Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
The battle outside ragin’
Will soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls… Bob Dylan
On Thursday 18 June a remarkable event took place. The near simultaneous release of an Alberta Energy Regulator (AER)/Canadian Environment Impact Assessment Agency (CEIAA) joint panel rejection of the controversial Grassy Meadows coal project and a news release from Alberta’s Environment and Energy ministers “respecting” the Joint Panel’s recommendations. The Thursday announcements followed declarations by federal Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson that all coal projects which produced selenium would be subject to federal review due to the environmental impacts on navigable rivers.
The Joint-Panel decision
The Joint Panel’s (JP) report was submitted to the federal Minister of Environment and Climate Change according to the Government of Canada’s announcement. The federal news release observed:
The report includes the panel’s decisions in its capacity as the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) for the provincial applications.
The panel concluded that the project is likely to result in:
- significant adverse environmental effects on surface water quality, westslope cutthroat trout and its habitat, whitebark pine, rough fescue grasslands, and vegetation species and community biodiversity; and
- significant adverse effects on physical and cultural heritage of some First Nations.
In the AER’s capacity to regulate mineral development in the public interest the AER concluded “the adverse environmental effects on surface water quality and westslope cutthroat trout and its habitat outweigh the positive economic impacts of the project and the project is not in the public interest.”
According to the AER’s terse press release “(T)he panel’s decision reflects the AER’s commitment to making evidence-based and risk-informed decisions in the public interest,” said Laurie Pushor, president and CEO of the Alberta Energy Regulator.”
The ground-breaking report is in sharp contrast to the conclusions of the Joint panel Review for the Teck Frontier oilsands project which approved the huge project- a project then shelved for financial reasons by Teck. A possible cause for the divergence is the difference in scale between the $20 billion oilsands project and expected billions in royalties and the smaller economic impact of the coal mine on employment and provincial coffers.
The 680-page report focussed almost exclusively on environmental issues including impacts on human health, wildlife, historical resources, vegetation, traditional land use, soils, water, aquatic life and reclamation and closure liabilities.
Ministers React
Ministers Savage and Nixon stated they respected the JP’s recommendation terming the review “rigorous” assuring readers that “all coal mining projects” are subject to a “stringent” review Still the ministers had to take a shot at those who “whose intent is to stoke fear and confusion on this matter, our government has not made changes to water protection legislation or water allocations in southern Alberta.” The usual boiler plate news release on energy-environmental issues contained words and phrases like “protection.” “safe,” “responsible,” “comprehensive land planning,” and “responsible resource development.”
Sonya Savage, Minister of Energy Source: alberta.ca
(This rhetoric was amped up a few days later in a press release from Alberta’s Environment and Parks Minister, Jason Nixon, extolling the virtues of protecting Alberta’s water quality.)
Background
Benga began its quest for an environmental assessment to AER and CEIAA back in November 2015 and an integrated application at the end of October 2017. According to the Report’s Executive Summary the application was to approve the construction, operation and reclamation of an open-pit metallurgical coal mine about seven kilometres north of Blairmore covering 1521 hectares. Project life was estimated to be 23 years.
On 16 August 2018 the AER and Alberta’s Environment Minister announced the formation of the joint panel to review the Grassy Meadows project chaired by Alex Bolton, the AER’s chief hearing commissioner, whom Jeff Gailus labelled as a “trained master” in the art of studying and approving massive industrial projects (July/August issue of Alberta Views). Bolton, a safe hand, is “a professional geoscientist with over 30 years of diverse technical and management experience in the energy, government, and consulting sectors.” His official biography at the AER confirms years of work Director of Compliance and Enforcement with the Natural Resources Conservation Board. As the Chief Hearing Commissioner he was paid $228,630 in salary and $51,607 in other benefits in 2020. for the provincial government, industry, and as a consultant.
His male AER co-commissioner was Dean O’Gorman who served in the federal government with Environment Canada, moved to Barr Engineering, and is currently a AER hearing commissioner. O’Gorman earned $222,718 plus $4388 in benefits from the Regulator. The final member was Mr. H. Matthews.
