Secret Recordings Show Executives Want AK Pebble Mine 9X Larger Than What They Applied For
Executives overseeing the development of a long-disputed copper and gold mine in Alaska were recorded saying they expected the project to become much bigger, and operate for much longer, than outlined in the proposal that is awaiting final approval by the Army Corps of Engineers.
The executives, who were recorded in remote meetings by members of an environmental advocacy group posing as potential investors, said the project, Pebble Mine, could potentially operate for 160 years or more beyond the current proposal of 20 years. And it could quickly double its output after the initial two decades, they said.
“Once you have something like this in production why would you want to stop?” Ronald W. Thiessen, chief executive of Northern Dynasty Minerals, the parent company of Pebble Limited Partnership, said in one of the recordings. Mr. Thiessen said local villages in the area would support extended operation of the mine because of the tax money they would receive. “It’s $10,000 per man, woman and child,” he said. “They want that to go away? No.”
The Pebble project, a major open-pit mine that would be dug in a remote, sparsely populated part of Southwest Alaska, has been fought over for a decade and a half by those who say it will provide much-needed economic development and others who argue it will cause environmental harm, especially to salmon that are the basis for subsistence fishing by Alaska Natives and the wild salmon fishery in Bristol Bay, one of the world’s largest.
EDIT
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/climate/pebble-mine-alaska.html
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