VIRGINIA — The state’s decades-old wild rice sulfate standard is as central to miners’ fears as it is to environmental advocates’ hope.
Steelworkers, contractors and others who rely on mining for their livelihoods worry that the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency’s efforts to finally enforce the sulfate limit will devastate the Iron Range.
Environmental and Indigenous advocates say enforcement is long overdue to protect sacred manoomin and keep Minnesota's water clean and safe.
Sulfate itself doesn’t actually impact wild rice. It's the potential for it to turn into sulfide that is the problem. When that chemical reaction occurs in lake sediment, the sulfide can be harmful to wild rice, especially as it is growing. Research suggests high sulfate levels also contribute to toxic methylmercury accumulation in fish.
Sulfate is generated throughout taconite mining and processing, and as mine’s reuse water, sulfate gets more concentrated. Mines eventually discharge this water, prompting concerns about sulfate pollution.
Wild rice standard worries aren’t new. For various reasons, it hasn’t really been enforced in the 50 years it has existed.
But new wastewater permits for Keetac are the latest step in a complex, years-long saga that involves tribal sovereignty, local and international economics, governmental rulemaking and scientific debate. The timing is exacerbating tensions, with hundreds of Cleveland Cliffs miners laid off and U.S. Steel selling to a Japanese company.
While some celebrate the possible enforcement of the sulfate standard, others are sounding the alarm, saying this could mean the end of mining on the Range.
“No mine in Minnesota has ever been required to comply with this standard established in 1973,” said Ricky DeFoe, Fond du Lac elder and board member of the nonprofit WaterLegacy, at the PCA’s Sept. 3 public meeting. “True community entails respect and accountability. But for 52 years, we’ve been disrespected, and there’s a lack of accountability.”
“Keetac is a domino. This will be the first one to fall. The first,” said Mike Jugovich, St. Louis County commissioner, an hour after DeFoe at the same meeting. “And nothing is going to stop the rest of the state from falling with it. When the Iron Range is shut down, rest assured, sleep well at night, because everyone will be affected by it, too.”
Keetac’s new permits
Sulfate limits were first placed on the Keetac mine in Keewatin in 2011 to protect Hay Lake, the first wild rice water downstream of the facility.
The small lake is nestled a mile back from the nearest road, its shores half owned by U.S. Steel and half by Blandin Paper Co.
The 2011 permits required Keetac to not exceed a monthly average of 14 milligrams of sulfate per liter of water, with a daily maximum of 24 mg/L by 2019. The state’s wild rice standard is 10 mg/L.
But in 2016, the state Legislature passed a law invalidating any sulfate limits in permits.
Attempted rule changes and legal limbo ensued, and in the end, sulfate enforcement returned.
The 2025 draft permits contain the same sulfate limits as the 2011 permit. State and federal anti-backsliding rules don’t allow the PCA to remove the limits.
Keetac must comply by April 30, 2030, with construction on its wastewater treatment equipment starting by May 1, 2028. The mine’s discharges average between 22 and 165 mg/L of sulfate, according to the PCA.
U.S. Steel requested a variance from the sulfate standard, which the PCA denied. That decision and the draft wastewater permits are open to public comment through Monday, Sept. 22.
The PCA responds to every comment it receives, whether individually or in a batch response addressing a specific issue.
The reemergence of the sulfate issue has been looming for some time. Range legislators even tried to address the issue in unemployment legislation earlier this year after the layoffs at Minorca and Hibbing Taconite, though that failed.
Modern science?
Minnesota’s wild rice sulfate standard was adopted by the PCA and approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1973. The EPA decides whether state water quality standards comply with the federal Clean Water Act.
The protective measure recognized the plant's environmental, economic and cultural importance. Wild rice, manoomin in Ojibwe, is an important food source for waterfowl. Cultivated wild rice contributes nearly $60 million to the state’s economy each year. And the plant is central to Ojibwe identity and way of life: past, present and future.
