Mining Monitor: Oak Flat reprieve; uranium briefs
Plus: Messing with Maps, United States of Mexico edition.
⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️
One of the longest-running and most fiercely fought battles over mining has been playing out at Chi’chil Biłdagoteel, aka Oak Flat, for at least two decades. That’s the area in central Arizona that is sacred to the San Carlos Apache and other tribal nations where Resolution Copper, a partnership of Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, wants to mine a massive copper deposit.
The fight continues. On Aug. 18, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily blocked the land exchange that would turn protected federal land over to the mining companies and clear the way for the project to proceed (though it still would need to go through more permitting). Mine opponents — who have suffered a series of setbacks recently — cheered the reprieve, as reported by Debra Krol for the Arizona Republic, whose work on this issue is a must read.
The copper deposit is so deep underground that it cannot be extracted via the commonly used open pit mining method. Instead, it will be accessed by a 7,000-foot long shaft and removed using the block cave method. This will cause the ground on the surface to subside, or sink, leaving a 1.8-mile-wide, 1,000-foot-deep crater at Oak Flat. The mine’s waste rock and tailings are expected to cover up to 5,900 acres nearby. And the mining, itself, will undoubtedly hijack the area hydrology, affecting springs and streams.
Also of concern is the mine’s water use: An estimated 544,858 acre-feet over the life of the mine that likely would be drawn from groundwater aquifers under the East Salt River Valley. In an Aug. 4 letter, the Arizona state land department expressed concerns about the groundwater withdrawals and their impact on the Superstition Vistas Planning Area, some of which has been slated for housing development. The mine’s pumping would likely draw down the aquifer 199 feet, causing the land above it to subside by as much as four feet, which wouldn’t be so great for houses, infrastructure, and utility lines.
Resolution doesn’t seem too concerned about the delay, saying it’s just a pause in the long process, but it did get President Trump’s attention. Perhaps seeing yet another way to distract from his non-release of the Epstein Files, Trump posted:
On Aug. 5 I wrote about how Anfield, the company that got its Velvet-Wood uranium mine permit fast-tracked due to an “emergency,” had not even submitted its application to the state of Utah. Guess what? On that very same day, Anfield submitted its application to the Utah Division of Oil, Gas, and Mining.
So far, however, the Utah divisions of water quality and air quality do not show any record that Anfield has moved forward with those agencies to permit its proposed water treatment plant and ventilation shafts. In other words, it’s likely to be a while before this mine actually starts producing any uranium, fast-tracked federal permit or not.
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If you follow mining news, you’ll soon learn to take the breathless press releases trumpeting a significant new find, outstanding drilling results, a big acquisition, or a proposed new mining operation with a grain of salt. Many of these moves are purely speculative, wishful thinking, or designed to mine investors’ pocketbooks as much as mining ore. And even the tiny percentage of projects that will come to fruition likely will take years to be realized.
One of the champions of being able to stay in the mining news headlines without doing any actual mining is Western Uranium & Vanadium, a company based out of Toronto and Nucla. CEO George Glasier appears on investor-news YouTube channels a couple times a year to tout his grand plans for leading a uranium boom in the Uravan Mineral Belt of western Colorado, build a uranium mill in Green River, Utah, and revive a defunct proposal to build a mill in the Paradox Valley.
Here he is in 2016, for example, talking about how his company could be profitable with uranium prices as low as $30 per pound, thanks to high-pressure slurry ablation technology (more on that, and the regulatory and technical uncertainties around it, in a future dispatch). Of course, uranium prices have been in the $80 range for years now, and the company has mostly remained in hype-mode, posting a $4.6 million net loss for the first half of this year.
So it was kind of surprising to see a press release indicating that the mining company actually does some mining: In June and July its Sunday Mine Complex in western Colorado delivered 792 tons of uranium ore to the White Mesa Mill near Blanding, Utah. That’s not much ore — it might yield a couple thousand pounds of yellowcake, at best (and won’t get near to offseting losses) — but I guess it’s something. Meanwhile, Glasier and co say they plan to shift their processing focus from the proposed Maverick uranium mill in Green River to the proposed Mustang, née the ill-fated Piñon Ridge, mill in the Paradox Valley. I guess they’re hoping the investors will forget what happened last time, when stiff opposition ended up killing the project.
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Check out the interactive Land Desk Mining Monitor Map to see where these projects — hype or otherwise — are located.
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On a tangential note: This summer, two big blazes, the Deer Creek and Turner Gulch fires, tore through uranium country along the Utah-Colorado line. As I watched from afar, I wondered what effects these fast-moving fires would have on the dozens of abandoned mine sites in the areas. Turns out folks who had a front-row seat, i.e. the firefighters, were wondering about the same thing. Of course, they had a heck more at stake, since they were breathing the smoke that came as those sites burned.
🤖 Data Center Watch 👾
There’s a bunch of new data center news already, mostly about the outsized demand that they will put on the power grid. But I’ll save it until next time. For now I’ll leave you with the renowned westernwatergirl’s take on a data center data dive I worked on for High Country News.
🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭
I was reading the always excellent and insightful Border Chronicle this morning, and when I saw the map they used to illustrate it I knew I had to get a high-resolution copy. Luckily, the Library of Congress had it, allowing me to zoom in and check out the details. It’s a “Map of the United States of Mexico: as organized and defined by the various acts of the congress of said republic and constructed by the best authorities.” It was published in 1847, just before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferred control of much of Mexico to the U.S. It’s just another old map, I suppose, but I’m always curious to see how those cartographers saw or imagined what is now the Western U.S. Here’s the full map, as well as two pullouts, one from the Four Corners area and the other from central and southern Arizona.
Parting Poem
Here’s another one from Richard Shelton’s Selected Poems, 1969-1981.
Doing fieldwork in Globe the last few weeks has given me the opportunity of driving by the giant copper mines and the processing plants near them. The mines themselves are way bigger than you might imagine, and over the years have created a boom/bust economy. When copper prices go down, everyone is out of work, leaving the towns in poverty. Not to mention thousands of acres of land that will never be restored.
Gosh, speculative claims and mining ventures! Who knew?
A buddy came from a Park City family. He told me the miners selling shares and claims to East Coast investors called them "pigeons," which I guess is still a term for a "mark" among grifters and cons.
There are plenty of companies large and small looking for "pigeons" in "advanced" geothermal and nuclear and AI and one big US EV company. I'm a bit annoyed by my CO gov and enviro orgs (looking at you, Yampa Valley Sustainability Council) who have been swayed by some unholy combo of Silicon Valley and Houston folks to think that if there is "heat beneath our feet," it can be turned into reasonably priced electricity with some minimal impacts. Has there been any commercial kWhs generated in CO from this in the three years or so since the gov made it a thing?