By Rich Nolan
For all the investments the Trump administration has made in reshoring the nation’s mineral supply chains, its investment in America’s mining schools may prove to be the most important.
In early August, the Department of Energy announced $100 million for the nation’s 14 mining schools, with the goal of doubling the number of graduates earning degrees in mining, minerals and related supply-chain fields. The Department of War added another $80 million for major workforce development programs and technology innovation hubs at three schools to train geologists, metallurgists and mining engineers.
This initiative could not have come soon enough. Rebuilding – much less expanding – America’s mining workforce is an urgent national priority. The administration’s leadership is a critical step toward getting us back on track, but it must be the first step, not the last. These investments should be the starting gun for a broader revitalization of the nation’s mining schools and workforce.
The U.S. is desperately short of the engineers, geologists, metallurgists and other specialists needed to build the supply chains we urgently require. American universities currently graduate just 200 mining engineers a year, compared with 3,000 in China. Even doubling the number of U.S. graduates, as the Trump administration aims to do, will leave us scrambling to catch up.
We also face an acute shortage of the skilled trades needed to build and operate a modern minerals industry. From electricians and pipefitters to mechanics and welders, demand is far outpacing the supply of qualified workers. This is an urgent need the mining industry cannot tackle alone. And the stakes are enormous.
In the great competition to secure the materials shaping the industries and technologies of tomorrow, the U.S. has fallen woefully behind China. Beijing’s mineral dominance has upended the geopolitical balance, providing it with a tool of economic coercion that can not only cripple the U.S. economy but bring our defense industrial base to a grinding halt.
The race is now on in Washington and allied capitals to defang China’s mineral weapon. The scale of the challenge has mobilized a remarkable effort moving at uniquely Trump speed.
The administration is using an all-of-the-above strategy to rebuild U.S. mineral security. Streamlined permitting, loans, grants, offtake agreements and direct investments in domestic mining and processing are all part of that approach. So, too, is an energetic mineral diplomacy aimed at securing access to overseas resources beyond China’s control.
The breadth of this effort reflects the magnitude of the challenge. China not only dominates mineral supply chains, but global demand for these materials is soaring. Until very recently, America’s mineral dependence was not simply an alarming strategic vulnerability; it was a crisis growing worse by the day.
To be clear, it is too soon to know whether we have turned the corner. China will not surrender its mineral dominance without a fight. Beijing has spent decades securing raw materials and building its domestic industrial base. Wherever U.S. diplomacy seeks to secure new mineral supplies, China is often already there or close behind with an offer of its own.
It remains to be seen whether today’s investments can produce the secure supply chains we will need tomorrow. But the entire effort could be undermined if we fail to address one of China’s greatest advantages and one of America’s most pressing weaknesses: workforce.
Mining is the foundation of the nation’s industrial base. It provides the copper wiring in our homes, the lithium in our batteries and the rare earths in our smartphones and F-35 fighter jets. Breaking China’s mineral chokehold will require more than financing projects and issuing permits. It will require Americans with the skills to turn untapped potential into domestic production, build mines and processing facilities, and operate them for decades to come. The Trump administration has fired the starting gun. Now industry, academia and government must come together to carry this race to the finish.
Rich Nolan is the President and CEO of the National Mining Association.
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
I’m actually more worried about the political barriers to exploitation of our abundant resources. Industry and investors need certainty, not environmental handwringing that blocks development, union agitation, or climate alarmism that is but a cover for socialism. Once massive development is underway, men will be scrambling to get retrained for the trade jobs that will be required. The engineers and scientists will also have computer assistance that will accelerate decision-making on where and how to develop prospects. The China competition is a challenge, but one can also learn from them, especially their mistakes (and there are a lot of them). American free enterprise, once the restrictions are removed, is extraordinarily productive.
Just Say
[Apply the]
D.P.A.
[for there is]
No other Way…
… outta this Fine Mess.
Great thing is that this investment in mining school will give students a well paid job if they can go the distance.
Unlike social studies, humanities, and other leftist woke subjects etc etc… where unemployment after studies is a feature/ result….
There is only room for so many baristas.
In Australia now, I have a dreadful image of future employment when, in the mornings, one half of our abundant baristas serve coffee to the other half; then in the afternoon, they swap places.
