For a few months each summer a 70-mile highway between Nome and the village of Teller opens. It’s a quiet drive – there’s more moose and muskox than cars. One thing you’re guaranteed to see out the window is the Kigluaik Mountains.
The rocky, 40-mile wide mountain range is home to wildlife and is a hotspot for subsistence users. But buried within it is also graphite, a key ingredient for batteries. For over a decade, Graphite One has sought to open a mine here. The Canadian company already holds two of the six federal permits it needs, with decisions on the rest expected by the end of September.
19-year-old Elle Garnie from Teller said the mine feels inevitable at this stage.
“I know it's probably going to happen, whether I like it or not, because of the amount of money that's going into it, and the amount of things that are getting approved,” Garnie said. “The best I can do is be here and speak about how I feel about it.”
On Tuesday, Garnie stopped by Teller’s James C. Isabell School for a community meeting hosted by Graphite One. It was her first time attending the mining company's annual meetings, a mainstay on the region's spring calendar for over a decade.
About two dozen people filled the stands of the gym with plates piled high with pizza and cans of soda. The company’s Senior VP of Operations, Kevin Torpy, gave a presentation on the proposed mine, including new photorealistic renderings of the site.
“So this is what it'll look like at the end, before we start restoring," Torpy said as he pointed a green laser at a projector screen. "The open pit will be about 1.1 miles in length."
For now, the site is only accessible by helicopter, but in the future Graphite One plans to build a 17 mile access road linking it to the state-owned Kougarok Road.
The graphite from the site alone, the company says, is worth billions of dollars. But recent confirmation of rare earth elements like neodymium and dysprosium, valuable ingredients in electric motors and military-grade sensors, could inflate the value of the deposit. The company is in the process of evaluating the quality and quantity of the rare earth elements, and whether it makes financial sense to extract and export them.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is the lead agency for Graphite One’s federal permits. It held meetings in Nome, Teller and Brevig Mission in April. The Native Village of Brevig Mission requested Graphite One not attend so it could speak more freely with officials.
For the scheduled June meetings, Brevig Mission again requested Graphite One not visit. In a press release, the village said “This meeting date was set by the company without tribal consultation” and that the date overlapped with an important subsistence period.
Representatives for Graphite One met with tribal officials from Teller and Mary’s Igloo before the open meeting, though. They discussed plans to build a temporary barge landing along the Imuruk Basin that would speed up construction of the mine, but the landing would send barges through the shallow Tuksuk Channel linking the basin to the Bering Sea. Locals say it's a precious habitat, and should be avoided. Torpy said Graphite One would go back to the drawing board.
“We've made a commitment today that we're going to look for ways to remove that from our plan,” Torpy said.
Graphite One is also drafting agreements with the local villages. While the exact details of the memorandums are still being hammered out, Graphite One Chief Operating Officer, Mike Schaffner, said they include assurances about environmental standards and potential compensation.
“So the first step is putting our commitments in writing, saying this is what we agreed to,” Schaffner said. “The second step from our side is turning those commitments into how do you make them solid, so if we get bought as a company, they live past what we've told people.”
Schaffner said a payment in lieu of taxes (PILT) is one way it could give back to the communities. The Red Dog Mine 200 miles to the north pays a PILT to the Northwest Arctic Borough worth tens of millions of dollars a year. But the area around Graphite One’s proposed mine doesn’t have an organized borough.
When asked by KNOM why Graphite One would compensate nearby communities, where there is no borough to enforce a tax, Schaffner said it was “the right thing to do”.
“What we found out is if you've got a workforce and a community that supports the mine, they come to work happy, your mine runs better, you don't have problems with environmental cleanup issues and all that,” Schaffner said. “At the end, it ends up making you more money, and it ends up a better operation.”
Like many villages in Western Alaska, Teller lacks city-wide running water and sewage. One in three people live below the poverty line. Schaffner said investing in Teller through scholarships and local hires is a top priority for the company.
“When we start, that's probably not going to be a realistic goal, but 15 years from now I would like everyone, from the general manager to the janitor, to be someone from the area,” he said.
Regardless of the economic promises, residents like Garnie still worry about the potential environmental impact.
“I feel like the amount that he's going to make off of the amount that he paid is going to be a steal, a real steal off of something that is sacred to us and something that we didn't decide to sell off, and it's really, it's painful,” Garnie said.
Others like Teller resident Freida Oquilluk fear irreparable damage to subsistence resources.
“These are not hobbies or seasonal activities. These are deeply connected to who we are and how we feed our families. If our waters, animals, and lands are harmed, it is our communities that will suffer and suffer the consequences first,” Oquilluk said during a Q&A following the Graphite One presentation.
To practice refining raw graphite ore into industry-ready material, the company plans to open a new processing facility in Conneaut, Ohio next year. If all of Graphite One’s federal and state mining permits are granted, Alaskan graphite could start shipping to Ohio by the end of the decade.