The idea of limiting sulfate to protect wild rice is based on studies done by future Minnesota Department of Conservation researcher John B. Moyle in the 1930s and ‘40s.
Moyle — who’s been called Minnesota’s Aldo Leopold — said in a 1975 letter that the limit was adopted after a phone call from someone with the PCA asking about water quality and wild rice.
“I said that there were no large and important natural and self-perpetuating wild rice stands in Minnesota where the sulfate ion content exceeded 10 ppm [parts per million],” he wrote. One ppm is equal to 1 mg/L.
It didn’t take long for industry to object to the limit. The 1975 letter includes Moyle’s recommendations for a wastewater permit for Minnesota Power’s Clay Boswell Energy Center in Cohasset, which the company called “unreasonable.”
The sentiment was echoed decades later at the PCA’s Keetac permits public meeting. Around 400 Rangers packed into the Iron Trail Motors Event Center in Virginia for a chance to address the PCA.
“The current 10 is [an] unrealistic level,”said Derek Peterson, business manager for Laborers Local 1091. “ ... Please do not include permanent limits, as we need to modernize these standards and follow modern science.”
There are multiple factors that influence the success of a wild rice bed in a given year and over time. Studies — including Moyle’s — seem to agree that the exact necessary sulfate limit can vary, though to what degree is more widely debated.
“Sulfate above 10 mg/L results in poor growth of wild rice, loss of seed production and population extinction. The science is both modern and solid,” said Janet Keough in her comments. Keough is the board of directors president for WaterLegacy and a retired aquatic ecologist who ended her career as a science director for the EPA research lab in Duluth.
But U.S. Steel has been discharging water for decades, and there’s still wild rice growing in Hay Lake, according to the company.
“[U.S. Steel] provided limited data for us to understand how much the wild rice is and whether it’s self-sustaining and all of that,” said Tom Johnson, PCA government relations director, in response to a question at the public meeting.“And so, we welcome any information that will help us better understand and better evaluate that.”
The PCA has acknowledged wild rice needs to be protected from sulfate and that a higher limit could still be protective in some cases.
Hundreds of pages of relevant analyses and reports were written in the 2010s as the PCA, at the direction of the Legislature, tried to overhaul the standard. That effort started in 2011, a year after the EPA told the PCA it had to enforce the standard.
A lot happened in between, but in 2017, the PCA proposed what has become known as the site-specific standard. As the name suggests, the rule would have given each body of water its own standard, based on some of those other factors previously mentioned, like carbon and iron levels.
Then in 2018, an administrative law judge rejected the rule change, writing the PCA failed to prove that the new standard would be "equally or more protective of wild rice waters.”
Then-Gov. Mark Dayton created a Task Force on Wild Rice shortly after the decision. Its report called for the PCA to promote sulfate minimization and improve its variance process.
The task force had no Ojibwe representation, as the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe declined to participate. The 1854 Treaty Authority issued its own report, stating the minimal tribal representation on the task force failed to respect tribal sovereignty. That report called for enforcement of the existing standard.
In 2022, the EPA again told the PCA it needed to enforce the standard.
“The EPA made it clear ... that they expect us to implement the sulfate standard across all of our Clean Water Act programs, despite the session law that the Legislature passed throughout the 2010s,” Johnson said.
Rangers pointed out the most recent letter came under a different administration. With President Donald Trump in office, would the EPA change its position?
“I’ve been in conversations with folks out in D.C. over the last couple weeks on this,” state Rep. Spencer Igo, R-Wabana Township, said at an August special meeting of the Range Association of Municipalities and Schools.
“There is stuff moving, to which point I can reveal too much of what’s going on, I can’t yet. But there is higher level conversations way above us lowly elected’s pay grades that are happening right now that are hopefully going to put us on track on the federal side of things.”
The cost of compliance
The technology exists to remove sulfates from water, and the Legislature has granted nearly $20 million for research on difficult-to-treat pollutants, with much of that focused on sulfates.
