Writing in support of Monsanto’s proposed Blackfoot Bridge phosphate mine in Southeast Idaho, two Idaho Council on Industry & Environment (ICIE) officials warned that if the project is not approved, the United States could become dependent on China for its elemental phosphorus – and the environment would suffer.
On Aug. 10, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) released its Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Blackfoot Bridge Mine, which Monsanto officials say would be one of the most environmentally advanced mines in North America once it opens. It is tentatively scheduled to open by 2011.
The mine’s three open pits would replace a million tons of annual phosphate ore that now comes from the South Rasmussen Ridge Mine in Caribou County, which could be exhausted by 2013. The Blackfoot Bridge ore is projected to last for 15 years. Monsanto hopes to start developing that mine in the second half of 2010.
In an Oct. 26 letter to the BLM project manager overseeing the Blackfoot Bridge Mine’s EIS, Patricia Barclay and Norm Semanko noted that elemental phosphorus is a key ingredient in the production of glyphosate herbicides.
Barclay is Boise-based ICIE’S executive director; Semanko, its environment/regulatory affairs committee chairman. The nearly 90-member ICIE was formed in 1989 to encourage the use of sound science and facts in shaping environmental policies. Members include the Idaho Mining Association, Idaho Power, the J.R. Simplot Co., and Monsanto.
Following the shutdown of FMC Corp.’s elemental phosphorus plant near Pocatello in December 2001, Monsanto’s three-furnace P4 Production LLC plant near Soda Springs is the only elemental phosphorus plant still operating in the Western Hemisphere. It provides the elemental phosphorus used in Monsanto’s popular Roundup, a glyphosphate weed killer.
When Monsanto’s Roundup patent expired in 2000, a massive rise in glyphosate production in China was sparked at factories in the Yangtze River delta, Sichuan province in the southwest, and Ningxia in the north, according to the Australian News Service.
“The indirect environmental and socio-economic consequences of alternatives for minimizing environmental impacts of mining at the Blackfoot Bridge Mine should be explicitly delineated in the final Environmental Impact Statement,” Barclary and Semanko wrote.
In its preferred alternative, BLM proposes best practices already used, including mine pit backfills, original terrain contouring, and store-and-release vegetated cover systems. It also proposes unprecedented new technologies such as a laminated geosynthetic clay liner and a massive water management system to encircle, capture, and store water around the mine.
The ICIE officials cited a January 2009 U.S. Geological Survey report that showed while the U.S. remained the leading exporter of diammonium phosphate and monoammonium phosphate fertilizers, China was the leading producer of DAP, MAP, phosphate rock, and phosphoric acid in 2008. China raised its export tariffs on phosphate rock and fertilizer products to ensure domestic requirements.
“According to that report, China clearly has the reserves and capacity to produce phosphate rock. As the only country with both major phosphate reserves and existing glyphosphate production facilities, should Blackfoot Bridge Mine not be developed, or even should it be delayed, the worldwide demand for glyphosphate will shift to China,” Barclay and Semanko said.
Time magazine and The New York Times published articles criticizing China’s disastrous environmental policies and standards, they pointed out.
The World Bank and State Environmental Policy Agency concluded in a study that up to 400,000 premature deaths can be blamed on China’s air pollution. The Council on Foreign Relations also reports: “China’s environmental woes are mounting, and the country is fast becoming one of the leading polluters in the world.”
Most Chinese fertilizer companies show inadequate environmental performance due to weak enforcement of regulations, Barclay and Semanko stressed.
“Action that prices phosphate production out of the United States would do more than move mining overseas. In the case of the Blackfoot Bridge Mine, the mine directly supports a processing and loading facility that ships elemental phosphorus throughout the Western Hemisphere,” they wrote.
“Here again, there are significant differences in how U.S. and Chinese phosphorus manufacturers affect the quality of the environment.”
China typically ships its phosphorus in 55-gallon drums, violating ISO packing and transportation guidelines, which require it be shipped in specialized, double-hulled containers such as those loaded in Soda Springs because phosphorus can spontaneously ignite on contact with oxygen.
Monsanto’s plant at Soda Springs complies with international quality management and environmental management standards as well as national worker safety standards, but the 14 Chinese companies that export elemental phosphorus fail to meet any of those certification standards, Barclay and Semanko wrote.