Tuesday Quick Hits

Mining Monitor, Reading Room, and more

A1/Anson’s lithium extraction well just outside Green River. Looks a lot like an oil and gas well. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

⛏️Mining Monitor ⛏️

• Utah regulators are clearing the way for Anson Resources’ Green River direct lithium extraction project. Last week the state again approved the company’s bid to pump 19 cubic feet per second of brine from its well next to the Green River and the town of the same name. The right is for non-consumptive use, meaning the company has to re-inject the same volume of water — minus the lithium — back into the same subterranean formation from which it came. The state approved the re-injection permit in August. The state engineer had retracted its earlier water right approval following protests from advocates and residents, who worried that all of that pumping and injecting on the site of an defunct uranium mill and tailings disposal site, could contaminate groundwater and affect surface water in the Green River. The project is just a piece of a larger, long-running effort to turn the melon-farming town of Green River into an industrial zone. Also proposed for the community and its vicinity: a uranium mill, an industrial park, and a massive 400-megawatt solar-plus-battery storage installation. Read the local take on Anson in the Green River Observer. 

• Anson’s not just going after lithium. In August, they filed a notice of intent to do exploratory drilling at their Yellow Cat uranium and vanadium project north of Arches National Park in Utah. Reminder: Exploration is a very early stage in the process and rarely leads to actual mining — at least not anytime soon.

• A bit of a brouhaha has erupted in Leadville over a plan to “remine” old waste-rock piles from the California Gulch historic mining district and Superfund site. CJK Milling proposes removing the mine dumps, processing them to extract gold, silver and other valuable minerals that were left behind, and then containing the waste onsite at a zero-discharge facility (meaning no water will leave the site). The idea is not only to make money off the metals, but also to get the acid mine drainage-producing waste piles out of the watershed. It has the potential to improve downstream water quality. But there is a catch: Extracting the minute concentrations of gold requires the use of cyanide, which, as you might expect, gives some folks the jitters. CJK insists it will follow rigorous safety protocols. 

🔋Notes from the Energy Transition 🔌

• The U.S. Energy Department has awarded the Navajo Transitional Energy Company $6.5 million to study the feasibility of installing carbon capture equipment on the Four Corners coal power plant in northwestern New Mexico. The feds could have saved a lot of taxpayer money by looking across the river at a similar effort at the now-defunct San Juan Generating Station. Spoiler: It didn’t fly. It costs a lot of money ($1.6 billion for the San Juan project); the technology has not proven all that effective in capturing carbon and it gobbles up gobs of the electricity from the plant; and even if it did keep 90% of the carbon emissions out of the air, the plant would still emit other harmful pollutants, kick out hundreds of thousands of tons of coal combustion waste, and guzzle millions of gallons of water. For what? To keep burning coal and generating power that no one is interested in buying. Carbon capture may have a place, especially on cement factories or steel mills, which are hard to decarbonize in other ways. But aging coal plants? Nope. If you want to clean them up, the best way to do it is shut them down.

📖 Reading Room 🧐

• A University of Utah paper published this summer explores the genetics of various populations of the Four Corners potato and comes up with some interesting findings. Ancestral Puebloan people ate the potato, Solanum jamesii, throughout the Four Corners. It resembles Solanum tuberosum except it’s smaller and far more nutritious. It also grows in marginal soils and resurrects after long dry spells, making it perfect for the Colorado Plateau. The new study finds that Indigenous people also cultivated, domesticated, and traded the crop with communities across the region, making it the fourth of the “three sisters” of corn, squash, and beans. The paper, by Bruce M. Pavlik et al, is a wonky but fascinating read. 

• Also from the Southwest archaeology beat: Jim O’Donnell has a captivating piece in El Palacio about politics, migration, and six-toed sandals in the ancient Four Corners region. There’s way too much there to summarize. So just read it! You won’t be sorry. 

• Anna V. Smith of High Country News and Maria Parazo Rose of Grist undertook a mind-boggling investigation of state trust lands located within tribal nations, finding that states are profiting off of land, that should by all rights belong to the tribes, by leasing it out to grazers, miners, loggers, and oil and gas drillers. In some cases, the tribes themselves are paying the state to use the land. It’s a clear case of some needed Land Back action. The web version also has interactive graphics allowing readers to see where state parcels lie within the tribal lands and who the primary leasers are. 

• Perhaps you’ve heard about the permitting legislation making its way through Congress. It’s a bipartisan bill, pushed by Sen. Joe Manchin, the former Democrat from West Virginia, and Sen. John Barrasso, a Wyoming hard-right Republican. Sen. Martin Heinrich, the New Mexico Democrat, also supports it. It’s generally supported by the build-your-way-out-of-the-climate-crisis crowd, who like the provisions that would streamline permitting for clean energy projects and the transmission lines they require. But it would come at a cost, not only to public lands, but also to, well, the climate, since it includes some giveaways to fossil fuels. Dustin Mulvaney has a takedown in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, calling it a “Faustian bargain.” 

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

• It’s official: Meteorological summer 2024 was a hot one in the West, with mean temperatures two to six degrees above average. It was also dry on the West Coast, but wetter than normal in much of the Four Corners region.

🦫 Wildlife Watch 🦅

• What is it with Wyoming, anyway? State lawmakers are pushing a bill that would codify the right to run over and kill wildlife with a snowmobile. Yes, that’s their response to a national outcry after a Wyoming resident blasted into a wolf on his snow-machine, then muzzled and collared the animal before dragging it to a bar and showing it off — i.e. torturing it — in front of his friends. The legislature formed a panel aimed at avoiding such depravity in the future, WyoFile’s Mike Koshmrl reports, only to come back with legislation that would solidify the right to run over animals, so long as they are killed soon afterwards.

• Speaking of wolves: Colorado wildlife officials last week announced they had captured the entire Copper Creek family of wolves in the Middle Park area and had taken them to “a large, secure enclosure with limited human interaction to balance the needs of the animals and Colorado communities.” They will eventually be released in another location. Not long after their capture, one of the males — which was found to be underweight and injured in its hind legs — died. (In an unrelated incident, another Colorado wolf died shortly thereafter). The action was taken because ranchers were unwilling to take the necessary measures to protect their livestock from the predators, according to the Western Watersheds Project, an organization that has been monitoring the reintroduction effort.