Ron Thiessen is President and CEO of Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd., owner of the Pebble Limited Partnership and the Pebble Project.
There’s at least one thing I can agree on with the Bristol Bay lodge owners who recently published an op-ed in the Anchorage Daily News. Well, maybe two.
The lodge owners faithfully report in the opening paragraph of their screed: “The most important document on the Pebble Project’s path to a key permit to mine … has been released by the Army Corps of Engineers.” They go on to say, quite rightly, “that document, the draft environmental impact statement, is often considered the linchpin of permitting.”
These things are exactly correct. But from that point forward, the views and opinions of the ardent anti-mining authors don’t only diverge from mine. They diverge sharply, even radically, from the professional judgment of the independent engineers and scientists employed by the US Army Corps of Engineers as expressed in the Pebble draft EIS.
For those of you who don’t know, for the first time ever last month, a truly objective, comprehensive and science-based study of the potential environmental and socioeconomic impacts of the Pebble Project was released for public review. This is the Pebble draft EIS, and if you haven’t read it, you really should – for a number of reasons:
The document, following a three-month public comment window that began this month, will become the final EIS for the Pebble Project next year. This is the key document upon which permitting decisions will be made.
For the rest of this opinion column: https://www.adn.com/opinions/2019/03/24/dont-buy-the-alarmism-about-the-pebble-mine/