Our “elites” have failed to understand and implement the concept of worker productivity, whereby a majority of jobs produce outputs that can be sold overseas to generate national income.
We once had a useful place in global production when we designed and built aircraft, cars, agricultural machinery; when we were achieving excellence manufacturing electronics and microelectronics like computer chips; when we designed and built ships including one that took the Americas Cup away from the US for the first time.
Whew. I need a coffee. Geoff S
A warning from the retirement bench.
Question to Grok: I am a retired professional geoscientist. I was made redundant from the Statoil UK oil exploration in 2015. Since then I have not worked and I recently became aware that 2015 was a year of significant loss of geoscience expertise from my industry. Can you exmine this claim of industial expertise loss for me?
Reply from Grok: The claim is well-founded. 2015 sat in the middle of one of the sharpest contractions in oil and gas exploration in decades, and geoscientists were among the groups hit earliest and hardest. Your own redundancy from Statoil’s UK exploration work that year was typical of what happened across operators, service companies and seismic contractors.
Why 2015 was a breaking point
Oil prices began falling in mid-2014 from around $100/barrel and stayed low through 2015–2016 (briefly below $30). Exploration budgets were cut first because they are discretionary. Rig counts collapsed, seismic acquisition dried up, and companies deferred or cancelled prospects. That immediately reduced demand for the people who generate those prospects: petroleum geologists, geophysicists, biostratigraphers and related specialists.
Industry-wide, more than 100,000 job cuts had already been announced by early 2015; by mid-2016 the running total exceeded 350,000 globally. White-collar technical roles did not escape. In the US, Houston’s professional geoscience community was described as especially hard-hit. In Alberta, unemployment among geologists and geophysicists reached an estimated 40–50 % and the Canadian Society of Exploration Geophysicists lost roughly half its membership; commentators called it a “lost generation” and a brain drain. Similar patterns appeared in Australia and the UK North Sea.
Statoil (now Equinor) was part of the same wave. In June 2015 it announced plans to reduce its permanent workforce by a further 1,100–1,500 people plus about 525 consultants by the end of 2016, on top of 1,340 permanent staff and 995 consultants already gone since late 2013. The company also cancelled or deferred exploration work (including withdrawing from Arctic Alaska later that year). Statoil (U.K.) Limited still had London and Aberdeen offices and drilled UKCS exploration wells in 2015, but the parent company’s efficiency programme and the basin-wide slump made further cuts inevitable. The UK North Sea as a whole lost around 5,500 direct jobs by autumn 2015, with industry bodies warning of many more to come and of risks to skills and safety.
Why this was more than ordinary cyclical unemployment
Two longer-running problems made the 2015 cuts especially damaging for expertise:
The “Great Crew Change”. The industry already had a badly skewed age profile: large numbers of experienced professionals hired in the 1970s approaching retirement, a thin mid-career cohort created by the 1980s–1990s downturn (when hiring almost stopped and many people left), and a recent influx of graduates. Schlumberger and others had been warning since the early 2010s of a coming shortage of 15,000+ experienced petroleum engineers and geoscientists. The 2015 downturn accelerated retirements and early-exit packages among the very people who held the tacit knowledge.A second “lost generation”. New graduates could not find jobs, so universities and companies lost another cohort. Many experienced people who were laid off never returned; their skills do not transfer easily to other sectors. Specialist niches (micropalaeontology/biostratigraphy is a frequently cited example) were already thin and became thinner. Knowledge-transfer and mentoring programmes were often among the first things cut.
Recruiters and industry observers at the time were explicit: “You’re seeing so many older people and experienced people be let go. The experienced people are out.” When activity later recovered, companies found they had lost both institutional memory and the people who could train the next generation. Some of that expertise never fully came back, especially once the energy transition added further pressure on traditional exploration roles.
In short, 2015 was not just another down-cycle year. It combined an abrupt collapse in exploration activity with an already fragile demographic structure and produced a genuine, lasting loss of geoscience capability. Your experience at Statoil UK was one data point in a much larger pattern that the industry itself recognised at the time and has continued to discuss since. /End Grok
Follow-up to Grok:
So, was the motive just a cost cutting way to get rid of the most expensive staff or perhaps something more sinister? YMMV
Response from Grok:
The dominant motive was cost-cutting under a sudden cash crunch, not a coordinated plan to purge expertise. That does not mean the outcome was accidental or that every decision was purely financial.
