In a letter dated March 22, Rio Tinto’s Eagle Project manager, Jon Cherry, notified the Michigan DNRE that the company “has determined” that it doesn’t need permits from the US Environmental Protection Agency for wastewater injection permits at the proposed Eagle Mine.  According to Cherry, Rio Tinto “certifies” that it has all the permits it needs to begin mining on 120 acres of public land in northern Marquette County.

In a quick response on the same day, Lynne Boyd, Chief of the DNRE’s Forest Management Division, agreed that Rio Tinto could begin its project, “based on the certifications” the company provided.

According to one official the news ”surprised and confused” federal agencies that “have not made a decision” on whether or not Rio Tinto must still obtain federal permits for its redesigned wastewater drainage system.

Last month Rio Tinto notified the DNRE that it would change the system in order to avoid having to obtain a federal permit for the proposed mine.

Read Rio Tinto’s Letter to the Michigan DNRE on the Eagle Mine Land Lease

And the Michigan DNRE’s Response to Rio Tinto

Four executives of the Anglo-Australian mining conglomerate Rio Tinto pleaded guilty to taking bribes today as their high-profile trial opened in Shanghai, lawyers and a diplomat said.

But Stern Hu, an Australian national, and three Chinese colleagues – Liu Caikui, Wang Yong and Ge Minqiang – disputed the vast sums they were alleged to have received, the lawyers added.

The men also face charges of violating commercial secrets, which are likely to be heard tomorrow.

Foreign companies will be watching the trial closely. Lawyers have warned that it highlights both the opaque nature of the Chinese legal system and potential grey areas of the law.

Tao Wuping, the lawyer for Liu, said all four defendants pleaded guilty. Calls to Hu’s lawyer, Duan Qihua, were not answered. The Sydney Morning Herald said it had been told by lawyers for two of the other defendants that Hu had been represented by lawyers they had never seen before, rather than Duan, a well-known figure.

Tom Connor, the Australian consul general in Shanghai, told reporters that Hu was accused of taking bribes of 1m yuan (£97,800) and $790,000 (£527,000) and had “made some admissions concerning some of those bribery amounts”.

Tao said his client Liu was charged with receiving 3.7m yuan in bribes, adding: “Part of the charge should not constitute a crime.”

Wang’s lawyer, Zhang Peihong, said his client had admitted he was “guilty in part”. He said Wang was accused of taking 70m yuan in bribes. But Zhang described $9m of that as legitimate profit from an iron-ore deal, adding: “There are plenty of reasons to argue against the rest of the amount.”

Ge is thought to be accused of accepting about 6.9m yuan.

The guilty pleas were unexpected. Rio Tinto has repeatedly said that its employees did nothing wrong and acted properly and ethically at all times.

Read the rest of the article at the Guardian.

Compiling comments from the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the US Army Corps of Engineers, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has issued a strong rebuke of the road project, insisting that it does not follow long-standing federal water protection laws.

Woodland Road LLC (formed by Kennecott Eagle Minerals Company – a Rio Tinto subsidiary – A. Lindberg & Sons, John Jilbert, and the Michigan Forest Products Council) proposes to build a 22-mile all season road that would connect U.S. 41/M-28, in the Humboldt area, with the Triple A Road, in Champion Township.   The group says the project will create 125 jobs during a two-year construction phase, and support 12 maintenance crew positions in coming years. 

The proposed route would cause over 27 acres of direct impacts to wetlands as well as 23 stream crossings. The proposed project area covers over 184,000 acres of land.

According to John Marshall, chair of the Lake Superior Community Partnership’s transportation planning committee, the Woodland Road would offer “a viable alternative for mining, logging, and industrial trucks to efficiently reach major highway, rail and shipping systems,” and the “…Woodland Road is a responsible solution that provides area employers with an option, and lessens truck impacts where others travel.”

But is the Woodland Road truly a responsible solution?

