After millions in environmental cleanup, Idaho’s cobalt hotspot is welcoming its first new mining outfit in 40 years. Can it dig up the essential metal without leaving a trace?
the Salmon-Challis National Forest of central Idaho, the remnants of the Blackbird Mine lie among 830 acres of steep-walled canyons thick with soaring conifers. Dirt roads slash through patches of forest, and a 12-acre open pit, roughly the size of nine football fields, remains as a reminder of a bygone era. Abandoned tunnels snake beneath a retaining pool that brims with a watery sludge of metallic deposits.
A sample of cobaltite-biotite, an ore of cobalt and other minerals, collected from the Blackbird Mine in central Idaho in the 1940s. Yet new activity is awakening old concerns, especially among local groups leerily watching developments within the state’s cobalt honeypot. The Blackbird Mine’s big sin was “open-pit” digging that allowed noxious byproducts to contaminate the local ecosystem.
“We have landscapes that have been turned to moonscapes and contamination left behind that will have to be managed for centuries,” says Aimee Boulanger, executive director of the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance, an organization that sets standards for the independent auditing of industrial-scale extraction operations.
Other international firms are interested in Idaho’s stash of cobalt, but Jervois has a head start. In 2019, it acquired a 2,500-acre claim in the cobalt belt from previous owners who had gone to the trouble of getting permitted by the US Forest Service back in 2009. Therefore, the area has already undergone an environmental impact study.
If there’s a sales pitch to be made for responsible mining, it comes from Lengerich. He’s quick to tout his outdoorsy bona fides and his residency in the town of Salmon, inside the Idaho Cobalt Belt.
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