What actually drove the 2015 cuts
Oil prices halved between mid-2014 and early 2015. Exploration is the first budget to go because it is high-risk, long-payback and discretionary. Statoil had already launched an efficiency programme in 2013 because costs had ballooned during the high-price years; the price collapse simply made the programme larger and faster. The company itself said the extra 1,100–1,500 permanent cuts plus consultants were needed “to strengthen competitiveness” and deliver $1.7 billion in annual savings. Norwegian analysts at the time were blunt: Statoil had become overstaffed and overpaid during the boom.
The same pattern appeared everywhere: service companies (Schlumberger, Halliburton) cut first and deepest, operators followed, seismic contractors mothballed vessels. High-cost basins and frontier exploration (Arctic Alaska, some North Sea work) were dropped because they no longer competed inside the portfolio. That is ordinary capital discipline, not a hidden agenda.
Why senior geoscientists were disproportionately affected
They were more expensive. Many were already in the “Great Crew Change” window (late 50s–60s) and companies used voluntary packages and early retirement to reduce headcount with less legal risk. Redundancy programmes also accelerate exits that would have happened a few years later anyway. Recruiters at the time noted companies tried to keep core specialists (reservoir engineers, certain geophysicists) while cutting more generic roles, but exploration teams as a whole shrank because the work itself disappeared.
There were individual age-discrimination cases in the wider industry, and some later academic work found women were hit harder in certain companies during downsizing. Those are real, documented problems. They are not evidence of a secret industry-wide decision to destroy geoscience capability.
Was there something “more sinister”?
No credible evidence supports a conspiracy to kill the oil industry or to wipe out a generation of explorers for climate or political reasons. Statoil’s 2015 sustainability reporting already talked about carbon risk and low-carbon investment, but the job cuts and project cancellations that year were framed as cost and portfolio high-grading, not as an exit from hydrocarbons. The company continued exploration in core areas and still announced discoveries in 2015. The later energy-transition pressure on traditional exploration roles came after, not as the 2015 trigger.
What is fair to say is that the industry repeated a known, short-sighted pattern: it treats experienced people as a variable cost when prices fall, then complains about skills shortages when prices rise. Knowledge-transfer programmes were often among the first things cut. That is mismanagement and boom-bust logic, not a plot.
Your mileage will vary by company and team. Some groups protected their best explorers; others used the downturn as cover to flatten structures or drop high-cost offices. The common thread remains the same: the work dried up first, the expensive people went next, and the long-term cost in tacit knowledge was accepted as the price of staying solvent.
I spent 25 years wearing a Managing Geochemist hat in Australia. I co-managed with geophysics and geology hats up to 100 graduate geoscientists and together we achieved world class results whose mine product sales continue around the tens of billions $ per annum 30 years later.
In my considered view, the recent decline that is reported in the article is mostly caused by shonky federal government deals with largely ignorant but cunning greens. They were quickly on the anti-nuclear scene with a surprisingly high level of activist people, like professors and senior bureaucrats, when we discovered Ranger Uranium in 1969.
You will understand this activism effect by comparing countries whose leaders understand its people and their demands like the hugely stupid net zero carbon fantasy that President Trump calls a scam. US mineral growth has been encouraged by its feds and it is buzzing along nicely.
By contrast, the UK, Germany and Australia, to name three, have central governments of leftist lean and a history of capitulation to green extremism. Example, Australia’s formerly right leaning government did a minor deal with greens, without much thought, that caused a law banning nuclear power generation.
Central governments have the power to minimise green harm. They should realise how large the activism effect is and move to reduce it if there is to be a growing, productive, strategically required mineral sector. Geoff S
Reshoreing what has been lost to China will be neither simple nor fast and easy—strategic mineral mining and processing is the example discussed in this post. Others include active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) manufacturing, simple electronics, and simple electric motors. China produces over 60% of US antibiotic APIs. They cut us off, we simply die.
Simple electronics and electric motors combine into the now very strategically important (as shown in Ukraine) military small drone industry the US presently lacks.
