President Donald Trump's administration is moving to lift restrictions on copper-nickel mining that the Biden administration imposed near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northeastern Minnesota.
The decision, announced Wednesday by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, threw a lifeline to the proposed Twin Metals Minnesota mine near Ely.
Democratic administrations have tried to kill the project because of what they called the threat of acid mine drainage into Boundary Waters, the country's most-visited federally designated wilderness area.
Twin Metals is owned by Chilean mining giant Antofagasta. President Barack Obama's administration declined to renew the company's mineral rights leases in the area in 2016. The first Trump administration reinstated those leases in 2019.
President Joe Biden's administration canceled the leases again in 2022 and imposed a 20-year moratorium on mining known as a "mineral withdrawal" in a 350-square-mile 900-square-kilometer area of the Superior National Forest upstream from the wilderness that includes the proposed underground mine site.