Victory at Bull Mountain - Again
Expansions to the Bull Mountain mine would make it the largest underground coal mine in the U.S. Map via U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
by Anne Hedges
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our quiz for today: What happens when government agencies inflate the benefits of a huge coal mine expansion but ignore the fact that permitting the mine will allow it to produce coal that, when burned, will emit more greenhouse gases than the largest single source of such emissions in the nation? The answer: MEIC, our partners, and our representatives at the Western Environmental Law Center (WELC), go to court. On April 4, 2022, that strategy paid off with a victory at the federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The court ruled in our favor on our challenge to an enormous expansion at the Bull Mountain coal mine near Roundup. The proposed expansion would have made Signal Peak’s Bull Mountain mine the largest underground coal mine in the nation, and 97% of the extracted coal would be burned overseas. The federal Office of Surface Mining (OSM) and the Montana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) are responsible for analyzing the impacts of mine expansion proposals before issuing permits for them, yet both agencies refuse to analyze the impacts that burning coal will have on the climate. DEQ argues that the Legislature has prevented it from analyzing
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Montana Environmental Information Center
such impacts. That argument is being challenged separately (see next page). In this case, OSM claimed that analyzing the mine’s climate impacts would be too difficult and uncertain. MEIC and, fortunately, the federal court, disagreed. The federal court said that expanding the mine’s operations by 7,161 acres and mining and subsequently burning the 176 million tons of coal in the mine’s permitted area could add 190 million tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere (this is an underestimate). That’s roughly the equivalent of the emissions from over 37 million gas vehicles driven for a year. MEIC, 350 Montana, Sierra Club, and WildEarth Guardians, represented by WELC, challenged OSM’s decision in January 2019. We argued that it was illegal for OSM to refuse to complete an environmental impact statement under the National Environmental Policy Act and to adequately consider the impacts of the expansion on the climate crisis. If this sounds familiar, it is. MEIC won a very similar case against OSM in 2017. In that instance, a federal district court found that OSM had “put its thumb on the scale by inflating the benefits of the action while minimizing its impacts” when it failed to analyze greenhouse gas emissions of the mine expansion.
