Ep. 411: Mining and the Environment with Julie Lucas

This week, Cal sits down with Julie Lucas, the Executive Director for Mining Minnesota. They tackle why some mining projects are so controversial, how modern mines protect the environment, and what a mine near the Boundary Waters would look like.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
From Meat Eaters World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
This is Col's Week in Review with Ryan cow Kla.

Speaker 1 (00:18):
Here's Cal, Hey, Cals, we can review. Fans. You are
about to hear an interview with Julie Lucas of Mining Minnesota.
Julie was a fantastic guest and as you'll hear, she
is the executive director the Face of Mining Minnesota as
in the Face of Mining in Minnesota, the Trade Association

(00:40):
for Mining as such. One of her clients is Twin Medals,
the extractive interest that intends to operate on the boundary
of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, our most visited wilderness
in the lower forty eight. You know that we should
be hearing on whether or not the mineral withdrawal will
be canceled. Under the Biden administration. There is a twenty

(01:02):
year mineralm withdrawal moratorium put in place, which is now
being contested, and Secretary Rawlins has claimed that she's going
to reverse that decision. We get a lot of requests
to have representatives from the industry side of the aisle
on the show. I think Julie did a fantastic job.

(01:23):
As you listen, we do get to the heart of
the matter of whether or not Twin Metals gets to
develop this contested area in the Superior National Forest. And
I thought it would be worthwhile to bring it up front,
as it's a little subtle in the interview. This is
national forest as such, it is a land of many uses,

(01:46):
many interests get to have their say. The question at
the heart of this issue. Should this particular interest outweigh
all others, then you can consider all the other points,
some of which will be bringing up here too. I
can't wait to hear what you have to say on
this one. Please write in ask c A. L. That's

(02:07):
Ascal at the Meat Eater dot Com. All right, hey, everybody,
welcome to another episode of cal the Wild. We have
a special guest with us this week, Julie Lucas, who
is the executive director of Mining Minnesota. I think, yeah,

(02:27):
that's that's right, and and uh. We have talked a
lot off and on about Boundary Waters Canoe Area and
the Twin Metals project and oh Chripes Pebble Mine, and

(02:51):
lots of other projects around the world and America and
old projects, new projects, and we always get the feedback
that says, hey, we should have someone more connected with
the industry and hear more from industry perspective versus what

(03:17):
we've had, which is typically like a user perspective, conservation
group and some administration state or or federal level. So
Julie has been in the news. Yeah, you're you're quoted
individual and mining Minnesota. From my take, I would I

(03:46):
would say it is a consulting group, trade association. Oh,
it is the trade association.

Speaker 2 (03:57):
Okay, all things not iron, so copper, nickel, manganese, and
helium currently.

Speaker 1 (04:04):
And that rolls perfectly into my first question that I
think everybody should enjoy non ferrous versus ferris.

Speaker 2 (04:15):
Yes, so in Minnesota we've had iron mining for one
hundred and forty years now, and so the Iron Mining
Association is well established. Well, they have their a trade
association for the iron mines up here. So I live
on the iron range. We have six operating iron minds
and you'll hear them called taconite mines. It's just a
different term. But then we have newer into the world.

(04:40):
Is the non fairist. So I tease the Iron Mining
Association executive director, I'm like, it's Kristin and not Kristin,
Like I'm not Kristin. It's iron and everything else, and
then she just picks on me. But yeah, so our
state regulations are actually we have iron mining rules, then
we have have the non fairest mining rules, and then

(05:03):
we have peat mining rules, so we have so it
just becomes everything but iron.

Speaker 1 (05:08):
Got it, got it. And you know, as I mean,
most recently in the in I shouldn't say most recently,
but uh, for the listeners of this show, what you've
gotten here most recently, the mining permit within the Superior

(05:30):
National Forest what had been put on a moratorium. And
we saw that the recision of that moratorium pop up
in the budgetary process for the Big Beautiful Bill, and

(05:50):
and then that was removed yep. And now we are
in a time where we hear that moratorium has been
rescinded again or.

Speaker 3 (06:11):
Not the plan not yet they the Department of excuse me,
the Forest Service, Department of Agriculture, who oversees the Forest Service,
had indicated that they plan to remove the moratorium.

Speaker 2 (06:24):
And that's where you know, like you folks out west,
you you work under different like we don't operate under
the eighteen seventy two mining law in Minnesota. We have
leases so that's kind of just one of the differences.
I don't know how much you folks have talked about
mining out west, but so in our case, yeah, we
need leases to.

Speaker 4 (06:44):
Start environmental review, so you have to remove the moratorium.

Speaker 2 (06:49):
Then they have to get the leases back. Then they'd
have to go through environmental review. Then they'd have to
go through permitting. And not just federal there's also State
of Minnesota also would do environmental review because we have MIPA,
the Minnesota Environmental Protection And then we have state permitting
because we have to have a permit to mine. So

(07:09):
there's multiple steps. But yes, the first thing is that moratorium.

Speaker 1 (07:14):
Yeah, that was a Secretary Rawlins statement.

Speaker 2 (07:18):
I think that's what I saw too, yep.

Speaker 1 (07:21):
Yeah. And then as far as the leases, those leases
were turned over or do those leases still exist?

Speaker 2 (07:33):
That I believe is in court right now, So that
one I can't speak to because I'm pretty sure that
one's still tied up in court. It gets incredibly complicated,
and timelines get incredibly complicated when you go back to
the Obama last Obama administration keeping track of all that.

Speaker 1 (07:53):
Yeah, it's there's a ping pong ball going back and
forth here.

Speaker 2 (07:58):
Yeah, which is not really how we should do this
in our country.

Speaker 1 (08:02):
But well, yeah, I'd love some more of that perspective.
But for what folks need to know is we have
from you know, sportsman, hunter, angler side of things, we've
been very interested in the Twin Metals project, specifically because
of its proximity to our most visited wilderness area in

(08:26):
the US.

Speaker 2 (08:28):
Yeah, it's amazing.

Speaker 1 (08:30):
And what kind of gets lost in that is that
there's a lot of existing mining activity in that in
that same general area, correct.

Speaker 2 (08:45):
Yeah, just upstream of that is an iron mind that's
currently existing. And we also just have on a stretch
almost one hundred miles long as the Iron Range with
like I said, the other mining operations not all in
that watershed because we where we live actually just twenty
minutes south of me as a three way watershed divide

(09:06):
where two continental divides actually come together. So we have
the Rainy River Watershed that's the one boundary waters is in.
But then we also have the Lake Spior Watershed and
we have the Upper Mississippi River Watershed and they all
come together at a little uh triple watershed right south
of me. So it's so within that watershed is one

(09:27):
iron mine and then the proposed Twin Metals and then
some exploration projects.

Speaker 1 (09:32):
And that's that's like Bmigi area.

Speaker 2 (09:35):
Right, Nope, I say that like there's anything wrong with Bmigia.

Speaker 4 (09:38):
I'm like, no, where you can jump across the Yeah, Bamidge,
So I'm about So if you're familiar with where Ely is,
just at the end of the road on the way
to the Bundy Waters, which is the way you're going
to go next time you come visit us, then you
from Ely if you head an hour because it's a rural.

Speaker 2 (09:58):
Area, right. We measure everything in time versus distance. I
couldn't even tell him any miles it is. So I
live about an hour and a half west of Ely,
and then two hours west of me is Bamidge. Sprawl
across the state?

Speaker 1 (10:12):
Got it? But yeah, lots of water.

