By Peter Milne
South32 will slash $830 million off the value of its alumina business after WA’s environmental watchdog recommended conditions the diversified miner says threaten the long-term viability of its $2 billion a year operation in the state.
The Perth-based diversified miner’s shares tumbled almost 13 per cent on the news as it said it would appeal for less onerous conditions to be imposed.
“Several of the recommended conditions go beyond reasonable measures for managing environmental risks of the proposal based on scientific assessment and decades of operating experience,” the miner said in a statement.
The WA Environment Protection Authority (EPA) imposed the conditions after concerns were raised about mining in Western Australia’s jarrah forests. South32 plans to mine 3855 hectares of forest to continue supplying bauxite to its Worsley alumina refinery near Collie for another 15 years.
South32 mines bauxite at Boddington, 130km south east of Perth.
However, a major environmental group is pushing for stricter protections of WA’s jarrah forests against mining activities.
WA Forest Alliance senior campaigner Jason Fowler said the group will also lodge an appeal with the WA Appeals Convenor pushing for better defined management of risks posed by South32’s mining.
“After 38 years of strip mining the northern jarrah forest, South32 have only begun to rehabilitate 42 per cent of cleared land and have provided no evidence that their rehabilitation is effective,” he said.
Two weeks ago, the WA EPA recommended that the main expansion proceed subject to a raft of conditions. These included a greater rate of rehabilitating forest already mined, restoring and protecting 12,000 hectares of threatened fauna habitat to offset damage elsewhere, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions in a roughly straight line to zero by 2025.
All large carbon polluters in Australia are also subject to the federal government’s safeguard mechanism that requires each facility to have net zero emissions by 2050, but details on the rate of reduction for each polluter, including Worsely, have not yet been made public.
South32 said it aimed to secure approval for the expansion by December, an ambitious timetable given another contentious high-profile project – extending the life of Woodside’s North West Shelf gas plant – has been with the convenor for two years.
South32 has joined WA’s larger bauxite miner, Alcoa, in the environmental spotlight after decades when their strip mining in the jarrah forest received little public attention. Bauxite is found near the surface in layers only a few metres deep, so its extraction, unlike ores from deep pits, impacts large areas.
In 2022, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2022 said with a hotter, drier climate and more fires, the forest faced a high risk of collapse without changes to management practices.
The EPA’s report on Worsley said climate change meant it may be impossible to rehabilitate the forest to its former structure. Other concerns were the threatened fauna species including quokkas that live in the area to be mined.
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