U.S. Steel acknowledged the technical feasibility in its variance request but said, “it has never been implemented at the scale required to treat this volume of water to these levels of sulfate.”
U.S. Steel estimates it will cost somewhere between $600 million and $1.3 billion to build the treatment systems and operate them for 20 years, with an actual estimate of $814 million. The PCA agrees with the estimate.
The variance request was based on two arguments: complying with the standard would cause more environmental damage than not complying and compliance would result in “substantial and widespread” economic impacts.
The PCA shot down both arguments.
“[The decision] is based on the application that we received,” said Theresa Haugen, PCA industrial water and mining section manager, at the public meeting. “The preliminary determination, the variance, is [a] draft, it’s open to public comment. So, we could receive more or different information.”
The PCA’s finding that the standard would not result in “substantial economic impact to the company” drew a significant amount of objection from Rangers.
U.S. Steel Senior Director of Environmental Chrissy Bartovich put it in terms of price per ton of taconite pellets: an additional $17.50, if treatment costs $105 million a year and Keetac produces 6 million tons. Prices average around $100 a ton.
“If it was economical now to sell on the global market, we wouldn’t have facilities shut down,” Bartovich said at a community meeting in August. “ ... We have to be globally competitive, and $17.50 per ton is not globally competitive.”
Erin Shay, executive director of Hibbing-based United Way of Northeastern Minnesota, is concerned about the risks to a region that “is already suffering.”
“We see firsthand what happens in every corner of the Iron Range when a mine closes its doors, even temporarily,” she told the PCA. “ ... It’s very likely that its enforcement will result in regionwide and long-term impacts. These obviously will include increased cost to residents, lost jobs, decreased tax revenue and community support organizations, like ours, stretched beyond capacity.”
Keetac employs about 450 people and indirectly creates another 566 jobs in the region, according to U.S. Steel.
The company estimated 453 Rangers would be unemployed because of the cost of compliance, and those job losses would cost social services over half a million dollars. The company also pointed to the possibility of local tax revenues decreasing while the need for social services went up.
The PCA only looked at company-wide financial metrics in its analysis, per EPA guidance. It found U.S. Steel would remain profitable even with the estimated treatment costs and so denied the variance request.
“U.S. Steel did not provide written evidence that the treatment costs would cause a slowdown or shutdown at Keetac, therefore, the MPCA could not consider that as part of the variance evaluation,” a presentation from the meeting reads.
It’s unclear how U.S. Steel’s sale to Japanese firm Nippon Steel affects the economics. A national security agreement is meant to safeguard against plant closures and requires the company to spend hundreds of millions on its U.S. mines.
Range response
The PCA’s September public meeting wasn’t the first time the Range gathered to discuss the issue.
Leaders came together twice in August to learn more about the issue and raise awareness of its implications ahead of the PCA meeting, each time echoing a similar message of catastrophic economic and community consequences.
The PCA and U.S. Steel presented at a special meeting of the Range Association of Municipalities and Schools on Aug. 14.
At the end of the two-hour meeting, the RAMS board of directors nearly unanimously approved a letter calling for the PCA to reconsider and approve U.S. Steel's variance request.
“There is no debate from our group that good standards are needed and appropriate to protect our citizens and the environment,” the letter states.
“Increased costs of compliance, however, for a standard that has a questionable foundation and has little chance of being substantially achieved on a state-wide basis, is unacceptable and will likely lead to more operations closing and the subsequent loss of economic activities that support our communities.”
The letter further highlighted mining’s “unequal treatment” in the application of the sulfate standard — another argument that was repeated at all three meetings.
U.S. Steel’s Bartovich said at the RAMS meeting that other industries aren’t talking about the sulfate issue because it’s being framed as a mining issue.
“That might be how it’s being messaged, but it’s coming,” she said. “So, yeah, I think people are afraid to engage because then it’s going to get them next.”
