EAST HAMPTON — Within the metallic gray rocks that can still be found along a few isolated roads in eastern Connecticut, there lies a key ingredient to powering much of the world’s electronics, from cell phones to cars.
One village on the banks of the Connecticut River, in fact, takes its name from the presence of the mineral element— cobalt — that has become an increasingly sought-after commodity for its use in rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. Cobalt is used to help keep the batteries from overheating and catching fire, as occurred recently on an electric bus parked in Hamden.
The history of cobalt mining in this area of Connecticut dates back centuries — and may even have roots in one the state’s first colonial governors — but geologists and local experts say that despite the periodic interest from prospectors, there’s likely never been enough deposits in the rocks around East Hampton to make mining commercially viable.
Today the remnants of the few, mostly unsuccessful efforts at extracting cobalt from ground can still be seen in a few places along the mile-long Gadpouch Road in East Hampton where all that remains are the earthen scars from the network of trenches, and few stone walls.
“Beyond building one or two, a few shafts and a few drips…. they didn’t really find much after a few years of digging around,” said Benjamin Chilson-Parks, a geology professor at the University of Connecticut who has taken students to study the remnants of the old mines of Cobalt.
“The funny thing is that very, very close to where that layer of cobalt-nickel ore is, there’s actually what seems to be a more significant load of gold,” Chilson-Parks said.
The discovery of gold in the nearby Meshomasic State Forest made by another team of geologists from UConn in the 1980s also attracted a flurry of interest from historians and prospectors — along with headlines in national papers such as the New York Times — but those deposits, too, ultimately proved to be of little interest to commercial mining operations.
In a response to questions from CT Insider, State Geologist Meghan M. Seremet said that she was not aware of any entities expressing interest in extracting cobalt in East Hampton or elsewhere in the state.
She also noted that many of the deposits exist on state land where mining activities are prohibited.
The presence of cobalt in a few rock veins of eastern Connecticut is due to geologic forces that occurred millions of years ago, deep underground, according to Chilson-Parks, the geology professor. The process, called metamorphism, formed rocks out of elements such as cobalt, nickel and arsenic through intense heat and pressure.
The resulting mineral, known as smaltite, forms the ore deposits that attracted a string of prospectors and commercial ventures to the region, he said.
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“These minerals probably formed in an environment that was kind of starved for oxygen, and so what was available in enough quantity was arsenic,” Chilson-Parks said.
The first attempts at mining in the village now known as Cobalt came in the 1770s, though a popular legend says that the state’s first governor, John Winthrop the Younger, had discovered a secret lode of gold in the area around the base of Great Hill roughly 100 years prior. According to a history of the mines written for a 1980s-era guidebook by UConn geology professor Norman Gray, the first prospectors to the area were likely attracted by the reports of gold, but instead found cobalt.
At the time, cobalt, prized for its deep bluish hues, was used as a dye to manufacture stained glasses and porcelain.
The first mining venture by German prospector John Stephauney failed within a year, according to Gray, and the mines sat vacant for roughly 50 years before two more brief efforts were made at extracting cobalt in the first half of the 19th Century. In the 1850s, miners turned their interests to the nickel present in the ore, as the metal’s use in coins led to an increase in its value around that time.
That last attempt at commercial mining for nickel lasted about 10 years and resulted in some of the largest excavations on the site that are still visible today, according to Gray. After that, interest in the area faded until gold was rediscovered more than a century later.
“It’s kind of ironic that there was more of an effort to find cobalt and nickel there than the gold that was in a layer very close to it,” Chilson-Parks said.
Because minerals containing cobalt are often formed very deep in the earth, Chilson-Parks said that the deposits are susceptible to erosion when they reach the surface — leaving few areas in the world with enough cobalt to be extracted through commercial means. Some of the largest known cobalt deposits exist in developing countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Indonesia, sparking concerns that the sudden demand to produce lithium-ion batteries has been fed by workers toiling under harsh conditions and low wages.
Despite the growing worldwide demand for cobalt, Chilson-Parks said there’s little evidence to show that any effort to exploit eastern Connecicut’s small deposits would prove more successful than the failed efforts of the past.
“I don’t know how much is still there, but I think what would still be there is very little,” Chilson-Parks said. “It’s definitely not easy to find there now.”
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