EPA blocks permit for mountaintop-removal job that would be the largest coal mine ever in W.Va.

The Environmental Protection Agency has blocked the permit for Arch Coal's huge mountaintop-removal mine in Logan County, W.Va. The EPA cited clear evidence of likely environmental damage, Ken Ward Jr. of the Charleston Gazette reports. The decision is more evidence that the Obama administration is taking a middle ground on mountaintop removal in Appalachia: not trying to stop or severely limit it, as the president and John McCain suggested in their campaigns, but putting the brakes on projects that pose the greatest threats.

EPA sent a five-page letter to the Army Corps of Engineers outlining concerns that the project, which would be the largest mine in West Virginia history, had the "potential to degrade downstream water quality" and that valley fills would be too large. Corps attorneys asked a federal judge to delay legal proceedings so the agency could have more time to revise the permit. "The EPA move comes as a self-imposed deadline expired Tuesday for EPA to submit to the corps an 'initial list' of mountaintop-removal permit applications that EPA officials want to more closely examine before they are issued," Ward writes. (Read more)

“It’s not the death of mountaintop coal mining,” Mary Anne Hitt, deputy director of the Sierra Club's campaign to limit the use of coal, told Jim Efstathiou Jr. of Bloomberg News. “But it’s clear that it’s not just going to be blanket approval of anything the Corps wants to do, which was essentially the case under the Bush administration.” Luke Popovich, spokesman for the National Mining Association, told Estathiou: “They’ve been looking at these permits for a long time and suddenly the new cop comes to town and says the work they’ve done heretofore is questionable. They seem to be moving the goalposts around so that you can’t score a touchdown.” (Read more)