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The Natural Resources Research Institute (NRRI) is a United States (U.S.) based research institute founded by the Minnesota state legislature within the University of Minnesota Duluth. NRRI is a non-profit, applied research organization, established with a mission to improve the economy of Minnesota.
The Institute aims to help launch small businesses and provides ongoing research and development assistance.
The mid- to late-1970s and early-1980s were particularly difficult times for Minnesota's natural resource-based industries, especially for the taconite mining industry. In the face of a domestic steel crisis, shipments of iron ore from Northeastern Minnesota's eight taconite plants plummeted. Growth in the taconite industry, which had begun in the 1950s, ended and employment in this critical base industry dropped from about 16,000 to 3,000. [1] About 2,000 supply companies on the Iron Range, in Duluth and elsewhere in the state were also critically impacted.
Perhaps not as dramatically as the taconite industry, the forest products industry was similarly impacted by the difficult economy. Northeastern Minnesota's logging and pulp and paper companies, in particular, were affected. At that time, the overall impact on Duluth and the Iron Range economy was verging on catastrophic. [2]
In the face of these challenging times, civic, business, government, higher education and labor leaders began to focus on initiatives to help the economy. With a strong belief in its long-term value, U.S. Eighth District Court of Appeals Judge Gerald Heaney advocated for applied research. Then, in his 1982 gubernatorial campaign, Rudy Perpich proposed that a center be established to do research on such resources as peat, biomass, forest products, water and minerals. [2]
A proposal to establish a Natural Resources Research Institute at the University of Minnesota Duluth was submitted to the Minnesota State Legislature under the seal of the Regents of the University of Minnesota. The proposal affirmed the applied nature of research at the new institute, noting that its work would be separate and distinct from the University’s Minerals Resources Research Center, and recommended the SAGE building in Duluth as an adaptable site. [2] UMD Chancellor Robert Heller worked with Governor Perpich and Judge Heaney to gain political support throughout the state. [3] The Institute also had strong federal support which included that of Minnesota's 8th district congressman, Jim Oberstar.
The proposal called for the institute to be divided into four major divisions:
The Regents proposal listed the members of the Minerals Development Commission, the Duluth High Tech Task Force and Duluth Future Task Force as endorsees of the Institute.
The simple notation of first-year funding of $1,650,000 and second-year funding of $2,250,000 for the Natural Resources Research Institute in Chapter 258, page 1051 of the LAWS of MINNESOTA for 1983, marks the establishment of the Institute. [2]
UMD Economics Professor Dr. Jerrold Peterson was named acting coordinator of the Institute and he began to hire temporary employees to begin the work of the Institute. An Advisory Board was established, with UMD Dean of the College of Science and Engineering George (Rip) Rapp as chair.
In August 1983, UMD Provost Robert Heller envisioned NRRI doing between $5 and $10 million per year in research and employing up to 150 staff members in five years.
Dr. Michael Lalich, with a background in industrial research and development, was the first permanent director of the Institute, starting on the job in April of 1984. He soon began the task of conducting national searches for Associate Directors for each of the four divisions. Successful candidates included: Dr. Thys Johnson, a native of Duluth and Department Head of Mining at the Colorado School of Mines; Dr. Robert Naiman, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and Director of a Research Station in Quebec; Dr. Eugene Shull, Associate Director of the Pennsylvania State University Combustion Laboratory; and Dr. Roy Adams, a senior research scientist at the Michigan Technological University Institute of Wood Research. John Sandy, head of the P-M-A Library at the University of Texas at Austin, was hired in November 1984 to develop a research library for the Institute.
Because of Minnesota's economic dependence on its natural resources, NRRI adopted the mission to foster the economic development of Minnesota’s natural resources in an environmentally sensitive manner to promote private sector employment.
The institute's goals are:
While the NRRI is not a teaching institution, it fulfills its academic goals with research conducted by faculty and students at the Institute and several NRRI employees hold faculty or adjunct faculty positions. NRRI assists students by providing scholarships and research assistantships. Moreover, the applied research skills learned at NRRI are invaluable in securing employment after graduation. [3] University faculty and students interact with NRRI researchers to conduct collaborative research on a wide range of topics.
Many of the early research directions for the Institute proved to be very productive and defined NRRI’s ongoing research agenda. For example, applied research to assist the taconite industry with more efficient processing and to improve pellet quality has been a mainstay of the NRRI’s minerals research since its inception. Likewise, helping the forest products industry develop value-added products and improve silvicultural practices have been primary objectives. [2] A resurgent interest in renewable energy production has refocused research on biomass as a source of energy. An early focus on ecological research to understand the role of humans and natural disturbances in regulating aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems also continued through the decades.