Speaker 2 (10:16):
A land of ten thousand lakes.

Speaker 1 (10:17):
Yeah, what we do a lot of a lot of
different directions. Uh when last time I was in Bimidgie. Right,
it's like you go jump across the Missouri Missippi.

Speaker 2 (10:28):
Yeah, yeah, it's you can. There's like a little crossing
point where you can say you walked across the Mississippi
because it's still tiny.

Speaker 1 (10:36):
Yeah, yeah, I love stuff like that. Yeah. So I
guess what makes the Twin Metals project uh different and
such a kind of political hot potato.

Speaker 2 (10:57):
I think a lot of it's just the location. And
you know, when the boundary waters was formed back in
the day, you know, it was created where it's at,
and then just around it as a mineral withdrawal area
or not withdrawal excuse me, mineral area. So it's like
you have the boundary waters you can't mine in, but
then there's a boundary around it, a buffer that you

(11:18):
can't mine around it. And then Twin Metals is south
of there, but it is still within the water shed.
So it's about five miles as it crow flies, but
it's about in sixteen miles river miles. But it's a
mining project with an ore that has sulfide. Sulfide has
been known to cause acid rock drainage. And it's a

(11:38):
mind being proposed in the watershed of an extremely protected
for a reason region, and so people are scared, and
people have lots of questions and concerns, and so you
see it. I wish it wasn't political. It's mineral extraction.
We've made it political in our try. I'm trying desperately

(12:03):
to peel that back because we all use these metals
and we should all care about the environment. Like caring
about the environment should not be a political thing, but
mining that creates our world shouldn't be either, So trying
to fix that so that it's it's not tied up
because you know, in mining, environmental review takes many years.

(12:24):
You know, from the time you start baseline samplings, you
need to underground you understand groundwater, surface water. From the
time you start that to the time you'd ever actually
start a mine as a huge long window that lasts
beyond political administrations. So how do we not have this
ping pong effect? Is something I'm trying desperately to fix,

(12:47):
which is kind of comical because I'm a scientist, not
a political scientist. So here we are.

Speaker 1 (12:54):
But you can talk to people, so you know that's.

Speaker 2 (12:58):
I used to be a teacher. I think I always
just kick in to educator. I taught biology for six years.
I think I just always.

Speaker 1 (13:06):
Yeah, it's a talent. So and then you know, I
often so I'm a Montana kid, right, and when I
think of copper sulfide mining, I'm like butt America, big
huge open pit copper sulfide mine. Yep, it's full to
this day of uh some really nasty water. Geese land

(13:31):
in there and die every year. And I grew up
with urban myths, right of like oh yeah, if you
took this is the one that that sticks with me,
right is if you took a railroad tie and dumped
it in there, it would disintegrate before I hit the
bottom of the pit.

Speaker 2 (13:49):
Oh that's fun.

Speaker 1 (13:50):
Yeah, So that's what I think of when I'm thinking of,
like of copper sulfide mining.

Speaker 2 (13:57):
But so did anyone ever do Actually, I'm just gonna.

Speaker 1 (14:02):
Well, I mean even when I was young young, there
wasn't much of a fence around the thing.

Speaker 2 (14:07):
So now, oh yeah, now there's a big fence.

Speaker 1 (14:12):
Like is that what we're talking about with this particular project,
like that type of a footprint.

Speaker 2 (14:20):
No, So one thing is the proposed Twin Metals project
is an underground mine and one of the other things
that you know. So I actually one of the reasons
that I got into mining was because of the Berkeley
Pit and and kind of a backwards way, because one
of the reasons I ever went into water resources science
was because of things like the Berkeley Pit, and I

(14:41):
was hell bent on stopping mining from creating such things.
It's a long story on how I still got into
mining coming from it from that perspective. But you know,
the Berkeley Pit was an open pit and it was
started pre Clean Water Act. And when they closed up shop,
they shut the pumps off, let the pit fill up.

(15:03):
And I actually did a research paper on Berkeley Pit
back in college. But so now you have water that
has to be run continuously through a water treatment plant
and they're they're doing that now and pulling out metals
and you know, recycling it. And I don't know how
many years that treatment is going to take. But you know,
one of the key things is that it's all about

(15:24):
the ore body, because not all ore bodies aren't created
the same, they're created different processes. Our case, ours are
volcanic in origin. They were formed when the Earth tried
to split itself apart, and so even even in our deposits,
so we have what's called the Duluthe Complex, which is
the mid Continent rift tried to yank the Earth apart,

(15:46):
volcanic intrusion intrusions shoved up into our region. Each one
of those intrusions has its own chemistry and own you
know what it has in it for metallurgy. So you
can't really look at the Berkeley pit because that had
pyrite and pyritite and which are just iron sulfides. And

(16:08):
the question is what do they have for neutralizing any
acid generated? You know, are there silicate minerals, are there
carbonate minerals, And so it's you can't really compare that
with Twin. And then they, like you said, the other
thing is Twin is underground, which right there changes a
lot of things. And then the other thing about northern Minnesota,
it's super weird to me. So like I live in

(16:30):
a spot I'm just an hour and a half west
of Ely. I have sand down to like one hundred
and fifty feet here the glaciers, Like, hey, here you go,
here's all your loamy sand. Where Twin is at, there's
like you've you've been to the boundary waters. There's barely
any dirt, right, It's like bedrock. And then what's weird

(16:51):
about Minnesota is that you go up to the boundary waters,
like there's water everywhere, but there's a lot of surface
water everywhere. We don't have a groundwater aquifer. If you
put in a well by Twin, you don't. You actually
have to have like a three hundred foot well just
to have water enough to like I fear, to have
a home. You're gonna look at a three hundred foot

(17:13):
deep well. And so there's a lot of water on
the surface, but in the groundwater it's it's dry. It's
it's so dry. In fact that where we found helium.
There's a reason we have helium naturally occurring is because
there's no water in those fractures. Even so, just helium's
been trapped underground for god knows how many millions of years.

(17:37):
So there's just all those different factors like what is
a geochemistry, but also just what is it water? And
then how are you gonna mine? Are you gonna be
an open pit that fills up. There's ways to still
manage acid rock drainage, But in Twins case, they're an
underground mind that starts four hundred feet down where it's dry.
So there's all those different things to factor in. Because yeah,

(18:00):
the Berkeley Pit, that's that's the case we all go to,
and we all are terrified of that. And that's why
when I hear people are scared about twin I get
it because that is not what we want there, like,
so I understand those fears.

Speaker 1 (18:15):
Yeah, the just reading through your your website right that
there's several projects. The helium one is topaz correct, yep, Yeah,
but the twin metals is described as a surgical Yeah,

(18:41):
operation is what they're going for. And it sounds like
in comparison with let's say the Sunrise project, it would
be very different scale wise. Sunrise you guys describe as
as like a high multi gen rational potential and.

