How a reclamation bond works
A reclamation bond is money a mining company must set aside before a federal regulator will let it dig. The regulator sizes it to what it would cost to hire an outside contractor to clean up the site if the company disappears, including any water treatment the site needs and keeping it stable until a contractor is found. On land managed by the Bureau of Land Management or the Forest Service, this comes from a regulation, 43 CFR 3809.552, which lets the Bureau of Land Management demand a bigger bond later if the cleanup cost estimate grows.
At Thacker Pass, a lithium project in Nevada, Lithium Nevada, a subsidiary of Lithium Americas Corp, has held a 1,200,000 dollar bond since 2014, covering only exploration, and has renewed it every year. The estimate to reclaim the full approved mine plan is 47,600,000 dollars, about 40 times the exploration bond, a ratio calculated by MAOWCE from the company own 2 figures. The company states the larger guarantee is required before construction can begin, so the gap is not a shortfall. It is 2 stages of the same rule, a small bond for exploring and a far larger one required before building starts.
This is not a funding gap. The larger bond covers the approved full mine plan and is required only once construction begins, not while the company is still exploring.
Show the numbers
| Bond during exploration | 1.2 |
| Bond required before construction | 47.6 |
Whether the money on hand is enough
For mines that already hold a permit, the money on hand looks close to enough. The Government Accountability Office, the federal agency that audits how other agencies spend money, calls this bond money a financial assurance, and found the Bureau of Land Management held over 3,000,000,000 dollars of it for hardrock mining, meaning digging solid rock for metals such as gold, silver and copper, in 2017. That was within about 11,000,000 dollars of its own cost estimate, across nearly 2,000 mining operations. The Forest Service held about 251,000,000 dollars in 2018, but auditors could not confirm whether that was enough, because the cost estimates sat in more than 500 paper case files across 14 states.
The mines nobody bonded
None of that money touches mines abandoned before this rule existed, or whose owner no longer exists to be billed. At least 22,500 such hardrock mine features, meaning old pits, tunnels and waste piles, sit on federal land with no bond behind them. The Department of Agriculture own estimate of the future cleanup cost has doubled, from 6,000,000,000 dollars to 12,000,000,000 dollars, in its own budget documents. The Department of the Interior spent about 109,000,000 dollars on these hazards from 2017 to 2021, and the Department of Agriculture spent about 10,000,000 dollars over the same years, both far short of the bill still ahead.
Two named mines show the cost of a missing bond. The federal government reached 63,000,000 dollars in settlements with New Mexico and the Navajo Nation over the Gold King mine, and the Questa mine in New Mexico is being cleaned up for about 1,000,000,000 dollars. The Government Accountability Office also reports that abandoned hardrock mines have helped contaminate an estimated 40% of the country rivers and 50% of all lakes, an estimate it attributes to the Environmental Protection Agency.
A liability still growing
The Government Accountability Office says this total includes the cost of cleaning up hardrock mines, among other liabilities, and that it grew 32% between fiscal year 2017 and fiscal year 2021.
Show the numbers
| Fiscal year 2017 | 465 |
| Fiscal year 2021 | 613 |
The Government Accountability Office says the federal government total environmental liabilities, which it states include mine cleanup, rose from 465,000,000,000 dollars in fiscal year 2017 to 613,000,000,000 dollars in fiscal year 2021, an increase of 32%. All 5 sources here cover federal land only, under the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service. Mines on state or private land follow separate state rules not measured here.