President Donald Trump on Monday signed legislation reversing a 2023 Biden administration moratorium that had blocked mining across more than 225,000 acres of the Superior National Forest in northeastern Minnesota, removing the primary federal obstacle for Antofagasta’s long-stalled Twin Metals copper-nickel-cobalt project.
The repeal, enacted through the Congressional Review Act, carries an unusual legal shield: no future president may reinstate a substantially similar mining ban by executive order. That furnishes the Duluth Complex mineral belt — spanning Cook, Lake and Saint Louis counties — with a degree of policy certainty unseen in three decades. The region hosts the largest untapped endowment of copper, nickel and cobalt in the United States, resources vital to electric vehicle batteries, artificial intelligence data centers, wind turbines and defense systems.
Twin Metals, a subsidiary of the Chilean mining group Antofagasta, is the foremost beneficiary. The company has spent years pushing to develop a large underground mine near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, only to see its federal mineral leases cancelled by the Interior Department in 2022 and the broader area locked up by the 20-year moratorium a year later. With the ban now erased, a pathway has reopened to reclaim those leases and begin permitting.
Twin Metals spokesperson Kathy Graul called the move a significant opportunity to strengthen the domestic critical mineral supply chain, while cautioning that the project still faces rigorous federal and state environmental reviews and permitting, a process expected to stretch across several more years.
Markets reacted promptly to the removal of a core political risk. Antofagasta’s London-listed shares extended gains as news of the signing crossed the wire. As the largest undeveloped copper-nickel asset in the U.S. outside of Alaska, the revived prospect of restoring federal leases is driving a reassessment of billions of dollars in resource value at Twin Metals.
Still, considerable execution hurdles lie between policy relief and actual production. The company must first prevail in an appeal to recover the terminated leases, and then secure a string of permits from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources covering water pollution prevention, tailings management and site restoration. Political risk has not entirely receded either: Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar, a staunch opponent of the mine, has officially entered the Minnesota governor’s race. A win in November could swiftly tighten the state-level permitting environment.
Even so, the legislative door swung open by Washington represents the most substantive thaw for mining development in the region in decades — a signal investors and resource strategists are unlikely to ignore.
