Although mining has changed drastically in the last century, the perception of the industry has not. Many people still think miners carry pickaxes and shovels and daily risk life and limb to provide for their families. The reality is that modern day mining is highly sophisticated, and Nevada is foraging the path for mining practices that are being adopted worldwide. And yet, the industry continues to struggle with recruiting a workforce and educating the public about the importance of mining in Nevada. Furthermore, legislative challenges and the need for investments continue to present a cloud. Despite these struggles, experts agree that the outlook for mining in Nevada is a positive one.
Recently, a group of mining experts met at a roundtable sponsored by Nevada State Bank and held in Reno to discuss their industry. Connie Brennan, publisher and CEO of Nevada Business Magazine, served as moderator for the event. These monthly roundtables bring together different industries to discuss issues and solutions.
Do people want to be in mining?
Rob Ghiglieri: Personnel is a major issue. And not just for the industry, but for the regulatory agencies as well. We are getting a lot of new people that do not understand the mining industry and have never worked in the mining industry. They come straight from school trying to issue permits and do not even understand what they are permitting.
Javad Sattarvand: Finding students is also getting harder. We try to work with different agencies like the Nevada Mining Association, but it still gets harder every day.
Naomi Duerr: I have served with several people here on the School of Mines advisory board, and we focus a lot on recruiting people to the university and specifically focusing on science, whether that is metallurgy, mining engineering, geologic engineering, geology, hydrology, or geography. I have been on that board for about 25 years and throughout that entire time, it has been a challenge to recruit students.
Randy Miller: The industry is in a critical place when it comes to public perception. And many challenges stem from that including the education system and the interest of younger people in getting involved in the industry, as well as the general public’s understanding of how important mining is.
Sattarvand: Workforce development is the biggest challenge that we face. Our student number has been fluctuating a lot. We have almost half of the students that we used to have 10 years ago when I joined UNR, and it is similar for all mining schools. There are only 13 mining schools left in the United States and last year in the whole country we graduated 165 students. That is compared to one university in China, which graduated 2,500 students. We have never been high for mining graduates, but at the peak we had around 500 graduates.
Duerr: We always have a challenge with getting good geological people to work with us, whether it is employees or contractors, and that is why we do a lot of internships with the university. We almost always have at least one student working with us. And we have also supported various centers at the university just to keep the research going.
Miller: I do a lot of different events with high school students, and I almost always ask them if they know what goes on in Nevada with mining. And across the state most students do not know about the kind of mining that we have in Nevada.
Ghiglieri: Our agency does hundreds of presentations every year in K-12 schools. And we have an education specialist in Las Vegas who taught approximately 300 individual classes last year alone. She does multiple classes in a day, and the idea that students have of mining is still of a pick and a shovel. The mining education materials that are being provided to kids are presented in that manner. They do not look at modern mining. They only talk about the history of mining and there is a big difference between mining 100 years ago compared to today and an even bigger difference between mining 40 years ago compared to today. It is constantly developing and changing.
Duerr: The misunderstanding of what mining is and how we use the minerals we mine is rampant. And the other issue is that at the end of the day, mining is about science and science is a little less sexy to get into these days. People are looking at other careers, whether it is being a social media influencer or more into the technology fields where you can sit at a desk and do programming. But they are not physical careers. They do not require you to be outside. That is why STEM and STEAM education is so important. They are focused on getting people involved in science in general.
Ghiglieri: When kids go to school, they say they do not want to be an engineer, they want to be an accountant. But there are accountant jobs in mining too. There are HR jobs in mining. There are maintenance jobs. There are technicians. There is every aspect of any industry that you could look at. Everything is available in the mining industry. It is important to educate people that just because you are not an engineer or geologist, does not mean you cannot work in mining. There are a lot of other opportunities.
Amanda Hilton: We need to be much more proactive about communicating what a fantastic industry this is and what fabulous jobs exist within the industry at all levels.
How does Rural Nevada attract employees?
Steve Antonini: I am short a truck driver in Elko and I cannot find one to save my life and we are paying a lot. The wages are good. We have 100 percent paid employee benefits with the company and the workforce is just not there. It is a struggle.
Ghiglieri: The rural factor is often a stumbling block to recruiting people. For young families it is hard to get day care and things like that. I would have been living in Elko if we could have found day care for an infant, but we could not.
Antonini: Finding doctors is also an issue in rural areas. And housing in these rural communities is very hard to find and when you do, it is very expensive. I will not say that it is worse than Reno right now, but it is pretty darn close.
Hilton: I live in Ely, and I live in Ely by choice. When I took this job with the Nevada Mining Association, I had the opportunity to move to Reno. But I love the quality of life in rural Nevada and that is part of the story that we need to tell. The perception problem that we have in mining is nothing more than an opportunity. As an industry we have not been doing a good job proactively talking about the great careers that are there, or just as importantly, the criticality of the work that is being done in the mines across Nevada. Mining is in 17 counties and there are 2,500 vendors across the state of Nevada who are impacted by mining. There are vendors in Clark County and in Washoe County. Every single country in the state supports the mining industry. You can still live in Las Vegas or live in Reno and be a miner.
How Safe is Mining?
Antonini: We are subject to two sets of rules. We have OSHA and we have MSHA (Mine Safety and Health Administration). We follow OSHA, but we adopt more of the MSHA safety rules because they seem more stringent, and we live by them.
Sattarvand: Safety is part of our curriculum. According to MSHA statistics, the number of injuries and fatalities have dropped significantly [since they were adopted industry wide]. After the year 2000 the statistics flattened, and the number of fatalities stayed around 10 to 20 per year in the whole industry.
