Dear Polymet Supporter:
We had a positive start to 2022 with the ruling late last month by the Minnesota Court of Appeals that affirmed key aspects of PolyMet’s water discharge permit. The ruling came on the heels of an encouraging end to 2021 as the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency reinstated our air permit just before Christmas.
This is welcome momentum as we attempt to put the major components of remaining litigation behind us this year and begin to transition from litigation to project finance and preparations for construction. Just this week we announced a funding agreement with our major shareholder Glencore that will provide the financial resources we need to work through remaining litigation and continue to advance the project.
You can read more about recent and future developments below:
Water discharge permit ruling
New land exchange lawsuits
Hearings in 2022
Biden administration mineral development and supply chain policies
The Duluth Complex and the PolyMet NorthMet project
We are on a good course for 2022. We sincerely thank you for your continued support.
Sincerely,
Jon Cherry
Chairman, President & CEO
Water discharge permit ruling
The Minnesota Court of Appeals water permit ruling on Jan. 24 took most of our opponents’ hotly argued legal issues off the table including requests for contested cases on numerous aspects of the project, claims that the MPCA acted illegally in its interactions with the EPA and claims that PolyMet would violate the Fond du Lac Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa water quality standards. Importantly, the court upheld the agency’s conclusion that PolyMet’s project has no reasonable potential to violate water quality standards.
However, the court ruled that the MPCA must conduct what’s called a Maui test, an analysis born out of an unrelated U.S. Supreme Court decision made more than a year after our permit was issued by the MPCA. In Maui, the Supreme Court found that if discharges to groundwater are the functional equivalent of discharges to navigable (surface) waters, they require a separate surface water discharge permit under the Clean Water Act. We welcome the test because even though it didn’t exist when the project was permitted, a similar scientific study was conducted on NorthMet before the permit was issued. The agency at that time concluded the project had no permittable discharge to groundwater.
We are pleased with the outcome of the Court of Appeals ruling. Not surprisingly, our opponents also claim it as a “huge victory.” We believe they will petition the state Supreme Court to appeal their “victory.” Keep in mind that our opponents were denied their petitions for review on two previous lower court decisions they appealed. By comparison, the only two petitions for review to the state Supreme Court made by PolyMet were accepted and we subsequently won on the central issues in both cases. The bottom line is that with every court decision and proceeding, more issues are resolved and fewer issues remain to challenge.
New land exchange lawsuits
Perhaps as a last resort, two new lawsuits were recently filed in federal District Court by the Fond du Lac Band, the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) and other groups challenging the land exchange we completed with the U.S. Forest Service in June 2018. (The CBD lawsuit also challenges the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ wetland permit.) We will address these cases aggressively as we have all other attempts to stop the project in court.
Hearings in 2022
As we look ahead in 2022, we have two important hearings that are the result of court rulings. One is a contested case hearing to be conducted by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and pertains to our Permit to Mine and specifically the bentonite clay amendment we plan to use as part of our plan to close and reclaim our tailings basin after mining ceases. The other hearing is by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and relates to our federal wetlands permit. That hearing is designed to determine if our project will impact water quality on the Fond du Lac Band reservation located more than 110 river miles downstream of the project.
We are encouraged by the recent Court of Appeals finding on our water discharge permit that neither Minnesota’s nor the Fond du Lac Band’s water quality standards will be violated because of the permitted project. Dates have not yet been released for either hearing, but we expect these hearings will occur sooner rather than later this year. In both cases, science is strongly on our side. These hearings simply add additional process to what has already been an exhaustive and lengthy process involving the procurement and legal defense of our permits.
Biden administration mineral development and supply chain policies
We also are watching with interest recent federal actions to stop copper-nickel and precious metals mining within the Rainy River watershed. Our project is not in that watershed, and we have no federal mineral leases and do not operate on federal lands, so those specific actions have no direct bearing on our project. Conversely, there is growing awareness by government policymakers, elected officials and leaders in manufacturing of the critical role that copper, nickel and cobalt will play in the supply chain to feed the exploding demand for clean energy technologies.
Global economies are growing at a swift pace and decarbonization efforts have never been greater around the world. Global demand for copper is projected to outstrip the supply of copper (new and recycled) by a significant margin beginning in the next few years and lasting indefinitely. The projected shortage of copper, nickel, cobalt and other metals in the near term – metals key to the manufacture of wind turbines, solar arrays, battery storage systems and electric vehicles – presents real risk to local and global decarbonization progress.
There is growing awareness both domestically and abroad of the capacity and leadership position Minnesota can play in furnishing these critical minerals. For example, a June 2021 White House report on supply chain vulnerabilities spotlights PolyMet as the only permitted project in the U.S. to mine nickel after 2025. State and federal governments need to embrace responsible mining if the world is going to successfully transition to clean energy and satisfy decarbonization goals.
Duluth Complex and NorthMet
Minnesota is fortunate to have the Duluth Complex, one of the world’s major undeveloped mining regions possessing an abundance of copper, nickel, cobalt and other minerals vital to the development of clean energy and global decarbonization efforts mentioned above. Our NorthMet deposit is within this complex and we are proud to be the first and only one so far to receive permits to mine it.
The environmental review, permitting and legal road we have traveled has been difficult, but the journey has proven that we can mine these critical minerals responsibly. We still have some work to do, but the road remaining is full of promises for good jobs, economic prosperity and minerals that can feed the supply chain to meet growing global demand.
AI
