Last gasp at coal mine on Riesco Island
The embattled Invierno Mine on Riesco Island that has been embroiled in conflict with environmental groups over the past decade appears on the brink of closing.
Chile's last functioning coal mine, it is located in the Strait of Magellan off the southern Patagonia coast and backed by Copec, one of Chile's largest fuel and forestry companies, and Ultramar, a Chilean shipping company. Last year, more than half of the sparsely populated 5,000-square-kilometer (1,930-sq-mile) island was protected as part of the new Kawésqar National Park. But the mine called for digging five massive open pits to produce up to six million tons of coal annually over 25 years. In February 2011, the center-right Sebastian Pinera government quickly approved environmental permits with almost no citizen input, prompting a flurry of lawsuits.
The project then commenced in 2012, but three years later the company announced it would need to use explosives to continue because the rock there was harder than they had anticipated. The highly destructive blasting technique they sought sparked a new legal showdown over the destruction of local flora and fauna. Nevertheless, the company won approval in September 2018 but after 43 blasts in May 2019 a regional environmental court in Valdivia shut the project down citing in particular a lack of environmental impact studies on how blasting might affect an important ecosystem containing plant fossils. It was to mark the beginning of the end.
In October, Chile's lower house of parliament approved closing all thermoelectric plants using coal by 2025. With the writing on the wall, the company has laid off 800 workers, 90 percent of its work force, effectively stopping the project – for now. Still, the company is in no hurry to exit, rather they appear to be holding out hope of a revival. Indeed, until they definitively withdraw their environmental permit, the project is not dead yet. Says Guillermo Hernandez, general manager of Invierno Mine, they will “tranquilly take their time over the next three or four years” to complete the closure of the mine and reforest and revegetate the areas they battered.
For Gabriela Simonetti, a leader of local citizen group Alerta Isla Riesco, the Invierno Mine “is a clear example of how you should not invest in Chile.” Ana Stipicic, a co-founder of Alerta Isla Riesco, added that “green and renewable energies should gain more ground” in the new energy scenario and “they will generate far more jobs” than the carbon polluting coal industry.