Sulfate standard

The hyperbole came fast and furious at times during the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency’s public hearing in Virginia last week on Keetac’s water discharge permits and the company’s request for a variance from the state’s so-called “wild rice” sulfate standard. To hear some of our area lawmakers, enforcement of the 10 milligram-per-liter limit on sulfate was an existential threat to the Iron Range, if not all of Minnesota.
According to County Commissioner Mike Jugovich, enforcement of the pollution standard would turn the Iron Range into a “barren wasteland,” ala a Mad Max movie. Some went even further, suggesting the standard threatened to bankrupt communities and businesses all across the state.
Sens. Grant Hauschild and Keri Heintzeman argued that trying to enforce the standard was ridiculous since there is no proven technology that can do it. That’s an odd argument coming from lawmakers who say they support permitting new mines, such as NewRange Copper’s proposed NorthMet operation, since the companies involved in that joint venture have long said they can meet the standard, based on well-proven technology. Apparently, Sens. Hauschild and Heintzeman believe NewRange officials aren’t telling us the truth.
Others described Hay Lake, which is the downstream wild rice water that triggered enforcement of the strict sulfate standard on Keetac’s discharges, as a verdant oasis of wild rice despite receiving decades of relatively high sulfate discharges from the Keetac facility. While we don’t argue with the fact that wild rice may have once grown abundantly on the small lake, information we’ve gathered suggests the rice is quite limited in more recent times.
This is not to suggest that all of the arguments heard at last week’s hearing lacked merit. There is no question that there are a multitude of factors that are impacting wild rice in northern Minnesota. Even remote lakes, with very low sulfate levels, are experiencing wild rice decline, and climate change is likely playing a role in that. It’s equally true that sulfate, by itself, has not been shown to harm wild rice. It’s only when it is converted to sulfide in lake or stream sediments that it becomes toxic to rice, and that process is a complicated one that can be affected by several factors. In other words, this issue isn’t as straightforward or as simple as people on either side of the debate might like to suggest.
Then again, there’s more at stake than wild rice. The same aquatic microbes that feed on sulfate, and convert it to toxic sulfide, help to convert mercury into its most toxic form as well, which then accumulates in our region’s fish.
Fortunately, this needn’t be a question of jobs versus the environment, the standard framing for these debates. While requiring Keetac to address its discharges through reverse osmosis (the usual technology for this kind of pollution control) would be expensive and come with its own environmental problems, we know that there are other technologies, developed right here in northeastern Minnesota, that are ready for commercial trials. They could offer effective sulfate control for a tiny fraction of the cost of reverse osmosis, and without all the downsides. Both Clearwater Biologics, in Babbitt, and the UMD-affiliated Natural Resources Research Institute in Duluth have developed technologies that offer real promise.
U.S. Steel, if it had any intent of ever cleaning up its act, would have been investing in these technologies for years. Instead, the company has preferred to pay lip service to potential solutions in favor of arguing that the high cost and side effects of reverse osmosis warrant a do-nothing approach to the sulfate problem. Far from costing jobs, developing and implementing these locally created control technologies could result in significant new employment in our region, while affordably addressing sulfate pollution.
While the mining industry and its local boosters claimed the impact of the standard would soon fall on municipal wastewater treatment plants and cost taxpayers billions, MPCA officials noted that public entity variances are far easier to obtain than for private industry. To suggest that communities will be bankrupted by enforcement of this standard is nonsense. By law, that can’t happen.
That’s why some of the comments last week from lawmakers and local union officials were so disappointing. It was clear they were there to carry U.S. Steel’s tainted water and were content to jettison the facts in favor of exaggeration and misdirection.
When you get past all the arguments, the bottom line is pretty simple. The mess that mining companies have left on the Iron Range will eventually be addressed. Either the companies that profited will pay that price, the taxpayers will pay the price, or the environment will pay the price. U.S. Steel has spent decades avoiding responsibility for its pollution. It’s time to start the cleanup.