Companies scrambling to increase supplies of critical materials are finding some luck in reopening sites.
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Bluelake isn’t the only one; this trend can be seen around the globe. In the U.S., Perpetua Resources is working to launch a gold and antimony mining project in Idaho; Resolution Copper hopes to open an old site in Arizona; and MP Materials has revived a rare-earth site on the California-Nevada border. Projects have also been planned in Germany and Italy.
“The challenge [for us] has been permitting and also getting a social license for the project,” Hjorth said. As a brownfield project, Joma has an advantage because waste from the new mine, known as tailings, is going to be stored underground in used tunnels left from previous mining, avoiding the large dams involved in some notable disasters, he said.Local memory of the former mine was also an important reason why the municipality chose to green light the copper mine, according to residents.
Perpetua Resources plans to reopen a former gold rush mine in central Idaho, about a five-hour drive from Boise. However, even with a potentially quicker permitting process, opening a brownfield mine remains costly. “The advantage of a brownfield is having a known site with a known ore body,” said James Litinsky, CEO of MP Materials. But he cautioned that they still remain “very capital intensive and difficult to operate.”When MP bought its brownfield site in 2017, it had a mining permit but was in a state of disrepair, with the pit itself flooded. The previous owner of the site had invested $1.
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