The administration of President Joe Biden awarded $2.8 billion in strategic funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to 21 battery mineral processing projects across the U.S. last fall. The funding was part of a rare bipartisan consensus that America needs to reduce its current dependency on China for minerals like nickel, cobalt, and battery-grade iron.
One of the projects awarded was a proposed battery materials processing facility in North Dakota, which received $114 million from the Department of Energy. This facility is proposed by Talon Metals, the developer of a nickel mine in Tamarack in Aitkin County, Minnesota — and a short drive from my family’s grocery store ( Aitkin County mine gets $114M for ND facility , Oct. 22).
Talon’s processing facility in North Dakota would process nickel ore from the Tamarack mine here in Minnesota.
People in Minnesota should be celebrating the U.S. government’s decision to award funding to the processing plant in North Dakota. This will help advance Minnesota’s ability to supply battery materials like nickel; will help achieve the nationwide goal of a made-in-the-USA electric vehicle battery supply chain; will deliver significant royalty payments to state, local, and regional coffers; and will bring high-quality, career-level union jobs to high-unemployment counties like Aitkin.
Some in Minnesota may wonder why Talon is establishing its processing and tailings facility in North Dakota rather than keeping it where the high-grade nickel ore was discovered in Aitkin County. The move does mean that 150 jobs that could have been in Minnesota will now be in North Dakota. My view on this is the North Dakota location is the result of several factors, but mostly a response to consistent community and tribal-government concern about the prospect of mineral processing and mine tailings in the water-rich environment near the Tamarack deposit. Moving the processing to North Dakota reduces land disturbance at the mine site and reduces the amount of risk that needs to be considered in the environmental-review process.
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Talon should get credit for doing a huge amount of community engagement even before submitting its plans for environmental review and permitting, for listening to concerns, and for taking significant action to address concerns.
No change that Talon makes to its plans will satisfy anti-mining activists. There is no mine they can support. Not even with the urgency of building out our domestic supply chains, nor the needs of the Aitkin County community for good jobs that keep people in the region, nor even Talon’s earnest efforts to address concerns.
On the other hand, those who recognize the need for an energy transition but have concerns about mining’s environmental and community impacts may be pleased with Talon’s plans and find that they resonate. Most year-round residents in Aitkin County are either supporters of this project or are willing to keep an open mind and participate in Minnesota’s public environmental-review process.
We need to consider the benefits and risks related to mining minerals, and the appropriate place to do that is in the process that has already been created to review proposals, seek broad public engagement, facilitate tribal governments to participate, and then decide if a project will be permitted. Prejudging and attempting to block a project prior to it even being submitted as a proposal are not ways we ought to do things in Minnesota.
Keep an open mind, let the process work, listen to project advocates and opponents, and then participate: That’s the Minnesota way of dealing with important proposals that have both opportunities and risks.
Zerek Marsyla is the owner and manager of Ukura’s Big Dollar store in McGregor, Minnesota. He wrote this for the News Tribune.
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