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Mining Environmental, Water Shortage and Land Reclamation/Revegetation Issues

Arizona judge recommends Curis’ Florence aquifer permit be rescinded – by Henry Lazenby (MiningWeekly.com – October 1, 2014)

http://www.miningweekly.com/page/americas-home

TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – Despite explicitly stating facts to the contrary, Arizona administrative law judge Diane Milhasky on Wednesday recommended that the Arizona Department of Water Quality (ADEQ) rescind a temporary individual aquifer protection permit (APP) granted to Florence Copper, the proponent of the in-situ copper recovery, solvent extraction and electrowinning (SX-EW) Florence copper project.

The judge made a nonbinding recommendation in the appeal of ADEQ’s decision to issue an APP to Florence Copper during July last year, which would be submitted to the Water Quality Appeals Board (WQAB) to make the final determination on the permit.

The town of Florence, legal representatives, Johnson Utilities and Pulte Home Corporation filed an amended notice of appeal with the WQAB to appeal the ADEQ’s issuing of the temporary APP to Florence Copper’s parent, Curis Resources.

In her recommendation, Judge Milhasky noted that Florence Copper’s proposed production test facility (PTF) would not have any impact on the drinking water wells in Florence, nor would it impact the wells owned and operated by Johnson Utilities located north-west of the project.

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Vale, nickel giant, gets into the bee business in Sudbury, Ont. – by Markus Schwabe (CBC News Sudbury – September 26, 2014)

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury

Bees help enhance the seeding of flowering plants, ‘which helps with the biodiversity of our city’

Mining company Vale is hoping honey bees will encourage its re-vegetation project in Sudbury. For decades, nickel producer Vale (formerly INCO) dumped tons of molten slag around its refinery in Copper Cliff. The by-product of the nickel-smelting process accumulated until black mountains were formed.

In 2006, Vale embarked on a $10 million re-vegetation project to grade the landscape, cap the slag with soil, then scatter the ground with clover, grass and wildflower seeds. Trees were also planted.

This year Vale contacted the services of a retired Vale employee, Wayne Tonelli, to raise honeybees on the property. “With all the wildflowers, it was thought to promote pollination and help the re-vegetation process,” the Vale superintendent of decommissioning and reclamation said.

Seven hives are now buzzing with more than 350,000 bees. The hives are situated in an old utility trailer owned by Vale, which allows for the bees to enter, but keeps predators likes bears out.

Dr. Jennifer Babin-Fenske of Earthcare Sudbury supports in the initiative.

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Environmental groups pitch planning solution for Far North – by Bryan Phelan (Wawatay News – September 18, 2014)

http://www.wawataynews.ca/radio

Ontario’s three major political parties promised during the 2014 provincial election campaign to speed mining development in the Ring of Fire.

At the same time, however, two environmental groups were making finishing touches on a report calling for the province to put the brakes on that development, at least for now.

Just four days after the Liberals were re-elected to power in June, the environmental groups Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Canada and Ecojustice released a report suggesting Ontario needs a whole new approach to planning for the Far North. In the meantime, no Ring of Fire projects should be approved, the groups said in their report, titled Getting it Right in Ontario’s Far North: The Need for Strategic Environmental Assessment in the Ring of Fire (Wawangajing).

The existing legal framework for industrial development in the region is “broken,” said Anastasia Lintner, a lawyer and economist who co-authored the report on behalf of Ecojustice along with a conservation scientist from WCS, Cheryl Chetkiewicz. Part of the problem, they showed, is that planning taking place now is piecemeal and narrowly focused on individual projects or pieces of projects. “The Far North faces uncoordinated resource development with little consideration for cumulative impacts (of multiple projects),” the co-authors wrote in the report’s summary.

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Environmental monitoring training underway at Matawa – by Rick Garrick (Wawatay News – August 8, 2014)

http://www.wawataynews.ca/

This year’s science and environment workshops at the Nibinamik Youth Retreat were part of the training for the RoFATA Environmental Monitoring Training Program.

“(The youth) really enjoyed it,” said Harry Bunting, a Ring of Fire Aboriginal Training Alliance (RoFATA) environmental monitoring student from Constance Lake. “They learned quite a bit actually, and so did I. I was able to do some sampling of fish, learned how to age a fish and what to do when you are sampling and doing your protocols to help assess the water quality and assess the environment itself.”

The Environmental Monitoring Training Program is being delivered by Four Rivers Matawa Environmental Services Group at the Matawa First Nations building in Thunder Bay.

