amounts in the United States since the 1970’s. Since then, we’ve largely relied on other countries for our supply with only modest domestic production and exports. In 2021, the United States was the world’s ninth-largest importer of manganese and primarily imported the mineral from Gabon, South Africa, Mexico, Brazil, and Ukraine.

[For the love of GOD, do not let the Biden administration find out about this. They’ll stomp all over it. ~ Beege]