Energy Roundtable.

• Author: Malan, Mekenna

This month, Utah Business partnered with Holland & Hart to host a roundtable event featuring Utah's energy leaders. Moderated by Blair Blackwell, manager of corporate affairs at Chevron, they discussed what Utah's energy future looks like, the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead, and the evolving conversation around climate in the industry. Here are a few highlights from the event.

What do we, as an industry, want Utahns to know about our energy future?

Matthew Anderson | Deputy Director | Utah Office of Energy Development

We're really excited about the State Energy Plan. Our office believes that more is going to happen in the next 10 years in the energy space than what's happened in the last 15, so it's important we have a guiding document to move us along. We went out and listened to Utahns in 22 of the 29 counties--ones that had energy production--and met with elected officials, energy producers, and people on the ground to get to know them. I will note here that for the first time ever, climate was mentioned in our energy plan. We believe that climate change is real and that we need to be engaging with the market and creating market-driven solutions to address it.

Josh Brown | Director of Government Affairs | Rio Tinto

About two weeks back, Rio Tinto Kennecott announced the production of tellurium, a byproduct of our product stream. We will be producing about 20 tons per year, which isn't a lot in the mining sense, but in the tellurium sense, we're one of the top two producers in the US now. There are a lot of opportunities for mining companies, as they go forward, to see if there are things that can help augment the overall production of materials from our ore body. At Rio Tinto Kennecott, I believe we have roughly 12-13 of the 35 critical minerals on our list. We're seeing which ones are viable, and well continue to do that.

Brian Somers I President | Utah Mining Association

It's really important that this tellurium, from the extraction through the processing and manufacturing, is all contained in North America. Currently, we're 95 percent dependent on foreign sources for tellurium. This is a really important step to make sure that we can extract things here. If [these materials] have to be sent to China or some other place to be processed or manufactured, it doesn't really help us in our mineral and energy independence. In many cases, these are fairly small pieces of a product stream, but ones that are very important.

Steven...