“As part of the training program, students are assigned to real community based projects or initiatives so that they can learn to do the work by actually doing it,” said Sarah Cockerton, manager of environmental programs at Four Rivers, in an e-mail. “This year, the environmental monitoring students organized, prepared and delivered the science/environmental workshops to the youth in addition to planning and organizing a lot of the logistics to the trip itself.”

The Four Rivers staff and the environmental monitoring students travelled to Nibinamik on July 14 for the youth retreat and returned on July 18. Soon after arriving back in Thunder Bay, the environmental monitoring students were back in class.

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BHP Billiton’s thirst triggers an outback water fight – by Sarah Martin (The Australian – August 9, 2014)

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/

SHANE Oldfield kicks the red rocks on his vast, dry pastoral lease north of Marree where he raises organic Angus beef for ­export.

The outback Clayton Station in northern South Australia has always been marginal farming land. With an average of 10cm of rain a year the property is dependent on water from the Great ­Artesian Basin in dry years.

“We are living in a desert, and without the basin we are non-existent,” Mr Oldfield says. “We haven’t had a decent rainfall since February 2012, so without the Great Artesian Basin we wouldn’t be here.”

But while accustomed to battling drought, the Oldfields now have another fight on their hands. The water level of the basin is dropping dramatically, raising fears that the pastoral land will become unviable.

The culprit, they say, is BHP Billiton, which pumps all of its water from the basin to its Olympic Dam mine and the Roxby Downs township 250km away. “BHP aren’t going to own up to the fact that they are sucking the guts out of the basin,’’ he tells The Weekend Australian.

“But they are. They want the water from this country because without the water they can’t mine, and the GAB water is the cheapest water they are ever going to get.”

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Spilled waste water at Mount Polley mine had failed guidelines for human, aquatic health – by Gordon Hoekstra and Tara Carman (Vancouver Sun – August 5, 2014)

http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html

Possible contamination after tailings pond for Imperial Metals’ mine breached, sending millions of cubic meters of waste into waterways southeast of Quesnel

The millions of cubic metres of water that poured out of Mount Polley mine when the dam collapsed had failed provincial water quality guidelines for human and aquatic health in the past, according to the B.C. environment ministry.

Data sent to the ministry by Mount Polley as recently as Monday showed that selenium concentration exceeded drinking water guidelines by a factor of 2.8 times.

There have also been drinking water exceedances of sulphate over the last few years, according to information supplied to The Vancouver Sun by environment ministry spokesman Dave Crebo.

Aquatic water guidelines have also been exceeded in the past for nitrate, cadmium, copper and iron.

The release of 10 million cubic metres of water — enough to fill BC Place more than four times — is also potentially contaminated with toxic metals such as arsenic and mercury, a concern for hundreds of area residents’ water supply and important salmon habitat.

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B.C. mine had issues with rising waste water ahead of breach, consultant says (The Canadian Press/Globe and Mail – August 05, 2014)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

Quesnel, B.C. — A tailings pond that breached Monday, releasing a slurry of contaminated water and mine waste into several central British Columbia waterways, had been growing at an unsustainable rate, an environmental consultant says.

Brian Olding, who operates Brian Olding and Associates Ltd., said Imperial Metals Corp. (TSX: III) had been working on fixing the problem with waste water from the mine. Olding said he was hired by the company as well as the Williams Lake and Soda Creek First Nations to review the company’s plans to treat and release water as part of the province’s effluent release permitting process.

“More water was coming in over the year than they could deal with,” Olding said. “They just kept building the walls up higher and higher every year and it got to the point where that was untenable.”

He said the firm was seeking a permit to treat and release some of the water to keep the size of the pond in check at its Mount Polley Mine, an open-pit gold and copper mine about 140 kilometres southeast of Quesnel.

The earthen dam at one end of the four-kilometre-long pond breached early Monday morning, sending a 45-metre-wide wall of water and mining debris into local creeks and lakes.

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Residents calling it an environmental disaster: tailings pond breach at Mount Polley Mine near Likely, BC – by Paula Baker, Marlisse Silver Sweeney and Justin McElroy (Global News – August 4, 2014)

http://globalnews.ca/toronto/

Local residents are calling it an environmental disaster. A breach of the tailings pond on Mount Polley Mine sent five million cubic metres of toxic waste into Hazeltine Creek, Quesnel Lake and Polley Lake, with fears it could spread far and wide in the coming days.

Residents in the area, along with visitors to waterways near the Mount Polley Mine close to Likely, B.C., have been issued a complete water ban. Affecting close to 300 homes, it extends to the entire Quesnel and Cariboo River systems up to the Fraser River, including Quesnel Lake, Cariboo Creek, Hazeltine Creek and Polley Lake.

