President Donald Trump took action Monday to reverse a Biden-era decision on Ambler Road, which would provide access to the Ambler Mining District in northern Alaska, an area rich in copper and other key minerals, including gold and silver.
Trump announced the presidential action on Monday during an Oval Office press conference along with Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and Energy Secretary Chris Wright.
“We’re making [Alaska] greater, bigger, and more powerful and job-producing. It’s an economic gold mine, so to speak. And I signed this years ago, and Biden unsigned it,” Trump said.
“This was something that should have been long operating and making billions of dollars for our country and supplying a lot of energy and minerals and everything else that we’re talking about,” he added. “And they undid it and wasted a lot of time and a lot of money, a lot of effort, and now we’re starting again.”
Trump added that there is ample time to complete the project over his presidency.
Burgum noted that the road would run from about 200 miles north of Fairbanks to the Ambler Mining District. He also spoke to the immense potential of the Ambler Mining District and the importance of critical minerals to America’s mission of beating China in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) “arms race”:
This is one of the richest copper locations in the country, and of course, today, to build a data center, you can have tens of thousands of tons of copper required for that. Even a single-family home today may have as much as 400 pounds of copper in a home, and we have as a nation in the past, basically gotten out of the mineral and energy and mining area. President Trump when he said, drill, baby drill, he also was mine, baby mine. We’ve got to get back in the mining business. China controls 85 to 100 percent of all the mining and refining of the top 20 critical minerals. And in this mine area up there, we got copper, lead, zinc, gold, silver, gallium, germanium–so rich in all of the minerals that we need to win the AI arms race against China and to prosper as a country.
Wright emphasized that Alaskans want to develop resources and desire the opportunities that come with it.
“This is a tremendous achievement for the people of Alaska,” Wright said. “We were in the North Slope of Alaska a few months ago, celebrating energy development there. They want jobs and opportunity to develop the resources on their lands.”
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