Ed Ballard

To critics of the administration, it looks pretty strange to be paying companies not to develop projects at a time when bills are going up, lots of data centers are being built that require lots of energy, and electricity is in short supply.

An important thing to know about these arrangements is that the companies will get their money back contingent on investing in oil and gas infrastructure.

The Trump administration consistently views oil and gas and coal as the most reliable, low-cost form of energy.

However, it's not quite that simple because one of these companies has agreed to put the money into an LNG export terminal.

And of course, that's not a like for like thing.

It's not like that is going to generate electrons for the grid.

That's more about exporting American oil and gas.

The other strange thing about these deals is that these companies are forswearing offshore wind in the United States in future.

And that's just legally a sort of strange thing for a private company to do.

Assuming that a future administration says offshore wind is OK, what happens then?

The basic idea is it's faster than a mine.

So to permit and develop a mine after you've determined that there are like enough rare earths in a certain place to make it worth building a mine, that can take like a decade or more.

And so that is really not a fast way if you're trying to rapidly build up your own secure supply chain of rare earths.

And so the idea behind the recycling is that you have all of this existing material

equipment out there in the world that is coming to the end of its life, and that is only going to increase, that can be harvested.

We already recycle all sorts of other metals, like most of the aluminum in your drinks cans gets recycled.

We're good at recycling steel.

Most of the US steel is already recycled, but it's never been economically viable

to recycle the rare earths and that's because for a start the actual volumes are pretty small and also because you're talking about often little bits of equipment where the rails are bound up with other materials bits of plastic other metals and it's just been too fiddly to get these materials out it just hasn't been economically viable

But now with this emphasis on building up a domestic supply chain, that's sort of increasing the interest in this potential path to improving the supply.