Speaker 2 (19:03):
It's and so the Sunrise is part of what's called
the Partridge River intrusion. It's like if you can imagine
billion years ago Earth trans tear apart self apart different
volcanic intrusions. So the Partridge River intrusion was the one
the Sunrise deposits in as well as a North met deposit,
which are both new range coppernickel and then north is

(19:27):
the South Koeshawei intrusion the Ski and so that one
was a completely different event. So the way those two
volcano you know, volcanic I don't want to keep wanting
to call them eruptions, and they're not eruptions they're intrusions.
I can hear my geologist friends hollering at me. But
if you think of the twin one was very much

(19:49):
like almost like a jet up kind of a slope
and it's very con you know, concentrated. The metals dropped out,
dropping down onto the granite below, and so you can
go in and yeah, like they said, it's like surgical,
whereas the other ones, the intrusions came up and they're

(20:09):
they're just more separate, separated, and they're the deposit is
more valuable near surface. So that one you'd have to
have an open pit to make it makes sense. Twins
deposit they're proposed to mind four hundred feet to forty
five hundred feet, so their deposits really deep, which you
would you're just not going to create an open pit

(20:31):
like that, and you don't have to because of the
way the ore is shaped. So it's all about how
the universe a million years ago decided to lap this
up into the crust. That's a technical pre hear and
by the way, cal.

Speaker 1 (20:45):
I like it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it allows it
allows people like me to understand, so keep them coming.
But yeah, so you know it is I think our
listeners understand that not all things are created equal, right,

(21:06):
we talk about in like the wildlife management aspect, like
you can't there's no one size fits all model, like
for fish limits. Yeah you know, like you know, there's
a lot of Montana that's an inch away from a

(21:28):
high desert, and uh, you can't take the way we
manage things over here and apply it to like the
Shenandoah Valley.

Speaker 2 (21:34):
Right. It's it's hard to look at that though sometimes,
because you know, I joke that normal people don't live
in this world of geochemistry and and different things like that.
So it's sometimes easy for us to forget that normal
people don't, like, they don't speak the same language. Right,

(21:56):
there's nothing worse than listening to the geologists talk. And
I say that with love, but I feel like they
could swap out dog breeds for the names of different
rocks and I would just like, yeah, the Dalmatian era, yeah,
I bet, and the Pomeranian yeah yeah, they're just so
sometimes I think those of us in mining even we
get so used to how we speak in our little

(22:17):
bubble that we forget normal people don't live in that
bubble and think regularly about what's going on underground. That's
an error on our part.

Speaker 1 (22:28):
Oh. I mean, everybody likes things in their own terms, right,
and it's you can't accommodate everybody either, But no, we.

Speaker 2 (22:39):
Should try to be we should try to be empathetic
and recognize that we have to educate, can't. We can't
get upset with people if we aren't educating them. Yeah, yeah,
I feel like your world of hunting and fishing is
very similar. My husband is regularly teaching me or trying
desperately to teach me about different rules and regulations and

(23:02):
why they're important and what they mean. And I once
again I he could just be making stuff up. I
used argon, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (23:10):
And they can change every couple of years at the minimum, right,
So yeah, it's always a learning process, which is which
is good.

Speaker 2 (23:21):
It's good for us.

Speaker 1 (23:26):
Yeah, if if it's cool with you, I'd just hit
like the a lot of the the common uh themes
around this twin metals project. But you know that I hear,
we hear. So it's what is the surface water component

(23:50):
of a project like this? And like you know, downstream
effect is certainly something that's on everybody's mind, right.

Speaker 2 (24:00):
Absolutely, And so with the boundary waters. Boundary waters are
different than other waters in that normally, when you have
a discharge permit from a facility, you know, whether it's
a brewery or a wastewater treatment plant or just any
kind of discharge into waters, you typically are allowed some
level of material to be added to the water that

(24:23):
isn't there currently. That's that's just how our countries Clean
Water Act works and there's you know, limits on things.
The boundary waters are special and that there can be nothing.
There's no acceptable amount that's allowed to enter the boundary waters.

Speaker 1 (24:42):
And that's because of that wilderness designation.

Speaker 2 (24:45):
That's because it's an exceptional water quality body so within
the state. So Minnesota doesn't Minnesota doesn't mess around with this.
So it's not just a factor of you know, seeing
what's permissionable, it's there's nothing thing permissible for water. So
twin metals is right next to Birch Lake Reservoir, so

(25:05):
we have if you've seen on the map, there's the
big reservoir there and then so Birch Lake flows into
White Iron flows two other lakes, farm and Garden and
then Fall Lake and then that goes to the boundary water.
So looking at you know, when we're looking at discharge
from the site, you can't have an impact at the
boundary water. So going back up, so what twins. One

(25:29):
of the things TWINS looking at is actually what water
would we would they have to to discharge because as
I mentioned, they're bone dry below surface and they have
to use water to process. So that's one of the challenges.
So it's different, like I think a lot of times
people look at the taconite mines, and the taconite mines

(25:51):
are in a different aquifer and they have water to discharge,
and their surface pit their open pit mines, and so
their discharge water to keep their equipment dry. With twin,
when you don't start mining until four hundred feet down,
any water that's coming into the mine will get pumped
back up to the surface to get used in the

(26:13):
processed water circuit, and then some will go out with
the tailings in a dry stack facility. But the vast
majority of water that would even come into the mine
is just getting circulated in processed water. So you don't
have you don't have a discharge, and they've committed to
no process water discharge. The water balance wondn't support that anyways,

(26:35):
there's no water to discharge. And then the other thing
would be contact water, So same thing committed to. So
contact water is anything that would come in contact with
or and that would include any water coming into the
underground mine. So they made a commitment to not discharge
any of that as well. So you don't have a

(26:55):
traditional discharge point, like if you think of I'm trying
to think I'm going to quit well, like the tack
and It mines, and I'm sure some of the mines
out west, I'm not super familiar with them, but they
might have an NPDS discharge point, but Twin wouldn't have that,
So you don't have that discharge out to Birch Lake.
So then when you're looking at surface water, that that's

(27:18):
the obvious one. But then there can be questions on
water quantity. Do you need to use any water from
Birch Lake to maintain your water levels in the process.
The other thing is protecting wetlands on surface you know.
So speaking of surface water, a lot of times people

(27:39):
think of like the big rivers and lakes, and I'm
not saying you did, but we just were not just
the land of ten thousand Lakes or the land of
even more wetlands. I think only Florida, Alaska, and Louisiana
have more wetlands than we do in Minnesota. So then
that's the other thing, is protecting the wetlands. And one
of the things Twin has is one hundred some pessometers
already out in the wetlands trying to understand how the

(28:02):
water levels fluctuate with rain. We're kind of in a
little bit of a drought here right now. But because
if you have an underground mine, are there surficial are
there connections to the surface from the underground mind that
could draw down those wetlands. So that's the other thing
with surface water, it's not it's not the obvious stuff sometimes,

(28:24):
you know, as far as any constituents getting out in
the water. It's also are you affecting water levels in
the wetlands that are above the mine, and are you
affecting water levels in birch lakes somehow? Are there any
fractures or faults that actually do have a meaning of
meaningful connection to the underground mind, So there's just all
of those things that have to get factored in. Yeah,

(28:46):
it quickly, I apologize if that was a lot count well.

Speaker 1 (28:49):
No, I mean it is a lot, but you know,
it kind of is like, well, why is this worth it?

Speaker 2 (28:55):
Huh?

Speaker 1 (28:56):
How much is down there? Like who can we live
and doing?

Speaker 2 (29:00):
Mix? So it's about a quarter of Minnesota's total copper
nickel resources, and we do the Duluth Complex, which is
this part of is one of the world's largest untapped
resources of copper nickel. So it's actually the vast majority
of nickel in the US is there in the Duluth Complex.