Long term gain for short term pain unfortunately never plays well in US politics, even tho is the wisest personal strategy—as Ben Franklin elucidated ‘A penny saved is two pence clear’ in his 1737 ‘Poor Richard’s Almanack’. Midterm 2026 election price of gas is a current example. My family never took the fancy vacations we could afford that our peers took, rather salting that money away. Now my ex-wife and I are both multimillionaires while they aren’t.
Savings? How deeply un-American. Besides, it is the very first target of Communists. They’ll soon run out of your money.
Here in the UK the government are eyeing up savings as a source of funds for their benefits programme and government employees. Guess who votes for the current government.
Fifty year mining guy here. Easy to say but hard to do. The geology and mining curriculum has disappeared from most US universities. Former geology departments have been merged into environmental nonsense departments. Only a handful of the true mining/geology schools remain and they are hard pressed to turn out graduates -BS, MS , PhD-that can, or want to, pursue a career in the mineral industry. Sad because that industry was very good to me.
Found in the above article:
“In early August, the Department of Energy announced $100 million for the nation’s 14 mining schools . . . The Department of War added another $80 million for major workforce development programs and technology innovation hubs at three schools to train geologists, metallurgists and mining engineers . . .
This initiative could not have come soon enough. Rebuilding – much less expanding – America’s mining workforce is an urgent national priority. The administration’s leadership is a critical step toward getting us back on track, but it must be the first step, not the last.”
Of course, at one time in the not-too-distant-past the US prided itself on the self-reliance of individuals and corporations that took the initiative to develop key industries and to be responsible for job training their employees, largely without much government help. I’m thinking here about people such as:
— John D. Rockefeller, oil refineries and petroleum distribution pipelines,
— Andrew Carnegie, American steel industry,
— Cornelius Vanderbilt, shipping and railroads,
— Henry Ford, automotive industry and introduction of the manufacturing assembly line,
— The Du Pont Family, large scale chemical production, including ubiquitous products such as nylon,
— Herbert H. Dow, large scale chemical production, including extraction fo chemical feedstocks from underground brine reservoirs,
— the founders of Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly and Company, Pfizer, and Merck, providers of most pharmaceuticals used in the US, and
— J.P. Morgan, premier investment banking and managing merging of massive corporations.
The promise of “free” government handouts has been so seductive in causing many people to give up the advantages—and, yes, personal satisfaction—that comes from self-reliance. So sad.
BTW, the Democratic Socialist agenda that is now apparently sweeping the US is the antithesis of self-reliance.
People who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to repeat.
In 1933, a national minimum wage was legislated.
The purpose was to keep interstate commerce viable, including lumber, mining, and forge industries. It was used to maintain a core of people with industry knowledge engaged such that when thing got better (aka exit the depression), those industries could ramp up without having to start from scratch.
I know there are tons of internet articles that will contest that, but my parents lived through the depression and I trust their honesty much more than the internet.
Not going into the politics of minimum wage today.
The point is, keeping a core of expertise is essential.
There is a reason why there are drill sergeants in boot camp.
Like the Boy Scouts once was, a senior down to junior mentoring is essential.
Without that kind of mentoring you end up with critical mistakes, such as an orbiting communications satellite lacking the means to reset/reboot the electronics via ground control commands (it happened). That company had up until then a policy of hiring engineers straight out of college, letting them work for a couple of years and sending them on their way, all to keep labor costs down.
So, no lessons learned from the school of hard knocks to pass on to the next generation.
No expert eyes to detect mistakes or potential problems or guide to more efficient/effective solutions.
Hopefully the cost of relearning will not be excessive.
Based on the absurd mission planning, including the officially-announced timeline for returning US astronauts to the Moon in “early 2028”, and the distinct lack of technology oversight by competent “greybeards”/learned engineers at NASA, the “cost of relearning” the lessons of lunar space exploration WILL be excessive.
SpaceX’s Starship HLS is maybe—optimistically, maybe—currently at 10% of the maturity needed to perform a successful manned lunar landing by end-2028. And Blue Origin just learned how to explode its planned lunar launch vehicle by simply having a faulty LOX valve on one of its booster engines.
Good grief!
I am a rocket scientist.
You are not telling me anything I did not already know.
I agree with one little detail.
We need a 22nd Century Mining force. This century is well underway. It is time to design the 22nd Century.