For industry, Spruce mine a case study in frustrations of getting mining permit
By Debra McCown- Bristol Herald Courier- February 9, 2010
Back in the 1990s, Arch Coal sought a permit to extract coal for its proposed Spruce No. 1 Mine in southern West Virginia. More than a decade later, it’s still unclear whether the project will be allowed.
The Spruce No. 1 was caught up in multiple lawsuits – the first alleging that the federal Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act was not being properly enforced, and a later one on whether fill permits were being given sufficient review.
The first suit was settled in 1999. The one over the fill permits was resolved in 2008, but the Spruce barely got moving before hitting additional snags.
Along the way, the mine project also underwent a lengthy environmental review, which finally led to the fill permit it received in 2007. But that’s when the project wound up on the fringes of the second lawsuit claiming that fill permits weren’t following proper standards.
Mining already had begun on the Spruce site but was restricted to a portion of the permit area while the fill permit case worked its way through the federal court system.
Then in October, in an unprecedented move, the Environmental Protection Agency decided that the Spruce mining operation would cause too much environmental damage and threatened to revoke the fill permit. So the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was required to take another look.
On both sides of the debate, the Spruce permit is seen as a case study for everything that is wrong with the permitting system.
“Spruce was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said Cindy Rank, the mining committee chairwoman for the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy. “[It] was the example of how far things had gotten beyond what the laws had originally planned for.”
For the industry, it is an example of how costly and how difficult it’s become to get the permits needed to mine coal.
EPA’s decision
According to the EPA, “The Spruce No. 1 Mine is the largest authorized mountaintop removal operation in Appalachia and occurs in a watershed where many streams have been impacted by previous mining activities.”
In its Oct. 16 letter to the Corps, the EPA said the Spruce project would bury seven miles of stream under six valley fills and be too destructive to the environment.
Matt Wasson, director of programs for the Boone, N.C.-based Appalachian Voices, called the EPA’s decision “the most encouraging signal we’ve seen that the EPA is willing to bring science back into it even under pretty difficult circumstances.”
Wasson said the permit “clearly was in violation” of the Clean Water Act – and if anyone is at fault for the long permitting process it’s the Bush administration, for failing to enforce the law in the first place.
Valley fills might be necessary for a mountaintop mine to operate, Wasson said, but he added that it’s impossible to have a valley fill without violating the Clean Water Act.