West Coast coal mine developer Bathurst Resources, which is preparing to fight two Environment Court challenges this year, has signalled it is considering applying to the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) for its Buller tenements to be classified "of national significance".
Whether the EPA process is a fast-track for consenting or a handicap is yet to be tested.
Gaining "national significance", which targets projects involving key infrastructure through the EPA process, means Bathurst could apply to streamline and relatively fast-track consents for new tenements, and lessen the chances of time-consuming appeals.
However, it also runs the risk that the relatively new EPA process could run against it in testing what would be a precedent-setting application for the mining/resource sector.
Bathurst would be following Marlborough-based New Zealand King Salmon farms, as only the second company to enter the EPA process.
In Bathurst's attempt to get fully started in mining its tenements around the Denniston Plateau, which is above Westport on the West Coast, it already faces several months delay as environmentalists appeal more than 20 consents granted by two West Coast councils last year, with the possibility the outcome could be appealed again.
Environmentalists have become incensed at the potential threat to flora and fauna around the plateau, while Bathurst has put forward mitigation and rehabilitation plans within its mine design.
Bathurst's chief operating officer, Richard Tacon, said the EPA was an "alternative approvals process" Bathurst was considering for future expansion.
"This path is very structured in its nature and the outcome is known in a set time-frame, typically within nine months of notification of the project.
"The other feature is that the final decision can only be appealed on a point of law," Mr Tacon said in a recent sharemarket update.
Any application to the EPA by Bathurst would cover future consent applications and have no immediate bearing on the appeals launched by Forest & Bird and the West Coast Environmental Network, challenging last year's more than 20 consents.
In deciding if Bathurst would be designated of national significance, the Minister for the Environment could hand the application to a board of inquiry or the Environment Court to decide.
Crucially, the minister would have to decide whether the application would be publicly notified for submissions.
What Bathurst must look at closely is some of the EPA criteria which will be considered for any national significance applications which:
- Involves or is likely to involve significant use of natural and physical resource.
- Affects or is likely to affect a structure, feature, place, or area of national significance.
- Affects or is likely to affect or is relevant to New Zealand's international obligations to the global environment.
- Results or is likely to result in or contribute to significant or irreversible changes to the environment, including the global environment.
With these criteria yet to be tested in a resource sector setting, especially with an operation relying mainly on open-cast mining, Bathurst will need some serious legal opinion on where an EPA application may end up.
Environmentalists have fought hard to have climate change debated within the context of the forthcoming and separate Environment Court challenges, but that request was declined last week by a judge.
Judging by the EPA's own criteria, such as "obligations to the global environment" and "irreversible changes to the environment", a platform appears already in place for environmentalists, conditional on the application being publicly notifiable.
