Baffinland mostly in compliance with Mary River project certificate: NIRB

Construction at Baffinland’s Milne Inlet port this past summer, from where the company plans to stockpile and ship out its iron ore extracted from its nearby Mary River mine. (NIRB PHOTO)

Baffinland Iron Mines Corp. is complying, for the most part, with the terms and conditions of its project certificate for the Mary River iron mine project in North Baffin, but at the same time, the Nunavut Impact Review Board has issued them a number of recommendations on monitoring, waste management and language requirements.

Among its many recommendations: the NIRB said its inspectors noted that signage relaying safety warnings around the project sign did not incorporate Inuktitut.

And the board asked Baffinland to provide a plan for posting signage in both languages.

In its 2013–2014 monitoring report, the NIRB said that Baffinland “demonstrated compliance with most of the reporting requirements” contained in its project certificate.

During a September 2014 site visit, NIRB inspectors didn’t find any issues of “significant concern,” but noted a number of smaller issues.

The NIRB’s recommendations include:

• dust-fall monitoring — the NIRB has asked Baffinland to provide results and analyses of the ash contents of caribou pellets;

• organ tissue monitoring — condition 35 of the project certificate requires Baffinland to monitor baseline metals in organ tissue from caribou harvested within the local study area;

• public consultation — Baffinland must respond to concerns expressed by affected communities about the impacts of the project and that information should be included in Baffinland’s next annual report.

• survey and monitoring of Arctic char: Baffinland should work with the Mittimatalik Hunters and Trappers Organization in nearby Pond Inlet to implement a monitoring program and survey of Arctic char in freshwater bodies;

• installation of flashing red or white strobe lights on communication towers to deter birds;

• update on plans to provide spill response equipment and annual training to Nunavut communities along the shipping route during the 2015 year;

• improvement of baseline data and study design for polar bear monitoring in the project area;

• implementation of an air quality monitoring program to account for the measurement of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions; and,

• immediate protective measures to prevent waste from attracting wildlife or from being blown offsite because the protective mesh around the project site dump has been damaged;

The NIRB also wants Baffinland to explain the source of liquid waste found on the floor of the incinerator facility, to prevent it from entering the drainage system.

And, given ongoing blasting on site, the NIRB wants Baffinland to report on monitoring for the potential runoff of ammonia nitrate residues from blasted areas.

The NIRB monitoring report, released last week, covers the period from September 2013 to September 2014.

For its part, Baffinland is obliged to provide progress on its commitments in an annual report to the NIRB, although some of the NIRB’s recommendations require the company to respond within 45 days.

The original Mary River project proposal, which would have seen a railway built from the mine to Steensby Inlet and for year-round shipping of an estimated 18 million tonnes of ore annually, earned its own project certificate from the NIRB in December 2012.

But a month later, Baffinland slashed the scope of the project, opting instead for a scaled-down “early revenue phase” that would, in the mine’s early years, focus on shipping smaller amounts of ore each year out of Milne Inlet instead, and only during open water season.

Earlier this year, the NIRB gave the go-ahead to Baffinland’s early revenue phase proposal, which could see up to 4.2 million tonnes of iron ore per year mined, stockpiled and shipped from Milne Inlet to markets in Europe.

This past October, Baffinland proposed a new plan, yet to be screened by the NIRB, that would expand shipments from Milne Inlet to about 12 million tonnes per year, with shipping for about 10 months of the year.