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Sunday, October 04, 2009

Wall Street Journal goofs on requirements for reclaiming mountaintop-removal coal mines

The Wall Street Journal's news columns are usually authoritative, but reporter Kris Maher owes the paper's readers a correction for an off-base assertion in her Friday story about the Environmental Protection Agency's decision that all 79 permit applications for mountaintop-removal and similar coal mining in Central Appalachia should be rewritten to reduce environmental impact.

Maher did make a useful distinction, noting that "Each mining project requires a dozen or so permits," not just one per mine, as some national reporters have assumed. But then she wrote, "Mining companies, which are required to rebuild mountains when work is finished, say their projects follow the permit process."

Mining companies are not required to rebuild mountains. The term "mountaintop removal" was coined to describe mines operating under the "steep-slope exception" to the 1977 federal strip-mine law's requirement that mined land be restored to its "approximate original contour." Most of the mines that remove all of the soil and rock above coal seams being extracted are generally called "mountaintop removal" but are officially classified as "area mines" and thus don't operate under the exception.

Also, state regulators have used such a broad definition of "approximate original contour" that the reclaimed landscape can have a very different elevation and slope. Tom FitzGerald of the Kentucky Resources Council says that results in "much more material being off-loaded into valley fills than Congress intended. A study by the Office of Surface Mining of sites in Kentucky where the variance had been approved and those that claimed to have achieved a return to 'approximate original contour' could not distinguish between the two."

Finally, exceptions to the original-contour rule require a higher post-mining land use, or public use, and state regulators' definition of "higher use" has usually been generous.

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