People in Quesnel are also being asked to avoid using water from the Quesnel River, and late in the day the Cariboo Regional District extended the water advisory right to the Fraser River – although they said that was a precautionary measure.

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Water scarcity and rising energy costs threaten mining industry – by James Wilson (Financial Times – July 27, 2014)

http://www.ft.com/intl/companies/mining

Access to water has become one of the most significant business risks for miners, says a report that also highlights the threat to the sector from rising energy costs in some resource-rich areas.

EY, the consultancy, said affordable water and energy should now be viewed as one of the 10 biggest problems for miners. The threat was particularly acute in South America and Africa, it said. These continents are significant in the global supply of many metals, particularly copper.

Spending by mining companies on water infrastructure amounted to almost $12bn last year, compared with $3.4bn in 2009, EY said. BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto, the two largest in the world by market capitalisation, are investing $3bn to build a desalination plant at Escondida, the Chilean copper mine that is the world’s largest by output.

The report underscores how water resources are becoming an increasingly important concern across business. Peter Brabeck, chairman of Nestlé, told the Financial Times in a recent interview that water scarcity presented a more urgent challenge than climate change.

EY said large companies such as Rio, BHP and Anglo American had the expertise and financial strength to build complex water procurement systems for large projects and were therefore “likely to emerge as the partners of choice in water-scarce countries seeking to exploit their natural resources”.

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Timmins’s Kidd Operations earn reclamation award – by Ron Grech (Timmins Daily Press – July 30, 2014)

The Daily Press is the city of Timmins broadsheet newspaper.

TIMMINS – As David Yaschyshyn leads the way towards the former jarosite pond site, a cool mild breeze carries a waft of clover from the field up ahead.

Yaschyshyn, the environmental manager at Kidd Operations (Glencore), points to the ground, noting the fresh moose tracks along the trail.

“Since the jarosite pond has been reclaimed and re-vegetated, we have seen hundreds of geese. We’ve seen bears and their cubs and even moose wandering across. So it really has been returned to nature. It’s now an open meadow ecosystem.”

Yaschyshyn isn’t exaggerating. The 50-hectare area that was once a dumping pond for a liquid byproduct of the zinc refinery process is now covered waist-high in wildflowers and native grasses.

The jarosite (iron sulphate mud) pond was built in 1971 and was used as part of the smelting process from 1972 until the refinery at the metallurgical site closed in 2010.

After that there was no use for the storage pond, so it was dewatered, dried, covered with layers of stones, gravel and dirt, before being sealed with a specially designed 60-millimetre thick plastic liner.

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US lawmakers introduce Bill to reform 142-year-old mining law – by Henry Lazenby (MiningWeekly.com – July 11, 2014)

http://www.miningweekly.com/page/americas-home

TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – Twenty US legislators had this week introduced a Bill in the House of Representatives looking for reforms to the General Mining Act of 1872, proposing higher royalties for mining companies.

The Bill suggests that mining companies be charged a royalty of 8% on new mines and 4% on existing properties for mining on public land.

The Bill was introduced on Thursday by the US House of Representatives natural resources committee member Peter DeFazio and subcommittee on public lands and environmental regulation member Raul Grijalva.

For over 140 years, the federal government has allowed mining companies to extract hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of valuable publically owned minerals from public lands without paying American taxpayers a single dime.

The 1872 Mining Law was signed into law by President Ulysses Grant. Originally intended to spur the nation’s westward expansion, the nineteenth-century statute still governs the extraction of hard-rock minerals on over 350-million acres of public lands in the western US.

“Adding insult to injury, the current law has allowed these mining companies – many of them foreign owned – to carve up our lands and abandon the toxic, hazardous mess for taxpayers to clean up.

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“You can’t breathe in air with 7000 micrograms of sulfur dioxide.” [Norilsk Nickel – Kola Peninsula] – by Amelia Jaycen (Barents Observer – July 03, 2014)

http://barentsobserver.com/en

BarentsObserver.com is an open internet news service, which offers daily updated news from and about the Barents Region and the Arctic. The site is run by the Norwegian Barents Secretariat in Kirkenes, Norway.

Putin presses Norilsk Nickel to move to a functioning, upgraded plant, dismantle the obsolete polluter in Nikel.

Russia’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Ecology on Tuesday told representatives of “MMC” Norilsk Nickel of the planned decommissioning some of Nikel plant rundown facilities by 2016 and reorganization of metallurgical production at the Monchegorsk plant, which must be upgraded and modernized, the ministry said in a press release yesterday. Monchegorsk is owned by the same company and located some two-hour drive south of Murmansk on the Kola Peninsula.