In 1989, the Institute was reorganized from the four original divisions to its current structure based on three research centers:
The Center for Water and the Environment with biologists, ecologists and limnologists to study development impacts and provide tools and data for informed decision-making by environment managers.
The Center for Applied Research and Technology Development includes elements of the original minerals and biomass divisions.
The UMD Center for Economic Development is a joint program of NRRI, the School of Business and Economics, and the College of Science and Engineering.
In 1986, NRRI began a long-term relationship with United States Steel Corporation to manage its Coleraine, Minnesota, laboratory. The laboratory was transferred to University ownership in 1989. As part of NRRI's CARTD, the minerals lab has a three-pronged strategy for improving taconite ore products from the Iron Range: flowsheet improvement, the use of by-product rock for construction and highway purposes, and the development of value-added iron nodules from the iron ore concentrate. Serving all Minnesota taconite plants, the research projects regularly reach the stage of commercial implementation after testing and demonstration in the lab's large pilot plants. The lab is currently developing a focus on the extraction of non-ferrous minerals from Northeast Minnesota's Duluth Complex of copper, nickel, and precious metals-bearing ore. The Biomass Conversion Lab at Coleraine has an industrial-scale kiln to convert woody and agricultural biomass into a variety of chars for a variety of applications.
NRRI received a National Science Foundation grant in 1990 to establish a geographic information system (GIS) laboratory within the Center for Water and the Environment. The visualization and spatial modeling techniques, along with state-of-the-art procedures developed in the GIS lab, give NRRI an advantage in the very competitive environment of procuring federally sponsored research grants and contracts. The Center's scientists are recognized around the world for their expertise in landscape ecology and the application of GIS technology for addressing natural resource questions. [4]
A field station was established in Ely, Minnesota, in 1999 to study microscopic algae (diatoms) as indicators of water quality and for paleolimnology research to understand environmental trends through analysis of sediment profiles. This site was closed in 2006 and incorporated into NRRI Duluth.
NRRI acquired 525 acres (212 ha) of drained peatland in Zim, Minnesota, in 1986. The Fens Research Site serves as an area for peatland restoration research and provides wetland mitigation credits for area road construction projects.
After the retirement of long-time Director Michael Lalich in 2015, NRRI welcomed new Executive Director Rolf Weberg. Under his leadership, NRRI reorganized into five Research Platforms that work together to inform integrated, applied research. The Research Platforms are: Applied Ecology and Resource Management, Minerals & Metallurgy, Materials & Bioeconomy, Data Collection and Delivery, and Commercialization Services.
Natural resources are resources that are drawn from nature and used with few modifications. This includes the sources of valued characteristics such as commercial and industrial use, aesthetic value, scientific interest, and cultural value. On Earth, it includes sunlight, atmosphere, water, land, all minerals along with all vegetation, and wildlife.
The University of Minnesota system is a public university system with five campuses spread across the U.S. state of Minnesota.
A renewable resource is a natural resource which will replenish to replace the portion depleted by usage and consumption, either through natural reproduction or other recurring processes in a finite amount of time in a human time scale. When the recovery rate of resources is unlikely to ever exceed a human time scale, these are called perpetual resources. Renewable resources are a part of Earth's natural environment and the largest components of its ecosphere. A positive life-cycle assessment is a key indicator of a resource's sustainability.
Taconite is a variety of banded iron formation, an iron-bearing sedimentary rock, in which the iron minerals are interlayered with quartz, chert, or carbonate. The name "taconyte" was coined by Horace Vaughn Winchell (1865–1923) – son of Newton Horace Winchell, the Minnesota State Geologist – during their pioneering investigations of the Precambrian Biwabik Iron Formation of northeastern Minnesota. He believed the sedimentary rock sequence hosting the iron-formation was correlative with the Taconic orogeny of New England, and referred to the unfamiliar and as-yet-unnamed iron-bearing rock as the 'taconic rock' or taconyte.
The University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD) is a public university in Duluth, Minnesota. It is part of the University of Minnesota system and offers 17 bachelor's degrees in 89 majors, graduate programs in 24 different fields, and a two-year program at the School of Medicine and a four-year College of Pharmacy program.
