Pebble Mine Wins Appeal – US Army Corps Forced to Reconsider Permit Denial

April 26, 2023

Late yesterday, without much fanfare, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Pacific Division ruled that its Alaska Division erred when it denied the Pebble Limited Partnership’s permit to develop the copper, gold, molybdenum and rhenium mine in Southwest Alaska.

Noting that the rejection was based on faulty science, the Pacific command returned the process to Alaska, ordering that team to review and correct the errors.

While noting that this doesn’t mean Pebble’s entire mine plan – one which received a clean Final Environmental Impact Statement from the Corps – should be approved, the order does bring to question whether the ultimate decision to deny Pebble’s permit was political in nature, as groups like ours believe, or scientific, as radical environmentalists claim.

Pebble still faces a pre-emptive veto of its project by the Environmental Protection Agency, who, working in conjunction with environmental organizations and wealthy ideologues, halted the established permitting process with clear political shenanigans.  That move is still under legal and regulatory scrutiny by mine proponents.

Still, yesterday’s announcement is good news for Pebble, its trillion-dollar deposit, the hundreds of jobs an operating mine would bring and the State of Alaska, as Pebble’s landholder.

We’ll continue to update this story, unabashedly promote Pebble and jeer the hijacking of a non-political permitting process for purely political purposes.