T he lone access road to the Jervois mine cuts through what was once the only cobalt mine in the U.S., the 10,830-acre Blackbird Mine. The recent burn scar from the Mud Lick Fire reached the edge of Jervois Mine. Yet cobalt mining has already changed this landscape, and is poised to do so again. You get to drive this.” He pointed out the window to rugged mountains covered in ponderosa pines and Douglas firs.
“This is our commute to work,” Lengerich said, with a hint of genuine awe. Lengerich said he had recently seen black-bear cubs run across the road I saw a grouse and two mule deer.
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I’m happy to share that I saw the initial trailer for the F-150 Lightning and went, ‘That's really cool.’”įor 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. “The EV story is one that I personally believe in,” he said. He told me that he switched companies, at least in part, because of his interest in electric vehicles.
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. 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. In Idaho, as in much of the world, the clean-energy revolution is reshaping the geography of resource extraction.Īnd 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. Most of these companies are in the early stages of exploration one has started to build a mine. At least six mining companies have applied for permits from the U.S.
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. 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. 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 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. “We can’t ignore the reality that these wildfires are being supercharged by climate change,” he would say later that day. 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. 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. The trip itself was largely uneventful, with one exception.
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