Arizona opinion: Arizona’s ‘critical’ opportunity

If it’s not grown, it’s mined.

It’s a simple phrase that boils down the global economy to its most basic components. You can either grow the materials you need, or you must get them from the ground. The iPhone in your hand, the car you drive, your kitchen appliances, needed medical equipment — all come from minerals harvested somewhere on this earth.

The stigma some have placed on mining fails to reflect reality, and it’s costing us here in Arizona.

Much of the popular perception of metal mining in this country invokes outdated cliches that do not represent what the industry has looked like for decades. Long gone are visions of prospectors with pickaxes.

The 21st-century reality looks more like your children’s Minecraft obsession: high-tech remote operations, using joysticks and controllers on automated mining equipment to pull critical minerals out of the ground. Modern mines here at home are state-of-the-art facilities that rely on world-class research. They are highly regulated operations that enhance safety, productivity, and environmental protection. That means an industry safe for its workers, safe for the public, and sustainable for our environment.

In fact, recent national safety data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that you are more likely to suffer a lost-time injury working at a grocery store than working at a metal mine — a safety record we in the domestic mining industry wear as a badge of honor.

The same, however, cannot be guaranteed globally.

Bad actors in the Democratic Republic of Congo and other countries that dominate the critical mineral markets do not share the same values of ethically-sourcing raw materials. News headlines are littered with stories about mining operations using child or forced labor in operations that are pouring additional greenhouse gas emissions and pollutants into the atmosphere.

As the United States and other countries throughout the world ramp up their demand for more electric vehicles and other clean energy sources, the stranglehold on these critical minerals on the global markets by bad actors only imperils our modern way of life.

If we are going to follow through with the demands of the energy transition, we should also demand that the materials required by that transition match the worker values at the core of our national identity. That means mining the materials we cannot do without, here at home.

Arizona can lead that charge.

Our state is blessed with reserves of some of the most in-demand minerals of the 21st century, including copper, zinc, manganese, and others that make up key components of everything from semiconductors to solar panels, to the batteries that will charge our fast-growing fleet of EVs.

One such project — South32’s Hermosa project in Santa Cruz County — could inject at least $1.7 billion in investment into the state to develop critical minerals like zinc and manganese. According to economic projections, such an investment could anchor about one-fifth of the county’s economy as well as support more than 1,000 family-sustaining jobs.

That investment has downstream effects too. For every direct mining job one of these projects in Arizona creates, more than three other indirect jobs are produced in a whole economic ecosystem. You may not know a miner personally, but you most likely know the mechanics servicing their vehicles, the environmental experts safeguarding water runoff, or the food trucks preparing their lunches.

Arizona’s federal, state, and local officials should be diving headfirst into this opportunity.

Demand for these minerals is here to stay. Just like we care where our tomatoes, avocados, and other produce come from, we should care about where and how we make clean energy. Either we dig it ourselves with the worker safety and environmental protections that make our country’s industry world-class, or we leave it to the global bad actors. I know my choice.