A renaissance on the Iron Range

Jennifer Simonson, Star Tribune

Dave Hughes, Polymet Mining’s manager of operations and development, walked around the former LTV Steel Mining facility near Hoyt Lakes in northeastern Minnesota. Polymet has spent more than $40 million in its attempt to show it can mine copper, nickel, cobalt and small amounts of precious metals.

After three decades in the doldrums, the Iron Range is on the verge of ushering in a new generation of miners and technology. A dozen large projects are lined up, with work underway on a couple.

By Larry Oakes, Star Tribune

Last update: March 2, 2008 - 2:22 PM

HOYT LAKES, MINN. - Barry Trach says that as he fights freeway traffic between home in Forest Lake and work in Maple Grove, he often longs for the slower pace of his native Iron Range.

Downsized out of mining in 2001, Trach, 47, moved from Gilbert, Minn., with his wife and two of their daughters. While they’ve adjusted, Trach, a field systems technician for Xcel Energy, says: “I do miss the Iron Range and would absolutely consider going back for the right opportunity.”

It may be knocking soon.

After a 25-year downturn in North America’s iron ore industry, surging worldwide demand for minerals and new technologies for refining them portend what increasingly promises to be a boom for the Range, even while much of the nation’s economy lags.

The world’s first commercial iron nugget plant — Mesabi Nugget — has jumped off the drawing board and is under construction north of Hoyt Lakes on the former site of LTV Steel Mining Co., which went bankrupt in 2001 and plunged the eastern Iron Range into joblessness and insecurity.

The $235 million facility rising there — a revolutionary leap from the region’s 50-year-old taconite-processing technology — is the first of a dozen large industrial projects proposed for the Range in the next five years.

They promise a combined investment of more than $6 billion, will require 7,000 construction workers, permanently employ more than 1,400 and support thousands of spin-off jobs.

“It’s incredible,” said Sandy Layman, commissioner of Iron Range Resources, the Eveleth-based state agency created decades ago with a mission to boost and diversify the region’s boom-and-bust economy. “We haven’t seen growth like we’re envisioning for at least 30 years.”

Environmental permits are in place and groundbreaking is expected this year on the Range’s first steel mill — the $1.7 billion Minnesota Steel Industries project near Nashwauk. It’s planned for the site where Butler Taconite closed in 1985, a victim of foreign competition and an industrywide recession.

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