Kennedy Halvorson
Northback says 2.5 million tonnes of steelmaking coal will be produced each year by reopening operations at old mines on Grassy Mountain. This would be a technical miracle, not observed in five decades of coal mining data from the Alberta Energy Regulator.
So far, Grassy Mountain has produced only crap coal and Australian bullshit
Luscar, the largest metallurgical coal mine in size and production in Alberta’s history, produced on average 500,000 tonnes less annually than Northback publicly claims Grassy will yield, at a mine nearly three times the size of what Northback proposes.
Of course, the surface area mined doesn’t tell the full story — mines can dig deeper and go underground. Alberta’s largest subsurface venture was a room-and-pillar style operation near Grande Cache, but even with 2.6 times the mining footprint of Grassy, it averaged less than a million tonnes of raw, unprocessed coal per year. If Northback’s improbable production figures don’t make you skeptical, consider the next miracle; it will extract and process more coal with less water than any other coal mine in Alberta.
Before it was rejected, the first proposal to mine Grassy Mountain needed just under 560 million litres annually. Northback has reportedly since negotiated access to the Municipality of Crowsnest’s allocations, and recently — controversially — applied for its own water licence. Controversial, because where Grassy is located hasn’t been allowed to issue new water licences for almost two decades, as existing allocations exceeded levels safe and sustainable for the Oldman River’s health and function.
While the application is under review, in sum, Northback needs at least more than 300 million litres per year, with total requirements likely higher considering the first application. Compared to other mines that have operated or are operating in the province, this volume is peanuts.
To run Alberta’s only active metallurgical mine, CST Canada Coal consumes 10 times more water to produce one-fifth of what Northback projects. The old owners of the Tent Mountain and Vicary Creek mines nearby Grassy needed 15 times more water to achieve a third of Grassy’s planned output. Collectively, Cheviot, Gregg and Luscar had more than 11.3 billion litres for their operations, two-thirds of which is still used for reclaiming the sites.
How Northback will outperform all these mines with a fraction of the land and water seems improbable — impossible even.
But why does it matter if Northback’s projections are off? Well, less coal to sell means lower revenues. It means reduced budgets to employ people and run the mine, less money available to eventually clean up the site, increasing the risk Grassy becomes even more of a liability in the Oldman’s headwaters.
Overestimating marketable coal production now means less royalties and taxes later, decreasing all those socioeconomic benefits Northback purports. It’s fewer dollars back to the public purse, and less in return for polluting the atmosphere, destroying the landscape and degrading the watersheds we rely on.
Coal companies promising more but failing to deliver is not uncommon. Studies in B.C. have found coal mines significantly underperforming in terms of the production, employment and tax revenue originally promised.
It seems evident that Northback is overestimating and even inflating the worth of the Grassy Mountain mine, and that’s problematic, because those projections will ultimately factor into whether the Alberta Energy Regulator decides to approve the mine and risk our air, land, water and wildlife to its downwind and downstream effects.
Alberta has been audience and victim to this story many times before — resource development companies make big promises to get approvals and permits, extract their profits and then leave when expenses mount. The polluters fail to pay and the public is left in the wake of their wreckage.
The only miracle evident is we allow this to happen, time and time again.
Kennedy Halvorson is a conservation specialist with Alberta Wilderness Association.
Crowsnest Headwaters is a purely volunteer group of citizens committed to the protection and recovery of the Crowsnest/Oldman watershed from decades of coal mining and clear cutting. We rely on your donations to continue our work in the field, in the laboratory and in the courts. Please donate what you can by Interac eTransfer to funding@crowsnestheadwaters.ca