A rock almost 2 billion years old emerges from the grip of a massive drill rig plumbing deep into the soil of Michigan’s remote Upper Peninsula — another clue in a national hunt for valuable electric vehicle battery metals.

Steve Hovis, general manager of exploration for Talon Metals, gently takes the glistening, cylindrical slab from workers manning the machine to scour it for signs of nickel, a critical metal that bolsters energy storage in EV batteries and extends a car’s range. What Hovis finds could determine whether a mine is one day built in this isolated region of Michigan carpeted in dense hardwood forests, glacial lakes and dotted with remote cabins.

“These guys are the first to see rock that’s 1.8 billion years old,” Hovis said of the cadre of workers donning hard hats and thick gloves.

Hovis is a “nickel hunter” for the Canadian mineral exploration company Talon, part of a group of highly trained geologists searching the Midwest with advanced, proprietary technology to find minerals for batteries, renewable energy equipment, transmission and defense systems. Hovis and his colleagues have been credited with discovering deposits that now make up the nearby Eagle mine in Michigan — the nation’s only operating nickel operation — and a high-grade nickel deposit underpinning the proposed Tamarack mine in Minnesota.

Today, the national search for battery metals — supercharged by national security concerns around China’s dominance of minerals and a surge of incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act — has led Talon to this stretch of land near Lake Roland in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It’s one of several strategic and high-potential targets that the company says it’s exploring within a 425,000-acre swath of land that includes mineral rights, which Talon acquired from Sweetwater Royalties.

Over the next three years, Talon plans to examine a large swath of Michigan and Minnesota with the help of a $20.6 million grant from the Department of Defense under a Cold War-era law that gives the president authority to shore up materials and services for national defense. Cheap nickel from Indonesia now dominates the global market. The federal government recently linked production there to forced labor, citing China’s involvement.

The DOD funding will also help Talon accelerate and expand its exploration in central Minnesota, where Talon is navigating the permitting process to build an underground mine near the small town of Tamarack, about 50 miles west of Duluth. The mine has an offtake agreement to supply Tesla with 165 million pounds of nickel and would ship ore to a processing facility in North Dakota.

The project, a joint venture between Talon and Australian mining giant Rio Tinto, has drawn the ire of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, whose members fear the project could pollute the Mississippi and St. Croix river watersheds, sources of drinking water and critical fisheries. The band declined to comment when asked about Talon’s exploration.

The push to find new minerals for green energy has raised concerns about how it will affect the Upper Peninsula’s rugged landscape and Indigenous lands, sensitive water and habitats, and whether tribal members — versus foreign companies — stand to benefit.

Talon is exploring land that’s part of the ancestral home of the Anishinaabe, a group of Indigenous peoples in the Great Lakes region of Canada and the United States. Under state and federal laws, tribes including the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, or KBIC, have “ceded treaty rights” to hunt, fish and gather plants and wild rice in the region.

John Coleman, an environmental scientist with Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, said tribes in the region are concerned about the growing push to find and extract critical minerals. If the federal government, which has a trust responsibility with tribes, is going to spend millions on exploration and mining, it should also boost funding for beefing up environmental protections, he said.

“It’s really the camel’s nose under the tent … if they find [minerals], then it can develop into a mining project,” he said. “Once a company’s invested a bunch in exploration and leasing, they get pretty heavily invested in an area, and they’re reluctant to give that up just because it might be near a tribe or have potential impacts on a tribe.”

Todd Malan, Talon’s chief external affairs officer, said mining companies and tribes can work together, and that the company is eager to move past the idea of passive consent to work proactively with the tribe around environmental and cultural protection. Malan reiterated that Talon would also work with tribes around financial benefits, including jobs and buying from tribal-owned businesses, and is holding regular community open houses and planning one for tribal members in October in Michigan.

Talon, he said, has yet to access the DOD funding for drilling in either state, and only a small amount of the money has been disbursed for planning studies, permitting and information sharing with tribes, but said it hopes to tap into the full award by the end of the year.

“The company is trying to do things differently. We’re taking the time to sit down, reach out, invite them to contribute traditional knowledge, make sure we don’t do the wrong thing, to validate on what we’re doing,” he said. “We’re charting a pathway to doing mineral exploration in a way that’s incredibly sensitive to tribal interest and tribal rights.”

Finding more ‘Eagles’

Hovis gingerly walks across a rocky clearing surrounded by dense patches of hardwoods to point out rocks that have for decades held the answers to whether or not a nickel deposit lies deep underground.

Holding a bulking stone under his arm, Hovis explains how Dean Rossell, now Talon’s chief geologist, scoured the area for signs of zinc in the 1990s when he came across rocks containing peridotite and sulfide minerals, typically associated with nickel and copper.

Rossell worked for Rio for three decades before joining Talon. Rio originally bought the land from Ford and explored for nickel and copper from 1995 to 2013, collecting geophysical data and drilling more than 80 holes.

A large deposit of high-grade nickel has yet to be uncovered in the area, but Hovis said he’s not deterred. Talon has since acquired Rio’s data; identified strategic targets; and has deployed an in-house team of drillers, geophysicists, geologists, engineers and environmental scientists to use a proprietary suite of geophysical mapping tools to identify recoverable nickel. The company says less than 1 percent of the land within the 425-acre exploration area will actually be drilled, and each exploration site covers less than an acre.

Hovis is quick to point out industry wisdom that the best place to find a new mine is near an old one. Eagle mine is about 62 miles away to the east.

“Now it’s 2024, so 30 years of collecting pieces of the puzzle and determining that the geology here is very favorable for finding these sulfide, magmatic nickel deposits, he said.

