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When Mike Heatwole, vice president of corporate communications for the Pebble Limited Partnership, gave a status report of the controversial and beleaguered Pebble project to a friendly audience in Anchorage Thursday afternoon, he laced his speech with sadness and resignation.
“What a difference a year makes. If you think about it, what a difference a few months makes,” Heatwole told attendees at the Alaska Miners Association convention.
Heatwole’s company would build one of the world’s largest open-pit copper mines in the headwaters of Alaska’s Bristol Bay. He closed his presentation with a slideshow of smiling workers, in the company’s Anchorage office, in the field and elsewhere. All were laid off after Anglo American, the moneyed partner in the project, announced in September that it was abandoning Pebble and its investment in it.
The Pebble partners had planned to submit a formal mine plan by the end of the year, kicking off permitting applications, he said. Now, with Vancouver-based Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd as the only remaining partner, that timetable is unclear. Heatwole, who admitted to choking up when he reviewed the photos of now-unemployed colleagues, said news about future plans will come later this month when Northern Dynasty CEO Ron Thiessen is scheduled to give a speech making the case for investing in Pebble.
The annual miners’ convention is the epicenter of the pro-Pebble universe in a state where opposition is widespread to a project that would create a giant open-pit mine on largely unspoiled southwestern Alaska land upstream from the world’s biggest sockeye salmon runs.
At the convention, in the Sheraton hotel, pro-Pebble buttons and stickers are plentiful, as is strong rhetoric against the Environmental Protection Agency and environmental activists. At this gathering, abandonment by Anglo America is a widely characterized as a big loss for all Alaska miners.
‘EPA storm troopers’
NovaCopper Inc. Chief Executive Rick Van Nieuwenhuyse, who referred to “EPA storm troopers” and called staffers at Anchorage environmental law firm Trustees for Alaska “the biggest hypocrites in the world,” said that and other events had added up to a tough year for the industry.
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