Brown: At 5,000 feet, the legacy of Iron Range mining in Minnesota is clear, but its future is hazy

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Once, when I was little, my teenage aunt was stuck babysitting me against her will. To wear me out, or perhaps be rid of me for good, she sent me scampering up the side of the big iron ore dump north of Keewatin City Park. At the top, beer cans outnumbered blades of grass. I peered down from this rusted mountain of waste rock into an active mine for the first time.

What I saw frightened and thrilled me. Equipment bigger than dinosaurs groaned like grumpy zoo animals. Electric shovels dropped car-sized chunks of ore into haul trucks in a deafening crash. The size, scale and thunder overwhelmed my senses. What I saw bore no resemblance to the green grass and cheerful playground on the other side.

This was hell. I loved it.

Almost four decades later, half spent writing about northern Minnesota’s mining industry, I was again surprised by what I had taken for granted. Last week, I flew along the entire iron formation, viewing every past, present and potential future mine of the Iron Range, including the wee little dump where I climbed years earlier.

I’d seen it all from the ground, driving through and around iron mines nearly every day of my life. But what I saw from the air showed the imminent change and difficult decisions facing this industrial frontier. After 140 years, workers here still mine most of America’s iron ore and might one day mine critical minerals used in advanced technology.

Retired mining engineer Chris Baldwin served as my guide. As we waited for the plane at the Range Regional Airport in Hibbing, he told a story about digging a test shaft for an exploratory copper mine along the Kawishiwi River near Ely in 1967. Then he pointed out that the small, loud plane pulling up to the terminal was built in 1967. Somehow that seemed less impressive to this very occasional air traveler.

He explained why he spends his well-earned retirement taking someone like me on an air tour. After moving millions of tons of earth over 40 years, the only way anyone can understand his legacy, Baldwin said, is to see it from above.

What we saw was not just one man’s legacy, however, but rather the work of six generations and the catalyst of American empire.

The first thing you notice about the Iron Range from above is how much of it is missing. Minnesota mines produced more than 34 million tons of taconite pellets last year, nowhere near the heydays of natural ore during the World Wars, but also not far off the typical year during the more recent taconite age.

Our state produced more than 4.6 billion tons of iron ore in its history, nearly all of it fed into blast furnaces to make steel. The vast canyons and piles of overburden found along this narrow 110-mile band of iron provide evidence visible from space.

Today, one of the starkest aerial observations is the proximity of the mines to one another, and the rapidly approaching consolidation or shutdowns that will result.

Near Virginia, Minn., U.S. Steel’s Minntac and Cleveland-Cliffs’ United Taconite and Minorca mines surround the town like three converging forest fires. Cliffs idled Minorca this past spring, and it’s plain to see why some workers fear it won’t reopen. With Minntac and Utac running hot, there’s enough ore to meet increasingly shaky demand.

An even more striking example appears just west of Hibbing, where Cliffs’ Hibbing Taconite pit is wrapped around U.S. Steel’s Keewatin Taconite. You can see a Hibtac drill rig standing just half a mile from the Keetac processing plant. Ore removed by the drill rig is trucked six miles back to the Hibtac plant, a considerable distance that eats into profitability.

Hibbing Taconite currently runs at half capacity, with hundreds laid off alongside the Minorca miners. This mine needs ore. It’s exploring options farther west, but with new owners at U.S. Steel something here may change sooner than later.

State highways and towns constrain mines across the Range. Companies could move them, as they have before, but at what cost? In most cases, it would be too expensive.

Taconite plants aren’t pretty. These facilities are generally anywhere from 45-70 years old, a fairly seasoned age for a person, but ancient for equipment that crushes boulders into paste before melting it into marbles.

The legacy taconite plants were all built for the 20th-century steel industry. Over the past 30 years, steelmaking rapidly shifted to mini mills that feed electric arc furnaces with higher-grade iron and steel scrap.

Only two Range mines currently produce material that eventually feeds those furnaces — Cliffs’ Northshore in Babbitt and Silver Bay and Keewatin Taconite. In both cases, the pellets require additional processing before going to the mills.

At Keewatin Taconite, you can see where U.S. Steel unveiled its new direct-reduced grade pellet facility two years ago. The bright blue building glistens from above, a tiny dot of hope amid decline.

An even bigger curiosity stands just a few miles west. Near Nashwauk, a few miles from my house, Mesabi Metallics continues to build an advanced iron mine that aims to supply the new mills. It has long-term goals to make steel on the Iron Range, an elusive dream first expressed decades ago.

From above, the project’s eccentricities show. Here we see hundreds of workers building a plant that looks far more advanced than anything on the Iron Range. But weathered beams and old mechanical parts lie around the construction site like junkyard fodder, remnants of the project’s failure under the bankrupt Essar Steel in 2015. Now owned by a reorganized Essar Group, Mesabi Metallics’ prospects depend on whether you believe forward-looking projections or past results.

The one unifying factor across the Range is aging mine infrastructure. Failure to make the leap to new steelmaking will be the death of the state’s iron industry.

The lush beauty of northern Minnesota was evident throughout my flight. Deep blue lakes and sprawling green forests thrive right next to active mining properties. But the environmental impact of mining can also be seen far more clearly at elevation than from the ground.

When you break into sulfide-bearing rock, you create sulfide-rich water. This isn’t the end of the world. But if the sulfides break loose of their containment to meet certain natural elements, they chemically transform into damaging sulfates. This kills wild rice, but at 5,000 feet you can see that it kills a lot of other things, too.

Tailings piles and basins are manufactured landforms designed to keep fine particles from escaping the mine. Collectively, tailings mitigation takes up hundreds of square miles and hundreds of millions in annual spending. Preventing environmental damage requires huge effort by many people. You can’t miss the scale of these efforts from above.

But Baldwin, who has worked with sulfide-rich ores like the ones found on the eastern Mesabi, pointed out places where water inside the tailings dams had slowly leached out over many years. These basins aren’t lined, the way the tailings basins he managed in South Carolina were. Over time, water will escape.

These patches of dead vegetation weren’t huge, nor were they found everywhere, but they are real. Over time, compounding the risk factors of heavier rains and reduced containment efforts after mines close, you can predict a real problem.

Managing sulfides is chemically difficult, but not impossible. Lining tailings basins is expensive, but if it can be done in South Carolina, one can imagine it being done here, too.

“If you don’t ask for it, you aren’t going to get it,” Baldwin said.

Sulfide content gets higher as you move to the east side of the Range, near where proposed copper-nickel mines like NewRange Minerals and Twin Metals are located. I noted that the only place I saw wild rice growing in quantities that could be seen from an airplane was just a mile south of Twin Metals, not far from the test shaft Baldwin saw almost 60 years ago.

I think what’s most visible about the Iron Range from above is how limiting the debate we have over mining really is.

Yes, you can mitigate the negative effects of mining with science and good corporate practices. But doing so is expensive. Both companies and the state must commit to clear long-term plans. And even responsible mining changes the landscape for the known future. Pits and tailings piles will likely be notable landmarks long after the English language is forgotten. Sulfides are another kind of landmark.

No, you can’t count on mining to secure the economy forever, or even for long. This will end. Whether or not Iron Range communities collapse when mining ceases is a question of preparation and imagination. From way up high, it’s hard to see either.

Our flight ended safely. I sent a picture of my feet on the tarmac to my concerned wife. As I left the airport in my earthbound vehicle, I formulated a lesson from the journey:

What’s here is ours, for better or worse, and what’s gone is never coming back.