First, environmental groups and the Tohono O’odham Nation, the Pascua Yaqui Tribe and the Hopi Tribe have sued to stop a copper mine in Arizona from starting up until the issues in an underlying lawsuit have been resolved. Excerpt from a story in the
Washington Post about the litigation:
Scenic State Highway 83 gently curves through southeastern Arizona’s wine country, past waves of blond grass dotted with orange-tipped ocotillo plants before the dark Santa Rita Mountains loom into view.
The Milepost 44 pullout offers a panorama of the range in the Coronado National Forest where a Canadian firm wants to carve out a massive copper mine near Tucson. The $1.9 billion Rosemont Mine, at a half-mile deep and a mile wide, would sprawl across federal, state and private land, leaving a waste pile the height of skyscraper.
Native American tribes and environmental groups have sued to stop Hudbay Minerals Inc. of Toronto, arguing its mine could desecrate sacred, ancestral lands and dry up wells and waterways while ravaging habitat for endangered jaguar and other species. Last week, they asked a federal judge to prevent the project from proceeding until the lawsuits are decided.
Here’s an interesting tidbit about the Rosemont Mine, which supports allegation of trump administration corruption and the ethical problems of our new secretary of the interior, david bernhardt. This is from the media source,
Arizona Central:
The lobbying firm that has represented Rosemont and Hudbay is Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck. Records show one of the lobbyists who worked for Rosemont from 2011 through 2015 was David Bernhardt, who joined the Trump administration and was confirmed by the Senate in April as Interior secretary.
In a 2017 letter, Bernhardt recused himself from participating in matters involving his former employer or clients for a one-year period. He listed Hudbay and Rosemont Copper among his former clients. Bernhardt is now facing an ethics investigation after Democratic lawmakers voiced concerns about potential conflicts of interest during his time as deputy secretary in 2017 and 2018.
Then, environmental groups have sued to enjoin the development of an oil shale mine in Utah. Excerpt from a story about this in
The Salt Lake Tribune:
A proposed oil shale mine and ore-processing project in the Uinta Basin is under legal fire from several environmental groups that are seeking to invalidate a recent Bureau of Land Management decision to let the developer cut a 14-mile utility corridor across public land.
In a lawsuit filed Thursday in Salt Lake City’s U.S. District Court, the groups say the BLM’s environmental review should have considered the impacts to air, water, wildlife and climate from the massive strip mine proposed on private land byEnefit American Oil.
The BLM had declined to conduct the wider analysis, opting instead to look only at the direct impacts associated with the construction of pipelines, roads and transmission lines to the project, which is angling to be the first oil shale mine in North America to produce commercial quantities of crude oil.
A subsidiary of a large state-run Estonian energy firm, Enefit hopes to develop a mine on 9,000 acresnear the White River, along with a 320-acre processing plant that would “retort” ore known as kerogen. This rockbound hydrocarbon can be converted to crude if subjected to intense heat and pressure. As a result, this form of energy extraction uses large amounts of energy and water.
The company hopes to produce up to 50,000 barrels a day, extracted from 28 million tons of ore mined each year for up to 30 years. It is seeking rights to nearly 11,000 acre-feet of water that would be needed to extract and process the ore. Spent ore would then be returned to the mine pit.
