Brown at Zaytinya. Photo: Daniel Moore/Axios
Mining industry veteran Judy Brown is optimistic that the Trump administration and Congress will address a missing link in the mineral supply chain.
Why she matters: Brown, who leads external affairs for South32's projects in the Americas, has watched the industry's D.C. influence grow in recent years.
- The South32 Hermosa project in Arizona is the country's only mine with two federally designated critical minerals, manganese and zinc.
Brown recently sat down over chicken durum at Zaytinya. Her remarks have been edited for length.
What are the biggest policy gaps today?
It's not necessarily economic to make critical minerals here, ship them to Korea or Morocco, have them put into components and then brought back to the U.S. So I think not missing part of that full supply chain would be really important.
What more can Washington do?
Looking at the foreign entity of concern regulations. The CHIPS Act has really straightforward foreign entity of concern, but when it came to the IRA, the DOE decided to have their own, maybe a little bit more exception-filled foreign entity of concern.
I understand balancing the need for the EV uptake and all of those things, but I think that actually had a disincentive on some of that midstream. And I think some of that was confusing, and it's still really hard to judge how you then count out the offshoring of Chinese manufacturing to other parts of Southeast Asia, etc.
Your project has DOE and DOD grants. Are you concerned about Trump or Congress pulling those back?
Some of that funding was really to help us with the fact that there is no battery-grade manganese market or production in the U.S. And so you're, essentially, adding capital and money to build something that you don't know that anybody's actually going to buy.
I think there's a lot of support for those types of projects within the funding. As long as we can deliver, I think they still want to see that production in the U.S.
Is there a member of Congress you enjoy working with?
[Rep. Doug] LaMalfa has been very curious … and we had a great meeting. We were very late for our next meeting, because he kept asking questions.
The thing I would say about [Natural Resources Committee Chairman Bruce] Westerman is, he's very creative in terms of how do we solve this problem in order to move forward.
What's the coolest mine you've visited?
You mean with the exception of our mine in Arizona? (Laughs).
The Grasberg Mine in Indonesia, in Papua, was probably one of the coolest experiences I've had, simply because it's so remote.
