Column written by Roel Snieder, Mines' W.M. Keck Distinguished Professor of Professional Development Education. Snieder created the Teaching with Heart program which focuses on enriching higher education by growing a character of love in teachers in higher education in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM).

Bill Zisch, the J. Steven Whisler Head of the Mining Engineering Endowed Chair at Mines, co-authored this op-ed. The piece notes the U.S. government has intensified its support for the responsible mining of critical minerals while tightening its focus on growing the critical minerals workforce.

A community-scale retrofit project in Colorado offers a path toward lowering power bills for a population that faces high levels of energy insecurity. Paulo Cesar Tabares-Velasco, Mines associate professor of mechanical engineering, leads the project and is quoted in this article.

“With this CarbonSAFE grant, Mines is excited to actively participate with the industry and the DOE to provide real time solutions to climate change,” said Ali Tura, professor of Geophysics and the Co-director of the Reservoir Characterization Project at Mines.

“If the commodity market had been different, they would have opened that mine,” said Jessica Smith, a professor in the engineering design and society department at the Colorado School of Mines who has written about Mt. Emmons. “It was really the market that [killed] that project, not the opposition.”

Sinkholes are fairly common, due to collapsed caves, old mines or dissolving material, but the circumstances in South Dakota stand out, said Paul Santi, a professor of geological engineering at the Colorado School of Mines.

Community Benefit Agreements are needed to integrate community priorities into project design and mining operations on public land in the USA, argues Elizabeth Holley.

“We knew that a requirement for any successful proposal was going to be to have a location where companies could get together, advance their technologies, share resources,” said Paul C. Johnson, president of the School of Mines. “That’s where we jumped in and said, ‘how about if we do that for you to make your proposal more competitive?’ They got very excited about it.”

Colorado School of Mines purchased the industrial property a month ago for about $14 million, university President Paul Johnson told the Denver Business Journal.

Gabriel Collins, Ian Lange and Morgan Bazilian, of the Payne Institute for Public Policy, co-authored a piece on the opportunity available in the United States related to critical minerals.