Chilean multinational Antofagasta plc made two big moves in the fourth quarter of 2023 to advance its Twin Metals project on the edge of the Boundary Waters. In October, the mining company won approval from the State of Minnesota for exploratory drilling, effectively staging an end run around the federal withdrawal of the Rainy River watershed. In the following month, the company filed an appeal in the DC Circuit over its expired mineral leases and Mine Plan of Operations.

As I pointed out in a previous post, the end run and the DC litigation represent only two parts of a multi-pronged strategy, and I want to emphasize, again, how important it is to look at what the company is doing on all fronts.

On the political front, the mining company is banking on a Republican victory — really, a Trump victory — in 2024, which would exert new pressure on federal agencies to reverse or find a way, lawful or not, to work around the mineral withdrawal. And then there is the ongoing federal lobbying effort, focused at the moment on positioning Twin Metals as a source of critical minerals for the energy transition.

The latest round of lobbying disclosures show the status of that effort, which started to yield some results this past quarter.

The same three firms represent Antofagasta on the Hill:

• In Q4, Brownstein Hyatt once again took the lion’s share of Antofagasta’s federal lobbying dollars: $110,000, the same as Q3. Three lobbyists worked the House and the Senate.
• WilmerHale, which did most of the Twin Metals lobbying work during the Trump years, billed $50,000 for lobbying the Senate and the House on “mining issues” for its Chilean client.
• Baker Donelson reports $30,000 for Q4 lobbying on Antofagasta’s behalf. Whereas in Q3 the firm reported no lobbying activity (but were paid the 30,000 retainer anyway), in the last quarter Baker Donelson reports lobbying the House and Senate on “Mining opportunities in northeast Minnesota.”

These are exactly the same amounts reported in Q3, $190,000 total.

So in 2023 Antofagasta dedicated over three quarters of a million dollars, $770,000, to lobbying the United States Congress. That’s significantly less than the record $1,010,000 the company spent in 2022 in an effort to block the mineral withdrawal, and right around 2021’s $800,000 figure.

Lobbying in the House appears to have hit paydirt in November, when three Republican members of the House Natural Resources Committee — Pete Stauber, Paul Gosar, and Bruce Westerman — sent a letter to Secretary of the Interior Haaland and BLM Director Stone-Manning seeking information and correspondence about the cancellation of Twin Metals’ mineral leases.

“The Committee,” they write, “is alarmed with the Biden administration elevating policies championed by radical eco-activists and far-left non-profits at the expense of national security, economic, and energy interests.” The cause of this alarm is a meeting that DOI Deputy Secretary Tommy Beaudreau held with The Wilderness Society, one of the plaintiffs in the Twin Metals litigation.

The Committee is deeply concerned that Biden administration officials potentially held private, undocumented meetings with plaintiffs suing the federal government over the Twin Metals mining permits. The Committee is especially concerned with the Biden administration’s general hostility to domestic mining projects as the world continues to require minerals at a growing, unprecedented rate. Indeed, the Committee is alarmed by the Biden administration’s ongoing prioritization of the radical demands of radical activists and far-left nonprofits over America’s energy and economic interests.

This letter starts to lay the groundwork for undoing the mineral withdrawal.

Postscript 31 January 2024: A followup letter, dated 8 January and accusing Interior and the Bureau of Land Management of “deliberately engaging in obstruction to frustrate the oversight power of Congress,” can be found here.