PERTH (miningweekly.com) – The $10-billion Alpha coal mine, being developed by GVK Hancock, is facing yet another legal battle after antimining activists launched a legal challenge in the Queensland Court of Appeals.
This was the fourth time environmental groups have launched legal action against the proposed mine and followed a September Supreme Court ruling that dismissed an appeal from an antimining group to have the project’s environmental approval overturned.
GVK Hancock spokesperson Josh Euler said the latest legal challenge did not involve any land-holders and did not incorporate objections around groundwater use.
Instead, the new legal action was based on an objection to emissions from coal-fired power generation in other countries not being incorporated into Australian approvals.
Euler said the latest legal action completely missed the fact that exporting coal from the Alpha project would, in no way, change global carbon emissions or global demand for thermal coal.
He noted that global demand for thermal coal was driven by the growing capacity increases in coal-fired power generation – the world’s cheapest form of electricity.
“If we, as a nation, don’t develop the Galilee basin, all that will happen is some other country will develop their equivalent resource and gain the significant benefits of billions of dollars in taxes and royalties and tens of thousands of jobs over many decades.”
Euler warned that the latest legal challenge would delay thousands of jobs for Queensland for around an additional nine months, on top of the already incurred 30-month legal delays from previous court cases.
The proposed Alpha project, in Queensland, has a Joint Ore Reserves Committee-compliant resource of 1.8-billion tonnes with some 1.2-billion tonnes of reserves. The opencut operation was expected to produce about 32-million tonnes a year over a 30-year mine life.
The project was granted environmental authority in 2014.
The Queensland Resources Council (QRC) has called on both the federal and state governments to close legal loopholes that enable activists to disrupt and delay major resource projects, while potentially leaving taxpayers to foot the legal bills.
QRC CEO Michael Roche said the time had expired for governments to sit on their hands and allow the blatant flaunting of the legal system by activists to disrupt and delay important projects.
“The Queensland government can no longer sit back and watch these important job-generating projects be bogged down by court appeal after court appeal on matters which the Land Court has previously ruled is outside of its jurisdiction,” he added.
“The Land Court has ruled more than once that it has no jurisdiction over climate change and, yet, the legal system allows this tactic of disruption and delay to be rolled out again and again.”
Roche said the current flaws across the legal system enabled activists to repeatedly launch litigation against industry projects, carrying out a strategy to disrupt and delay projects.
“If the state does not act, this tactic will be deployed against every new resource project in Queensland. Success for the green activists is not measured by winning an appeal, but rather in months and years of delays.
“Their objective is for project proponents to decide that investing in Queensland is too hard and walk away,” Roche said.