From coal gasification to robot space mining, small towns fall prey to PR promises

Dave Neville told a Hoyt Lakes City Council: "My ultimate goal is to build mining robots to bring to the moon, Mars and the asteroid belt.” Photo illustration by Getty Images.

HOYT LAKES — Early this year, a friendly man wearing glasses and a corporate polo shirt approached the City Council here with a big idea. 

This was already a contentious meeting. A woman had just accosted officials over the city’s decision to stop using Facebook. Another group waited patiently to protest higher pickleball fees. Still ahead, councilors faced logistical challenges related to the merger of the city police department with neighboring Aurora, another cash-strapped small town on the Mesabi Iron Range.

The man, Dave Neville, began his pitch. He runs Infinity Robotics, a company based in Savage, Minnesota, that develops industrial robots, including robots used in mining operations. Business has been good, he said, but he’s got a problem. He needs a space port. 

“Our goal is to [use] automation to help the human condition so that 60 billion people can inhabit our planet at some point and have meaningful useful lives,” said Neville. “One of the ways to do that is to mine and colonize outer space to help humanity. My ultimate goal is to build mining robots to bring to the moon, Mars and the asteroid belt.”

At this point, the City Council blinked politely. Personally, I wondered if this was the origin story of an alien invasion movie where it turns out the aliens were us all along. 

Neville continued.

His idea is Can/Am 5M, a company that seeks tens of billions of dollars in private and public investment to create a nonprofit space port. The former mine pits located near Hoyt Lakes and Babbitt are ideal places to launch rockets, he said. He just needed one thing: public support.

“We want to get you guys involved now so you can bring in new residents and develop housing,” said Neville in his closing pitch. “For Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk to write the checks to get this done — that’s going to be happening at the end of this month [January 2024]. We’d like them to come in as partners and not as owners. We want this to be state owned or owned by nonprofit. We want to see that infrastructure be maintained in perpetuity. The best way to do that is to get everyone involved.”

Musk and Bezos have yet to announce investment in the project. 

Becky Lammi, the Hoyt Lakes city administrator, said Neville hasn’t contacted the city since its Jan. 8 meeting and left no forwarding address. A social media message to Neville went unreturned.

On his website, Neville describes himself as a “serial entrepreneur.” He also described his past companies, including a mobile DJ service and a gun manufacturing company. Robotics is just what came next. Now, space.

Despite tantalizing claims that the project would benefit northern Minnesota mining interests, the Hoyt Lakes council took no action on Neville’s request. 

But Neville still got what he wanted. The two largest northeastern Minnesota newspapers, the Duluth News Tribune and Mesabi Tribune, both ran generous coverage describing the Can/Am 5M project in January. A few days of intense social media reach followed, including the full range of algorithmic emotions — likes, loves, anger and laughing faces.

Tellingly, statewide media, even Duluth TV stations, declined to cover the story. This one was just too far out there. But the spectacle reveals a common flaw in small town development schemes.

Deep space mine

It’s the hope that gets you. Every time.

Hoyt Lakes is the late-bloomer of the Iron Range. Built in 1955 to serve an innovative new low grade taconite mine, the town missed the early 20th century bacchanal of high grade iron ore mining tax wealth. It then took a devastating blow when the LTV mine closed in 2001. Since then, the eastern Mesabi — towns like Babbitt, Biwabik, Aurora and Hoyt Lakes — became a hub for high minded economic development proposals. Each idea promised to restore the boom times of a remembered past. So far, each has failed.

In 2005, a startup called Excelsior Energy proposed the Mesaba Energy Project, a coal gasification power plant at Hoyt Lakes. Backed by a married couple of energy lawyers, one with Iron Range political connections, the company received more than $9 million in loans from the Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board. Those loans were the main income for the company as it sought and received $36 million in federal energy funds. 

The IRRRB included members of the then-DFL dominated Iron Range legislative delegation, all of whom were hungry for a post-LTV win for the Range. The erstwhile Mesabi Daily News threw its editorial weight behind the project as well. But then Excelsior moved the project to a site in Itasca County while arguing the state Public Utilities Commissioner mandate Xcel to buy its electricity. The PUC declined, citing the high cost to consumers. More than 20 years later, no project ever happened, and the loans were never repaid.

Perhaps most notably, Hoyt Lakes is home to the original PolyMet copper-nickel mining proposal, now part of NewRange Minerals. PolyMet began exploring minerals in the area more than a decade before LTV closed. But the company didn’t begin its environmental review process until 2005, amid the same local recession caused by the mine closure. It even promised to make use of the old LTV plant.

Once again, backers boosted the promise of restoring lost jobs. The local political establishment so completely bought in that the region’s entire political apparatus warped itself around the promise of copper-nickel mining as an all-purpose economic solution. Republican deregulation policies became irresistibly attractive and the region cast away the leftist politics that once defined it. 

But even accepting New Range’s proposal at face value would mean just a few hundred permanent jobs. The reality of the project has never matched its political importance. History teaches that commodities are unreliable engines of local economic stability. I could tell you a story about how my family almost moved away from the Range in the 1980s, and how many thousands of other Rangers actually did. This is life in any town dependent on mining alone.

It’s hard to make sense of economic development, especially when proposals touch on new or unfamiliar industries. Even in mining, the bread-and-butter of the Iron Range, local leaders know more about working in the mines than the complex skullduggery of global mineral markets and corporate strategy. More often than not, local leaders reduce themselves to cheerleaders. They have no ability to negotiate with the developers because they have pinned their political identity to giving them everything they want. Just like the people they represent, they wait in the lobby for a decision made elsewhere.

Project information comes filtered through intermediaries with a vested interest in the developments. Some environmental opponents are naive to the role of mining in society, but a local public relations echo chamber rolls even valid environmental questions into the same category. The debate calcifies. Political polarization destroys creativity. The end result is a coin flip between disappointment and nothing.

Keeping our cool

Space mining might one day prove an important source of resources. But that fact can be claimed by literally anyone with the gumption to say, without evidence, that they’re on the cusp of launching a multi-billion dollar fleet of mining robots. Meantime, small towns fervently desire a big win after decades of economic decline. False hope and longing souls find each other every day in so many ways.

Of course, Infinity Robotics could turn out to be the next big Fortune 500 company. They could be flying moon rockets out of Hoyt Lakes like Fourth of July and boy, would I look foolish then. Heck, I would enjoy being that wrong, especially if it leads to a robust new tech industry that employs generations of my fellow Iron Rangers. 

But there are enough red flags here to suggest that this is another in a long line of PR flimflammery. Given the propensity of skepticism in our society, surely we can spare a little for the high rollers who tell us what we want to hear.

The future of communities like Hoyt Lakes and towns like it must be built brick by brick from within. The only outside force you can count on is the money that’s currently buying up all the lakeshore.

If a company offers jobs with great wages on a defined timeline, they might be considered real. But a company asking you to wear their t-shirt on a stage where they demand attention and friendly new legislation? Just so their company might actually exist someday? That’s lobbying. That’s PR work. And believe me, you shouldn’t do either for less than $200 an hour and a steak dinner. In St. Paul or D.C., anything less would be an insult.

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