he Pebble Mine project has never been closer to becoming reality. A favorable Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) published in July was a key step in the project’s progression from concept to active mine.

But permitting a large, controversial project is seldom a linear process.

A few weeks after publication of the EIS, several new challenges for the project emerged that could further delay the mine or even completely sink the project’s viability.

First came a fresh wave of opposition to the mine from national figures. Donald Trump Jr. voiced opposition to the project in an August 4 tweet. The next week Fox News host Tucker Carlson devoted a segment to “the case against Alaska’s Pebble Mine.” In early August, Joe Biden announced his own opposition.

Then, on August 20, the US Army Corps of Engineers announced challenging wetland mitigation rules for Pebble that go beyond the usual requirements for Alaska mines.

An EIS is the cornerstone of the federal permitting process, so the July EIS was a major milestone for the Pebble Mine project.

Widely seen as favorable to the project, the document made sweeping statements about the potential gold, copper, and molybdenum mine’s impact on salmon populations including that the mine “would not have measurable effects on the number of adult salmon” returning to the two watersheds around the mine site.

But a month after publishing a favorable EIS, the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) sent mine developers a letter containing wetland mitigation requirements, including a directive that Pebble preserve wetlands within the same watershed as the mine to offset destroyed wetlands. Other mining projects in Alaska have had the option of fulfilling this Clean Water Act mitigation requirement by restoring or preserving wetlands from other parts of the state. Especially in a state as large as Alaska, an in-watershed mitigation requirement severely narrows the available options for developers.

For Pebble, mitigating the mine in-watershed will likely involve securing land or a conservation easement from the state, which owns most land in the area, says Bob Loeffler, a consultant who previously worked as the director of the Alaska Division of Mining, Land and Water during the Tony Knowles and Frank Murkowski administrations.

Any deal with the state would require a public process and likely result in delays to Pebble’s federal permitting.

“The state cannot sell development rights to Pebble without preparing a best interest finding and requesting public comment. Pebble has made no application to the state, and the state has not started any process to grant these rights to Pebble,” Loeffler wrote in an August memo to his client, the Lake and Peninsula Borough Assembly. “It is unclear how and when, or even if, the state may wish to do so. But if they do, it will require a public process.”

Opponents of Pebble Mine have described the wetland mitigation letter as a reversal from USACE, which earlier had appeared to green-light the project. But then-CEO Tom Collier said it wasn’t a reversal. [Editor’s note: Tom Collier resigned as Pebble’s CEO in late September; as of publication, previous Pebble CEO John Shively has been appointed interim CEO.] Prior to his resignation, Collier said the requirements from the letter were not unforeseen and that the wetland mitigation requirements are achievable.

Speaking at an Alaska Support Industry Alliance digital breakfast event in early September, he said Pebble is complying with in-watershed mitigation requirements despite believing these rules go beyond what is required under the law.

“We’re not left with much of an option: we either comply with their mitigation request or we refuse to, in which case the permit is denied and we have to go to court to overturn their decision,” he said.

At the early September event, Collier said Pebble’s wetland mitigation plan would be available within a few weeks.

As evaluated in the July EIS, the Pebble Mine would include an open pit about one-third the size of Anchorage’s Kincaid Park with a depth ten times the height of the Hotel Captain Cook. The mine project features two mine waste storage sites that are larger than the pit, an 82-mile access road with seventeen bridges, and a natural gas power plant fed by a pipeline that would run under Cook Inlet to the Kenai Peninsula.

While it’s a big project, it could have been bigger. And it may still grow into a much larger mine. The mine plan analyzed by USACE is a scaled-back version of the project that Northern Dynasty initially pitched to investors. This “right-sized” mine would process only 12 percent of the known deposit and would close after twenty years of operation. Additional mining would require additional permitting.

In what the Pebble Partnership describes as concessions to minimize the mine’s impact, the company’s current mine plan doesn’t involve processing materials with a toxic cyanide solution. The current mine plan also focuses on the Koktuli River watershed, keeping mining out of a second watershed also known to contain valuable minerals.

But even the smaller mine proposal threatens the Bristol Bay salmon fishing industry and the subsistence fishing culture of the region’s largely Alaska Native population, say mine opponents.

One of the main criticisms of USACE’s work is that it chose not to model a mine tailings dam collapse like the one that occurred at the Mount Polley mine in British Columbia in 2014.

Another concern is that mine developers overstated their ability to treat all the water used by the mine before releasing it back into the environment.

As Bristol Bay Native Corporation (BBNC) said in its response to the EIS, treating this wastewater—39 million gallons of it per day—would require wastewater treatment facilities with more than half the capacity of the Municipality of Anchorage’s wastewater treatment.

BBNC describes Pebble’s plan to treat this water as a vague pipe dream:

“Should PLP’s [Pebble Limited Partnership’s] water treatment approach fail, the resulting pollution would flow directly into Bristol Bay’s salmon-rich waters. Pebble’s uniquely sensitive location requires the highest level of precaution in mine design, especially including water treatment of these magnitudes,” states the regional Native corporation’s response to the EIS.

“Yet, in a continuing theme, PLP only presented [USACE] with concept-level technology to treat massive amounts of water.”