(29:21):
So not just a twin project, but twin projects about
a quarter or the proposed project that they had in
twenty nineteen. They don't currently have a proposed project, they
don't currently have leases, but the project they propose in
twenty nineteen, it's about a quarter of the Duluth Complex.
So the Loof Complex is about a third, give or take,
of this nation's copper, almost all of the nickel, and

(29:44):
then almost all of the cobalt actually, so it's it's
a massive deposit. And I look at it like if
it wasn't a significant deposit, we wouldn't see the investment
we've seen in it, and we wouldn't you know, they've
drilled two million and feet of drill cores to understand
that deposit. If it wasn't worth it, they wouldn't have

(30:05):
done that, and they wouldn't still be sticking around.

Speaker 1 (30:07):
So it's, oh.

Speaker 2 (30:12):
My god, I can't even imagine. It's cool though. They
have a you know, I keep saying when you come back,
when you come to Eli, I'm just going to keep
pushing on you properly. They have a huge core shed
where you can see the walls full of They have
all the core in the building. But it's it's a
mind blowing amount and it's it's a huge deposit, and

(30:35):
it's you know, we've known about it since the sixties
and people have been you know, poking around trying to
figure out how big that resource is for a long time.
And we haven't had underground mining since the sixties, and
it's a that's a whole different you know, we have
all these open pit minds, but we don't have any

(30:56):
underground mind so that's a whole learning curve there. And
I get claustrophobics, so don't ask me if I'm gonna
work in the mine. I padicked going through Mammoth caves
and they had fat Man's Misery and tall Man's misery,
and I'm like, yep, I am not enjoying this. I
am quite miserable right now. So I don't think underground
mining is for me, but it is proud of people.

(31:18):
They love it.

Speaker 1 (31:19):
The Tamarak project that's on the list has a current
contract with Tesla for seventy five thousand metric tons of nickel.

Speaker 2 (31:31):
Yeah, that project has so the Tamarac intrusion. I'm sorry,
I'm really kind of geeking out a little bit. I do. Yeah,
forget me. So there's the Duluth complex and then there's
the Tamarac intrusion. So those are two separate. They're separated
by six million years, still part of the Mid Continent rift,
and the Tamarat intrusion is actually a high grade nickel.

(31:55):
So it's they actually they just hit all They're gonna
yell at me over twenty percent nickel in one of
their dro cores. And there's there's rumors that the Smithsonian's
interested actually in it because it's crazy high grade nickels.
So they have that deal with Tesla, and so you know,
we do see Tesla switching out to more lithium ion

(32:17):
iron phosphate batteries, but they also have their deposits different,
and they actually have the iron you could use for
lithium iron phosphate batteries as well. So they're still working
with Tesla on not just a nickel, which is still
going to be used in batteries as we go forward,
but also those lithium iron phosphate battery chemistry is fascinating

(32:42):
and we're gonna have to figure it out because we're
going to need to figure out storage.

Speaker 1 (32:46):
Well, yeah, it's a direction that we're heading, that's what. Yeah,
everything I see says.

Speaker 2 (32:52):
Yeah, how do you get how do you get batteries?
How do we power a nation? How do we power
a world? It's it's a fascinating time to be in
mining and metals.

Speaker 1 (33:03):
Well, yeah, you know, and I saw there's some reference
to recycling, and you know, just full disclosure as a
you know, teenage mutant Ninja Turtle Saturday Morning cartoon kid, right,
and they kept telling us like, recycle your batteries, recycle
your batteries. And then as an adult, I find out
that you basically can't recycle batteries double a's triple as right.

Speaker 2 (33:27):
Yeah, so your regular alkaline batteries, you're kind of normal
that I'm saying this is a redhead who got called
copper top as a kid. But you're regularly, like through
a cell, copper top batteries an energizer. Yeah yeah, Unfortunately
those aren't. But the lithium batteries, the nickelcademium batteries, all
your power tool batteries, you know, those are all those
rechargeables can be recycled and they have to be. You know,

(33:51):
it drives me. So I worked thirteen years at an
iron mine and my husband still is a steel worker
at one and I like, if you if people truly
understood what it takes to ever get a metal product
out of the ground and into a produit, you know,
the actual metal into a product, they would recycle stuff more,

(34:13):
you know one and I think that statistic is one
in every thousand exploration sites actually becomes a mine. And
this world is finite. So if it takes that much
to ever find a resource in the first place and
use it, and it takes thousands of people to make
it into a product, why, oh my god, why are
we throwing these things in landfills? And you know, especially

(34:35):
the lithium and the nickel and all of that stuff.
We Minnesota has a huge commitment to figuring that out.
So we actually have the state of Minnesota created a
Materials Recycling Task Force solely focused on improving our metal
recycling and understanding some of those challenges. You know, if
you live in a rural area like I, do you

(34:55):
take your garbage to what's called the canister site that
then goes to the county land pill and it's this
whole thing, but they don't They only accept batteries once
a year on has waste Day, So you're hoarding your
stuff and then taking it in or you're going to
a best Buy or something like that to take your electronics.
And so Minnesota saying, how do we how do we

(35:17):
fix this because you know, you know, people are just
throwing cables and other stuff into their bags and just
throwing them in the garbage. Given what it takes to
permit a mind, given what it takes to find the
minerals in the first place, why the heck are we
letting these things go into landfills. So I'm super proud
of our state for being like, hey, we're not going

(35:38):
to keep letting these things go into landfills. We're going
to find a way to make it where it's just
as easy to get rid of your metal recycling, electronics
recycling as it is anything else. Like they're trying to
just they're trying to dumby proof it because people, you know,
like environmental has always been a huge priority for me,
and my mom is a huge environmentalist. Like so for me,
recycling is just what you do. But to normal like

(36:00):
average people, they're busy chasing kids, they're busy, like maybe
they're sick, maybe they have a life, I maybe they
just have other stuff going on, and we have to
make it easy for them to recycle because you don't
get a circular economy if you're just letting everything go
into a landfill. And it just, honestly, like I said,
spending thirteen years out of twenty four to seven seeing

(36:22):
what these folks do at mines, it's to me, it's
disrespectful to the workers to not recycle. It's disrespectful to
the earth because you cut her open and you said
give me your metals and I'm just going to throw
them back in his waist Like that is just to me,
the hugest insult we can do with things. And I
just went on my soapbox and I was great I mean,
it's just it's.

Speaker 1 (36:43):
It's somebody else this week instead of just me. That's
that's perfect.

Speaker 2 (36:47):
I just it's you know, we just struggle as a
nation where consumer nation. We buy too much stuff. We
don't treat the stuff we have well, it's disposable. Planned
obsolescence is my greatest enemy. And we just we have

(37:07):
to do better because mining, no matter what, mining is
always there. It's a cut on the earth. And so
and it's only twenty twenty five. There's eight billion people
on the earth. I think last time I looked, I'd
like to think we're going to be around a lot longer,
which means if we want to have the quality of
life we have a lot longer. We have to start

(37:30):
managing our materials better so that people down the road
don't hate our guts.

Speaker 1 (37:37):
Absolutely. And you know, so we just had an act
Trout Unlimited was was huge on this and it's going
to kind of come back to water, right, but it
was regarding like the cleanup of abandoned mind sights yep,
So we don't have these downstream effects when you have
flash floods, oh, that happen to these mine areas that

(38:03):
basically have been biohazard off not biohazard, but have have.

Speaker 2 (38:11):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (38:13):
And one thing that we talk about is is how
do we we have to take a leap of faith
as a consumer of the outdoors that we can have
any one of these projects in a way that is

(38:33):
sustainable yep. And then we also have to have like
the leap of faith that it's going to get cleaned
up once the extraction period has ended.

