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Action this week by President Donald Trump could bring new hope to companies looking to advance copper- nickel mining projects in northeastern Minnesota.
An executive order, signed March 20, aims to fast-track mining projects across the country and prioritize mineral production on public lands.
Reaction was swift, and predictable, given a decades- old dispute between those who favor new mining initiatives and those who say copper-nickel mining will pollute the environment in northeastern Minnesota.
While the action figures to boost prospects for both the Twin Metals Minnesota project near Ely and the NewRange Copper (formerly PolyMet) project between Babbitt and Hoyt Lakes, environmental groups quickly cried foul.
Ingrid Lyons of Save the Boundary Waters called the move “an attack on all public land in America,” said Lyons. “They belong in public hands. Fundamentally, this executive order is taking them out of public hands.”
Lyons and other environmental groups allege, and they’ve vowed to take legal action.
The Trump order is the latest in a series of actions by the new administration aimed at rolling back environmental regulations and streamlining mining efforts.
The order uses emergency powers to fast track federal reviews of mining projects and that figures only to help the projects planned for northeastern Minnesota, which have been bogged down in permitting processes for more than a decade.
Mining is deemed virtual to the administration’s “energy dominance” agenda, with the projects being pursued critical to everything from transmission lines to batteries for electric vehicles.
Part of the order reads “The United States was once the world’s largest producer of lucrative minerals, but overbearing federal regulation has eroded our nation’s mineral production. Our national and economic security are now acutely threatened by our reliance upon hostile foreign powers’ mineral production.”
The order affects all mining projects for copper, uranium, gold and other critical minerals, and agency heads have been directed to identify “priority projects” that can be immediately approved or for which permits can be immediately issued, and to expedite and issue the relevant permits.
The U.S. Department of Interior has also been tasked with identifying all the known mineral deposits in its jurisdiction and designating mining as the primary use of those lands.
While mining interests hailed the developments, the order is facing vehement push-back from environmental groups who promise legal action and contend that copper- nickel mining is too risky for northeastern Minnesota’s water-rich environment, and that it would lead to pollution that would harm the region’s amenity-based economy.
The Wilderness Society called the order “one of the most brazen attempts to expand mining on public lands in more than a century” and that the edict “could end up posing significant risks to lands, waters, wildlife and the communities that rely on them.”
Largely supported by the area’s government officials, proposed copper-nickel mining projects in the area such as NewRange Copper and Twin Metals have been hailed as initiatives that could usher in a new era of mining in the area, bringing hundreds of new jobs and spin-off employment.