Northern Dynasty Minerals—Pebble project’s 100 percent owner—is publicly traded on the New York and Toronto stock exchanges. Claim to the world’s largest undeveloped gold deposit is the company’s only mining prospect, so its share price over the last twenty years has closely tracked major developments in Pebble Mine’s permitting process.

As of publication, Northern Dynasty shares were trading at about $1 a share on the New York Stock Exchange, and four of the five financial analysts who follow the company gave it a “buy” rating.

Founded in 1985, Northern Dynasty is part of Vancouver-based Hunter Dickinson Inc., a privately-owned affiliation of mining businesses. Each of the affiliated companies is associated with separate mining projects.

In 2001, Northern Dynasty began acquiring mining claims to the Pebble deposit, which was discovered upstream from Bristol Bay in 1988. The company accelerated research on the prospect and established partnerships with several large mining companies.

But none of the mine’s initial investors stayed with the project. Over the next three years Pebble partners Mitsubishi, Anglo American, and Rio Tinto departed the project, leaving the Pebble Partnership a partnership of one: Northern Dynasty.

Northern Dynasty’s share value hit a peak value about $20 in 2011 before the departure of the project’s partners, a valuation that’s the equivalent of a $5 share price today when accounting for dilution from the company issuing more than 300 million new shares over the last decade.

Northern Dynasty’s stock price hit a ten-year low of $0.22 in January 2016 following EPA action that sought to pre-emptively block development of the mine. Share prices have never approached the heights achieved during the Anglo American partnership phase, but shares have twice crested over $1 per share, most recently following the July publication of the EIS.

While Pebble Mine has always faced organized opposition from a variety of environmental groups, in August several influential conservative figures, including people close to the president, entered the fray.

Most notably, the president’s eldest son retweeted a message from Mike Pence’s former chief of staff urging the president to block the Pebble Mine. “As a sportsman who has spent plenty of time in the area, I agree 100 percent,” said Donald Trump Jr. in the tweet. “The headwaters of Bristol Bay and the surrounding fishery are too unique and fragile to take any chances with.”

In August, two days before USACE announced the wetland mitigation requirements, a Politico article forecast the new requirements for Pebble Mine. These soon-to-be-announced requirements were cast as a “surprise reversal” from the Trump administration intended to “block” construction of the mine because of the new conservative opposition.

Collier was adamant that the USACE letter was a regular part of the permitting process and not a quiet way for the White House to kill the project.

“A clear reading of the letter shows it is entirely unrelated to recent tweets about Pebble and one-sided news shows,” Collier said in a news release responding to the Politico story and other related coverage. “The White House had nothing to do with the letter, nor is it the show-stopper described by several in the news media over the weekend.”

While it was predicting the demise of the Pebble project, the Politico article—which was sourced to Republican billionaire donor Andy Sabin and unnamed sources—also predicted federal regulatory action to block the mine would be followed by a direct comment against the mine from the president. That wasn’t the case.

In mid-September, the president tweeted that there will be “no politics” in the Pebble Mine review process.

Of course, politics is involved and Joe Biden wrote in August that Bristol Bay “is no place for a mine” and criticized the Trump administration for re-opening the issue after the Obama administration preemptively blocked the project.

Pebble’s owners say a Biden win wouldn’t be a dead-end for the project. That’s based on the position that a federal Record of Decision on the mine’s EIS will lock-in federal policy this fall, making it difficult for a future administration to take actions that contradict the document.

If the Pebble project gets the federal signoff it seeks this fall, the next step is State of Alaska permitting, a process the project’s owners say will take three years, so mine construction would begin in 2023.

Politics will also play a direct role in state permitting because the final project requires a sign-off from the state legislature. Alaska’s Democratic Party directly opposes construction of the mine as one of the planks in the party platform. Meanwhile, the state Republican Party passed a resolution in August stating its support for the Pebble project “unequivocally.”

The Pebble project needs legislative approval because of 2014’s Ballot Measure 4. Known by proponents as “Bristol Bay Forever,” the ballot measure passed by a 65/34 percent vote, evidence of broad opposition—or at least skepticism—toward Pebble Mine among Alaskans at that time.

But Pebble’s backers point to a more recent voter initiative as evidence of an electorate that’s sympathetic to the Pebble project: the “no” campaign won the 2018 Stand for Salmon/Stand for Alaska initiative by a similar margin to 2014’s Ballot Measure 4.

As the project moves toward state permitting, the Pebble Partnership plans to emphasize the jobs and tax revenue the mine will bring with it, topics that are especially relevant during the recession but which the company didn’t always emphasize during the environmental review, Collier said.

The mine plan calls for employing about 2,000 people for construction and 850 during mine operations. These numbers are eclipsed by the 12,000 fishing and fish processing jobs in Bristol Bay. But armed with July’s favorable EIS, Collier argued the case that new mining jobs can be created without risking established fishing jobs.

“We’ve been hesitant to discuss our positive economic impact because we didn’t want people to think we were trying to buy off a negative impact on salmon,” Collier said at the Alliance breakfast in September.

“Now it’s time to talk about the economic benefits of this project. And they’re going to be substantial.”