25 Sep 2024
An unbroken string of court and regulatory losses makes Gina
Rinehart’s Canadian coal play a black hole worth $646 million and counting
Despite Rio Tinto’s $3
billion write-off arising from its reckless 2010 purchase of Riversdale
Mining African coal play named Benga
She seems to have accepted
the assurances of their reincarnated “Riversdale Resources” that the re-opening
of its Grassy Mountain metallurgical coal property in the Canadian Rocky
Mountains would surely be approved. (It also appears she may not have gotten
the hint from Riversdale’s naughty naming of its Canadian operation “Benga” in
homage to the Rio Tinto caper.) The property had been exhaustively mined until
the 1960s and abandoned as uneconomical, leaving an ugly mess of waste rock and
water-filled pits.
Unusually for Canadian
mining schemes, the Benga application was denied by federal and provincial
regulators in 2021
Rinehart renamed Benga
“Northback” (a clumsy amalgam of Canada’s comical reputation as “The Great
White North” and the tired cliché of Australia as a barren wilderness).
The Alberta Court of Appeal decided
on August 22
It was Northback’s third
legal defeat after two failed attempts to appeal the regulatory denial,
including a definitive refusal to hear the case by the Supreme Court of Canada.
The joint federal-provincial
regulatory panel had rejected the Grassy Mountain project both for its
environmental degradation and the coal’s low quality and quantity, saying “we
find that the project’s significant adverse environmental effects on surface
water quality and westslope cutthroat trout and habitat outweigh the low to
moderate positive economic impacts of the project. Therefore, we find that the
project is not in the public interest.”
Northback then applied in
September 2023 for new exploration permits for the same Grassy Mountain
property, as though the preceding regulatory and judicial processes simply had
not happened.
Northback has a willing and
influential ally: the Alberta government itself had promised Grassy Mountain’s
Australian promoters smooth sailing through the normally stormy regulatory
seas. Defying its own provincial regulator, the federal government, the courts
and just plain cowboy common sense, the provincial government declared the
defunct project to be an “advanced project”. It ordered the Alberta Energy
Regulator to duly consider Northback’s application for new exploratory
drilling.
The issue before the Alberta
Court of Appeal is whether a definitively dead project can simply be
disinterred as an “advanced project”.
Just
where Northback’s zombie project floats between dead and alive will likely take
more than a year to argue and decide. Based on the judge’s analysis of the
application to appeal, the outcome is not likely to go her way. Redefinition of
legally denied projects as advanced projects “invites the possibility of a
sequence of applications … over many years, which could repeatedly affect
multiple parties and stakeholders with an interest in either supporting or
opposing a new application”.
In other words, the
regulatory process is simply a never-ending cycle of rejection and
reconsideration, with “no” meaning “maybe” ad infinitum.
It meshes the freebooting
ways of Australia’s mining sector with the overt anti-environmental ideology of
Alberta’s fossil-brained governing party, which actually banned new wind and
solar power projects while encouraging the growth of oil and coal extraction.
Rational minds, notably that
of Alberta’s preeminent mining lawyer, consider that the failed Grassy Mountain
scheme cannot suddenly reincarnate as an “advanced project” by political fiat.
In a nod to Monty Python’s dead parrot, Nigel Bankes, professor emeritus and
retired chair of natural resources law, wrote
APMDC Suliyari coal upcoming auction 1,50,000 MT for MP MSME on 2nd Dec 2024 @ SBP INR 2516/- per MT
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