The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Coal mine to benefit in Gunnison County
by Crystal Kotowski
Nearly three years after the initial lawsuit, High Country Conservation Advocates v. United States Forest Service, the U.S. Forest Service is moving closer to reinstating a controversial exception in Gunnison County to the Colorado Roadless Rule.
On November 17, the Rocky Mountain Region of the U.S. Forest Service and the Colorado Department of Natural Resources announced the Colorado Roadless Rule Supplemental Final Impact Statement (SFEIS). The preferred alternative of the document would allow construction of roads into a Colorado Roadless area on the west side of Kebler Pass near Paonia.
The SFEIS evaluated three alternatives for reinstating the North Fork Coal Mining Area exception to the Colorado Roadless Rule.
—According to the U.S. Forest Service, Alternative A is the No Action Alternative and continues the current management under the Colorado Roadless Rule without a North Fork Coal Mining Area exception.
—Alternative B reinstates the North Fork Coal Mining Area exception, opening about 19,700 acres of national forest in Colorado to temporary road construction for coal mining.
—Alternative C established the North Fork Coal Mining Area exception, but excluded National Forest System lands identified as “wilderness capable.”
With this latest action, the USFS is on record preferring Alternative B.
As part of that preferred alternative, about 19,000 acres of land in Gunnison County in the North Fork Coal Mining Area would be available for temporary road construction and placement of methane vents associated with underground coal mining.
That exception from the Colorado Roadless Rule has been controversial for years. Crested Butte environmental watchdog organization High Country Conservation Advocates (HCCA) has fought the exemption and believes given the declining global coal market, there is no reason to jeopardize pristine wilderness.
“Of course we’re disappointed in the Obama administration’s decision to undermine climate commitments and achievements, and instead to sanction industrial development across nearly 20,000 acres of Gunnison County roadless forest,” said HCCA’s public lands director Matt Reed.
“President Obama has said that to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, some fossil fuels must remain in the ground,” continued Reed. “Yet with this decision, his administration is proposing to significantly increase climate pollution. This paves the way for coal burning that could cost the world’s economy and environment up to $3.4 billion, according to the Forest Service’s analysis, and combustion of the coal made available here will displace nearly 10,000 gigawatt hours of renewable power.”
On the other hand, the Gunnison County commissioners have endorsed the exception in an effort to compromise with the coal companies operating in the region in order to acknowledge the economic benefit to the county and the world due to the availability of cleaner burning coal coming from the North Fork mines.
“Through our own regulatory process, Gunnison County designated the North Fork Valley Coal Resource Special Area and adopted the Coal Resource Special Area Coal Mining Regulations. In those regulations, Gunnison County recognizes that coal is a resource valuable to the United States, Colorado and Gunnison County,” its January 2016 comment letter reads.
According to Earthjustice, an environmental law organization that teamed up with HCCA to challenge the proposed exception, the proposal provides for 170 million tons of coal to be mined and subsequently burned, resulting in millions of tons of new carbon pollution.
In 2014, a federal court vacated the coal mine roadless exception loophole because the Forest Service failed to disclose the climate change impacts of unlocking hundreds of millions of tons of coal for burning.
The SFEIS is a response to deficiencies outlined by the District Court of Colorado, supplementing the 2012 Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Colorado Roadless Rule with additional analyses.
A quantitative greenhouse gas analysis put into the context of climate change, the social cost of carbon, updated coal market economics, and supplemental analyses of fisheries and critical habitat were included.
“HCCA is currently working closely with our partners at Earthjustice to digest the FSEIS and determine next steps…. We’re still reviewing the SFEIS to determine the legal adequacy of the document and whether it addresses the issues raised in HCCA’s lawsuit that prompted this process. But we urge President Obama to scrap this loophole. If he doesn’t, we’ll take a hard look at challenging it in court,” said Reed.
BOCC position on the Colorado Roadless Rule
Prior to the completion of the comment period from the U.S. Forest Service, the Gunnison Board of County Commissioners submitted a detailed request to reinstate the North Fork Coal Mining Area exception.
The BOCC’s letter included a few caveats: they wanted the Forest Service to consider in its Environmental Impact Statement analysis the viability of the coal mining industry in the North Fork; they wanted an analysis of the quantity and quality of recreational tourism in the North Fork Coal Mining Area; and they wanted to encourage opportunities to recover methane from active and inactive mines in the area.
Arch Coal, the second-largest coal company in the country and operator of the West Elk Mine near Somerset, will drill wells above the mine to vent methane gas into the air. According to the EPA, Mountain Coal’s West Elk Mine is one of only 12 in the country that does not capture for use methane vented from drill holes. Although the mine is underground, the coal seams are some of the gassiest in the nation. (The county commissioners are on the record as wanting to encourage methane capture for things like electricity generation.)
“The language of the proposed exception doesn’t require Arch to do anything about methane… West Elk is the single largest industrial source of methane pollution in Colorado, meaning Gunnison County is home to the single largest industrial source of methane pollution in the state,” confirms Reed. “The coal mine loophole places no limits on West Elk’s emissions, and will extend methane pollution for three decades. Furthermore, the methane pollution from this one single mine will undo about 30 percent of the benefit of Colorado’s oil and gas methane rules.”
HCCA sees the bankruptcies plaguing the coal industry as one more reason why mining exploration should not be permitted in the North Fork Colorado Roadless Area. More than 50 U.S. coal mining companies have gone bankrupt since 2012 and there are subsequent concerns of insufficient bonding; Arch Coal declared bankruptcy in January 2016, eliminating its $5 billion in debt. “Arch’s precarious financial state has reprecussions for its ability to comply with its reclamation duties under law, as well as its willingness to comply with environment regulations that it perveives to impact its bottom line,” HCCA’s January 2016 comment letter to the USFS reads. Further, bankruptcy courts allowed Arch to continue to mine despite setting aside only $75 million to cover its $458 million in self-bonded cleanup obligations.
Coal in the county and Colorado
The amount of coal being produced by the single operating mine in the North Fork Valley, the West Elk, produced nearly 5.1 million tons of coal in 2015. In 2016, the Somerset field provided less than a quarter of Colorado’s coal. Nearly 1000 miners worked three active coal mines in Somerset field in 2012; today that number is less than 250. Colorado is the seventh-largest coal-producing state in the country. Coal generates 60 percent of the electricity in Colorado, according to an April Denver Post article.
According to Reed, the Forest Service intends to issue the final rule on the roadless rule on or near December 19. With the SFEIS’s publication last week, the Forest Service has started a 30-day waiting period before it publishes the rule and signs the Record of Decision. The 30-day period is not a comment period.
“Now that the coal mine exception rule is on its way to approval, the GMUG could begin processing Arch Coal’s pending lease modifications to 1,700 acres within the Sunset Roadless Area, for which the GMUG issued a scoping notice last spring. The GMUG could not issue a decision on the lease modifications until after the coal mine exception becomes final, which would be February at the earliest,” said Reed.
