>> All right, Senator Johnson, thank you very
much. >> Have a good day.
>> Right now in northern Wisconsin, crews are
working around the clock to drill deep into the bedrock.
It's called exploratory drilling. And the goal is
to determine if a deposit of copper, gold and other
minerals in the rock is rich enough to bring
metallic sulfide mining back to the state. Here and
now, senior political reporter Zac Schultz has
the story. >> What we have going on
here is the drilling process has just started.
>> It's a Sunday morning in the Chequamegon-nicolet
National Forest in Taylor County. A drill team out of
Minnesota is making the final site preparations,
digging a sump pit that will hold cuttings from the
drilling that is about to begin. Steve Donahue is on
the board of directors for Greenlight Metals, the
company behind the exploratory drilling.
>> And so the drill crew is getting ready to start
coring the bedrock. Okay. And that's a hollow barrel
with a diamond impregnated tip on it. And it just cuts
out a cylinder of the rock going down.
>> The drill team will cut ten feet of bedrock. Use
this tip, called a water swivel, to pull up the core
and repeat. >> This particular hole
will go down about 1500 feet.
>> Greenlight Field geologists will then box up
the cores and bring them back to their facility.
>> They log the geology, process the core, cut it up
into segments, send it off to a lab where the lab
tests it for things like copper and gold and
tellurium. >> Greenlight metals
conducted exploratory drilling at the site last
summer. >> What we're seeing is
about 2 to 3% copper in the ore, or what we would call.
Or if you look at the average deposit that's
being mined in the world, it's maybe half a percent.
>> The site is known as the bend deposit, and it was
first identified and explored in the 1980s.
>> So each of these is a drill hole.
>> Eric Quigley is Greenlight Metals director
of exploration. A computer model shows every
exploratory hole drilled at the site in the last 40
years. >> That red represents the
copper, you know, primarily the copper and gold
mineralization that we've identified.
>> The current drilling is trying to expand the
picture to see if the deposit runs deeper than
previously known. The cores from last summer were
promising. They used a red marker to circle flecks of
gold in the bedrock. >> The visible gold within,
I think, is about roughly two meters, probably
averaging about a third a third of an ounce per ton,
which is extremely, extremely high grade
material. >> They have conservative
projections of what's in the bend deposit.
>> 4 million tons of ore, copper grade ore that was
about 1 to 2% copper with good grades of gold. And
now we're finding tellurium in there. What we're hoping
to do is to expand the tonnage of that by drilling
other areas around this deposit.
>> The results were enough for Greenlight Metals to
secure another $11 million in funding from investors
to continue the exploratory drilling. But that doesn't
mean a mine is coming to Taylor County in the
immediate future. >> So we're years away from
ever from being at the point where we would
actually start the permitting process with the
DNR and the federal government on an actual
mine out there. >> Previous mining
proposals in Wisconsin have received hostile reactions.
So Greenlight Metals is being proactive in
community outreach, presenting updates to
groups like the Westboro Town Board.
>> We want to be coming in and talking to you and
other local units of government, because I think
your input is going to be important and we want to
factor that in. The public, I would say, is about 70%
enthusiastic about the potential. And then there's
another group of people who obviously have concerns
about what it means for the environment.
>> I know you guys take water from the yellow River
to the drilling. What kind? What is there in the permit
that maintains a minimum flow in the yellow River?
>> The concerns are primarily focused on
environmental impact. The bend deposit is under
national forest land in just a few hundred yards
from the yellow River. >> We just keep each other
informed, informed about the issues. Protecting the
environment. >> Scott Stalheim and Cathy
Mauer are part of a group called friends of the
yellow River. >> I think there should not
be mining in this area for a lot of those reasons.
That's my personal opinion, and I think many of the
friends of the yellow River would feel that way.
>> The group is small and private, mainly focused on
educating members. An open question is whether they
should become more public and vocal.
>> We had quite a few people with different
opinions. because it's just
exploratory mining that, well, it doesn't matter
much. And until a real mine comes, then we'll start to
worry about it. >> I think it's a
fundamentally incompatible land use to have on our
national forest. >> One group that is
publicly opposing the drilling is the Wisconsin
chapter of the Sierra Club. Dave Blouin is the state
mining committee chair. >> The environment here is
especially water rich, and that makes it really almost
incompatible with modern mining, especially metallic
sulfide mining. >> The issue is the copper
and gold are found within bedrock heavy with sulfides.
As you can see in the cores from the bend deposit.
>> There's a very stark contrast between the
unmineralized rock and the heavy sulfide content.
>> After the ore is mined, it has to be processed.
Sulfides in the rock produce acid when exposed
to air and water. >> Imagine a finely ground
up, almost powdery waste material that's that's left
over from the processing to skim off the metals in the
first place. And you have this acid producing
material that is chock full of nasty toxics that if
they get into groundwater or surface waters or
wetlands, are absolutely polluting and damaging to
the environment. So this includes lead, mercury,
arsenic. >> Most of the
environmental damage from metallic sulfide mining
comes from leaks at the tailings facilities
polluting the groundwater. >> That's an area that has
gone through tremendous changes in terms of how the
tailings facilities are managed.
>> This video shows the processing plant and
tailings facility for the Eagle Mine, a metallic
sulfide copper mine in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
Donohue says they don't have designs yet, but a
processing facility in Wisconsin would have an
engineered liner and a drainage system and would
be capped at the end of its lifespan.
>> So it's very analogous to what you would see for a
municipal waste landfill. >> He also says the ore
wouldn't be processed in the national forest. Bend
is one of four deposits across northern Wisconsin
they would hope to mine, and the processing and
tailings facility would be at one centralized location.
>> And that allows us to then capitalize, create
economies of scale where we can have a pipeline of
projects that over a generation or multiple
generations are feeding into that operation.
>> Blouin says green light is the fourth company to
explore bend, and each previous effort has shown
it wasn't economically viable.
>> The overall deposit at bend is under 2% copper,
meaning 98% of the material that comes out is waste.
>> Donohue says a lot has changed since the last
exploration at bend. For one, the demand for copper
is up, raising the price for copper.
>> So there's a lot more demand in the system
because of things like AI, electric vehicles building
out the electric grid. It's going to take a lot of
copper. >> They've also discovered
a rare earth element called tellurium, labeled by the
U.S. as critical to the creation of solar panels.
>> In the drill program that was completed this
past summer. The assay data indicated about 340 350g of
tellurium per ton in the material.
>> The old argument for mining in Wisconsin focused
on the miner on the flag, or the need for jobs. But
the new argument is national security.
>> We're very reliant on foreign sources for many,
many critical metals. If we don't want to be dependent
on adversaries for these critical metals, we're
going to have to do it here domestically.
national security argument simply because bend isn't
big enough to factor in. >> In terms of the amount
of minerals that ore metals that a bend deposit can
produce, it's not going to dent or make any real
difference in terms of national security for the
United States. >> Blouin understands any
mining permit is years away, but even the exploratory
drilling comes with concerns.
>> It's concerning to us because you know that
potential, and they've described it as a potential
mining district across northern Wisconsin is
deeply concerning. Every potential proposal results
in risk to the environment, to air, to water, to
habitat in multiple locations forever.
>> Donohue reiterates there's a lot more drilling
and a lot of studies to go, but at some point in the
future, the economics will make the bend deposit
viable. >> If you look at these
types of belts across the world, this is one of the
larger undeveloped belts of its type in the world. So
from that perspective, I think very confident that
there will be mining again in Wisconsin.