Elections Have Consequences

The Bureau of Land Management has announced that it will end coal mining leases in the Powder River Basin.

Good.

The Bureau of Land Management announced Thursday that it would no longer make federally managed lands in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin available for new coal mining leases, drawing condemnation from the fossil fuel industry in the region that produces the most coal in the country, but delivering a boon to the nation’s clean energy transition.

The Powder River Basin, a geological formation that covers much of northeast Wyoming and a portion of southeast Montana, has been the nation’s largest source of coal for decades, with production there peaking in 2008. Since then, demand for coal has plummeted, largely due to the rise of natural gas and renewable energy. Taking federal coal off the table in the basin could all but put an expiration date on the nation’s thermal coal industry.

“This is a really critical, and frankly long overdue step that BLM has taken,” said Melissa Hornbein, an attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center, which was part of the legal team that represented several environmental groups in two legal challenges to the Bureau of Land Management’s previous resource management plans for the area.

Juxtaposing the large number of environmental issues from mining coal, as well as lease terms are more subsidies than they are a revenue source for the government, this is an unalloyed good/

And the Mineral Source of the Future Remains a Decade Away

Just like it did in 1963, 1973, 1983, 1993, 2003, and 2013.

I am referring, of course to mining ocean beds for manganese nodules, which have been touted as a source for  manganese, nickel, copper,and cobalt.

There has always been something preventing the development of this resource.  This time high levels of radioactivity in the nodules:

Manganese nodules at the bottom of the deep sea contain a wealth of valuable metals that are vital to the electronics and steelmaking industries. Accordingly, these sectors and many countries have pinned their hopes on deep-sea mining to meet the growing demand for raw materials like cobalt and rare-earth elements.

In a study just released in the journal Scientific Reports, experts from the Alfred Wegener Institute show that such activities could not only have ecological impacts, but also pose health hazards, for example, in connection with the industrial mining and processing of the nodules. According to their findings, in some cases, the radioactivity of radium-226 in the nodules exceeds the safe limit defined in the German Strahlenschutzverordnung (Radiation Protection Ordinance) 100- to 1,000-fold.

Large areas of the ocean floor are covered with polymetallic nodules and crusts. The potato-sized manganese nodules can be found in all oceans, especially in the Pacific Ocean, at water depths between 4,000 and 6,000 meters. Formed over millions of years, they contain valuable metals like copper, nickel, cobalt and rare-earth elements—in other words, a range of elements required for the manufacture of electronic products like computers, smartphones, batteries, magnets, motors and high-tech components.

I don't expect meaningful mining of manganese modules in my lifetime.

A Good Start, US Forest Service Smackdown Edition

A judge has ruled that the US Forest Service erred in granting a mining permit, upending decades of policy by the agency, which has literally operated on the assumption that it has no basis do deny a mining claim in almost all circumstances.

Basically, the ruling says that while there is an affirmative right for miners to mine a claim where there is valuable minerals (Gold, Silver, Platinum, Uranium, Tungsten, etc.) on public land, but that if you are dumping millions of tons of tailings on a part of your claim, you are tacitly admitting that there are no valuable minerals under that portion of your claim.

As a matter of law and common sense, this seems to be correct.

Clearly, this will be appealed, and clearly it is clear that the Trump administration, and the Forest Service:

For decades, the U.S. Forest Service has said it can’t say “no” to a mine on its land.

Now, the recent federal court ruling overturning approval of the Rosemont Mine on service land near Tucson will make it harder for the Forest Service to say “yes.”

Legal experts say U.S. District Judge James Soto’s July 31 ruling, if upheld in higher courts, will have national repercussions.

………

The ruling could chill the hard-rock mining industry that has lived under a generally favorable legal climate since Congress passed the 1872 Mining Law to encourage mineral exploration of public lands.

Mining industry lawyers say the ruling usurps the role of government agencies in making such decisions, could bring chaos to federal mining reviews and will add more delays in permitting to an industry already having some of the longest permit times for new mines in the Western world.

Environmental law professors say the ruling is well-grounded factually and could end a century-old practice by mining companies of skirting or dodging federal law by dumping mining wastes on federal lands without proper reviews.

