Alaska's Pebble Deposit: From Discovery to New Critical Security Asset

RedState 

Alaska is, as I've been saying and writing for some time now, America's treasure chest. Until recently - oh, until January, 2025, in fact - the federal government has insisted on treating the Great Land like the world's largest national park. Democrats and environmental activists, few of whom seem to actually live out in the environment, have pushed a "no development, no extraction, no mining, no drilling, no nothing, no kidding" policy for decades.

All that's over now. Alaska is open for business, and America's treasure chest just opened a little wider with some new survey results in Alaska's Pebble deposits.

Under the 2023 mine plan evaluated in the PEA, using the metal price assumptions applied in that study, Pebble was projected to generate approximately $1.74 billion in royalties, fees, and taxes for the state of Alaska, about $490 million for the Lake and Peninsula Borough, and roughly $1.4 billion in federal tax revenue.

Under the longer-life expansion scenarios extending operations toward a century, those public revenues were projected to rise to roughly $22 billion for Alaska, $4 billion for local government, and about $19 billion for the federal treasury, reflecting the magnitude of the deposit's contribution at both state and national levels.

Since then, rising metal prices and new critical mineral designations have reshaped the context for evaluating the deposit.

In its most recent update, the USGS expanded the federal critical minerals list to reflect updated assessments of supply risk and economic exposure, increasing the total number of designated minerals from 50 to 60 and adding several widely used industrial and energy transition metals.

These are, in many cases, metals and minerals we have been getting from other sources, including China and Russia. And the dollar value of these deposits are, to put it mildly, impressive. 

Collectively valued at approximately $591 billion based on 2025 prices for the contained resource from all categories, this valuation represents a nearly 50% increase from the estimated $393 billion valuation from 2023 metal prices.

Based on contained metal and current pricing, copper accounts for the largest share of Pebble's critical mineral value, at an estimated $431 billion, followed by molybdenum at approximately $120 billion.

Silver contributes another $27 billion, while rhenium – one of the rarest elements in commercial production – adds roughly $13 billion, reflecting its critical role in high-performance aerospace applications.

When the gold also found at Pebble is added in, the total in-ground value rises to $904 billion – nearly a trillion dollars and a 64% increase from the $552 billion valuation at 2023 prices – reflecting both the surge in gold prices and the broader repricing of strategic metals amid tightening global supply and rising geopolitical risk.

The rising geopolitical risk is the elephant in the room.

To put it bluntly, there's no reason why the United States should be beholden to any foreign power for metals and minerals we can obtain from domestic deposits. To rely on countries like China and Russia for mineral resources is well to the left of crazy, especially given today's geopolitical environment. Aside from the jobs created and the economic activity generated, developing resources like Pebble is good for national security.

Of course, if Democrats ever regain control of the levers of power, they will do their utmost to shut all this down.

Pebble, of course, is only one part of Alaska's possibilities. From Prudhoe Bay to the Cook Inlet, Alaska has oil and natural gas resources; gold, silver, and rare earth minerals are found in several deposits, from Pebble to Ambler and more. Our technologically-based modern lifestyle requires the rare-earth metals in particular, and Alaska has a lot of them. 

Add this to your list of reasons to get out and vote in this fall's midterms.