Twin Metals Minnesota wants the Biden administration to reconsider its plan to impose a 20-year moratorium on mining near Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW), Kallanish reports.

Last week, two federal agencies, Interior and Agriculture, called for a mineral withdrawal study on 93,000 hectares of federal land in Superior National Forest in northeast Minnesota that could block Twin Metals’ proposed $1.7 billion copper-nickel-cobalt-platinum mine near the BWCAW. That process to protect the BWACW is getting underway. The company, an Antofagasta subsidiary, says it will comment on that proposed ban during the upcoming public comment period.

The company also says it intends to appeal a separate decision by the Bureau of Land Management to reject the company’s preference right lease applications and prospecting permit applications for additional areas near the BWCAW. The BLM says it rejected those applications because of the proposed federal mining moratorium. The company has two other leases in place although they are being challenged in court.

The company says those back-to-back federal actions threaten jobs and the local economy. They would also hurt US efforts to develop a secure domestic mineral supply chain to combat climate change.

“We have a viable mining project that we will move forward under existing law,” says ceo Kelly Osborne in a statement.

The BLM’s rejection of the applications was “both politically motivated and completely unnecessary,” adds chief regulatory officer Julie Padilla. “This tells us that the federal government has no intention to listen to science, and it also makes clear that opponents of copper-nickel mining are afraid that the established environmental review process already underway for our project would show that a modern copper-nickel mine can be safe for the environment and should be permitted.”

A contingent of Twin Metals supporters descended on Washington, DC, earlier this week to lobby federal officials in support of the project, according to media reports.

The company has been working on the project for 10 years and submitted its application in 2019 to federal and state regulators.

The case is being closely watched because it is one of the first cases to gauge President Joe Biden’s support for expanding domestic mining for needed battery metals. In 2016, the Obama administration took initial steps to withdraw portions of the watershed from new mineral permits and leases. In 2018, the Trump administration cancelled that action.