HEARING RECAP: Owens Highlights Utah’s Mining Leadership in Push to Strengthen U.S. Energy Dominance
WASHINGTON — Education and the Workforce Committee Vice Chair Burgess Owens (UT-04) waived on to the Committee on Natural Resources, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations for an oversight hearing titled “Unleashing American Energy Dominance and Exploring New Frontiers.”
In the hearing, Rep. Owens highlighted Utah’s long-standing leadership in American mining and the urgent national need to rebuild the mining workforce to secure U.S. energy and technological leadership.
Rep. Owens: “Utah knows the strength of American mining. From the University of Utah’s Mining Engineering program to Kennecott and operators statewide, we’ve built from the ground up for generations. But America cannot lead in mining or advanced materials unless we rebuild the workforce needed to sustain it.”
Rep. Owens emphasized the importance of his bill, the Mining Schools Act, which expands mining and geological programs at U.S. colleges and universities, ensuring students are equipped to meet the nation’s energy demands and bolster our national security by increasing the workforce and capacity to mine critical minerals domestically.
Rep. Owens: “Congress can enact every permitting reform and critical minerals bill on the docket, but without the workforce to execute them, we still won’t restore American leadership in mining. This bill is more than education – it is national security.”
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Rep. Owens questioned Dr. Walter G. Copan, Vice President for Research and Technology Transfer at the Colorado School of Mines, about the importance of traditional mining expertise in the modern mining industry.
Dr. Walter Copan: “It’s a really wonderful time as we look at the actual growth that we have in the mining engineering program at Colorado School of Mines. We have been exposing students… to what the future of the mining sector means for our nation and the opportunity for them to participate in a revitalized future – one that delivers the kind of sustainable results that are so important for America and all of our communities and for our national security.”
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Rep. Owens then questioned Mr. Danny Donahue, Head of Growth at Terra AI, on how emerging companies depend on graduates trained in mining schools.
Mr. Donahue: “We need good geologists who do fieldwork and understand these deposits to train our models… We don’t have an internet-sized database of geology out there that we can train on like an LLM. So we have to have really good geologists who literally live inside these deposits.”
Donahue also detailed how AI and geology merge in real-world applications:
Mr. Donahue: “Every day, the very first step of our process is we will send an AI engineer and one of our geos to meet with a partner geo and write down the rules our AI should follow. Typically, these geologists are relying on the fieldwork of young geologists who go out into the field and get to know this deposit.”
The full hearing is available to watch here.
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