A few days later, on Aug. 19, RAMS, the Iron Mining Association of Minnesota and the Iron Ore Alliance — a partnership between U.S. Steel and the United Steelworkers — hosted a community meeting at the Minnesota Discovery Center. Some 100 Rangers attended.
There, Bartovich said agricultural producers she’d met didn’t even realize that the sulfate standard was in one of their permits.
“We totally ruined that man’s day when we talked to him about the sulfate standards,” added Kristen Vake, executive director of the Iron Mining Association. “It was not on his radar.”
The implications of the standard for municipal wastewater facilities have been brought up even more.What happens if they have to comply with the wild rice standard, which is significantly lower than the drinking water standard of 250 mg/L?
The PCA, seemingly in anticipation of this argument, highlighted the difference between public and private economic variances in its presentation.
Per EPA criteria, wastewater treatment costs must remain affordable at less than 2% of a community’s median household income. A municipality would be eligible for a variance if compliance would make rates unaffordable.
State Rep. Roger Skraba, R-Ely, is on the Capital Investment Committee, which handles bonding.
“If this standard is what every wastewater treatment plant has to do, I promise you, every one of them will come to the Capitol, looking for money to upgrade their wastewater treatment plant, and there is not enough money to go around. It’s impossible,” he said at the community meeting.
All Range legislators except state Rep. Ben Davis, R-Mission Township, addressed the sulfate issue between the three meetings. But Skraba made it the most explicitly political, pointing out that the governor — currently Tim Walz, a DFLer — appoints agency commissioners.
“All these commissioners carry on what the governor wants. It’s an ideologue. That is how it works,” he said.
“So, we keep saying, ‘MPCA, MPCA, the standard.’ If we have a governor that stands up for the Iron Range, for us, for our way of life, then this room wouldn’t be full of us right now. It would be taken care of. It’s not. And if you have any energy and if you have the time, we need a new governor.”
The idea of the Iron Range and Northern Minnesota versus the Twin Cities was also carried between the meetings.
“We got to act on this. The MPCA, the DNR, they’re all full of environmentalists. They want to shut down Northern Minnesota,” said Chisholm city councilor Jed Holewa at the RAMS meeting. “This is just another arm of the metro doing what they can to shut us down. We need to stop it.”
A few days after the meeting, the Northern Minnesota USW units sent a joint letter to Minnesota media and specifically the Minnesota Star Tribune, in response to a July article about the sulfate issue, calling for a stop to “inaccurate, misleading, and reckless reporting about the taconite mining industry.”
“The current public discussion has been tainted by outside narratives and slanted talking points that do not reflect the real conditions, realities, and environmental stewardship happening on the Iron Range,” the letter states. “The most frustrating part? Many Minnesotans have no idea what is actually going on here. They are forced to rely on outlets like the Star Tribune for supposedly unbiased information.”
The us-versus-them mentality didn’t go unnoticed, with many commenters at the public meeting alluding to the perceived conflict. Not everyone chose to take a firm side.
Many Rangers were quick to point out they love the outdoor living of Northern Minnesota and want to protect it.
“We work here, we live here, our families are here,” said Jake Friend in an interview. Friend is the president of USW Local 2660, which represents Keetac employees. “We enjoy everything up here, and we obviously don't want to destroy it. For ourselves or future generations.”
Mike Maleska is a retired miner and former union president from Hibbing and a WaterLegacy board member. He opposes the variance and points to historic turning points for the mines when public dollars assisted and highlighted the potential job creation from cleaning up pollution.
“The company doesn’t want to pick up the tab. Instead, they want you to raise your voices to pressure the MPCA to eliminate the only water quality standard we have, so they can continue to pollute, setting the stage for even worse desecration of our rivers and lakes for our kids to deal with,” he said.
“Want to talk about jobs, jobs, jobs? Your enemy is not a tree hugger, environmentalist or some faraway hippie lawyer. Your enemy is the fear the company stoked in you to get you to do their dirty work for them.”
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