[Greens-Media] PARNELL: Olympic Dam expansion EIS approval to run out in 11 years

[Parnell]

Media Release
Saturday 16th October 2010

Olympic Dam expansion EIS approval to run out in 11 years

The Mining Minister, Paul Holloway, has declared that BHP Billiton will only have Government approval to expand the Olympic Dam project up to 750,000 tonnes of copper/year, despite the company's claims that it will reach that milestone after just 11 years of operation.

This puts the company on a collision course with the State Government as it prepares to invest billions of dollars in the super-sized project.

In a briefing in South America last month, the CE of BHP Billiton's non-ferrous metals division, Andrew Mackenzie, outlined the company's plan to reach 750,000 tonnes after 11 years, on the way to an ultimate production scale of 1.4 million tonnes of copper/year by year 40 of the project.
Yet the company has only detailed an upper limit of 750,000 tonnes in the 4,600 pages of the draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) the company released last year.

When asked in Parliament by Greens MLC Mark Parnell about whether the Minister would be requiring BHPB to submit a revised EIS in line with BHPB's proposed doubling of the project, Minister Holloway replied:

"BHP has indicated to me that it will be responding to the original proposal it put forward, and that will cover them up to 750,000 tonnes, I believe it is, of production. If it wanted to extend beyond that, clearly, they would have to apply and the process would begin again .........
....... If BHP wished to double production again then one imagines that will inevitably mean that they will go through the same sort of process they are going through now-if they seek to go beyond what would be their approval limits. That is what has happened in the past and I do not see any reason why they would not be the case in the future."

"This response by the Minister shows that much more work needs to be done before we properly understand the true environmental, social and economic consequences of this project," said Greens MLC Mark Parnell.

 "Has BHP Billiton told the SA Government of the greatly beefed up size of the project? If they have, surely the EIS should be amended now to reflect the larger scale?

"BHP Billiton said last month that the Olympic Dam expansion is now twice what was previously revealed to the South Australian people in the company's 2009 draft EIS.

"Already, the size of the project is truly gob-smacking.

"Doubling the size of this project again has even greater implications for water demand (including the size and impact of the desalination plant proposed for Upper Spencer Gulf), the size of the tailings dams, the size of the waste rock piles, energy use and greenhouse pollution, to name but a few.

"Yet, what the Minister said in Parliament was that the company would not be able to go beyond 750,000 tonnes of copper production per year without the assessment and approval process starting all over again.

"This has major implications for BHP Billiton and its shareholders.

"The current EIS has taken 5 years to get to this point, and clearly, the process is still not complete. If limits to production are reached in just 11 years the Minister says BHP Billiton will need to go back to the drawing board (and the South Australian people) soon after starting the expansion.

"The Minister's reply will not satisfy anyone. It will surely not comfort the company or their shareholders as they work out whether to commit billions of dollars to the multi-decade project; potentially leaving them with another assessment and approval process to manage when conditions and community expectations around water, energy and waste are likely to change in response to climate change, peak oil and carbon pricing considerations.

"Yet, it also fails the South Australian community by not giving them a chance to fully consider the reality of an apparently much larger project.

"The State Government and BHP Billiton need to come clean with the South Australian people and reveal the full extent of this project, before any approvals are given," he said.


For further comment contact Craig Wilkins on 0434 007 893


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