Mesabi Range iron ore depletion

Cited as comparison to India's cheap ore — the US once had crushed-stone-grade ore in Minnesota that could go straight into the blast furnace, but it was depleted in WWII.

Someone asked J. J. Irani, who was the chairman of TATA Steel — why do you make steel in such an environmentally unfriendly manner in India? His answer was, India has some of the cheapest iron ore reserves in the world, five dollars a ton for the iron ore, whereas you might be paying a hundred dollars, a couple hundred dollars a ton somewhere else, Brazil or something. We've got some of the cheapest iron ore reserves in the world. The United States used to have them — they called it the Mesabi range up in Minnesota, but in World War II we basically dug it all out.

You take that, and you crush the limestone — you don't have to do much more than that. Today we have to take iron ore from different parts of the world, grind it and sinter it and make it into pellets. They used to be golf-ball size; now they're smaller than that to get faster reactivity — marble-size pellets of iron ore. In the old days, anyone ever heard of the Mesabi Range in Minnesota? The iron ore was so pure all you had to do was crush it up like limestone and stick it in your blast furnace. But we ran out of the Mesabi Range right after World War II — we just mined it into extinction. There's still lots of iron ore up in Minnesota, and the Great Lakes were huge shipping routes going from Minnesota to Pittsburgh and Chicago.

Mesabi was pure iron ore consumed during WWII and just after; postwar transition to sintered iron oxide at Bethlehem produced 5,000 lb/day of cyanide emissions until fixed. Used to introduce the Air Quality Act of 1972 and the pre-EPA regulatory environment.

When I worked for Bethlehem Steel, they had changed their iron ore charge from something that was basically just a rock that came out of the Mesabi Range in Minnesota. It was virtually pure iron ore — wonderful material — but we used it all during World War Two and just after. So they went to sintered iron oxide, which they got from a bunch of rock in Minnesota but they had to do some processing. When they started putting the sintered iron oxide in with the coke and the limestone in the blast furnace in Bethlehem Pennsylvania, they found they were producing five thousand pounds a day of cyanide going up the stack. Didn't bother to tell anybody because that would upset some people, but it didn't matter legally — they had no duty to clean up. They actually did fix it; they realized it was something that should be fixed, and they figured out what the chemistry was. Cyanide is just carbon-nitrogen, right? If you start burning carbon in air with a lot of oxygen, you can get a chemistry that gives you CN. But people living in Bethlehem just had to breathe the air. That was the different rules they had back in the old days.

Parallel to Rhodesian chrome — Mesabi was direct-charge quality, ran out ~1948.

Embargoes. There were blood diamonds in Angola back longer ago than — actually, when your parents were in diapers. Rhodesia, which is now part of Zimbabwe, just northeast of South Africa — they had the world's best chromium ore reserves. They had a civil war going on, and the world tried to put pressure on them, just like we try to put pressure on North Korea and Iran and other countries to not build nuclear weapons. Rhodesia wasn't building nuclear weapons, but it was a lot of pain and suffering for a lot of people there. So we basically said we're going to put an embargo on Rhodesian chrome. They had the best chrome ore in the world — it was so good you could basically just take that rock and crush it and throw it into your steel furnace to make stainless steel. That's how good it was. No one else had chromium that good. We used to have iron ore that good — it was called the Mesabi Range in Minnesota, and it ran out about 1948, but it was so good we could crush the rock and put it right into the blast furnace to make steel. We didn't have to process it. We had the world's cheapest iron ore in the United States, but we used it all up.