From the Duluth News Tribune, by John Meyers
The plan would produce the largest loss of wetlands for one project in Minnesota.
PolyMet Mining Co. has formally applied for a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers permit to fill or drain 1,200 acres of wetlands for a proposed copper mine in the Superior National Forest near Babbitt.
The application, posted Tuesday by the Corps, is the first formal action signaling that the largest noniron mining operation in state history is moving forward.
The company continues with drilling and testing, a feasibility study and pursuing financing for the $340 million project.
``We're moving on all tracks simultaneously with the goal of commercial production by early 2008,'' said Warren Hudelson, PolyMet spokesman.
Federal officials said it would be the largest single loss of wetlands for any project in Minnesota since regulators have been tracking developments. The sprawling, open-pit mine would eventually cover about 4,100 acres of forest and wetlands.
``It's certainly the largest in my time with the Corps,'' said Jon Ahlness, project manager, an eight-year veteran of the St. Paul District of the Corps.
Other concerns addressed in the permit application include runoff from the waste sulfide rock that holds the copper. Unlike more benign iron ore tailings, runoff from waste copper tailings is expected to be acidic and a potential pollutant to nearby rivers and lakes.
``This is an entirely different thing than iron ore mining because of what it can do to the water. That's why this is such a big deal,'' said Clyde Hanson of Lutsen, a Sierra Club activist working on the group's Mining Without Harm project.
The proposed mine is six miles south of Babbitt at the headwaters of the Partridge River and a mile from the existing North Shore Mining taconite pit.
PolyMet's raw material would be taken by railroad to the shuttered LTV Steel Mining Co. taconite plant about eight miles west of the mine near Hoyt Lakes. The plant would be refurbished from taconite processing to copper processing.
The project's startup cost has been estimated at about $240 million. That's far less than originally expected thanks to the re-use of the LTV taconite plan.
``About 85 percent of what we need for the process we need is already in place at the plant,'' Hudelson said.
Over the project lifetime, the operation is expected to produce about 3.2 million tons of copper, 860,000 tons of nickel, 9.3 million ounces of palladium and 2.6 million ounces of platinum. At the current price of $1.50 per pound, the copper would be worth $9.6 billion. The platinum would be worth about $2.3 billion.
Higher-grade copper would be processed at the old LTV site while lower-grade deposits of gold and other minerals would be taken by railroad to processing plants in other states.
Early tests show the area, called the NorthMet deposit, holds some of the best untapped copper-nickel deposits in the U.S. The increasing value of the minerals, plus improved technology making it less expensive to extract the valuable mineral from raw rock, has pushed copper mining into a fast-track in Minnesota, officials said.
The copper mining process would leave a waste rock that would be acidic and, according the permit application ``contain metals in concentrations that would require treatment before discharge.'' Hudelson said ongoing tests will determine how much of a problem that runoff from waste rock will be.
According to the permit application, the new mining operation would dig 32,000 tons of rock per day -- 24 million tons annually -- and then extract copper, nickel, gold, palladium, platinum and cobalt from the rock using solvents.
Instead of smelting, which creates considerable air emissions, the metals would be pulled from the other materials in a ``giant pressure cooker,'' Hudelson said. The process takes place at high temperature in a liquid solution and creates little or no air pollution.
The project would create about 400 jobs and operate for about 20 years until mineral reserves were diminished, the application states.
While the permit application made public Tuesday triggers a 30-day public comment period, any mining is years away, if approved at all, state and federal officials said.
The DNR, Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will be involved in the environmental review -- covering wetlands and runoff to air emissions and impacts on federally endangered species in the area.
Vancouver-based PolyMet has not unveiled how they plan to mitigate the 1,200 acres of lost wetlands as required by federal law. Corps officials said they will first be required to look at replacing the wetlands on-site or in the immediate area, if possible.
Hudelson said the company is pursuing options to ``replace all the wetlands involved. We don't think there's an environmental issue in this that we can't overcome and do it right.''
But regulators aren't yet convinced.
``This is a huge project and, so far, we don't have all the information we need from the company. There's a bit of a dance going on with that,'' said Lee Pfanmuller, director of the DNR's ecological services division.
The Sierra Club's Hanson said the sheer scope of the PolyMet project is daunting.
``We just got back from the duck rally in St. Paul to protect wetlands, and they want to dig up and fill in 1,200 acres of wetlands in one shot. It's not very encouraging,'' Hanson said.
But Hanson said it's the mining process that will have the longest impact on the region's environment. The Iron Range's large-scale iron ore mining has generally avoided sulfide-bearing rocks by quirk of geology, Hanson noted. Now, copper mining will expose sulfide rock and create acidic runoff that has caused major problems in other regions.
``We may have to treat the water leaving that site for the next 200,000 years. Will they leave enough of their profits behind when they leave to protect the Partridge River forever from their mining waste?'' Hanson said.