In its recent letter, the EPA expressed concern that “the quality of the aquatic resources being impacted is not appropriately quantified,” and that the “supporting documentation identifies rare wetland communities such as bogs, bog lakes, and wet meadows within the project area,” but does not mention the amounts of these rare aquatic resources.

Other concerns mentioned in the letter include indirect impacts to aquatic resources such as increased runoff, the introduction of pollutants from vehicular traffic, pollution related to winter road maintenance, the introduction of invasive species, and the introduction of further development along a new all season highway through one of the last remaining wild places in the region.

But, perhaps the most obvious problem was pointed out by the Army Corps of Engineers. 

Rio Tinto claims the road is needed “to construct a multi-purpose road to connect key industrial, commercial, and recreational areas in northwest Marquette County to US-41.”  The Corps notes that Rio Tinto’s project description “does not adequately depict the purpose of the project” and that a more direct and accurate description of the project shouldn’t dodge the primary reason the company is trying to build the new road:  “to haul ore between the Kennecott Eagle Minerals Company mine site and the Humboldt Mill processing site.”  This criticism was shared by many concerned citizens at a February 10 public hearing.

According to the Army Corps, “if the road is required to connect the proposed nickel mine at Eagle Rock with the milling operation and tailings disposal facility at Humboldt, these actions should be evaluated under one project. . .our regulations require a holistic view of a project, and the public and the process are best served by evaluating projects in their entirety.”

Although paying for the entire road project itself, Rio Tinto has actively tried to pursuade the public that the haul road is only indirectly related to its mining plans.

Last September, Rio Tinto’s chief operating officer for the haul road project, Ken Wooley, insisted that the road was not specifically for the proposed EAgle Mine:  “The road is not tied to the mine.  This is truly a multi-use road.”

The PR has been working.

At a Marquette County Road Commission meeting in October, Mark Holmes, a concerned citizen, stated, “As of right now it [the road] has nothing to do with the mine, although in the future it might.”

The Army Corps also insisted that Rio Tinto must disclose its full plans for the road:

“The MDNRE should request information from the applicant about other potential mining projects which could be expected to be served by the proposed Woodland Road in the foreseeable future, including expansion of the current proposed mine at Eagle Rock.”

The haul road project is estimated to cost Rio Tinto approximately $50 million.  The company expects the road to be in service by late 2013, after two years of construction.

However, the recent federal objection may slow the process down.  The EPA has given the DNRE 90 days to either deny the permit or work with Rio Tinto to make the project comply with the law.  According to the EPA’s letter, if their objections are addressed, the federal government will allow the DNRE to grant Rio Tinto a permit.  If the permit is not denied by the DNRE and the federal objections are not withdrawn, Rio Tinto would have to obtain a Section 404 Clean Water Act permit from the Army Corps of Engineers before the project can move forward.

Map created by Adrian Bakker

For more information, click HERE.

According to EPA statistics, PolyMet’s “draft environmental impact statement,” (DEIS) is incredibly incompetent.  Less than 0.4% of all such reviews obtain such a bottom-of-the-barrel rating.

Disturbingly, PolyMet’s amateurish DEIS was conducted by a firm working with Aquila Resources to develop a zinc-gold mine on the Menominee River, in Michigan.  In December Al Trippel, an environmental consultant with Environmental Resources Management, gave a presentation on PolyMet’s DEIS that outlined environmental concerns related to the review as well as unrelated information claiming the project would benefit the regional economy.  Trippel has worked with Aquila as a consultant since at least 2004 and conducted studies necessary for that company’s own environmental impact statement.

From the Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness (March 5):

Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency gave the PolyMet mine draft environmental impact statement the lowest possible rating the agency can assign such a document. Citing incomplete work and unacceptable pollution, the EPA assigned the project its “Environmentally Unsatisfactory – Inadequate” rating.

The rating highlights the extraordinary threats represented by the mine to clean water. The agency does not assign such ratings very often. In the past 23 years, the EPA has reviewed 11,834 EISs and gave the rating it gave to PolyMet to only 41, or 0.3 percent. In the upper Midwest region, the agency gave the rating to just 0.2 percent of the 844 EISes it reviewed.