Speaker 2 (38:48):
Yeah, And can.

Speaker 1 (38:49):
You talk about how that works? And and just so
you know, I know you haven't been listening to the
show very long, but we talked often about how there's
good actors and bad actors in everything, doesn't matter, pick
your pursuit, pick your industry, whatever. There's there's plenty of
hunters that I would be proud as hell to be

(39:13):
lumped in with. And there's plenty of hunters out there
that I'm like, oh, I'm not part of that crew,
you know.

Speaker 2 (39:19):
So no, you're onred percent, right, And the I like
that you said leap of faith. I've never thought of
it that way before. And I know they're working on
the Good Samaritan laws for out West for mining companies
to start cleaning up other people's YESSS is that they left,
and it is it's so I don't even know what

(39:45):
the right word for it is frustrating, whatever, it sucks.
When you there, we go just go real technical term.
Your listeners are like, wow, she sounds really professional. But
it sucks when you look at what people did in
the past. Yeah, and you're and from an industry perspective,
it sucks because you're like, you buggers. You made it

(40:05):
harder for everyone that follows in your footsteps because we're
going to get compared to what you did, and you know,
often without any regulations. So I've I worked on a
site doing so. In Minnesota, we have the voluntary cleanup
program and you can you get legal coverage to clean

(40:26):
up someone else's mess. So we don't like it's once
it was private land, so things are different. I know
out West with so much public land, it's it's its
own thing. But I worked on a project where we
were cleaning up of mine that closed in nineteen sixty four,
and they had left their shops and so back then
they used leaded grease, they had PCBs, they had all

(40:49):
sorts of really not fun things to clean up, and
so you can see this is what happens when you
don't have regulations, because Minnesota had no mining regulations until
nineteen eighty and that was only for iron mines, and
then our regulations for nonfares came out in ninety two,
and so yeah, which I isn't that long ago, so

(41:11):
iron minds. I mean, so the mine I used to
work at had already been running for four years before
Minnesota even had reclamation rules. And so I sometimes have
to what I worked on that project where that mine
had closed in sixty four and we were cleaning up
the shops. I had to keep telling myself my coworkers,
this is what they did preregulation, which is why we

(41:31):
have regulations. Like we can be mad. This is what
people did. They had their back forty you know, it's
it's no different than what homeowners did right where they
just threw you know the joke. So I grew up
on a small farm, and you know the classic line
was that, well, yeah, when you change out the oil
and the tractor, you put it on the road so
you keep dust down like that was. And it's like

(41:54):
trying to understand how people have changed over time. But
so in ninety two ninety three, when the state came
up with its non Ferris regulations. One of the things
they said is we do not want to have happen
here what happened out west. So the Minnesota mining reclamation
rules are very specific on here is what you have
to do for your stockpiles. If you have stockpiles, here's

(42:17):
the cover you have to have, Here's what you have
to have for you know, just even shaping the piles.
But then we have our own wetland rules, and that's
a whole different beast. But the big thing they did
that I'm really happy about is they have financial assurance.
So they said, we do not want to be left
holding the bag if one of you starts up and

(42:37):
goes bankrupt and leaves. We do not want to count
on the State of Minnesota getting the money through bankruptcy
proceedings because those sometimes can just not leave any money
for the state to clean up anything. So Minnesota has
financial assurance requirements that say, before you can put a
shovel on the ground, you have to give us money
to clean up whatever you do. And so it's water

(43:01):
treatment if needed, it's shaping of stockpiles, it's reclamation of
stockpiles if you have any. So Twin doesn't have stockpiles
because it's underground, but if you were to have an
open pit with stockpiles, so it's reclamation, it's raising of buildings,
and so it factors in all of those things you
would need to pay. And it allows money for the

(43:24):
state to hire a contract or a consultant to manage
it for the state, which I think was a really
smart addition. So it's contractor fees, it's the whole beast,
and they have to give it to the state and irrevocable.
The state can't lose it. It's not dischargeable through bankruptcy.
It's cash, it's irrevocable letters or credit bonds, things like that,

(43:51):
and it has to get re upped every year. So
every year the DNR in our case, Department of Natural Resources.
I know every state's different. The DNR and the company say,
have you opened up new land, have you built new stockpiles?
What have you done? Or it can go or it
can work backwards. Have you reclaimed a stockpile? Okay, we
don't have to do that. So then that amount gets

(44:13):
adjusted every year. So that's one of the things Minnesota
did to try to prevent exactly what you've seen out
West where people just went bankrupt, and I think that's
to me, that's critical and one of the reasons that
I feel better about the projects personally. But I also
think just having people engaged makes me feel better about

(44:36):
the projects. Like you, we have groups that care enough
to challenge and ask and push and hold the agencies accountable,
and I there's a lot of value in that and
a lot of other places. I mean, in the US
you have a say, but other places around the world
don't have that, And I think those awkward, tough conversations

(44:57):
are good for us, you know.

Speaker 1 (45:01):
Just a funny memory on the outreach side of things.
I had a friend who was a geologist for Midas
Gold and oh yeah, yeah. One of the outreach community
outreach things that they would continually do is they would
set up little presentations where they'd let kids pan for gold.

(45:27):
But Midas was was pulling like microscopic gold out of
the ground in Idaho, so they actually had to buy
gold that was big enough for the kids to see.

Speaker 2 (45:41):
Yeah, because you can buy those you can buy those
kids online, yeah.

Speaker 1 (45:45):
Because that's what But that was like their outreach, like
this is how we engage the community and and have
those conversations and get buy in to the project in
that area.

Speaker 2 (45:59):
I'm trying to picture ours is like, we couldn't do
that with ours. Ours would be really boring. It's one
of the things I loved about working in iron mining
because the ore is actually magnetic, so that one was
a lot easier to go kick kids and.

Speaker 1 (46:13):
Be like, that's me.

Speaker 2 (46:14):
Here's a chunk of rock. Look, magnets stick to it.
This is how we separate it. Our stuff is not
is not as exciting, But I found that.

Speaker 1 (46:24):
So when we're talking about uh, I guess twin metals
specifically is the the main aside from just the proximity,
is the major concern in the processing then after the
ore has come out of the ground.

Speaker 2 (46:42):
I don't know if it's specific to that or if
it's just a general When I talk to folks, they're
just they're just concerned in general. And a lot of
folks do think it's going to be an open pit,
and a lot of folks think that there's also going
to have a conventional tailing spasin versus a dry stack,
which is where you pulled out a lot of the

(47:04):
moisture and so you don't have a dam in this case,
but a lot of folks don't recognize that yet. It's
really the proximity, and it's it's just we you've been
to the Boundary Waters. It is not a normal place
to visit, and I feel weird saying that's someone from
out west, where when I go out west, I'm like,
oh my god, this is magical. But Boundary Waters is

(47:26):
magical and it is it's not a place where we
think rationally. So when we had a huge windstorm back
in ninety nine that like decimated the northern part of
the Boundary Waters, which you may have seen some of
evidence of that when you visited, if you went in
through the gunflint. We didn't react like it was just
a normal storm. It's it's a bigger thing than that.

(47:49):
It's it's a spiritual thing to us. It's a whole
different place. So when you talk about putting an or
a mine that has a sulfide or like, all all
conversations start from that place of fear of what it
would do to the Boundary Waters. And that's a challenge
we have, and it's that's that's it's a tough conversation.

