The old mine at Faro is the environmental disaster that keeps on giving.
Once the largest open pit lead-zinc mine on the planet, the Yukon News reported in 2022 that it is 26,000 football fields of acid-rock drainage and other contaminants located upstream from the Yukon River. Now, YESAB reports it is a carbon bomb too.
Faro’s numbers never fail to gobsmack: 70 million tonnes of tailings, 320 million tonnes of waste rock, 15 years of remediation work, centuries of monitoring.
Parsons, a global reclamation giant, said their contract “could span over 20 years and exceed $2 billion.”
The federal agency responsible calls it “one of the most complex mine clean-up projects in Canada.”
They would know. They are paying for it.
Now it turns out that the remediation plan itself has major environmental impacts.
YESAB’s draft 445-page Executive Committee screening report says that the project will “result in significant adverse effects” to the climate.
The project involves clearing and burning, heavy vehicles, backup generators, landfill emissions, blasting and purchasing electricity from the Yukon’s partly fossil-fueled grid.
In the peak year of activity, total emissions will be 194 kilotonnes of carbon dioxide or its equivalent in other greenhouse gases (CO2e).
That’s the equivalent of 77,000 Yukon homes — if we had that many; there are only 17,000 households in the Yukon — each burning 2000 litres of home heating fuel. The Yukon’s entire emissions under official federal carbon accounting were 650 kilotonnes in 2021, meaning the Faro remediation project would be like a 30 percent increase.
The timing is awkward as Canada’s international climate change targets approach. We have committed to slashing emissions 40 to 45 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, not increasing them.
Of the 194 kilotonnes, 109 kilotonnes come from slash-and-burn land clearing.
The Faro mine’s love affair with diesel heavy equipment continues into the remediation era with 64 kilotonnes from vehicles. They will burn an estimated 23 million litres of liquid fossil fuels. Diesel pumps and generators will contribute 15 kilotonnes.
Four tonnes will come from landfill emissions since, like Whitehorse, the Faro landfill does not have a landfill gas collection system. Blasting and fossil grid power each add up to less than a kilotonne.
And this is just the direct emissions from the project. There are also “Scope 3” emissions, which come from suppliers in other locations. The YESAB report flags unknown emissions from lime production elsewhere. Large quantities of lime “will be required in perpetuity to treat surface water” at Faro.
The production of lime typically requires heavy equipment to mine the limestone then large amounts of natural gas for the kilns, as well as trucking to the customer.
When you add in the emissions from offices in Whitehorse and staff flying in and out of the Yukon, the Scope 3 emissions would be sizable.
Fortunately, the emissions after the peak years will be significantly less than 194 kilotonnes, although we do not know the estimated total direct and Scope 3 emissions for each of the fifteen years in question. YESAB recommends regular greenhouse-gas audits once the project moves forward.
So, since the remediation must go ahead, how should the emissions be dealt with? It’s hard to avoid the slash-and-burn emissions, and buying a small modular nuclear reactor to electrify all the diesel engines is infeasible.
So YESAB recommends that the “Proponent shall offset all annual carbon emissions” through activities such as tree planting or the purchase of carbon offsets. Tree planting sounds like an easy way out, but there are issues. YESAB recommends that any tree planting done to offset carbon emissions be in addition to the tree planting required to rehabilitate the site. This is because the proponent was already planning to rehabilitate the site, so the tree planting there is not an additional activity to offset the additional carbon emissions. Furthermore, YESAB recommends the tree planting be done in an ecozone similar to Faro. It’s not clear why this is recommended, since climate change is a global problem and a tree planted anywhere soaks carbon dioxide out of the sky.
The bigger problem is Yukon trees. Yukon saplings are so small and take so long to grow that their CO2e appetite is measured in grams not kilograms. It would take an absurd number of Yukon trees to offset 194 kilotonnes.
Which brings up the idea of buying other kinds of offsets. Some low-quality international offset schemes have proven controversial. For example, you don’t want to pay someone to reduce emissions they would have reduced anyway. So you need to stick to certified offsets.
Carbonzero.ca offers a range of options to individuals and organizations. For example, you can pay $30 per tonne to the Great Bear Forest Carbon Project, led by the Coastal First Nations in BC. Or you can help Niagara, Ontario install a landfill gas collection system to divert methane from the town’s rotting leftovers and use it as energy. That costs $25 per tonne. BC Greenhouse Biomass Project will charge you $28 per tonne to help them switch from fossil fuels to biomass. Or you can pay $28 per tonne to a group of 45 farmers in the Prairies so they practice “conservation cropping practices,” which helps their soil absorb carbon dioxide from the sky.
Offsetting 194 kilotonnes at $25 per tonne would cost $5 million on top of what the Faro remediation already costs. But it is needed to offset the emissions.
This raises an interesting idea for enviro-entrepreneurs and activists in the Yukon. Why should Faro ship money Outside to create green jobs on other people’s climate projects? Instead, we should create some Yukon offset projects. How about capturing the methane from our landfill, like Niagara is doing? Why not use some of the $5 million to pay people to install heat pumps? Or how about a Yukon version of that BC biomass project?
Time to fire up your laptop, do some carbon math, and prepare your pitch for the people planning all that slashing and burning in Faro.
Keith Halliday is a Yukon economist and the winner of the 2022 Canadian Community Newspaper Award for Outstanding Columnist. His most recent book Moonshadows, a Yukon-noir thriller, is available in Yukon bookstores.