Can Minnesota's Boundary Waters be mined safely?

Gov. Tim Walz's move to ban mining near the Boundary Waters highlights a long-standing debate: Can a copper-nickel mine operate in a northern Minnesota watershed without tarnishing the world-class Boundary Waters? The answer depends on who you ask.

After falling in love with the vast, rugged wilderness of the Boundary Waters, Ely Outfitting Owner Jason Zabortsky dedicated his life to sharing it with others.

"The heart of what we have is clean water and a lot of it," he said. 

But here at a popular entry point, he's worried something could change it all. 

"All the water that flows by the proposed mining area is flowing actually right here, right by us on Fall Lake," Zabortsky said. 

He points out the potential path for pollution into the wilderness if anything ever went wrong at a future Twin Metals line – a risk too steep for Zabortsky. 

"The Boundary Waters are just too special," he said. 

Local guides Dave and Amy Freeman agree. 

"The fact that you can just dip your cup in and drink the water, it's amazing," Dave Freeman said. 

The professional explorers spent a year living inside the Boundary Waters, using their platform to speak loudly for its protection. 

"We're not lawyers. We don't have a lot of money, but we can paddle a canoe and we can tell people how special this place is," Freeman said. "Not just as a place that's special for Minnesota, but really a national treasure." 

The couple eventually paddled to Washington, D.C., to hand-deliver a petition to oppose mining near the wilderness. 

"It belongs to everybody and nobody," Freeman said. "Literally millions and millions of people that are saying this place is too precious to risk." 

"We will never earn the permits that we need to construct a mine if we don't prove through the environmental review process that we meet all of those standards that are in place," said Kathy Graul, the Director of Public Affairs and Communications for Twin Metals. 

Twin Metals explains how their former plan would have worked. 

"We get the ore underground, we crush it underground and then the crushed ore is sent to a surface processing facility," Graul said.

From there, the minerals are sent away to be further processed into useable material, but that's a small fraction of what's mined out. The other roughly 95% is a crushed powder that is called tailings. 

"We'll also have a tailings storage facility, which is a dry stack facility, in our case, which essentially just looks like a hill," Graul said. 

The ability for those tailings to be stored on land safely is a key debate. 

"The number one concern with copper-nickel mining is what's called acid rock drainage," Julie Klinger, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin – Madison specializing in rare earth elements, said. "When you expose sulfide-bearing rock to air and water, acid formation is a chemical fact." 

As for what it does to the watershed, Klinger says, "Imagine you have a fish tank and you pour a whole bunch of lemon juice into that fish tank." 

"These are some of North America's highest quality freshwater systems. And the science on acid mine drainage longevity suggests the persistence of these contaminants that's measured actually in centuries, not in decades," Klinger added. 

Twin Metals says it's confident that is not a concern with this project. 

"All of the material that could cause that potential acid rock drainage is actually going out into our mineral concentrates. It's our job to get all of that out of the ore that we're digging up underground," Graul said. "The tailings are completely benign." 

Kurt Doran is with an Iron Range engineering firm that worked with Twin Metals on baseline environmental studies and project development in the past. He says a safe copper-nickel mine and the Boundary Waters can coexist. 

"Worst case scenario, something catastrophically fails, we still have a very, very low input to the system," Doran said. 

But a 2018 Department of Natural Resources review of a similar mining proposal pointed out that "dry stacking has major environmental disadvantages," saying that rain or snow can cause heavy metals to leach into water bodies. 

"There can be no measurable detection of any kind of pollution at the Boundary Waters from a project like ours," Graul said. "We are confident we can achieve that, and if we do not prove that we can accomplish that through the regulatory process, then we're not going to earn permits. We're not going to be building a mine." 

Still, some doubt they can have both. 

"This is just too water-rich of an environment to try to get it right and not pollute it," Zabortsky said. "If you think that risk is just unacceptable, you've got to say, 'Not this mine and not this place.'"