Legislators rejected common-sense policies to protect state’s clean water and taxpayers. Series of Senate hearings provided an important opportunity to discuss the issue, including flaws with PolyMet mine proposal.
Clean water advocates should plan to attend at least one of three Senate meetings scheduled on March 8 and 10 to discuss PolyMet, existing mining regulations, and “damage deposit” legislation.
It has decimated water supplies, killed fish, destroyed entire landscapes, and left taxpayers holding the bag for expensive clean-up operations almost everywhere it’s been done before.
Now, the sulfide mining industry has set its sights on northeastern Minnesota, including many areas at the very edges of the Boundary Waters.
In November 2009, the Friends released a new short film about sulfide mining titled “Precious Waters: Minnesota’s Sulfide Mining Controversy.” You can watch the film below and learn more and take action at www.preciouswaters.org.
Sulfide mining is not your grandparents’ iron mine. Sulfide mining is the extraction of metals like copper and nickel from sulfide-bearing ores. While Minnesota’s traditional iron mining deals with relatively harmless oxide ores, sulfide ores are a much different animal.
Essentially, when rain, snowmelt and other precipitation runs off the waste from iron mining, it creates rust. No big deal.
When water runs off the waste from sulfide mining, it makes sulfuric acid.
Sulfide mining exploration proposals at the edge of the BWCAW (click to view full-size version)
Sulfide mining is being proposed or explored across Minnesota’s Arrowhead region. Franconia Minerals Corp. is considering a mine that would actually be underneath Birch Lake, which is located near Ely where the South Kawishiwi River flows out of the BWCAW, before flowing through the White Iron chain of lakes and back into the wilderness.
Franconia and other companies are also looking to mine even closer to the Boundary Waters, along the shores of the South Kawishiwi and in areas south and east of Bald Eagle Lake and Gabbro Lakes in the wilderness.
PolyMet Mining Corp.’s controversial NorthMet project, which is the furthest along in the permitting process, is in the Lake Superior watershed, and could have enormous impacts on the ecosystem of the Superior National Forest. The project would also pave the way for future mining proposals.
“Other states have suffered because their leaders saw dollar signs when they should have seen question marks. Leaders believed promises that the mines wouldn’t pollute, but ignored all the times those promises had been broken.”
In states like Montana, New Mexico, and Nevada, sulfide mining has contaminated thousands of streams and devastated entire ecosystems. Faced with clean-up costs in the tens of millions of dollars, companies have frequently filed for bankruptcy, leaving taxpayers to pick up the tab.
For example, at the Brohm Mine in South Dakota, which operated from 1988 to 1998, mining unexpectedly produced acid mine drainage (including turning the waters of a nearby stream more acidic than lemon juice). Ultimately, the company went bankrupt and, because the financial assurance the state had received was only sufficient to cover about 1/8 of the clean-up costs, the site was declared a Superfund site, meaning that American taxpayers are now paying to clean up the pollution.
To read more about the Brohm Mine example, check out this article from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. (Note that the executive who was at the helm during the mine’s pollution and its bankruptcy was appointed to the Board of PolyMet Mining Corp. in 2000.)
One of the biggest factors in the dark history of sulfide mining is how frequently mining companies are wrong about what their impacts on water quality will be. One peer-reviewed study found that, while all projects that were reviewed predicted they would not pollute, at least 76 percent of the time they still did. [1] The same study found that 89 percent of mines that have polluted said they would not.
It is this history that is one of the biggest reasons for worry about proposals to bring the mining to Minnesota. The industry says they won’t pollute our prized waters, but they’ve said that before, and they’ve been wrong more often than not.
The Brohm Mine, mentioned above, is also a useful illustration of this problem. There, the mining company assured the state that the mine would not produce acid mine drainage because the ore was low in sulfides, around one percent average. The mine still did create terrible pollution, killing all the fish in that stream turned acidic.
This is an important point, because the mining industry in Minnesota frequently states that because the ore here is low sulfide, it won’t cause acid mine drainage. The companies claim that the ore averages about one percent sulfide. Sound familiar?
Taxpayers left holding the bag
Confronted with astronomical clean-up costs and battered by a volatile metals market with frequent boom-and-bust cycles, mining companies often abandon their polluted mines, walking away and leaving taxpayers holding the bag.
Most states, including Minnesota, require mining companies to provide financial assurances to fund clean up if the company goes bankrupt or is otherwise unable to perform the work itself. But, there are two common problems that contribute to taxpayers still bearing the brunt of clean up costs:
Difficulty predicting the extent of pollution and clean-up costs. Because it has proven so difficult to predict when, where and to what extent acid mine drainage will occur, it is hard to determine how much it will cost to clean up a mine. For this reason, when mining companies go bankrupt, states frequently discover that the financial assurance the company provided is insufficient for the clean up job.
Assets of bankrupt mining companies are awarded to other creditors. When a mining company goes bankrupt, there is usually a long line of creditors–banks, investors, vendors–that attempt to get paid. If financial assurance isn’t provided in a bankruptcy-safe method, the state is just another creditor clamoring for reimbursement.
The industry’s track record of not paying to clean up its messes is long and shameful. A few examples include:
Zortman-Landusky Mine, Montana – $33 million and counting
Summitville Mine, Colorada – $185 million and $1.5 million/year
Grouse Creek Mine, Idaho – $53 million
Solutions
The perils of sulfide mining have prompted a variety of responses from other states.
In Wisconsin, voters in 1997 passed a “Prove It First” law. This law says that, before opening a mine, a company must be able to point to a similar mine to what it is proposing that a) has operated for 10 years without polluting and b) has been closed for 10 years without polluting. Unable to point to such an example, no new mines have been proposed in Wisconsin since the law passed.
In New Mexico, in response to catastrophic pollution and abandoned mines, the state raised the amount of financial assurance on two dangerous mines to about $400 million each.
In Michigan, the law says mines may not be operated in such a way that they will require “perpetual care.”
There are plenty of people in Minnesota who would like to simply ban this form of mining from being done in the state, or pass a “Prove It First” law like Wisconsin’s. The Friends takes a common-sense approach meant to prevent mines from polluting, and to protect taxpayers from getting left paying for clean-up. In the 2009 Minnesota legislature, the Friends supported legislation introduced by Rep. Alice Hausman and Sen. Jim Carlson meant to achieve those protections. The bill would have done three things:
Prohibit mines that would require water treatment after closure
Ensure mining companies put up enough money to pay for clean-up in case they go bankrupt or otherwise abandon the mine
Increased government transparency so citizens are informed of how mines are regulated
In addition to improving Minnesota’s laws, the Friends is also closely analyzing specific mining proposals and advocating for the public interest and our legacy of clean water in working with government agencies.
PolyMet has stated that the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for its NorthMet project will be released in the third quarter of 2009 (its release has been delayed numerous times already for unknown reasons). The Friends will submit comments to the Department of Natural Resources on the DEIS, and will work to educate the public about the project.
If you want to be notified of the release of the DEIS and learn more about what the project could mean for Minnesota’s lake country, and how you can make your voice heard, consider signing up for the Friends’ email action alerts and e-newsletter.
Sulfide mining’s potential for pollution is directly tied to the presence of water, and it has usually been done in more arid climates than Minnesota’s. Even in those dry areas, the mining has still created enormous toxic messes. The chance that it can be done in northeastern Minnesota’s watery ecosystem without polluting our cherished lakes, rivers and streams is slim. And the price we could all pay is very high.
