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The U.S. Department of the Interior canceled two mineral leases for Antofagasta Plc’s proposed Twin Metals copper and nickel mine in Minnesota on Wednesday, effectively killing the project and handing a major win to environmentalists.
The decision shows President Joe Biden’s administration is increasingly comfortable prioritizing domestic conservation efforts even as demand for minerals used to build electric vehicles rises amid efforts to combat climate change.
The leases for the proposed mine in northern Minnesota had first been pulled by then-President Barack Obama’s administration in 2016. But President Donald Trump’s administration reversed that decision.
Biden officials on Wednesday said Trump erred in giving the leases back.
“We found the leases were improperly renewed in violation of applicable statutes and regulations, and we are taking action to cancel them,” said U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, adding that her department has a responsibility to “ensure that no lessee receives special treatment,” though she did not elaborate.
Twin Metals, which is controlled by Chile’s Antofagasta, said it feels the decision was based on politics and not science.
“We will challenge this attempt to stop our project and defend our valid existing mineral rights. We expect to prevail,” said Twin Metals spokesperson Kathy Graul.
The step was in addition to a plan announced last fall by the White House to impose a 20-year ban on mining in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters region, where Antofagasta hopes to build an underground mine to supply copper for electric vehicles, which use twice as much of the red metal as those with internal combustion engines.
Related Article: To go electric, America needs more mines. Can it build them?
The leases were first granted in 1966 and have been passed between successor companies. No mining has taken place at the site.
Environmentalists have long feared mining would pollute the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, a 1 million-acre (405,000-hectare) preserve on the U.S.-Canada border.
“It is heartening to have an administration making decisions with integrity. Twin Metals leases should never have been reinstated in the first place, and this announcement should stop the Twin Metals mine threat,” said Becky Rom of the Campaign to Save the Boundary Waters, a Minnesota conservation group.
Reuters reported last year that Biden aims to look abroad for metal supplies and focus on domestic processing into battery parts. The strategy was a move by Biden to shore up support with environmentalists and counter to his private commitment to miners during the 2020 presidential campaign to allow more domestic mining.
The U.S. Forest Service, part of the Agriculture Department, controls the surface land at the site. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management, part of the Interior Department, controls the underground copper deposit and must approve plans to extract minerals.
(By Ernest Scheyder; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)
6 Comments
Bob Hall
Way to go Joe! Keep those pesky miners unemployed. Buy our copper from Africa and make political hay. Donèt you find things like this a little contradictory.
Alessando
they know that but they do not care Bob
that is typical AOC hyprocisy at its best
they are very proud now
mike failla
Shortsighted and stupid decision. Typical for this administration. No common sense because common sense, in this administation is not to common.
Steve Noakes
In another story in Mining.com, Peru and Chile, as the world’s leading producers of copper, are finding resistance to copper mining applications due to environmentalist pressures.
So let me get this right.
Environmentalist are looking for clean energy. Clean energy means electricity. Electricity means hydro installations on wild rivers, wind turbines that seldom return enough power to offset their production and installation, solar panels and batteries requiring metals from holes in the ground and evaporation of brine waters of the worlds salars and electric motors for all the electric cars we will be driving.
Environmentalists are against copper mining. And copper is needed for all these clean energy installations.
Is it just my brain that’s exploding???
PaoloP
I wonder how environmentalists think to build electric batteries for cars, when they close copper and nickel mines.
Ah, ok, I see: they buy them in the shops.
Kerry
Well we all know that mining technology has not improved at all over the past 100 years. Mines still dump arsnic right into the water. They dump pollutants without regard to anything around them. They send small children down into the mines with no protection at all and let them get black lung disease.
Listen to the uninformed liberals, and you might actually believe the nonsense I just wrote above! But that seems to be exactly what our idiotic president is doing — listening to the uninformed while killing our jobs and our economy.
Let’s Go Brandon!