The Iron Range is collectively or individually a number of elongated iron-ore mining districts around Lake Superior in the United States and Canada. Much of the ore-bearing region lies alongside the range of granite hills formed by the Giants Range batholith. These cherty iron ore deposits are Precambrian in the Vermilion Range and middle Precambrian in the Mesabi and Cuyuna ranges, all in Minnesota. The Gogebic Range in Wisconsin and the Marquette Iron Range and Menominee Range in Michigan have similar characteristics and are of similar age. Natural ores and concentrates were produced from 1848 until the mid-1950s, when taconites and jaspers were concentrated and pelletized, and started to become the major source of iron production.
The Duluth, Missabe and Iron Range Railway (DM&IR), informally known as the Missabe Road, was a railroad operating in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin that used to haul iron ore and later taconite to the Great Lakes ports of Duluth and Two Harbors, Minnesota. Control of the railway was acquired on May 10, 2004, by the Canadian National Railway (CN) when it purchased the assets of Great Lakes Transportation.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in the US specializes in the research and development of renewable energy, energy efficiency, energy systems integration, and sustainable transportation. NREL is a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the Department of Energy and operated by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, a joint venture between MRIGlobal and Battelle. Located in Golden, Colorado, NREL is home to the National Center for Photovoltaics, the National Bioenergy Center, and the National Wind Technology Center.
The North Shore of Lake Superior runs from Duluth, Minnesota, United States, at the western end of the lake, to Thunder Bay and Nipigon, Ontario, Canada, in the north, to Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario in the east. The shore is characterized by alternating rocky cliffs and cobblestone beaches, with forested hills and ridges through which scenic rivers and waterfalls descend as they flow to Lake Superior.
The geology of Minnesota comprises the rock, minerals, and soils of the U.S. state of Minnesota, including their formation, development, distribution, and condition.
The economy of Minnesota produced US$312 billion of gross domestic product in 2014. Minnesota headquartered 31 publicly traded companies in the top 1,000 U.S. companies by revenue in 2011. This includes such large companies as Target and UnitedHealth Group. The per capita personal income in 2016 was $51,990, ranking sixteenth in the nation. The median household income in 2013 ranked eleventh in the nation at $60,900.
Cleveland-Cliffs Inc., formerly Cliffs Natural Resources, is a Cleveland, Ohio-based company that specializes in the mining, beneficiation, and pelletizing of iron ore, as well as steelmaking, including stamping and tooling. It is the largest flat-rolled steel producer in North America.
Natural resource economics deals with the supply, demand, and allocation of the Earth's natural resources. One main objective of natural resource economics is to better understand the role of natural resources in the economy in order to develop more sustainable methods of managing those resources to ensure their availability for future generations. Resource economists study interactions between economic and natural systems, with the goal of developing a sustainable and efficient economy.
Mining in New Zealand began when the Māori quarried rock such as argillite in times prior to European colonisation. Mining by Europeans began in the latter half of the 19th century.
The Taconite State Trail extends 165 miles from Grand Rapids, Minnesota to Ely, Minnesota and intersects the Arrowhead State Trail west of Lake Vermilion. On the Grand Rapids end, the trail is paved for the first 6 miles for in-line skating and biking. The rest of the trail is natural surface used primarily in the winter months for snowmobiling. In the summer, several areas contain standing water, but some areas are suitable for horseback riding, hiking, and mountain biking
Peak minerals marks the point in time when the largest production of a mineral will occur in an area, with production declining in subsequent years. While most mineral resources will not be exhausted in the near future, global extraction and production has become more challenging. Miners have found ways over time to extract deeper and lower grade ores with lower production costs. More than anything else, declining average ore grades are indicative of ongoing technological shifts that have enabled inclusion of more 'complex' processing – in social and environmental terms as well as economic – and structural changes in the minerals exploration industry and these have been accompanied by significant increases in identified Mineral Reserves.
The Oliver Iron Mining Company was a mining company operating in Minnesota, United States. It was one of the most prominent companies in the early decades of mining on the Mesabi Range. As a division of U.S. Steel, Oliver dwarfed its competitors—in 1920, it operated 128 mines across the region, while its largest competitor operated only 65.
Elcor is a ghost town, or more properly, an extinct town, in the U.S. state of Minnesota that was inhabited between 1897 and 1956. It was built on the Mesabi Iron Range near the city of Gilbert in St. Louis County. Elcor was its own unincorporated community before it was abandoned and was never a neighborhood proper of the city of Gilbert. Not rating a figure in the national census, the people of Elcor were only generally considered to be citizens of Gilbert. The area where Elcor was located was annexed by Gilbert when its existing city boundaries were expanded after 1969.