Antonini: We do a ton of team meetings, and every meeting starts with a safety share. Everything we do is related to safety. Every morning, our guys get together and have a toolbox meeting. There is nothing bigger in mining than safety.
Miller: The risk-based process is followed at mine sites. It is used in other industries as well, but mining was really a leader in rolling it out worldwide. [The risk-based process] is when a miner or contractor goes out to work and does a hazard assessment to start with. They consider all the tasks they are going to do and then consider what could go wrong or how they might get hurt and identify the mitigation measures that they would employ. That is a simplistic way of describing it because it is much more involved. It has had a huge effect on the improvement of safety in mining.
Duerr: On the exploration side, there are different challenges with safety. It is kind of a gung-ho environment. But some companies, even in exploration, are very careful. They will chalk the tires of vehicles and will have all their employees wear long-sleeved shirts.
Sattarvand: Most of the injuries that happen in mining are due to tripping or slipping while going up a ladder and falling. Mining has somehow overcome the safety issue. It is no longer a seriously dangerous industry. But the perception of it still being dangerous is still there.
Hilton: There is so much adoption of technology occurring in mining to further improve safety. For example, there is autonomous equipment being commissioned across Nevada. And one of the key components of that autonomous equipment is that it removes miners from working in the pit where there may be more hazards. It completely removes some team members from any of those risks. I have had the opportunity to tour about 15 different mine sites and the one thing that is consistent at every single mine site is their commitment to safety.
Antonini: When I was at Sandvik, we had a mine in Chile with operators that sat 100 miles away from the mine, and they did their operations on a screen. They have proximity detection and can run underground equipment with no driver in it. It does not hit the walls or hit anything. There are also exploration drills with rod handlers now. Back in my day, we had to physically lift the big heavy rod and put it on the drill. Now there is a hydraulic arm that puts it on, so there are no smashed fingers and no hurt backs. You are not standing on trailers or tripping and falling to put on the rods.
Duerr: Safety has improved in mining due to technology. Even the introduction of cell phones has helped. I made my husband start carrying a cell phone in 1993. He had never used one before, even though I had been using them since 1986. Cellphones have helped tremendously with checking-in.
What Role Does Legislation Play in This Industry?
Duerr: About 15 years ago there was a proposal from the legislature to increase the mining claim fees. Being in research and development, we are dependent on our mining claims. We have over 3,000 to 4,000 mining claims. It is a lot of money. It was unconstitutional because it was not a fee, it was a tax and would go to a general fund. So, several companies got together and challenged that, and we won. The point is that sometimes the legislature gets it wrong, and we have to take action to protect our industry and do what is right.
Hilton: In 2023, the mining industry paid $410 million in taxes to the state of Nevada. And everybody here knows that mining pays every other tax that every industry pays with the addition of two other taxes. One is the net proceeds on minerals. We paid $156 million in net proceeds tax in 2023. And then after the 2021 session, there was a new tax called the gold and silver excise tax that goes directly to fund education in the state of Nevada, and we paid $76 million for that gold and silver excise tax.
Duerr: I have had to communicate to the legislature before that they do not want to overtax this industry so much that it cannot do its business and produce. Our company works in seven states, and we have a lot of investment in Nevada, but it is not the only place we work. And if it becomes an unfavorable business climate, then we can’t do our work. The legislature needs to be very mindful of what works. Everyone wants to contribute to the success of Nevada, but it should not be a single industry taxing approach.
Hilton: We are proud of the investments that we make, especially in education for the state and we do not see that as being a significant potential threat in 2025, but it is something that we are always preparing for. We want to make sure that we are paying what we need to pay for taxes. But we do feel that today, what we are paying is fair since we are paying every other tax plus two.
Duerr: I have often had to testify at the legislature and tell them they do not want to kill the goose that lays the golden egg. They want the products and want the money, but in order to get there, we have to explore, we have to develop, and we have to mine.
Hilton: We have worked very hard over the last several months to develop relationships with existing legislators and candidates who were just elected. We feel like we are well positioned as an industry to be able to have open dialogue with the legislators in the next session. Water is going to be the hot topic at this legislative session, we believe. And that is what we are preparing for and working towards.
What is the Outlook for Mining in Nevada?
Duerr: The outlook is dependent on the money and who is willing to invest in grassroots projects that involve drilling. That is the biggest challenge because it is a long bet. Maybe 1,000 projects turn into one mine. We need good money and good investments to be able to drill which is expensive.
Antonini: Interest rates are also a challenge right now. Nobody wants to borrow money at 10 percent. You are not going to go out and borrow $10 million at 10 percent and put your money in that investment. Exploration is not always 100 percent [certain].
Duerr: Mining is a long play for investments. It takes a long time to bring a mine to market. And with the loss of capital in the markets, the lack of geologists, and the changing interest to critical minerals [it is a challenge]. There is a big focus on lithium, and it is a sexy thing, but we need all those other minerals to work on our devices, in our cars and batteries. It is not just one mineral.
Antonini: Most of the investors that fund the junior miners, are typically baby boomers and are retiring. They do not want to invest. They do not want to lose their fortune. And we are also seeing studies that the younger investors are more interested in tech and crypto. I do not think they realize how many minerals are going into technology. Without us, they do not have it.
Hilton: The state of Nevada is well endowed with mineral inventory and there is excellent momentum, especially behind lithium. And with all the excitement around lithium, it is opening the door to allow us to talk about mining on a bigger level. The future is bright in regard to the opportunity to help improve public perception of mining and also the opportunity to expand the existing mines and to bring additional lines online in Nevada.
Antonini: Last year I was very optimistic, but cautious. Right now, I am very positive. Everything seems to be trending towards the good.