………

Soto’s order is “likely the most significant federal court decision on federal mining law in several decades,” mining industry lawyers James Allen and Michael Ford of the Phoenix-based law firm Snell and Wilmer wrote in an online article.

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In the meantime, the ruling, if upheld, would make opening a big new mine in the United States on public lands very hard, said Leshy, professor emeritus at the University of California-Hastings College of Law.

………

Soto overturned the Forest Service’s approval of the mine, which would create 500 full-time jobs at high wages and 2,500 construction jobs, but would disturb 3,653 acres of national forest.

Rosemont also would disturb and desecrate 33 ancient Native American burial grounds containing or likely containing human remains of ancestors of the Tohono O’Odham, Pascua Yaqui and Hopi tribes, the judge wrote, as he ruled on two lawsuits, filed by four environmental groups and the other by the three tribes.

The opponents’ lawsuits successfully argued that only public lands directly above valuable mineral deposits are covered by the federal 1872 Mining Law’s definition of mining rights.

The judge found that the Forest Service had erred in approving Rosemont without determining the validity of the mining claims on 2,447 acres of public land where Hudbay Minerals Inc. wants to dump the mine’s waste rock and tailings.

To prove validity under the 1872 law, Soto wrote, Hudbay would have had to show that the land contained valuable mineral deposits, which he said the company had failed to do.

………

Soto’s ruling effectively holds that the feds cannot say “yes” to a proposal to dump mine tailings on invalid mining claims, said Mark Squillace, a University of Colorado law professor. Mining claims can only be used to extract the minerals located there, he said.

“Since dumping tailings on the claims could make it difficult or almost impossible to develop the claims going forward, Rosemont seems to be admitting that the claims do not contain valuable minerals and thus are not valid claims,” Squillace said.

………

Since the 1872 Mining Law passed, mining companies have legally dealt with their need to dispose of waste rock and tailings in two ways.

They have placed them, as Hudbay wants to do, on federal land on which they have filed “unpatented” mining claims, on which they don’t own the land but own its mineral rights.

Or, they have created what are known as mill sites to let them put wastes on those lands. That doesn’t require proof of a valuable mineral deposit but is limited to 5 acres per mining claim.

Legal experts on both sides of the issue say the use of unpatented claim land for mine wastes without a check on their validity has survived largely unchallenged until now.

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The exceptions would occur when a mining company wants to operate on land where the service has already forbidden mining; when someone applies to “patent” a claim by getting it as their property; and when the service determines that a company’s proposed land use isn’t related to mining.

Nearly seven years later, in the final Rosemont environmental impact statement, the service said that putting waste rock and tailings on forest land is considered to be connected to mining under federal rules.

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Soto’s ruling bought into Huckelberry’s arguments, saying Rosemont’s proposal to bury its unpatented claim land with waste “was a powerful indication that there was not a valuable mineral deposit underneath that land.”

Geological studies and maps indicate primarily common sand, stone and gravel lie beneath the land: “This does not constitute a valuable mineral,” Soto wrote.

He noted that the Forest Service and Hudbay cited two federal laws passed a half-century apart that say mining can’t be prohibited on federal lands. One, the Multiple Use Act of 1955, also prohibits interfering with “reasonably incidental mining activities” on federal lands, which Rosemont says its waste disposal would be.

But those laws only protect mining activities permitted under the 1872 Mining Law, which isn’t the case for Rosemont’s dumping tailings and waste rock on non-valid claimed land, the judge wrote.

………

Attorney Jensen’s view is what former Interior Solicitor Leshy said he expects will be the industry and government’s arguments during an appeal.

“It’s basically saying, the government can stick its head in the sand and not look at the obvious, and the courts should not intervene to stop it. It’s kind of a ‘prosecutorial discretion’ argument — the government gets to decide when and whether to challenge the validity of mining claims,” he said.

But although the government gets a good deal of deference, it can’t act “arbitrarily and capriciously,” said Leshy, citing a phrase from Soto’s ruling.

“It is arbitrary and capricious for the government to close its eyes to the plain facts in front of it — these mining claims used for tailings piles do not have minerals that can be profitably mined and are therefore invalid, and that means the company does not have a right to use them for that purpose.”

Here is hoping that this ruling survives appeal.