Yesterday, PolyMet released a statement seeking to control the damage the EPA’s rating has done to its credibility. Unfortunately, the company included a statement in their press release that is blatantly false:

“The EPA’s rating of the draft EIS as unsatisfactory appears to have been based on the ‘proposed project’ without  consideration of alternatives or mitigations discussed in the document.”

This is false. In page two of the EPA’s letter, the agency states:

“This rating applies to the Proposed Action, the Mine Site Alternative and the Tailings Basin Alternative.”

There is no way to excuse such a misleading statement as PolyMet has made. Rather than offering specific details that respond to the EPA’s criticisms, the company has chosen only to muddy the waters.

Not many are getting the message.  A recent editorial in the Minneapolis Star Tribune supporting PolyMet’s controversial NorthMet project claims that environmental laws are strong and are vigorously enforced.  Only four days after the Tribune’s confident editorial, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a strong critique of the environmental review of PolyMet’s project, giving it the lowest possible rating, “environmentally unsatisfactory-inadequate,” and recommending the mine “must not proceed as proposed.” According to the EPA, PolyMet would destroy hundreds of acres of “high quality” wetlands, pollute ground and surface water of “national importance” with acidic mine drainage and dump mercury into Lake Superior.

From Duhigg’s, “Rulings Restrict Clean Water Act, Foiling E.P.A.”:

Thousands of the nation’s largest water polluters are outside the Clean Water Act’s reach because the Supreme Court has left uncertain which waterways are protected by that law, according to interviews with regulators.

As a result, some businesses are declaring that the law no longer applies to them. And pollution rates are rising.

Companies that have spilled oil, carcinogens and dangerous bacteria into lakes, rivers and other waters are not being prosecuted, according to regulators working on those cases, who estimate that more than 1,500 major pollution investigations have been discontinued or shelved in the last four years.

The Clean Water Act was intended to end dangerous water pollution by regulating every major polluter. But today, regulators may be unable to prosecute as many as half of the nation’s largest known polluters because officials lack jurisdiction or because proving jurisdiction would be overwhelmingly difficult or time consuming, according to midlevel officials.

“We are, in essence, shutting down our Clean Water programs in some states,” said Douglas F. Mundrick, an E.P.A. lawyer in Atlanta. “This is a huge step backward. When companies figure out the cops can’t operate, they start remembering how much cheaper it is to just dump stuff in a nearby creek.”

To read more, please visit the New York Times.  Read the rest of Duhigg’s articles on this subject by clicking HERE.

From an article by the AP‘s John Flesher:

A company preparing to build a nickel and copper mine in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula wants to change its wastewater treatment system in a way that could negate the requirement for a federal permit, officials said Tuesday.

Kennecott Eagle Minerals Co. has asked the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and Environment to modify a 2007 state permit authorizing underground discharge of treated wastewater from the mine planned for rural Marquette County.

Originally, the company proposed injecting the treated water back into the groundwater through a network of soil-covered infiltration pipes. The new plan calls for keeping the pipes on the surface and covering them with Styrofoam insulation and a liner. The treated water would still be pumped into the groundwater.

To read the rest of this article, click HERE.

US Senator and comedian Al Franken is one of PolyMet's staunchest supporters

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has issued a strong critique of an environmental review of PolyMet’s proposed NorthMet mine, located outside of Hoyt Lakes, Minnesota, and is recommending the mine “must not proceed as proposed.”

According to the agency, PolyMet’s project “may have substantial and unacceptable adverse impacts on aquatic resources of national importance.”  The criticism comes months after a slew of state and federal politicians issued statements of support for the project, assuring the public and media the review was rigorous and the mine would not harm the environment.

In a December 9 support letter for PolyMet US Senator Al Franken told the state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) the project should be approved:

“Throughout this multi-year process, PolyMet has done their due diligence and has faithfully followed the law.  This includes providing all the necessary information for the draft environmental impact statement (EIS).  The resulting draft describes the many steps PolyMet will take to minimize environmental impacts.”