(48:14):
So it's it doesn't necessarily matter if it's underground or
open pit. You know, I don't know if that makes
a difference to people unless you can really go into
detail and start pulling out schematics and showing things. I
don't know if most people know the difference between a
conventional tailings basin and a dry stack. Once again, I

(48:34):
feel like you need schematics the processing itself. Most people
don't have any experience with the processing of the ore,
so I don't know if I don't know if that
one actually ever really rises to the top level of
concern as much as just the mind in general. So
it's it's a hard one.

Speaker 1 (48:56):
And then like footprint overall foot print support and everything
else for a project of this size, how substantial is that.

Speaker 2 (49:10):
Well, that's where it gets funny too, Because I coming
from a rural area, I think my sense of scale
is probably skewed compared to normal people. So the dry
stack facility would have the largest footprint, and that's five
hundred acres they had proposed in the mind plan. So
five hundred acres sounds I think to some people like

(49:32):
a very big footprint. But when you look at like
the mines on the Iron Range, their tailings basins are
six seven eight thousand acres, So a five hundred acre
is pretty small, just like the scale of mining is
pretty small. It's eighteen thousand tons a day. The tac
nights are you know, one hundred thousand tons plus a day.

(49:53):
So even like that sense of scale, and when you
look at you know, in a public land setting, five
hundred are sounds huge and they're like, well, Minnesota's got
you know where we at five million I think acres
of public land. No, it doesn't sound great, it's more
than that.

Speaker 1 (50:12):
Well, I mean you're talking to a lot of white
tail folks right who when they hang themselves to a tree.
You can put a lot of a lot of folks
on a small chunker ground.

Speaker 2 (50:25):
So that's terrible the way you phrase that, you know,
And I think public lands is a weird thing here too,
because we have so many private like hunting hunting here
is I think different than it is out West, where
a lot of people have like hunting shacks here and
have private lands. And I don't do you folks have
that kind of thing where a lot of your hunting
is done on private lands.

Speaker 1 (50:46):
Oh sure, you know, we we always talk about like
public and private, But I think it's it's fairly abnormal
to not cross the fence one way or the other,
at least during some point in your season. Yeah, but yeah,

(51:06):
I mean there there's We took a friend ours into
the Bob Marshall Wilderness. A friend of ours Drew goat
Tag Mountain goat Tag in there, and we all went
in for a little over ten daysn't and one of
our friends born and raised Montana dude, that was his
first public land hunt, and he was probably late forties

(51:32):
at the time. I yeah, and he just grew up,
grew up surrounded by big ranchers and and that's that's
how they did everything. But I was pretty blown away
by that, so I would call him the exception to
the rule.

Speaker 2 (51:48):
But and here, I feel like it's a lot of
private land hunting. We have some public land hunting. You know,
the superior National Force is three million acres. So you know,
when you look at the twin footprint of the five
hundred for the dry stack, the building itself, it's small.
I can't I know, I'm going to screw up how

(52:08):
big the building is. But it makes a huge difference
to have an underground mind versus a surface mine and
it makes a big difference to have dry stack. A
dry stack of five hundred acres is a fraction of
what you'd have with a conventional tailings basin where it
has to be big enough for the tailings to go
out and settle the clean water to get pumped back. Like,
it's just a totally different structure.

Speaker 1 (52:30):
So yeah, as as a trade organization, how do you
allow membership? Right? Like, basically what I'm getting at is,
do you ever deny membership?

Speaker 2 (52:48):
No one has ever wanted to be a part of
us that we wouldn't want to be a part of us.
I guess if that makes sense. So we've never had
it come up yet. So I and I, Oh, I
know what you're saying. Oh you mean like for big companies. Sorry,
like we were established with our big corporations. You meant
like our mining projects. I was mining, you know, because

(53:12):
we misunderstood.

Speaker 1 (53:14):
Oh no, I'm now I'm a confusing guy. The you
know what, because like oftentimes we say, hey, we we
are self aware we need this stuff out of the ground,
but can't we get it from someplace else instead of here?

(53:36):
We're not anti mine, We're just anti this particular mind
and this particular spot. Does mining Minnesota ever find yourself
in that position?

Speaker 2 (53:48):
We we haven't yet. So you know, for us, the
Twin project is a good project, and so that one
has been an easy one for us. And you know,
New Range, same thing talent we feel good about. But
we have had conversations if we had a company propose
a project and we thought they were shady and we
didn't feel good about it. You know, I this is
where I live. I've you know, I've lived in Northern

(54:10):
Minnesota my whole life. This is where I'm going to die.
I I already have a niche at the Columbarium with
my husband, like this is this is where I'm going
to stay and I am not going to put you know,
my master's's Water resource science is like, this is what
I've done. My whole life is environmental work. I will
not accept a company where I don't sleep at night.

(54:31):
Like if Twin was to go through and they started
just proposing just sorry, I don't want to give you
an explicit rating on your thing if they started proposing
a not good project. The other thing is that our
other member companies would say, hey, look we're we're investing
in your voice. You are not. We do not want

(54:52):
you to be the voice of this company or you know,
secondary voice. So there's that. You know, I have a
board of directors, So my board of directors, you know,
I have the companies, but we also have a strong
union presence. You know, we have three unions that are
on our board of directors. We have an energy company,
we have you know, other consulting firms. Our reputations all

(55:12):
rest on the projects that we support. We're not going
to support projects we don't feel good about. If Twin
was located anywhere else in the country, Twin would have
already been mined out, Like that project is well thought out,
they care, they're focused. It's where it's located. So it's
not an issue of if it's a good company or

(55:34):
good project. It's a matter of this is just where
it's located. And these are the challenges solely because of that.
So that's a big thing is that Luckily we haven't
had to wrestle with that yet. But you know, maybe
somebody else starts exploration, maybe a different company comes in,
and it's it's really about I need to sleep at

(55:54):
night and I need to know that I'm not going
to waste I've worked too old to lose my credibility
on a project. So I was.

Speaker 1 (56:08):
Speaking with a young fellah who's I would guess a
sophomore maybe junior at the max At School of Mines
in Colorado. Oh yeah, I had brought up the idea,
and you know, I think it's something that gets used, right,

(56:30):
like when we talk about these moratoriums. Yeah, there's a
lot of ways to think about those, but I think
about them and okay, if if it's really a moratorium,
what we're saying is we recognize what's in the ground
as valuable, but we're going to kick the can down

(56:52):
the road until something else comes along that makes whatever
that resource is more worthwhile to extract right now, So
I think about it in terms of like new technologies
that come on the scene that make whatever that is

(57:16):
easier to deal with cleaner on the environment, you know,
some something that reduces the overall footprint. And in this case,
with this this fella I was talking about, we were
talking about oil, right, and he's like, well, at the
end of the day, oil is always going to weigh

(57:36):
the same And I was like, oh, yeah, I guess
that's true.

Speaker 2 (57:42):
I thought of it like that.

Speaker 1 (57:45):
But where can you just talk to the practices technology
side of things of we have got I mean, we've
got to be mining cleaner and better now than we
were one hundred years ago.

