Seabed mining for phosphate? No thanks
by Cindy Baxter KASM Chairperson
In the past 12 years we’ve had two different seabed miners trying - and failing - to get consent: Trans Tasman Resources in the South Taranaki Bight - and the other, lesser-known, Chatham Rock Phosphate (CRP), for whom the EPA refused consent in 2015 for its bid to mine the Chatham Rise for phosphate.
This seabed mining would be deep seabed mining, at depths of 500m, out in the Tasman near the Chatham Islands, in a benthic protection area, home to ecologically-significant areas teeming with sea life, and ancient corals that take thousands of years to grow.
This coral garden habitat, according to the EPA decision, “would not return to its present form but rather would be transformed wholly into soft sediment habitat.” Ancient corals turned into mush. Effects the EPA says “could not be avoided, remedied or mitigated.”
The video below was shot by a deep sea expedition across three areas around Aotearoa, with some of this footage from the Chatham Rise.
The EPA decision was extremely strong - far stronger than the 2014 decision refusing TTR its consent for the Bight.
After it was refused this consent, aside from trying (and failing) to sue the EPA to avoid the costs of the application, CRP delisted itself from the New Zealand Stock Exchange and listed instead on a sub-exchange attached to the Toronto stock exchange, an exchange with lax rules around how companies behave in terms of transparency and accuracy.
Indeed the company was able to rally shareholders and take millions from people who honestly think that it owns a 70 million tonne “resource” in the Tasman Sea. It was not at all transparent about the strength of the EPA consent refusal, nor at all clear about the fact it needs a marine discharge consent to mine, focussing only on the mining permit given it by NZ Petroleum & Minerals.
It’s extraordinary how these companies can get away with omitting key information in order to get shareholder investment.
Now, CRP has gotten a major new investor, global critical minerals company Wetstone, and is now reapplying to come back to the NZ Stock Exchange. The NZX has some of the strictest transparency rules in the world, so let’s see how this goes. We don’t think it will be easy.
Wetstone was previously known as Seafloor Minerals Fund, whose special advisors include former Australian PM Scott Morrison, and Republican Mike Pompeo, former Secretary of State in Donald Trump's first administration.
CRP is now preparing for a fast-track application, even though it’s not on the list of companies invited in Round 1 under the Act, but has been relegated to the waiting list. It shouldn’t even be on that list.
The phosphate is radioactive
TVNZ News this week ran a story about a new, on-land phosphate mine in Otago, now
providing the resource to farmers who are staring down the barrel of hugely high prices since the Gulf of Hormuz.
They did interview me, but they didn’t run a key point I made in that interview: the phosphate on the Chatham Rise, underneath those ancient corals, also holds another secret - it contains radioactive polonium, uranium and thorium.
We raised this issue in our submission on the CRP application in 2014, but the EPA said it couldn’t rule on the impact of a product on the land when it was considering a marine discharge consent. Fair enough.
But the decision did express concern at the potential effects on the marine environment. Here's an excerpt:
We have no idea how the radioactive materials would build up in the New Zealand environment if farmers started applying it to their paddocks. And we have no way of measuring that buildup. We don’t have any radiation experts who can do this in Aotearoa. A
Aside from the polonium, uranium and thorium, phosphate is itself a bad polluter: it pollutes the streams it runs into and, when mixed with the nitrates also being poured onto our land, creates algal blooms in lakes. It’s nasty stuff. That's assuming the phosphate goes to NZ farms: CRP admitted during the 2014 hearings that it would be exploring the vast majority of the phosphate.
So there’s a few courses of action here:
1. Farmers need to minimise the use of phosphate
2. Chatham Rock Phosphate cannot be allowed to mine the Chatham Rise
3. But the very obvious one would be to BAN SEABED MINING (sign the petition!)
Comments