Hovis is aiming for a second stroke of good luck: In 1994, he had been working for Rio for three weeks when he helped drill into the deposit that would one day become the mine. “By sheer luck and good fortune, I was standing on the drill rig when it happened,” said Hovis. “I was the new guy in the right place at the right time.”

Today, the push to to find and extract critical minerals is being driven by the national shift to electrify Americans’ daily lives. Will Talbot, an analyst with Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, said the global nickel market hovers around 3.6 million tons today — most of it used for stainless steel — but is growing quickly with the adoption of electric cars.

“Over time, the proportion of vehicles with higher nickel chemistries will increase, because the more nickel you have, effectively, the higher energy density you can get,” said Talbot. “We’re going to need a hell of a lot more supply come 2030,” he added — demand is slated to reach 5 million tons by 2030 at that point, he said.

Automakers are keenly aware of the growing demand for nickel. In the summer of 2020, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, famously called on mining companies to fill the coming gap, exclaiming on a post-earnings call, “Tesla will give you a giant contract for a long period of time if you mine nickel efficiently and in an environmentally sensitive way.”

According to a presentation on Talon’s site, new nickel demand for batteries is expected to be in the steepest portion of the exponential growth phase before leveling off post-2030. “This is our last chance to develop a domestic battery supply chain,” the presentation reads. “Otherwise, new production capacity from China will fill this supply gap and become entrenched for the rest of the 21st century.”

Federal and state officials are also pushing to map U.S. deposits with the help of $320 million from to the bipartisan infrastructure law. That includes mapping the forested, remote lands of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Jamey Jones, who coordinates research for the U.S. Geological Survey’s Earth Mapping Resources Initiative (Earth MRI), said two major airborne geophysical surveys this year will produce valuable data for most of Michigan’s northern reaches.

But no surveys will be conducted on the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community’s reservation — the L’Anse Indian Reservation — or other trust lands, except where permission is granted, Jones said. Instead, the agency will help the tribe by increasing resolution in watersheds around the reservation to help model groundwater.

USGS is also funding the Michigan Geological Survey’s ongoing work to examine legacy mine sites and mine waste throughout the region for valuable minerals, he said.

“It’s a pretty rich portfolio in Michigan. It’s kind of a microcosm of everything that we’re doing,” said Jones. “For a place like the [Upper Peninsula], where the bedrock exposure is highly discontinuous and the geology is very complicated, we don’t have enough data to make modern maps, so that’s one of the things we’re trying to rectify.”

Tribal concerns

Mining in northern Michigan has a turbulent past, including years of legal fights and protests surrounding the Eagle mine.

Chris Swartz, a tribal member who served as president of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community when the Eagle mine first emerged in the early 2000s, said that Rio and Toronto-based Lundin Mining never really had the tribe’s consent to build and operate the mine, and he’s worried the national rush to extract more materials like nickel and copper could change the face of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Swartz said he worries about the region’s rivers, vulnerable species like the coaster brook trout, and the tribe’s treaty rights and future generations.

Matt Johnson, a spokesperson for Lundin, countered that the company is working to build community acceptance and trust, work that’s measured through community forums, engagement and surveys. Eagle mine has also earned recognition for launching a novel program that brings together environmental groups and the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community to watchdog water quality at the mine site and nearby Humboldt mill.

Talon is trying to do things differently, said Malan, emphasizing that the company reached out to the tribe soon after acquiring the mineral rights in Michigan and Minnesota. Talon has met with the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community many times, he said, and members of the tribe’s environmental team have participated in some field geophysical studies and assessments of some potential sites.

“In our first meeting, we committed to information sharing with KBIC as a tribal sovereign government about our future plans and sought their guidance on areas of potential sensitivity,” said Malan.

Within the tribe’s reservation, Malan said there have only been surface-level geophysical surveys on private land where Talon has mineral rights, meaning people walking on ground looking for rock signals of mineralization. Talon has also offered to enter into a more formal process with the tribe that could produce an agreement around exploration in the region, he said.

“Right now, we are just focused on understanding what is [or is not] in the ground, and Talon is committed to doing that in a way that respects the role of KBIC as a tribal sovereign government with special interests in their member’s treaty rights to hunt, fish and gather in the region where our exploration will take place,” he said.

Emily Shaw, the tribe’s Great Lakes resource specialist, who monitors proposed and ongoing mining activity, said the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community is committed to the rights and responsibilities reserved in the Treaty of 1842, including the right to hunt, fish and gather and the responsibility of landscape co-management for conservation and public health and safety.

“At this time we are not in a position to comment directly on Talon or mineral exploration within the ceded territory,” said Shaw.

Evelyn Ravindran, the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community’s natural resources director, in an email confirmed that Talon is sharing information and has signaled interest in developing an agreement with the tribe.

Federal scientists maintain they’ll boost data to help the tribe make such decisions. Jones with the USGS said the Earth MRI program will provide the tribe with groundwater modeling, which will ultimately help members keep a close eye on the effect of any exploration or mining, should it one day move forward.

Even without an existing agreement, Ravindran said Talon has shared regular updates on their activity in the area; extended an open invitation to accompany, observe and ask questions at their exploratory sites and their core shed; and has remained available to answer questions about their work.

The Keweenaw Bay Indian Community’s tribal council, she said, will ultimately decide on a position and whether the tribe enters into an agreement with Talon.

Yet Coleman with the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission cautioned that tribes remain leery of international mining companies moving into the region as projects crop up, including a controversial plan to build a copper mine near Lake Superior and the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park.

Mining companies, said Coleman, must forge long-term relationships with tribes that have long suffered from pollution tied to mining in the Upper Peninsula, and the federal government needs to prioritize tribal concerns when doling out money and backing exploration, even if it does have a relatively limited footprint.

“Exploration is opening Pandora’s box,” said Coleman. “Once it’s open, it gets harder and harder to close the lid.”