Speaker 2 (57:59):
Right, Yeah, it's not even a question, you know. One
of it. One of the things is we care now
we have a Clean Water Act like that alone, I
think it's really hard for folks born after the Clean
Water Act to fully recognize what that did for our nation.
And that was a bipartisan effort, that was Richard Nixon

(58:21):
like that was and I'm proud to say, uh my
congressman at the time, Congressman Overstar, was one of the
authors of that and it was that was game changing.
So that's a big part of it is that we
actually just pay attention now so we actually have regulations.
We also have control of waste, you know, even just
how do we manage and materials we you know, generate

(58:43):
and how do we manage that stuff. But you look
at equipment, you know twin had proposed. Now now there's
electric vehicles, you know, the big companies. I'm not gonna
start naming brands because I feel like that's a whole
different issue, but there are companies that make electric vehicles
for use underground versus having diesel powered equipment where you're

(59:06):
dealing with you know, big ventilation systems that are necessary
for worker safety things like that. So Twin had, you know,
looked at evaluated electric vehicles. One of those things with
those electric vehicles is the power of GPS and the
power of controlling where you mind and understanding where you
mind real time. You know, it was cool working at

(59:26):
an Iron mind where they had the big dispatch system
set up and it's all polygons based on a block
model of the ore, and the shovels know exactly where
they're digging, they know exactly what they're you know, what
they need to do. The trucks know exactly where they're going.
All of that stuff is so controlled versus in the
old days. It's like it looks like the rock we want, okay. Now,

(59:49):
it's all just that ability to even just manage where
you go, what you do, understand where water's coming in,
and just even the mapping of fractures in the rock.
So one of the big things that you know, Twin
had to do is looking at drill holes to understand
where are they're naturally occurring fractures and then do packer
tests and do you know, different surge tests and see

(01:00:11):
where are those fractures connected, and just all of that
mapping and understanding like we've just so improved GIS and
GPS capabilities, I think it's a huge thing. And understanding metallurgy,
so doing material characterization before you ever start mining and
you are artificially weathering the rock to see what's coming

(01:00:35):
out of it, how much acid you know? How much?
How much is the risk of acid generation and what's
your neutralization potential? You know? So even just those setups
that they work with the labs to do huge advantage.
Dry stacks are relatively new versus conventional tailings like, so
there's just we've learned. We've learned in painful ways. Right,

(01:00:56):
you brought up Berkeley Pit earlier. That was a lesson,
So it's not a great lesson to learn, but it
was a lesson and we've had other painful lessons the
industries had to learn, and not just from our industry
but just just in general. Right, humans, how do you
know how we do highway projects, how we do other things?
Like we have to keep improving equipment. But that's the

(01:01:19):
big things I see are just those capabilities of just
that knowledge, the ability to generate knowledge, and the ability
to do something with that knowledge has been to me
the biggest improvement I've seen in the twenty years I've
been in this industry. So, and it's gonna be who
knows where we're going to be in the future. But
you know, I think, you know, back in the old days,
they were they had the boundary waters, they had that mineral,

(01:01:41):
they had that buffer created for a reason, and our deposit,
you know, the twin deposits out of that region. And
so we look at what most people have never even
seen what they proposed to do because it never got
into environmental review. It was stuck in scolping. So that
that's the other thing is if a project doesn't actually

(01:02:03):
go into environmental review, how do you ever really learn
all of those super nerdy things.

Speaker 1 (01:02:10):
Yeah, I mean there's got to be I think, right
on the investment side of things, there's got to be
a higher likelihood that the project's going to happen in
order to pony up the cash to do that further research, right, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:02:25):
Because during environmental review is typically where you do really
I mean, they started baseline monitoring back in early two thousands,
but doing some of that other development is done partly.
As you go through scoping environmental review, you also are
required to do an alternatives analysis and scope and environmental
review that says, and that's multiple people that contribute to

(01:02:48):
alternatives analysis, like do you need to put the dry
stack there? How about put the dry stack there? How
about this? How about that? Do you need to run
that kind of equipment? Do you? And all of those
things kind of get hashed out, which is how that
system was designed to be used for. You know, as
far as environmental review goes, it's an important process and

(01:03:12):
because that's a state and the FEDS and the tribes
and it's everybody contributing to that process of questioning.

Speaker 1 (01:03:19):
Wow. Yeah, I mean there's it's hard to imagine like
getting into this business from a planning point of view.

Speaker 2 (01:03:34):
Oh, it's nuts. It's it's so much more complicated, even
iron which some people think iron simple. I'm like, no,
nothing is simple. Mining is complicated. It's we I hate
the image of the pickaxe and shovel. I want to
throw that pickaxe at people when I see that as
a logo because I'm like, we are not We are

(01:03:55):
not that simple. We are highly technical. Know for people
that are super into technology and or just stem stuff
like oh my god, go into mining, it is the
engineering is insane. I'm sure when you talk to that
student from Colorado School of Minds, you start asking what
they're learning in their classes and you're like, oh, oh,

(01:04:15):
this is not this is not what I thought. I
know that's how it was for me getting into mining.

Speaker 1 (01:04:21):
Oh yeah, that's definitely why I'm on the question asking
side of things.

Speaker 2 (01:04:28):
I mean, I love it. It's a water resources person
to get to do geochemistry and understand hydrogeology and all
of the you know, in the surface water hydrology stuff
like it was it was awesome. And now you know,
in this role getting to kind of look at all
these different projects and learn about them. And like I said,
living here where the projects are not that far away,

(01:04:50):
it's a it's a cool place to be as a
water resources scientist to just better learn this stuff because
I want clean energy to happen. And I know takes
a ton of copper, and more than a ton of copper,
takes a lot of copper and how do we how
do we get that? What does that even look like.

Speaker 1 (01:05:10):
Well, yeah, it's something I can kind of struggle with
as well. When we talk about like the not in
my backyard type of mindset, I would definitely be a
kick the can down the road type of person, like,
there's got to be something better to make me one

(01:05:32):
hundred percent sure that'll come up in the future. But
like I love hunting in Sonora, Mexico, And when I
go down to Sonora, in the background of almost every
moment of the day, you just hear explosions going off
in the copper minds.

Speaker 2 (01:05:54):
Really, yeah, that one definite advantage of an underground mine
is having it. But the four hundred foot crown pillar
at the top of the mine, there's a lot of
noise absorption happening in four hundred feet of rock.

Speaker 1 (01:06:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:06:08):
Granted, granted that makes beautiful countertops. Not that I'm trying
to sell countertops. However, we do have companies selling it,
no and not. I mean, so the noise is a concern.
You know. The other thing is Twin worked with the
Dark Skies folks to develop them for the processing plant
and the dry stack facility a dark Sky's friendly lighting plan,

(01:06:31):
because that's the other you know issue, it's the noise,
and what's the potential light because you don't want light pollution, which, frankly,
I wish every city had to work with the dark
Skies folks to figure out a lighting plan for every
everything in this country. But you know, so that's those
are the other things that have to be evaluated through
environmental review. Is we don't we don't want to hear

(01:06:53):
the mine. We don't want to drive from a distance
and see, I mean it's a little weird. There's a
so you're already going to see the city of Ely
right there, but you don't want to see the mine
next door to it. So it's it's evaluating all of
those things, you know, environmental review, and valuate socioeconomic make
sure there's environmental justices taken into consideration. There's just all

(01:07:16):
of those different factors because we didn't always have this process.
It's and we had mines going places where knowing how
to stay, and they left and they you know, did
they did things that make it a lot harder to
open the mind today, even for the best intentioned folks.