In a similar letter, US Representative Jim Oberstar urged the DNR to approve PolyMet’s project:

“PolyMet has earned my support from the outset because of its responsible, innovative approach to nonferrous mining and processing; the DEIS does an excellent job of describing the many steps PolyMet will take to minimize environmental impacts.”

Oberstar and US Senator Amy Klobuchar tried introducing a bill that would allow PolyMet to directly own 6,700 acres of the Superior National Forest.  The move would also eliminate requirements requiring consultation and cooperation with Native American tribes, under an 1854 treaty with the US government.  Because the proposed site, located on public land, is protected from strip mining by the Weeks Act, passed in the early 1900s, PolyMet will either need special legislation or an equally controversial land exchange with the US Forest Service in order to proceed with its mine.

And just last week State Representative Tom Rukavina claimed, in an interview, that “this mine as it moves forward will be the most environmentally sound copper nickel mine I think in the world.”

In a letter to the St. Paul District of the US Army Corps of Engineers, Bharat Mathur, Acting Regional Administrator for the EPA’s Midwestern district, said the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for the project is “Environmentally Unsatisfactory-Inadequate” (the lowest rating possible) and would violate federal Clean Water Act requirements by contaminating ground and surface water with acidic mine drainage and mercury and destroy over 1,000 acres of high –quality wetlands.  According to the agency, plans to combat acid mine drainage are “inadequate.”

The letter notes that the DEIS failed to include information on financial assurance and was missing much information on the tailings basin’s projected stability, impacts to groundwater and surface water, and impacts to wetlands.

According to the EPA, “The project will result in unacceptable and long-term water quality impacts, which include exceeding water quality standards, releasing unmitigated wastewater discharges to water bodies (during operation and in the post-closure period), and increasing mercury loadings into the Lake Superior watershed.”

The EPA’s letter confirms criticisms coming from citizen groups and environmentalists that the project would destroy valuable wetlands and pollute groundwater and surface water feeding into Lake Superior.

“The EPA decision to rate the PolyMet DEIS as ‘environmentally unsatisfactory-inadequate’ confirms what our grassroots group has been saying for the past 5 years,” said Elanne Palcich, a retired school teacher from the Iron Range.  ”This type of mining cannot be done in the wetland environment of northeast Minnesota without polluting our waterways for centuries.  There is nothing in this DEIS that demonstrates how water contamination from acid mine drainage can be prevented.

Late in 2009 the Friends of the Boundary Waters listed some concerns on the group’s website:

Water leaching from the waste rock piles is expected to be contaminated for up to 2,000 years

The West Mine Pit will overflow at Mine Year 65 (45 years after expected mine closure), contaminating the adjacent Partridge River with sulfates and heavy metals

Groundwater at the mine site is expected to exceed water quality standards

Due to structural instability, the tailings basin has a “low margin of safety”

The Minnesota DNR hired Environmental Resources Management (ERM), based out of London, England to conduct the DEIS.

PolyMet plans to use this closed processing plant for its proposed NorthMet mine

In December, Al Trippel, an environmental consultant with ERM, gave a presentation on PolyMet’s DEIS that outlined environmental concerns related to the review as well as unrelated information claiming the project would benefit the regional economy.

Trippel has been actively involved in new mining proposals in the region for years.  Trippel acted as Aquila Resource’s representative throughout Michigan’s “Part 632″ statute and rules process, from 2004 through 2005 that crafted legislation regulating the metallic sulfide mining industry.  Trippel is currently on Aquila’s payroll, and was responsible for conducting baseline environmental studies necessary prior to submitting a mine application for the company’s proposed “Back Forty” project, located along the Menominee River, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.  Aquila plans to submit a mining application for the project this year.