Joint Panel Report
The tone of the report is a decided shift from an uncritical acceptance of company’s claims about new technologies to address environmental damage. For instance:
While Benga acknowledged the importance of taking a conservative approach to the identification and assessment of project effects, we find that in practice it did not always do so. Overly optimistic assumptions resulted in a likely underestimate of predicted project effects in some areas, such as for surface water quality and human health, and this reduces our confidence in Benga’s assessment.
Of particular note was the skepticism of “several participants” about Benga’s reliance on the use of “adaptive management to address uncertainty,” the JP bravely opining:“(W)e cannot defer important matters or decisions to a later stage of the regulatory process. Most notable in the decision was the attention now devoted to cumulative effects.
We also find that the project is likely to contribute to existing significant adverse cumulative environmental effects on westslope cutthroat trout, little brown bats, grizzly bears, and whitebark pine. Due to the limitations of Benga’s approach to assessing cumulative effects, we are unable to assess the magnitude of some cumulative effects (emphasis added)
The summary noted weaknesses in the “end-pit lake” water with elevated concentrations of arsenic, aluminum, cadmium, cobalt, lead and thallium. The panel found that reclaimed areas would likely not be useable until 25 years after reclamation or later, Although the panel held that the overall effects on rare plants would not be significant due to the localized nature of the project, the collective loss of species and plant communities “would result in the loss of vegetation species and community biodiversity in the local study area for 100 years or longer.”
The JP noted that during operations, the mine and facilities would employ 400 workers and pay about $77 million in taxes and royalties to the federal and provincial governments along with about $1.4 million in municipal taxes. However, Benga did not provide the JP with “methodological details and models to support its estimates, we are not able to verify the magnitude of the estimated benefits. Additionally, we are not confident that Benga’s estimate of future royalty payments of $30 million per year is accurate.” Benga could not explain why its estimates of coal royalties were significantly higher than those of other existing bituminous mines. The JP also questioned the impact the mine would have on other sectors such as tourism, nor the impact of declining quality of the coal resource or demand for the coal given the context of global measures to reduce greenhouse gases.
The panel also considered established aboriginal and treaty rights of 14 First Nations. All of the Treaty 7 nations had signed agreements with Benga. However, the private agreements were not accessible. The commissioners’ overall conclusion was that the project would result in the loss of lands used for traditional activities. They noted a variety of effects, some significant, others not significant with differential impacts among the 14 nations.
In short, the JP found plenty of reasons to deny the application of Benga, the Australian coal mining subsidiary of Riverdale Resources.
What it means?
Ian Urquhart, spokesman for the Alberta Wilderness Association and former political science professor at UofA (and author of Costly Fix, expressed it well in an interview with the Globe and Mail’s Emma Graney: “This is a watershed,” he said. “This is the moment when a variety of actors are saying that the future of metallurgical coal in Alberta is very dim.”
The fact that the Alberta Energy Regulator has in effect moved sharply from which Jeff Gailus observed in Alberta Views as a common three-step playbook process to approve major industrial projects is highly significant. Gailus summed up the historical playbook this way:
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regrettably, and with a heavy heart, the project will likely have some significant adverse environmental impacts on a long list of things Albertans thought were protected by law, as well as on Indigenous land use, rights, and culture;
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mitigation measures proposed by the owners of the mine are not proven to be effective; and
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In spite of all these effects and the lack of a plausible mitigation plan, the project will provide significant economic and employment benefits, and therefore, under the authority as the AER, we consider those effects to be justified and the project to be in the public interest.
In making its recommendation to deny Benga permits to continue its development, the accepted playbook of environmental policy in Alberta, and Canada has altered permanently. No longer do regulatory panels feel compelled to accept company’s adaptive management and plausible mitigation plans. The protection of habitat and water, traditional land rights, and attention to cumulative effects is a profound victory to environmentalists. This also means that more scrutiny will be given to oil sands expansion as the AER has signaled concerns about cumulative effects, plausible mitigation and reclamation claims. In short, the Alberta regulator has suddenly woke up to the reality of the climate emergency and Alberta’s over-sized contribution to that emergency.
This regulatory action is a huge victory for the tens of thousands of Albertans who mobilized and pushed back against the feckless efforts of the Alberta government bend on creating “good jobs” while seeing the profits flow to Australia. This may also signal a turning point in the public’s attitude in accepting the current royalty rates which are no longer the rich vein of gold that allowed past provincial governments to bribe the electorate with more spending and low taxes. The times they are a’changin.
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