Speaker 1 (01:07:38):
Well, yeah, I mean, you know there's always a trade too.
You know a lot of people use the reclaim coal
land in West Virginia as an example, and I hunted
on some of that this spring for turkeys, and to me,
it's like gorgeous woods. You know, I'm not a deciduous

(01:08:00):
tree guy. You know, I grew up with pines, right,
and so I'm always blown away by green and diversity.
But you know, there was like, yeah, a trade off
there right where it was like when we scraped this mountain,
nothing was going to live here for you know, thirty years,

(01:08:23):
sixty years repla it, yep, yeah, and until that reclamation
process happens.

Speaker 2 (01:08:32):
Yeah, And that's that's why Minnesota also requires you have
ten year standards for reclamation. So by ten years it
has to be like reclaimed. So you have one year,
you have one, three, five, and ten year numbers that
you have to meet for percent cover and for native vegetation.

Speaker 1 (01:08:50):
And that's but I guess what I'm saying is is
like we as like the consumer taxpayer, yeah, environmentalist that
consumes batteries left and right, Like knowing, like really knowing

(01:09:10):
what the trade off is, Like what are we going
to get for what we're giving up? Is hard to
find a lot of times because we're.

Speaker 2 (01:09:20):
So we're so shielded from it, you know. It's like
I said, I grew up on a small farm and
my dad had a meat processing plant. I couldn't hide
from where meat came from. I had, you know, and
he was a big hunter, and he would if he
was still alive, he'd be ecstatic I was doing something
like this with someone like you. But it's so when

(01:09:41):
we ate food, we always knew what it was, except
for when my dad told me that rabbit was chicken,
so that I didn't cry. That was different, but it
was you knew it because it was in your in
your world, and you know. One of the things I
love about living on the Iron Range is for me
to go get groceries. I drive past an open mine.
It's eight and a half miles long. I see an

(01:10:03):
open pit mine. I know where my steel comes from,
and I know what that means to the earth, and
we don't. It's one of the things I love about
living in rural America is that you know this stuff,
not just on an intellectual level, but on a visceral level.
And I think it makes you better at taking care

(01:10:24):
of the stuff you have. We are super disconnected from stuff,
and we don't always understand there's a cost to everything.
You know, recycling sounds great, but recycling facilities need air
permits and need water permits, and need has waste licenses
and need all of that. So there's a cost to recycling.
There's a cost to flipping on a light switch. There's

(01:10:46):
just all these things, and we were so shielded from
that for the most part, you know, And I think
it makes us sloppy as consumers, and I think it
just makes us sloppy as citizens tut to not be
fully engaged in where stuff comes from. I live in
a big logging area too. It's the same thing. I
know where pulp and paper comes from because before they

(01:11:08):
fix the scrubber systems, it used to smell like sauerkraut
in that town, and not great sauer kraut, Like I'm Polish,
I should like to smell a sauerkrout, but it.

Speaker 1 (01:11:17):
Was not that kind, that kind.

Speaker 2 (01:11:20):
But I knew where paper came from. And I still
see logging trucks on the daily where I live, and
I wish i'd never seen final destination. But that's a
different But it's so it's like, you know, that's all
of the times I try to talk to a lot
of folks in the urban areas because they are disconnected.
And Minnesota is a huge farming state, and yet people

(01:11:42):
don't know that American crystal sugar packets are from sugar
beets grown in western Minnesota. And like just making that
connection between the land. The land gives us everything. The
land gives us our food, the land gives us our clothes,
the land gives us our paper, the land gives us
our metals. We should know what that cost is to
the land. And we've we've grown separate in so many

(01:12:06):
areas and we we can't be that way because it
makes us sloppy.

Speaker 1 (01:12:11):
Julie, sound like you would sign up for my idea
that when you go into the grocery store before you
put something in your cart and you have to watch
an educational video.

Speaker 2 (01:12:22):
I love that idea. I mean, honestly, like, having to
work in a meat processing plant as a kid is
probably illegal, but beyond my dad's gone now so they
can't do anything about it. But I knew what a
hanging cow looked like. I knew what a hanging pig
look like like. Bacon is delicious, but I understand what
and I understand what it takes to grow them right,

(01:12:44):
like bottle feeding calves and you know, chasing piglets around
so that we could cut off their tails because they're
like puppies and they eat each other. They're just anyways,
Pigs are just pigs are fun. But like, yes, I
do think we should have to watch videos because I
think we should understand one the distance much of our
food is traveled. Like do we need to eat food

(01:13:07):
that has traveled that far? Like what is a carbon
footprint of your diet? Like we should be thinking about
those things and we should be asking the ethical It's
one of the reasons my hunt you, Like I said,
my husband hunts and fishes. I feel good about the
walleye we eat because I know he's not he hates
wanton waste. I know he's an ethical like angler. I

(01:13:29):
know he's an ethical hunter. He cares for the animal
and that's important to me. And we just we should
be like that with what we do upon the earth.
Because we're one human. Our impact should be small and
it's not always.

Speaker 1 (01:13:45):
It is not always. Uh, Julie, Well, we're gonna have
to chat with you again. That's in a month, all right.
So Well, here's a tip for you. Don't wear a
felt cowboy hat. It's it's not the season. Duly noted

(01:14:09):
my buddy's mom will like attempt to get up and
walk across a restaurant to tell somebody that you don't
wear a felt cowboy hat in the summer.

Speaker 2 (01:14:20):
Oh yeah, it's love.

Speaker 1 (01:14:22):
Yeah, yeah, but no, thank you so much for expanding
our knowledge on this subject. I'd love to get in
touch with you again once we see how some of
these things move. Yeah, and I'm sure we'll get something
out of Secretary of Rawlins again here in the near

(01:14:44):
future from the sounds of it, and maybe we can
get back on for an update of what the process
is then.

Speaker 2 (01:14:53):
Yeah, that'd be great. I thank you so much for this.
Was this was a delight.

Speaker 1 (01:14:58):
Oh good, No, thank you very much much. Is Is
there any resources that that you'd like to point people
to I use on the hunt and angland side of things.
I always talk about Sportsman for the Boundary Waters Canoe area.
Would what would your if if you wanted to show

(01:15:21):
people how to get some more information, uh, do some
of their own research on on this project? Where where
would a place like that exist?

Speaker 2 (01:15:30):
So I would tell folks just to go to the
Mining Minnesota dot com website. So we have our resources
page that we're working on building out further with different things.
We are working on some educational materials right now, talking
about watersheds and some different things. So just our website
to start with, and my ted x is on there.
There's some other talks I've given that are on there,

(01:15:52):
and then go right to the Twin Metals website. I
think it's it's not it's twin dash Metals dot com.
I screw that up every time, but just go right
to the site. Their mind plan of operations they submitted
is on their back from twenty nineteen. Like I mentioned,
they don't currently have a project, but if you want
to see what they propose in twenty nineteen, just go

(01:16:13):
read it and go scope out the resources directly on
the page.

Speaker 1 (01:16:17):
Excellent.

Speaker 2 (01:16:18):
Well, and thank you on LinkedIn and Facebook. There we go. Sorry,
well there you got to hear my communications coworker being
like Lucas, I can't believe you forgot to tell.

Speaker 1 (01:16:26):
People there's too much to keep up with. You know,
I have empathy forgetting things on that that side of deals.
But yeah, everybody, thank you so much for listening. If
you have questions for Julie, please write into askcl that's
askcal at themeeater dot com. I will compile them and

(01:16:51):
we can have Julie back on again, or I can
have her answer them and I'll read them back to you,
whatever you prefer. So thank you so much for listening.
Uh pleas know what's going on in your neck of
the woods, and we'll talk to you again next week.

Speaker 2 (01:17:10):
H