Our team did not find any deposits but soon after our attempt, United States Steel did locate a deposit of sulfide minerals in Minnesota and began drilling on their NorthMet project in 1969.  After my brief stint with United States Steel, I proceeded to work doing oil and gas geology and then at various business jobs. After I left my job as Vice President of Energy Supply and Marketing with the Midland Cogeneration Venture Limited Partnership in 2004, I began writing and lecturing on a variety of technical and business topics.  Some of this work was as a consultant and other was simply as an independent activity.  Despite the different activities I have pursued in my life, I remained fascinated with the idea that new mining could be done in the northern Midwest for sulfide minerals containing copper, nickel, cobalt, and other minerals.

In 2016 I gave a series of lectures at Saginaw Valley State University on the sulfide mineral deposits found at the Back Forty, Eagle, Eagle East, and Copperwood deposits.  Preparing these lectures, I became interested in the fact that in spite of the delineation of many  sulfide mineral deposits in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan,  as of 2016 sulfide mineral  mining had taken place only at locations at the Flambeau deposit in Wisconsin and the Eagle and adjacent Eagle East deposits in Michigan, and the White Pine Mine in Michigan.

A seemingly disconnected project from the permitting of sulfide mineral mining was my writing a book about a failed nuclear project in Midland, Michigan (Nearly Nuclear – A Mismanaged Energy Transition published by Michigan State University Press in 2021). Nearly Nuclear focused on the conflicts that occurred between the executives of Consumers Power and the Dow Chemical Company who wanted to build two large nuclear reactors in Midland, Michigan and local people that did not want these reactors built where they lived. What could not be found was an acceptable agreement (often called a social contract) between the pro-nuclear and the anti-nuclear groups.

As I studied the geology of sulfide minerals in the Northern Midwest, I observed the failure to reach a social contract between people who want to dig mines and those who oppose sulfide mineral mining. Each sulfide mineral deposit has its unique setting and proposed method of mining and milling the ore, but wherever a sulfide mineral mine is proposed Native Americans, conservationists, and environmentalists oppose the permitting of the mine.

Sulfide Mineral Mining in the Northern Midwest – Claims of miners, Native Americans, Conservationists, Environmentalists, and the rest of us is the working title of a book manuscript I have prepared to describe the failures, no matter what the details are of a proposed mine, to reach consensus on mining the valuable sulfide mineral resources in the northern Midwest.