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Idaho is Sitting on One of the Most Important Elements on Earth
SCIENCE
IDAHO IS SITTING ON ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT ELEMENTS ON EARTH
The clean-energy revolution is unleashing a rush on cobalt, reviving old mines—and old questions—in a remote forest.
By Michael Holtz
Photographs by Alexis Joy Hagestad
JANUARY 24, 2022
On september 13, I took my first plane trip in 18 months: Kansas City to Boise with a layover in Denver. The trip itself was largely uneventful, with one exception. After I boarded my connecting flight in Denver, a pilot announced that we would be briefly delayed because Air Force One was also en route to Boise. President Biden was responding to yet another record-setting wildfire season, during which 5.3 million acres of the U.S., an area the size of New Jersey, had already burned. “We can’t ignore the reality that these wildfires are being supercharged by climate change,” he would say later that day. “It isn’t about red or blue states. It’s about fires. Just fires.”
The wildfires had both everything and nothing to do with my trip to Boise and, from there, to the Salmon-Challis National Forest, a five-hour drive northeast of the city. For me, the area’s most immediate draw was cobalt, a hard, silvery-gray metal used to make heat-resistant alloys for jet engines and, more recently, most of the lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles. The Salmon-Challis sits atop what is known as the Idaho Cobalt Belt, a 34-mile-long geological formation of sedimentary rock that contains some of the largest cobalt deposits in the country. As the global market for lithium-ion batteries has grown—and the price of cobalt along with it—so has commercial interest in the belt. At least six mining companies have applied for permits from the U.S. Forest Service to operate in the region. Most of these companies are in the early stages of exploration; one has started to build a mine. In Idaho, as in much of the world, the clean-energy revolution is reshaping the geography of resource extraction.
And so it was that, on a pleasantly cool late-summer morning, I found myself in the back seat of a Ford Expedition alongside the mining engineer Matthew Lengerich. As the executive general manager of mining for Jervois Global, the Australian company that owns the new mine, Lengerich was my guide for the day. Lengerich has been in the mining industry for the past 23 years, and before joining Jervois in August, he worked for the Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto. He told me that he switched companies, at least in part, because of his interest in electric vehicles. “The EV story is one that I personally believe in,” he said. ”I think it's here to stay. I’m happy to share that I saw the initial trailer for the F-150 Lightning and went, ‘That's really cool.’”
For most of our hour and a half drive from Jervois’s office in the town of Salmon to the Jervois mine, we bumped along a dirt road that ran adjacent to several creeks and down a series of vertigo-inducing switchbacks. Lengerich said he had recently seen black-bear cubs run across the road; I saw a grouse and two mule deer. “This is our commute to work,” Lengerich said, with a hint of genuine awe. “We’re not sitting in traffic on I-15. You get to drive this.” He pointed out the window to rugged mountains covered in ponderosa pines and Douglas firs. Yet cobalt mining has already changed this landscape, and is poised to do so again.
{snip}
IDAHO IS SITTING ON ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT ELEMENTS ON EARTH
The clean-energy revolution is unleashing a rush on cobalt, reviving old mines—and old questions—in a remote forest.
By Michael Holtz
Photographs by Alexis Joy Hagestad
JANUARY 24, 2022
On september 13, I took my first plane trip in 18 months: Kansas City to Boise with a layover in Denver. The trip itself was largely uneventful, with one exception. After I boarded my connecting flight in Denver, a pilot announced that we would be briefly delayed because Air Force One was also en route to Boise. President Biden was responding to yet another record-setting wildfire season, during which 5.3 million acres of the U.S., an area the size of New Jersey, had already burned. “We can’t ignore the reality that these wildfires are being supercharged by climate change,” he would say later that day. “It isn’t about red or blue states. It’s about fires. Just fires.”
The wildfires had both everything and nothing to do with my trip to Boise and, from there, to the Salmon-Challis National Forest, a five-hour drive northeast of the city. For me, the area’s most immediate draw was cobalt, a hard, silvery-gray metal used to make heat-resistant alloys for jet engines and, more recently, most of the lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles. The Salmon-Challis sits atop what is known as the Idaho Cobalt Belt, a 34-mile-long geological formation of sedimentary rock that contains some of the largest cobalt deposits in the country. As the global market for lithium-ion batteries has grown—and the price of cobalt along with it—so has commercial interest in the belt. At least six mining companies have applied for permits from the U.S. Forest Service to operate in the region. Most of these companies are in the early stages of exploration; one has started to build a mine. In Idaho, as in much of the world, the clean-energy revolution is reshaping the geography of resource extraction.
And so it was that, on a pleasantly cool late-summer morning, I found myself in the back seat of a Ford Expedition alongside the mining engineer Matthew Lengerich. As the executive general manager of mining for Jervois Global, the Australian company that owns the new mine, Lengerich was my guide for the day. Lengerich has been in the mining industry for the past 23 years, and before joining Jervois in August, he worked for the Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto. He told me that he switched companies, at least in part, because of his interest in electric vehicles. “The EV story is one that I personally believe in,” he said. ”I think it's here to stay. I’m happy to share that I saw the initial trailer for the F-150 Lightning and went, ‘That's really cool.’”
For most of our hour and a half drive from Jervois’s office in the town of Salmon to the Jervois mine, we bumped along a dirt road that ran adjacent to several creeks and down a series of vertigo-inducing switchbacks. Lengerich said he had recently seen black-bear cubs run across the road; I saw a grouse and two mule deer. “This is our commute to work,” Lengerich said, with a hint of genuine awe. “We’re not sitting in traffic on I-15. You get to drive this.” He pointed out the window to rugged mountains covered in ponderosa pines and Douglas firs. Yet cobalt mining has already changed this landscape, and is poised to do so again.
{snip}
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