TAMARACK — A company seeking to develop an underground nickel mine in Aitkin County is changing the design for a tunnel to reach the ore and will now put all the mine’s above-ground operations in one building.
Talon Metals, which in 2022 agreed to provide electric car maker Tesla Inc. with nickel for its vehicle batteries, said it would use a mobile tunnel borer to carve a single-decline ramp from the surface to 2,000 feet below the surface at an average 13% grade. It’s a more common method for underground mines, the company noted in its most recent plans submitted to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources earlier this month.
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That ramp plan replaces the original plan that called for a looped tunnel to the desired depth created by a tunnel boring machine, which is typically used for large civil projects like subways.
The tunnel boring machine and mobile tunnel borer use similar rotating cutter heads.
“This proposed change will decrease the volume of development rock generated and reduce material handling demands,” the company said in a news release last week.
Plans also now call for all above-ground operations to be housed in a single enclosed building, eliminating the storage of waste rock outdoors and “significantly reducing the risk of fugitive dust outside of a controlled environment,” the company said. It will also house the mine’s tunnel entrance or “portal.”
The company will still send the ore to Mercer County, North Dakota, by rail for processing and tailings storage.
“These proposed updates reflect Talon’s ongoing commitment to listening and responding to feedback, ensuring that the Tamarack Mine Project evolves in a manner that addresses both technical requirements and the expectations of those invested in the project’s success,” Chris Wallace, vice president of environmental and permitting for Talon, said in the release.
The changes were made in the latest project proposal, which was submitted to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources on Dec. 12. This is the third proposal submitted by Talon since June 2023.
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The DNR comments on each proposal, and the company then provides additional information or changes based on those comments in resubmitted versions. It’s part of the project’s scoping phase — the first step in its environmental review and permitting process. Scoping helps the DNR determine what to study, what information it needs from the company and what alternatives exist before it assembles an environmental impact statement for the project.
The DNR said it’s typical for a project to undergo multiple rounds of comments during the scoping process.
“Preparation of an environmental impact statement (EIS) for any complex project is a multiyear process,” the DNR said in an update last week. “The DNR is currently in the early steps of the scoping phase of the EIS process for the proposed project.”
Environmental groups and Indigenous bands have raised concerns that the mine could pollute nearby water. The mine sits within the Mississippi River watershed.
Talon has received millions in federal funding from the Biden administration. Most notably, the federal government in 2022 awarded the company $114 million to help build its mineral processing facility in North Dakota.
In Talon’s most recent federal funding announcement, on Dec. 11, the company said it received $2.47 million from the Department of Defense’s Defense Logistics Agency to fund research into “new approaches for extracting nickel, cobalt and iron from domestic nickel sulfide ores and tailings.”
In a news release, Paula Maccabee, executive director and counsel for environmental group WaterLegacy, said Talon’s news release, coupled with the project plan submitted to the DNR last week, “raise issues of purpose, viability and potential adverse effects on workers as well as nearby Minnesota communities and ecosystems.”
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“Talon’s greenwashing is wearing thin,” Maccabee said “The purpose of its proposed mine, unsurprisingly, is simply to extract sulfide ores for profit. … Talon is wasting Minnesota’s time to review a project based on speculative technology that isn’t even at a pilot project stage. Nothing about Talon’s sulfide mine proposal is trustworthy.”
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