There are 10 different bills being considered by the Maine legislature right now about the state’s laws against large (over 3 acre) open-pit mining. The reason: There’s a whole bunch of lithium available near the New Hampshire border.
One problem, as I learned from an excellent article in the Maine Monitor: The state law concerns “metallic minerals” and it’s not clear if that includes lithium.
The whole story is here.
Return to the Concord Monitor
I was puzzled enough by your “not clear if that includes lithium” phrase to look at the Maine Monitor article. And then to look at some of the documents it links to. It seems the argument is not whether lithium is a metal (it is). And the relevant letter from the Maine Dept. of Environmental Protection (https://files.constantcontact.com/4559eefc001/5606fe3d-de45-4ea6-b389-1fc7a805e021.pdf?rdr=true) makes a pretty tight argument that the Li-rich stuff the landowners want to dig up, spodumene, is a “metallic mineral” under the law.
The landowners, it appears, argue that spodumene should be considered a rock, like granite or limestone, for regulatory purposes. I am not a lawyer, but that seems weak.
The real problem is that the applicable 2017 law is very wide-ranging and onerous about what it regulates; the legislators may not have meant it to apply to spodumene mining, but it does.