FOWLER, N.Y.—A fierce wind is slinging sleet and forcing 30-foot hemlocks to genuflect in its gusts this gray, cold November morning, but Joel Rheault is enjoying a warm and fuzzy moment atop a dynamited blast bowl.
Below, a bulldozer is churning through newly dredged soil and shoving boulders aside in an open pit burrowed into the sandy, finely ground waste tailings from the nearby zinc mine.
“Drilling and blast rocking,” Rheault, vice president of operations for Titan Mining Corporation, said. “It’s a beautiful thing.”
The “beautiful thing” taking shape is Titan Mining Corporation’s $360 million Kilbourne Graphite Project within Empire State Mines’ century-old zinc mine and mill, a nationally vital venture in the United States’ drive to develop a domestic manufacturing supply chain free of China’s mineral market manipulation that could revitalize New York’s rural St. Lawrence County, where small towns with proud mining heritages have languished for decades….