The program involves modernization and renovation of all stages of processing and consolidation of smelting and refining capacity to a more modern venue including technological upgrading and expansion of refinery at Monchegorsk during 2016-2017. Capital investments in the program total more than 50 billion rubles, the release says.

The decision was made in the course of inter-ministerial consultations, and the updated reconfiguration of Monchegorsk is to be accompanied by a special Russian-Norwegian working group. The parties scheduled a technical workshop for September 2014 in Moscow to plan the next steps.

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NEWS RELEASE: Acknowledging Glencore’s environmental excellence in Timmins

This article was provided by the Ontario Mining Association (OMA), an organization that was established in 1920 to represent the mining industry of the province.

Congratulations to Glencore’s Kidd Operations in Timmins for earning the 2014 Tom Peters Memorial Reclamation Award. This environmental honour was presented in Peterborough earlier this month at the seventh annual Ontario Mine Reclamation Symposium and Field Trip, which is jointly organized by the Canadian Land Reclamation Association and the Ontario Mining Association.

David Yaschyshyn, Superintendent of Environment at Kidd Operations, was on hand to accept the trophy. The specific project being recognized was for the closure plan design and reclamation of the Kidd jarosite pond area and Three Nations Creek. The jarosite (iron sulphate mud produced from zinc refining) pond, or landfill facility, was built in 1971 and it operated from 1972 until operations ceased in 2010. Rehabilitation activities included the removal of soils, re-vegetation and a remedial action plan for the aquatic ecosystem in Three Nations Creek.

Tom Peters was a pioneer in the field of mine reclamation and a founding member of the CLRA, which was established in 1975. Mr. Peters died in 2007. He enjoyed a lengthy and successful career at Vale’s predecessor company Inco where he led the company’s tailings re-vegetation and land reclamation programs. He played a major role in the re-greening of Sudbury and was awarded a honourary degree from Laurentian University in recognition of that significant contribution.

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NEWS RELEASE: Far North at risk unless Ontario adopts new, inclusive planning process: report

http://www.ecojustice.ca/

http://www.wcscanada.org/

Planning tool unites stakeholders with a focus on sustainable, collaborative development

Click here for full report: http://www.ecojustice.ca/publications/getting-it-right-in-ontarios-far-north-the-need-for-a-regional-strategic-environmental-assessment-in-the-ring-of-fire-wawagajing/attachment

THUNDER BAY – Jun 19, 2014 – With the Ontario government poised to spend $1 billion to promote development in the Ring of Fire, a new paper from Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Canada and Ecojustice identifies risks inherent in the current planning legislation and provides a solution.

Ontario’s Far North is the world’s largest ecologically intact area of boreal forest. It contains North America’s largest wetlands, is home to a number of at-risk species, including caribou and lake sturgeon, and is a one of the world’s critical storehouses of carbon. First Nations depend on these systems for food and medicines, sustenance of culture and spiritual values, their livelihoods, and rights. At the same time, the remote region contains potential world-class deposits of minerals that offer economic opportunities.

Getting it Right in Ontario’s Far North: The Need for Strategic Environmental Assessment in the Ring of Fire (Wawangajing) points out that the current planning approaches in the Far North are piecemeal and narrowly focused on specific projects, or pieces of projects. Because of this, cumulative ecological and social effects, planning for regional infrastructure (roads, transmission lines, and railroads), and regional coordination, are not properly considered.

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After 22 Years, Canada’s Aboriginals Issue First Bond – by Ari Altstedter (Bloomberg News – June 19, 2014)

http://www.bloomberg.com/

When Deanna Hamilton returned to her British Columbia Indian reserve after taking early retirement, she found herself revisiting a mystery she had encountered as a child.

Unlike her reserve, the city of Kelowna across the lake didn’t suffer from foul-tasting drinking water, unlit streets or sewage-saturated lawns that discouraged children from playing outside.

In short order, Hamilton discovered an explanation in one of capitalism’s most basic tenets: Kelowna could finance its superior infrastructure by raising money in the debt markets — an option not open to her Westbank First Nation reserve.

From there, it was simply a matter of gaining acceptance for an aboriginal bond — a process that tested her perseverance through 22 years. This is the week Hamilton, 71, should finally see the First Nations Finance Authority, which she helped create, issue Canada’s first bonds backed by aboriginal governments.

Ernie Daniels, chief executive officer of the finance authority, said he expects to sell C$90 million ($83 million) worth of 10-year notes with National Bank of Canada as the lead underwriter.

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