NEAR PATAGONIA, Arizona — Deep in Arizona’s Patagonia Mountains, the push to both accelerate and green mining of critical minerals for electric vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines and batteries is testing the industry’s environmental bona fides.
A winding road out of the small town of Patagonia followed by the bubbling Harshaw Creek and marked by roaming cattle, “private property” signs and RVs opens up to an industrial site where Australian miner South32 is angling to dig into one of the world’s largest undeveloped zinc resources and possibly produce enough battery-grade manganese to satisfy domestic demand as the nation shifts to electric vehicles.
The federally backed Hermosa critical minerals project in Santa Cruz County is at the center of an ongoing debate on and off Capitol Hill: whether the nation’s mining sector can shed its historically dirty reputation to produce materials needed to fight climate change and wean the U.S. off China without wrecking the environment.
