CEC bases robust economics on 2009 market Another Rant: although claiming commitment to povide uptodate, accurate information, CEC repeats on its Feb. 2013 updated raven web fact sheet that economics for Raven are ROBUST and to use 2009 figures and projections.
To place faith in a return to high prices and demand by 2015 is to ignore the 10 percent increase yearly in production costs ,steep finance charges that are causing coal giants to default on loans, increases in security bonds, global competition from third world countries and Chinese economic and energy usage trends.
Such faith also ignores the projections of industry analysists, many of whom believe coal is in its sunset phase and will not recover. For the BC government to ignore the billions required to cleanup coal polluted waterways, most recently Elk River, evidence that coal mines squeeze out economic diversity and can have a devastating negative impact on nearby communities is, in the words of a West Coast Environmental Law lawyer, "a betrayal of public trust." It is this profound betrayal of public trust and lack of transparancy in the environmental review process that has generated such fierce opposition to the Raven coal mine that is growing daily.