“The landscape doesn’t naturally recover once it’s been disturbed by humans.”
It did after the glaciers bulldozed it down to bare rock – it’s a matter of time scale. Not “if” it will recover – it always does eventually. “Environmental advocates and some First Nations question whether development in the Ring of Fire is a good idea at all, given the importance and sensitivity of the landscape. Northern Ontario’s peatlands sequester an estimated
35 billion tonnes of carbon, the equivalent of a year’s worth of emissions from seven billion cars.”
It took 10,000 years (after the aforementioned glaciers) to sequester that tonnage, and underground mining will only cover over maybe 5 (five!) of the 228,000 Km2 – the sequestering loss of the combined emissions of 13 (thirteen!) average automobiles per year… AND… there is no plan to burn any of it to release the carbon back into the atmosphere. It’s only math, eh? The emissions of only 13 average automobiles. “No single mining company can carry the financial burden of building the needed road infrastructure,” read a September 2021 briefing note to Rickford’s office, marked as “confidential intergovernmental advice.”
The chromitite resource is so large and so rich it could carry the whole region for a not much more than a rounding error. The perception of the complexity and intractability of the
Ring of Fire situation had led to commercial financing providers (streaming/royalty/offtake) using reduced confidence factors and delivery inputs stretched out to between
20 and 40 years in their formulas which, for instance, reduces the amount offered for a royalty on production by 80 to 90 percent (Example: Notes to Anglo Pacific’s financial statements on their writing down their
Ring of Fire royalty value). For instance, a long term royalty stream calculated to commence in 8 to 10 years of $25,000,000 annually should be worth a payment of about $30,000,000, but shrinks to about $3,000,000 if stretched out to commencing 30 years out. If there is ever to be financing raised for this project, there needs to be expectations that it will proceed sooner than later.
The government could certainly assist the industry with moral suasion on the expected timelines at no cost.