Army Corps sticks with January target for Pebble mine environmental analysis

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is sticking with its January target to complete a Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the proposed Pebble copper/gold/molybdenum mine near Iliamna but will keep the DEIS open for public comment for 90 days rather than the usual 45 days.

in a briefing July 26, Shane McCoy, the Army Corps’ Alaska district Pebble program manager, told reporters that a Record of Decision, clearing the way for federal permits to be issued for Pebble, would come in early 2020 under the current schedule.

Pebble Partnership, the company making the proposal for the mine, has not yet filed applications for state permits. The project is controversial because of its proposed location in uplands near rivers supporting salmon.

McCoy said the Army Corps will publish a “scoping report,” a compilation of comments gathered during the DEIS scoping sessions that ended June 29, by the end of August.

About 175,000 comments were sent in during the scoping sessions. “Many of these were form letters with many of them coming in at the close of the comment period,” McCoy said.

“There were a lot of issues and they were pretty well vocalized, but so far there are no real surprises,” among concerns raised, he said.

McCoy said the Corps was unable to comply with Gov. Bill Walker’s request to suspend the EIS for the mine because Pebble Partnership, the company making the proposal, had submitted no feasibility study or evidence that the project is viable.

A demonstration of economic feasibility is not a requirement of the National Environmental Policy Act, which focuses entirely on environmental effects of a proposed action, McCoy said.

Also, once an EIS process is launched it cannot be suspended unless that is asked for by the proponent, in this case Pebble Partnership, or if the company is unable to supply additional information requested by the Corps.

So far Pebble Partnership has supplied all information asked for by the agency, McCoy said.

The point where economics does enter the picture is later, he said, when the EIS is complete and the Corps conducts a separate analysis on whether to issue a Section 404 dredge and fill permit.

The Section 404 permit is the key federal permit needed for Pebble to build a mine. It focuses on impacts on aquatic resources, including on fisheries and wetlands habitat, as well as on navigable waters.

In the “404” analysis, McCoy explained, the Corps examines alternatives considered in the EIS to select the least environmentally damaging alternative that is practical to approve in its Record of Decision.

It is this point, in the Section 404 analysis, that costs, logistics and other economic considerations are weighed, but the analysis is not based on information supplied by the company but on industry standards for costs. This is information that is gathered independently, McCoy said.

The Corps has not replied in writing to the governor’s letter because the agency does not respond to letters filed during the scoping process, he said. “The governor is treated no differently than anyone else,” he said.

However, Col. Michael Brooks, the Army Corps’ Alaska District Engineer, did telephone the governor to discuss the issue, McCoy said.

Pebble has become a hot-button political issue because of possible adverse effects on streams popular with sports fishermen and on rich salmon fisheries further downstream.

When it filed its permit applications last December Pebble Partnership proposed a scaled-down version of a plan for much larger mine that it contemplated originally, but opponents to the mine have argued that the smaller mine would have to be expanded eventually.

The company says it can construct and operate the mine safely and that, of built, Pebble would create hundreds of highly-paid jobs in a region that is economically-depressed, and where local communities are losing population because of a lack of jobs.