UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The United States will need to make dramatic advances to increase its technical- and skilled-labor workforce to power its green energy future and to become less reliant on foreign nations for securing materials used in both everyday devices and critical national security applications. According to the United States Geological Survey, about 80% of these materials are imported from China.

That was the message Barbara Arnold, professor of practice in mining engineering in the Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, told a U.S. congressional committee in September.

“When Congress stopped funding the U.S. Bureau of Mines in 1996, we lost a centralized agency to coordinate U.S. mineral activity,” Arnold said. “Our reliance on foreign sources of minerals accelerated and the numbers of U.S. mining schools has decreased.”

The select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party's Critical Minerals Policy Working Group, led by Rep. Rob Wittman (R-VA) and Rep. Kathy Castor (D-FL), met to address the human capital gaps in the U.S. critical minerals supply chains, focusing on workforce shortages and skills deficits. They explored opportunities to develop a skilled domestic workforce through education, training programs, and strategic partnerships with industry and academia and examined potential policy gaps associated with workforce development.

Experts included Arnold, undergraduate program chair of the mining program at Penn State; Elizabeth Holley, associate professor of mining engineering at the Colorado School of Mines; and Anna Fendley, director of regulatory and state policy for the United Steelworkers.

Arnold, who also testified to U.S. Senate leaders in June, said the U.S. is graduating about half the mining engineers needed to replace a rapidly retiring workforce. She cited half of the nation’s mining workforce is expected to retire by 2029. About 300 mining engineers graduated in the United States in 2020, compared to the approximately 3,000 mining engineers who graduated in China that same year.

In addition to workforce shortages, Arnold pointed to the need for funding the Mining Schools Act to provide funds for recruiting activities and the need to duplicate some of the workforce programs that were recently announced by the Appalachian Regional Commission and the Department of Defense. She said the U.S. needs to develop and implement methods to obtain the needed critical minerals from both traditional mining methods and from reclamation of mining waste sites.

Arnold said many of the rare earth elements and critical minerals needed to manufacture semiconductors, national security devices and other advanced technologies can be found in mine waste. To address these opportunities, Penn State launched the Center for Critical Minerals (C2M) in 2019 to research effective ways of extracting these necessary materials.

Arnold worked for more than three decades in the extractive industry, including coal and mineral processing. At C2M, she conducts research related to critical mineral extraction, including the health and safety concerns that need to be addressed when training the workforce. Her other research is focused on respirable dust and the beneficial use of mine tailings.

“To decrease our foreign dependence on critical minerals, we are going to need to invest in research and education so that we can explore these outside-the-box ways of extracting rare earth elements from mine waste,” Arnold said. “But this work isn’t easy. It’s going to take a new generation of experts to ensure we do it effectively, economically and safely.”