EPA Revives Possibility Of Massive Mine Near Lake Clark National Park And Preserve

As expected, the Trump administration is proposing that a company that wants to sink a massive copper, gold, and molybdenum mine not far from Lake Clark National Park and Preserve and near the headwaters of Bristol Bay in Alaska be allowed to apply for the necessary permits.

On Tuesday afternoon the Environmental Protection Agency opened a 90-day comment period on its proposal to withdraw an Obama administration decision to restrict the discharge of dredged or fill material associated with the potential “Pebble Mine.” Without the requisite Section 404 discharge permit, the project couldn't move forward.

Northern Dynasty Minerals, Ltd., which holds the mining rights, applauded the EPA's decision.

"The current administration at EPA is closely focused on enforcing environmental standards and permitting requirements for major development projects like Pebble in a way that is both rigorous and robust, but also consistent in order to provide predictability and an even-playing field for all resource developers," said Pebble Partnership CEO Tom Collier. "It's an approach all Alaskans and all Americans should support, because it has the benefit of maintaining the high standards for environmental protection for which the state and country are known, while attracting investment in projects that create high-wage jobs and other much-needed economic benefits in our country."

The EPA's action was quickly criticized by the Natural Resources Defense Council, where Joel Reynolds, the organization's Western director and senior attorney, wrote in a blog that when President Trump was elected "Northern Dynasty saw an opening in Washington to breathe new life into its hugely unpopular project, no matter what the people of Alaska might think, and it seized that opportunity immediately. Only months into the new administration, (EPA Administrator) Scott Pruitt and Trump’s EPA agreed to withdraw the agency’s proposed restrictions and allow the Pebble Mine to move forward."

"It didn’t apparently matter that the people of Alaska don’t want the mine. Indeed, the people of Alaska – especially those in the Bristol Bay region – have led the project’s opposition for well over a decade," Mr. Reynolds added. "Tribes, village associations, commercial and recreational fishing interests, hunters, conservationists, and even development corporations who recognize that the $1.5 billion a year Bristol Bay fishery is the economic engine of success for the region and its people, their communities, and their wildlife.

"...Thanks to Trump the Pebble Mine is once again raising its battered head – a project reviled around the world for its recklessness but nowhere more vociferously than in Alaska itself. If the company follows through on its latest promise to seek federal permits, the intensity of that opposition will only grow as the necessity of engaging yet again to stop it grows clearer."

Three years ago the Obama administration decided that the project posed too much of a threat to the fisheries' rich Bristol Bay waters to permit it. In studying the project, which would be roughly 14 miles from Lake Clark, the EPA at the time said that upwards of 100 miles of streams that might be valuable to "spawning or rearing habitats for Coho salmon, Chinook salmon, Sockeye salmon, rainbow trout, and Dolly Varden (trout)" could be lost or blocked by the Pebble proposal; that more than 4,000 acres of wetlands providing "off-channel habitat" for fish could vanish under the mine's potential footprint, and; that impacts to surface and groundwater flows could harm winter and spring fish habitat.

In its review of the project, the Obama administration's EPA found the simple existence of large-scale mining operations could adversely affect the culture of the area.

"Under routine operations with no major accidents or failures, the predicted loss and degradation of salmon, char, and trout habitat in North Fork Koktuli and South Fork Koktuli Rivers and Upper Talarik Creek is expected to have some impact on Alaska Native cultures of the Bristol Bay watershed," it noted in 2014. "Fishing and hunting practices are expected to change in direct response to the stream, wetland, and terrestrial habitats lost due to the footprints of the mine site and the transportation corridor. Additionally, it is also possible that subsistence use of salmon resources could decrease based on the perception of reduced fish or water quality resulting from mining."

The project long has been opposed by Native Americans in the region, salmon fishermen, and environmental organizations.

But Northern Dynasty officials believe they can mollify those groups.

"We believe the project design we are preparing to advance into permitting, as well as the social and stakeholder programs and commitments we are building around our project, will address many of the priorities and concerns we have heard from stakeholders in Alaska," said Northern Dynasty President & CEO Ron Thiessen. "We have every confidence that a permitting process led by the Corps will be objective and science-based, and provide us an opportunity to demonstrate that Pebble is a project of merit that will provide very substantial benefits to the people and communities of southwest Alaska, the state and nation as a whole."

The company said that in the weeks and months ahead it would be "focused on qualifying and securing a new major funding partner for the Pebble Project, while the Pebble Partnership is advancing plans to initiate federal and state permitting with a smaller, environmentally-optimized project design. Both major project milestones - re-partnering and initiating permitting under the CWA and NEPA - are expected to be achieved in the near term."