Mich. reconsiders Kennecott application
Published by MAC on 2007-03-02Source: Business Week
Mich. reconsiders Kennecott application
by JOHN FLESHER, Business Week
2nd March 2007
A company's plan to drill for nickel and copper in the Upper Peninsula was thrown off track as state regulators acknowledged they hadn't adequately considered reports questioning whether the mine's roof would hold up.
The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality said Thursday it was withdrawing tentative approval of Kennecott Minerals Co.'s application to operate the mine, which was awarded in January.
The DEQ had planned to make a final ruling as early as May, following public hearings this month in Marquette and Lansing. Instead, Director Steven Chester canceled the hearings. He promised a thorough study of the reports and an investigation of why department staffers apparently downplayed them and excluded them from the public record.
"This department has committed itself to making this process as open and transparent as possible," Chester said in a statement. "In light of this information, we must allow the needed time for ourselves, as well as the public, to give it the appropriate review."
DEQ spokesman Robert McCann said the agency wasn't necessarily changing its mind about whether the mine should be allowed, but was reconsidering how it made the preliminary decision.
The DEQ's move "is not due to any action or inaction on Kennecott's part," said David Salisbury, the project's president. "This is an MDEQ internal issue they must address themselves."
Jon Cherry, the Kennecott project manager, said the mine's stability was among many questions the company had answered to the DEQ's satisfaction.
"We stand behind our design and our application," Cherry said. "We think we have a proposal that's safe, stable, protects the environment and meets all the requirements and we look forward to the process getting back on track."
McCann said there was no timetable for when the department would issue another tentative ruling on the Kennecott application.
Environmentalists who have fought the proposed mine said the developments cast doubt on the objectivity of DEQ regulators involved with the project, although they praised top-level managers' response.
"The DEQ's actions today confirm that their entire decision-making process on this mine has been corrupted," said Michelle Halley, a Marquette-based attorney with the National Wildlife Federation. "What other reports are out there that were not to the staff's liking that have been buried?"
Marvin Roberson, a Sierra Club spokesman, said Michigan had a good law and regulations for the type of mining Kennecott proposes. "But none of that matters if there's incompetence or malfeasance on the part of the people who apply those rules," he said.
DEQ staff members who received the reports and didn't handle them properly are being reassigned during the investigation, McCann said. But he insisted there was no evidence anyone had deliberately suppressed the documents, saying the likely explanation was "just mistakes." He would not identify the staffers.
The company is targeting a six-acre underground deposit expected to yield 250 million to 300 million pounds of nickel and about 200 million pounds of copper. It is located in the isolated Yellow Dog Plains region of northwestern Marquette County.
Despite the Upper Peninsula's long mining history, the Kennecott operation would be the first to extract minerals from sulfide ores through a process that critics say could cause acid to leach into the groundwater and nearby Salmon Trout River, a Lake Superior tributary.
Announcing tentative approval in January, the DEQ said extensive steps would be taken to avoid sulfide pollution, including moving the ores from underground directly to enclosed buildings, then to covered trucks and finally rail cars for transport to a processing facility in Canada.
The two reports that prompted the DEQ's backpedaling were written in May 2006 by David Sainsbury, a Minneapolis mining and geotechnical engineer. He was a subcontractor for an outside consulting company the DEQ hired to help analyze Kennecott's application, McCann said.
Sainsbury focused on the "crown pillar" -- the bedrock atop the underground mining area. A layer of soil 40-80 feet thick lies between the earth's surface and the crown pillar, Cherry said.
Sainsbury called for more extensive analysis of whether the crown pillar would hold up under Kennecott's proposed design.
In one report, he wrote that techniques used to assess the stability "do not reflect industry best practice. In addition, the hydrologic stability of the crown pillar has not been considered. Therefore, the conclusions made within the ... application regarding crown pillar subsidence are not considered to be defensible."
However, in a one-page memo dated Nov. 9, Sainsbury recommended allowing Kennecott to develop the mine while further analysis was conducted, as long as the area being mined remained a safe distance down.
"He's saying that if they do this in phases, which is what they are proposing, and keep the mining below that elevation, then his concerns of those other two documents are allayed," McCann said.
Cherry said Sainsbury's earlier concerns were based on company data that didn't include its plans for ensuring stability, such as backfilling the mine section by section as the minerals are removed.