Minerals Processing Corporation, a Minnesota company associated with Aquila, was recently denied a “conditional use permit” to explore for minerals in Carlton County, Minnesota.  In 2006 Kennecott (a subsidiary of Rio Tinto) was denied a similar permit in Aitkin County.  Kennecott sued the county and was supported by the Minnesota Court of Appeals.  The court complained that county commissioners were too “heavily influenced by public opposition” and argued that the public had no legal right to stop a mining project in Minnesota.  The company is now promoting the “Tamarack” copper and nickel project to investors.

According to a news release, PolyMet is viewing the EPA’s criticism as just another part of the process.

The Final EIS will likely incorporate many of the suggestions from the EPA and others that have been proposed during the public comment period. The intent of the draft EIS process is to use the comments on the DEIS to improve the proposed project that will be documented in the Final EIS. The Final EIS will be subject to public review before being declared “adequate” by the MDNR and receiving a “record of decision” by the USACE. Once the comments have been fully analyzed, the MDNR and the USACE will establish a timetable for completion of the Final EIS and subsequent permitting.

Similarly, in Michigan, Rio Tinto’s Humboldt Mill project received sharp criticism from the EPA and the US Fish and Wildlife Service in June 2009.  Yet, by January 2010, the agencies had retracted their opposition so long as Rio Tinto adequately monitors the pollution.

A small handful of participants turned out Monday night in Marquette for an event supporting the cause of about 560 U.S. Borax workers locked out of their jobs in southern California by Rio Tinto, the parent company of the Kennecott Eagle Minerals Company.

The event was organized by Yellow Dog Summer, an environmental group that opposes Kennecott’s proposed nickel and copper mine in northern Marquette County.

The Borax workers, represented by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 30, have been locked out since Jan. 31 after labor negotiations broke down with Rio Tinto.

The International Mining and Maritime Unions called for “worldwide solidarity actions” to take place Monday.  The Yellow Dog Summer event was held at the Messiah Lutheran Church in Marquette.

Organizer Gabriel Caplett said he was hoping some members of local mine workers unions would have attended the meeting.  None did.  But the irony of the Kennecott opponents holding the miner support event was not lost on Caplett or the group’s other organizers.

“Some people can definitely see it as being ironic,” Caplett said.  ”I didn’t think that it was a bad thing to show support for them (the Borax miners).  It’s a very human story.”

Caplett said the groups opposing Rio Tinto and Kennecott’s mining efforts are not against local mine workers.

Caplett said he hoped the church as a meeting place would work to level differences on both sides, providing a starting place for more substantive discussions in the future.  The church broadens the debate and is more inclusive of people on both sides, Caplett said.

“The faith community bridges that issue and makes it more of a neutral ground,” Caplett said.  ”I think we have to have more of that kind of dialogue.”

Caplett said good points have been made in the discussions on Kennecott’s mine from both sides.  He said those in favor of the mine speaking at local hearings and meetings seem to be reasonable people and he can understand how anti-Rio Tinto events organized by environmental groups might seem polarizing.

Caplett said that he, like some other opponents, want the best circumstances to come out of the situation if the Eagle Mine is dug into the ground by Kennecott.

“If it does open up there, there should be as many workers as possible with good pay and benefits and the county should get more revenue our of this than it has,” Caplett said.  ”We should get the most out of it that we can.”

The small gathering of less than 10 people at the church Monday listened briefly to remarks by Caplett and local reverend and environmentalist Jon Magnuson.  The 1976 documentary “Harlan County U.S.A.” was then shown.  The film chronicles the 1973 struggle of nearly 200 Kentucky coal miners in their unionization efforts against the Duke Power Company.

Yellow Dog Summer organizer Teresa Bertossi said, “With Rio Tinto trying to slip through the back door in our community, we must stand in solidarity with the Borax workers and demand that Rio Tinto finally make good on their claims to respect worker rights and labor laws wherever the company operates.”

Caplett said he hopes for a larger turnout at the group’s next event.

“Hopefully, the next one can have more people from both sides, Caplett said.  ”Maybe not yelling, but debating fiercely.”

Note:  Gabriel Caplett is Editor of the Lake Superior Mining News.