The Washington Post cited a statement by Colonel Damon Delarosa, commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Alaska, who said that the proposed project did not have an adequate plan to handle waste that it produced.
Northern Dynasty called the decision politically motivated and said it is fundamentally unsupported by the administrative record as developed by the USACE through the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS)
process for the Pebble Project.
With resource estimates including 6.5 billion tonnes in the measured and indicated categories containing 57 billion pounds of copper and 71 million ounces of gold, 3.4 billion pounds of molybdenum and 345 million silver ounces, if permitted, Pebble would be North America’s largest mine.
Pebble faced environmental opposition from the onset as the mine would be near the world’s largest commercial sockeye salmon-producing region, and controversy surrounding the project rose steadily over recent months.
In September, short seller J Capital Research accused Northern Dynasty management of “gaslighting investors” and said the mine plan “is on its face absurd.”
“We believe Northern Dynasty has crafted a money-losing mining plan to achieve government approvals. Since management is bonused on lobbying success instead of for producing minerals, NAK has no reason to care that the new plan is irrational: we think it will lose money, leave investors with a stranded asset, and be canceled anyway if Joe Biden is elected,” JCap’s report read.
The Northern Dynasty said it intends to launch an administrative appeal of the USACE permitting decision within the provided 60-day window.
(More to come)
