NMA Newsmakers: Mitch Bainwol on Minerals’ Powering the Auto Industry

In the latest “NMA Newsmakers,” National Mining Association’s Jamie Caswell sits down with Mitch Bainwol, president and CEO of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, to discuss the importance of American minerals and metals to domestic automobile manufacturing.

“Minerals are crucial to the automobile manufacturing industry. When you think about it, the average age of a car that is on the road is 11 years old. It’s got to last a long time – endure as much as 150,000 miles,” Bainwol says. “It’s got to work in snow, in desert temperatures, etc.  It’s got to be reliable, and that reliability is predicated in all of the technologies that are going into vehicles, and these minerals are critical to each of these technologies.”

Bainwol explains that as new automotive technologies are developed, access to a consistent supply of minerals and metals allows not only for faster development, but also for improvements in personal and environmental safety.

Such a supply is already available; the United States is home to a rich $6.2 trillion mineral reserves base — a tremendous resource kept at arm’s length due to a duplicative and outdated permitting process for new mineral mines. Bainwol asserts the importance of a streamlined regulatory process because “when we have regulatory delay, it raises cost to product, slows down the production cycle, makes it tougher to employ people and makes cars less safe. The best thing we can do is get rid of this regulatory friction, and that means legislation to streamline the permitting process.”

To learn more, continue watching this interview below.