Harnessing Technology, Energy, and Natural Resources to Transform Industries

Overview

Mines, farms, forests, and the supply chains that connect them are critical to powering the innovation economy and fueling America’s national laboratories, universities, factories, and utilities. Without them, none of the other industries that America aspires to build and maintain would be possible. Leaders in the Mountain West’s natural resource production and agriculture industries sat on this panel to discuss the importance of these fields to reindustrialization and innovation, the hurdles they face, and how to overcome them.

Key Session Insights

Idaho and the Mountain West have a rich history in mining, agriculture, and forestry. Today, technology is driving them to new heights. It was these industries that drove the state’s early growth, attracting gold rush miners and homesteaders to begin carving out a new life in the 19^th century. Fast forward to the 21^st century, and these same industries continue to be major economic drivers in the region. According to the Administrator of the Idaho Office of Energy & Mineral Resources Mr. Rich Stover, Idaho and the broader Mountain West have an enormous advantage due to the natural resources present. This advantage is amplified by world-leading research into the technologies that make these critical industries more productive, efficient, clean, and safe.

Partners in the region are fully aware of the critical role new technologies will play in natural resource production in the years to come. Vice President for Research & Technology Transfer at the Colorado School of Mines Dr. Walter Copan explained how his school is partnering with institutions across the region, including Idaho National Laboratory, to create the technologies that will move the mining industry forward. Being a world leader in mineral extraction, his school is already leading the development of AI, better communications, and quantum sensing that promises to revolutionize the industry. But beyond gains in efficiency and productivity, he also raised the need for better reprocessing technologies, allowing for a more closed-loop mineral system.

The need for mineral reprocessing is not borne only out of a desire to reduce the environmental impact of mining. As the energy transition continues, the amount of materials required to sustain it will balloon. Approximately 700 million metric tons of copper have been mined in human history; if formed into a cube, it would be a quarter of a mile on a side. Copan believes that, in the next twenty years, we will need again as much copper to sustain the energy transition. The scale of the problem is almost beyond comprehension.

Despite its critical importance, the mining sector faces many man-made hurdles. As Executive Vice President of the Idaho Mining Association Mr. Benjamin Davenport reminds us, even those who oppose mining as an industry are consuming its products. This public opposition has led to difficulties permitting mines, hamstringing the industry’s ability to meet demand. These difficulties are only increased by the geological reality that miners cannot choose where to mine; they must go where the minerals are. If there is not enough domestic supply, we will be forced to import materials from abroad. As Davenport put it, we can rely on potential adversaries and “kids in the Congo,” or we can figure out how to produce these inputs ourselves.

Much of the opposition to mining comes from a perception of it as a dirty, environmentally harmful, and unsafe industry. But today’s mines bear little resemblance to this image. If the industry is to succeed and expand to meet demand, it needs to reach out and talk to people who want the benefits of a clean energy transition but do not want to allow the mining that will make that possible, educating them on how central a robust mineral production system is to that effort.

The agriculture industry is facing a moment of unparalleled risks and opportunities. Director of Government & Public Affairs, J.R. Simplot Company Mr. Ken Dey described the importance of the food production system: “without agriculture, there is no culture.” By 2050, there are expected to be more than nine billion people on the planet, and falling levels of hunger worldwide, while an incredible victory, means the amount of food being produced will go up by 65 percent by then. At the same time, farmland is becoming increasingly scarce; in the past quarter century, Idaho has lost a quarter of its farmland, primarily to development. The same story is playing out worldwide, in some places spurred on faster by desertification thanks to a warming planet. All these factors conspire to place mounting stress on the industry, and on the firms and farmers who sustain it.

Beyond the pressure placed on it by the broader need to feed more people on less land, the agriculture industry also faces supply chain vulnerabilities. Modern food production is dependent on fertilizers to create high yields. These fertilizers are primarily composed of phosphate, which must be mined, leaving food production with many of the same vulnerabilities as the general mining sector. If the United States cannot produce its own fertilizer, it will be reliant on imports from abroad, leaving it critically vulnerable. This problem is compounded by stricter U.S. regulations governing phosphate mining, making it easier for foreign suppliers to undercut domestic producers. For Dey, phosphate and other fertilizer inputs should be on the critical minerals list as much as any rare earth element.

Further pressure is placed on agriculture by public opposition to one of its most powerful tools, GMOs. Strains of crops modified for better yields, resistance to adverse conditions or pests, less need for pesticides, and other desirable traits have massively increased the productivity and resilience of the agriculture sector. While this has traditionally been done via selective breeding, a long and expensive process without guaranteed results, modern bioscience has made this process far faster and easily controllable and allowed for far greater possibilities for modification. Simplot was an early adopter of CRISPR, the modern gene modification technology. However, despite GMOs remarkable benefits, public distrust of the technology has lessened its potential benefits. GMOs are tightly regulated, and broader hesitance by consumers to use them lessens their market value.

The resource industries need a new public image to attract a new kind of worker. While new technologies and techniques are rapidly transforming the ways that resource production industries like mining or agriculture operate, their public image is still often stuck in the past. The image of mining and farming as low-paid, unskilled, dangerous, dirty work remains embedded in popular consciousness. This mental disconnect between perception and reality has enormous implications for these industries as they seek to attract the skilled workers they need.  

The decline in people entering the mining workforce has had a detrimental impact on our ability to train new miners. A lack of demand and emphasis has led to the shuttering of mining schools and bureaus nationwide, leading to a dearth of new entries to the field. Today, half of the mining workforce, or about a quarter of a million workers, are nearing retirement age. While this is a challenge that needs to be overcome, it also presents an opportunity. Reliant on new, technology-driven techniques for their work, mining could be an attractive career path for many new entrants to the workforce at all levels. Ms. Catherine Cantley, Center Director for studio\Blu, a Boise State University-based center for career development and exploration, described how she has had to fight misperceptions that these jobs are low paying, when in fact their salaries can be thirty to forty percent higher than other industries. Further, these industries are requiring greater familiarity with high-tech methods of production, increasing their desirability to new tech-savvy graduates. Cantley and Davenport espoused how today’s food processors and miners are more likely to work in an office supervising machinery or running tests than doing manual labor in a mine or in a processing plant.

Progress is being made in directing students at all levels towards these careers. Dey praised the Governor’s Launch program as a good start, but expected that more steps would be needed, especially in bringing in workers with technical degrees. Copan likened the need for a new partnership between industry and education to the search for Olympic athletes: potential and interest needs to be identified and encouraged at a young age, rather than waiting for them to make a career choice in college or later before making a pitch. The Colorado School of Mines is already engaging with a growing student body, producing half of the country’s mining professionals.

As the panel wrapped up, they made clear thatan innovation economy would be impossible to sustain without food and mined resources. Rather than seeing sectors like mining and agriculture as low-tech laggards divorced from the innovation economy, the United States must prioritize the crucial role they will play in growing our innovation ecosystem.